Assessing speaking

What is speaking?

It is one of the productive skills. Listening and speaking are almost closely interrelated. It is difficult to isolate oral production tasks that do not directly involve the interaction of aural comprehension. Most of speaking is the product of creative construction of linguistic strings.
The speaker makes choices:

Lexicon
Structure
Discourse

Scoring speaking: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use, grammar comprehensibility etc.

Types of speaking:
1.-Imitative: the ability to simply parrot back (imitative) phonetic level of oral production, prosodic, lexical, and grammatical properties of languages. Interested only in pronunciation
2. - Intensive: the production of short stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical phrasal, lexical or phonological relationship intonation, stress, rhythm, juncture.
3. - Responsive: interaction and test comprehension of short conversations. Simple request and comments.
4. - Interactive: it has the purpose of exchanging specific information or interpersonal exchanges.
5. - Extensive: (monologue) includes oral presentations and story telling. Language style is frequently more deliberative and formal for extensive tasks.



Micro and Macro Skills
The micro skills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units.

The macro skills imply the speaker's focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options.

THERE ARE THREE IMPORTANTS ISSUES FOR DESIGNING TASKS:

1. - Involvement of the additional performance of aural comprehension, and possibly reading
2.- Your elicitation should prompt achieves its aims as closely as possible
3.- specify scoring procedures for a response