Assessing Speaking

Basic Types of Speaking

1. Imitative
The ability to simply parrot back(imitate) a word or phrase or possibly a sentence. The criterion included in this performance is phonetic level of oral production, a number of prosodic, lexical and grammatical properties of language.

2. Intensive
The production of short stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical, phrasal, lexical or phonological relationships (such as prosodic elements - intonation, stress, rhythm, juncture). Examples of intensive assessment tasks include directed response tasks, reading aloud, sentence and dialogue completion; limited picture-cued tasks including simple sequences; and translation up to the simple sentence level.

3. Responsive
This assessment tasks include interaction and test comprehension but at the somewhat limited level of very short conversations, standard greetings and small talk, simple requests and comments, and the like.
It's almost a spoken prompt (in order to preserve authenticity), with perhaps only one or two follow-up questions or retorts. For example:

You : Hey, Go, how's it going?
Me : Not bad, and yourself?
You : I'm good.
Me : Cool. Okay, gotta go.

4. Interactive
The difference between responsive and interactive speaking is in the length and complexity of the interaction, which sometimes includes multiple exchanges and/or multiple participants.

5. Extensive (monologue)
This tasks include speeches, oral presentations, and story-telling, during which the opportunity for oral interaction from listeners is either highly limited (perhaps to nonverbal responses) or ruled out altogether.

Micro and Macroskills of Speaking
The microskills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words collocations, and phrasal units.

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

Oke, sampai disini saja pengenalan materi tentang Assessing Speaking. Setelah mengenal dasar-dasar dari Assessing Speaking, materi selanjutnya adalah mengenai desain test untuk setiap tipe test yang telah disebutkan sebelumnya. Anda bisa mendownload selengkapnya materi berikut ini dalam format PowerPoint. Dalam PowerPoint tersebut, mencakup beberapa materi tentang Assessing listening, seperti Basic Types of Speaking, Micro and Macroskills dan Designing Assessment Tasks for Each Types of Speaking.

Download :
Assessing Speaking with Pictures
Assessing Speaking without Pictures

Further reading :
Brown, D. (2004). Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices. New York: Pearson Longman.