"Two monologues do not make a dialogue." - Jeff Daly
Speaking is a skill which can be triggered by factors of any kind. it is mostly conditioned by receptive skills: reading (including interpreting images) and listening. That is to say, for any kind or level in speaking, imitative, intensive, responsive, interactive and extensive (Brown 2000); it is essential to rely on receptive skills like listening or reading. This characteristic makes the assessment of oral production almost impossible to determine in isolation. And why sould it be anyway? These two types of skills are fairly linked and are necessary to create communication in real life scenarios. Even monologues (extensive speaking) can start from written, visual or spoken stimuli, which means that speaking doesn't exist in a vacuum and it shouldn't be assessed as if it were. It will always need a catalyst.Focusing on evaluating speaking and listening, I think we all understand the pressure most students feel when it comes to take a test. All these feelings affect their performance most of the time, which would make the outcomes lack from the necessary reliability to evaluate their performance. Thus, it is important to consider constant assessment based on observation of students' performance during classes, regardless scoring, in order to have a clearer idea of their abilities.
To conclude with this entry, I'd like to superficially refer to speaking tasks which allow the students to performe with more freedom, such as sentence/dialogue completion tasks ( intensive speaking). Although there exists some predictable output, as speaking is one of the most flexible skills (if not the most flexible one), there is always room for diverse responses. In my opinion, these responses should be considered part of the students' oral production even when the content is not the expected one. That is why it could result more accurate to assess those responses taking into account standard traits such as pronunciation, fluency and vocabulary use, in order to evaluate students' performance in a more equal way.
