"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.
Taking into account what you say about speaking as a skill that does not exist in a vacuum , and making a connection with chapter 7 in which Brown stated that the integration of skills is the paramount importance in language learning, it can be said that we cannot consider the assessment of speaking as an isolated issue, all the skills must be integrated now that some of them are vital to get better performance in the others. For example if students are good at listening and speaking they will develop reading and writing skills in a better way, so it is a matter of making connections.we as teachers can not judge students just because their performance in certain scenario we have to remember that assesment is a process and continous observation in really important
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DeleteCommunicative language teaching is based on real-life situations that require communication. By using this method in ESL classes, students will have the opportunity of communicating with each other in the target language. So teachers should create a classroom environment where students have real-life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language.
ReplyDeleteI think you're both right. I also think it would be ideal to assess students' performance as a whole and not in separate pieces, in that way their performance would resemble real life communication, and would make assessment much more meaningful and pleasant.
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