Because speaking tests are seldom given in the language classroom, this facet of testing is being given special consideration in this chapter. The exclusion of speaking tests should not be too severely criticized because the reasons for not including them are practical and valid. Some teachers are not aware of the various techniques for testing speaking. Others feel that a subjective evaluation based on classroom performance is sufficient. For those who do not have language laboratories, systematic procedures are difficult, if not impossible. Tests to accompany most textbooks do not include sections testing the speaking skill. And last, but certainly not least, is the question of time. Many teachers feel they do not have the time to prepare or grade speaking tests.
On the other hand, the teacher cannot expect her students to take seriously any goal that is not tested. Their whole educational background has conditioned them to study for examinations and to consider that the content of these examinations covers the important objectives of the course. Therefore, if the teacher is really serious about having the students concentrate on speaking, she must include some form of testing on speaking ability. Granted such testing does take more time, but good teaching takes time. Written tests take more time to grade than listening or reading tests, but such tests are commonly given.
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As was mentioned previously, the most common way of evaluating the students' speaking ability is the teacher's subjective evaluation of the students' work in class. Certainly this approach is practical in that it takes very little time. The disadvantage is that no class grade can be as important psychologically to the students as a test grade. However, if the teacher decides that she does not have the time to do more in testing speaking, she should emphasize to the students that they are being given a grade on their speaking ability and that this grade is an important part of their grade in the course. To assist the students in improving and to demonstrate to the students that this grade is indeed a fact, she should keep notes on the students' progress and point out to them at the end of each grading period what their grades are and what their weaknesses and strengths are. She should tell them, for example, those sounds they pronounce well and those they need to improve. She can even point out specific structures that they use only hesitantly or not at all and suggest work on which they might concentrate to better their oral mark.
A preferable alternative to the class grade as an indication of speaking ability is to give short speaking tests in class. In this type of test the teacher prepares a long list of personalized questions based on the material being tested. She then proceeds down the list, asking questions of students in a random fashion. As they answer, she grades their responses. By asking the question, waiting a few seconds for the students to formulate an answer, and demanding a prompt reply, the teacher has sampled quite well the students' ability to answer personalized questions based on the vocabulary and structural content of the text. The advantages of this approach are that it does stress in a test situation the importance of the ability to speak the language, and it is not especially time-consuming. The disadvantages are that only the ability to answer teacher-chosen questions is tested and that asking all students questions that are equally difficult is impossible.
Another version of the procedure outlined in the preceding paragraph is to ask the students to come to the teacher's desk to answer personalized questions from a prepared list. The teacher may, for example, ask each student five or ten questions. In asking the questions, he must be careful to insist upon definite time limits as the students respond. The good students can answer up to ten questions per minute or more, but slower students need more time. One solution to this problem is to ask each student questions for one minute. The results are then scaled and letter grades assigned.
Another method of testing speaking in the case of more advanced students is to require them to come in for a personal interview. The advantage of this procedure is that it resembles very closely a true language situation. The disadvantage is that some students will most likely be even more nervous during the interview than in the normal test situation. Also, the grade must be assigned on the basis of a global, subjective evaluation. If the teacher decides
508 Part Two: Practice
to test speaking by means of a personal interview, she should prepare the students carefully and provide them with definite topics upon which to focus their study while preparing for the test.
A practical procedure for testing interaction in groups of two or more is to have students make a recording. A topic, chosen from those practiced during the work with the unit in class, is given to the students. They then go to some quiet spot where they use a tape recorder to record their conversation. Their performance is later graded by the teacher. Ideally, someone is present to handle the tape recorder and to prompt the students if they need assistance.
For those teachers whose schools have tape recorders in all the booths in the language laboratory, the fairest, most objective, most complete, and in the long run probably the most efficient approach to testing speaking is to record the students' answers. The advantages to this procedure for testing are many: (1) All students answer the same questions. (2) The teacher can stop the tapes as she grades in order to be completely sure of the grade she is giving. (3) All difficulty levels of the speaking skill from pronunciation to sustained oral response to a single stimulus can be included. Oral pattern drills, for example, which are basic to the audio-lingual technique of skill development and which are seldom tested as they are taught, can be an important part of a test given in the laboratory. Such a test becomes a true test of the skill that the students have been practicing. The disadvantage is that, in the beginning, such a test may take a considerable amount of time. (This author found, for example, that it is possible to give a speaking test containing 125 points in a recorded time of fifteen minutes. The recorded student responses varied from two to three minutes.)
There are two time-consuming blocks to efficient testing in the laboratory that the teacher should plan to eliminate before considering seriously the possibility of giving speaking tests in the laboratory. First, the students must record only their responses, not the stimuli. Second, the individual student tapes should all be transferred to a single tape. The first problem can be solved by recording the examination in the following fashion. After the stimulus, the teacher should allow approximately ten seconds for the students to prepare their responses. She then makes a sound on the tape, a bell perhaps, which indicates to the students that they are to start their tape recorders and give their answers. As soon as she has had time to give the answer twice quickly, she signals the students to stop their tape recorders and get ready for the next question. It is extremely important that the procedure outlined above be carefully followed for two reasons. First, unless all students answer at approximately the same time (the pause before responding facilitates the probability of some synchronization), the slower students merely need to imitate their neighbors' answers. Second, if the students are permitted to turn off their recorders as soon as their answers are completed, the teacher will not have
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sufficient time to record the grades without stopping the tape recorder. The second problem is easily solved by having a lab assistant collect the tapes and rerecord the students' answers all on one tape. It is doubtful that grading such a tape will require any more time than grading a typical writing test.