Oral Assessment: A Mission Impossible?

Alexandra Costa, Portugal

English / Portuguese teacher since 1996. Currently teaching in Loulé’s Secondary school. Experience in teaching students from Primary, Basic, Secondary schools and in the Professional school of Hotel Management in Faro, Portugal. Being involved in several EU educational projects. E-mail: alexandrasobralcosta@gmail.com

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count;
Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted”
Albert Einstein

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Introduction
Oral assessment
Oral interaction 1
Oral interaction 2
Oral production (pair / group work)
Conclusion

Introduction

Evaluating is a complex and difficult process and teaching deals with students, human beings who have feelings and problems and teachers need to understand and apprehend this fact. Albert Einstein with this quotation shows clearly the difficulty that a language teacher faces everyday and throughout his/her career: evaluating students.

We live in a very competitive world and due to this fact, everybody tends to evaluate everybody’s actions, thoughts, knowledge. In Portugal there is a school ranking where every year everybody knows what school is the best and the worst. With massive increase in school attendance, education became not a luxury for the ones who could afford it but a right to know more, a right to end ignorance! The school rankings are used as instruments to compare schools, regardless of the internal or external factors that contributed to that position in the ranking. It should be a way to help educationalists and teachers to comprehend the factors, to overcome the difficulties and a reason to achieve better results.

In a smaller scale, the students’ evaluation in a classroom, those external factors should be considered by the teacher. Even when a teacher wants to do a thorough, exhaustive evaluation, it will always be subjective because our students aren’t machines or numbers, they are human beings. Continuous assessment is an instrument used by all teachers who want to give, at the end of the school year, a fair evaluation which has ‘measured’ the students’ oral, reading, written performance but what I ask is this: will it be really continuous?

In my opinion, the answer is no. Let us analyse: the students are evaluated in a limited period of time, on a daily basis, they aren’t alone, they are involved in a students’ group interaction. The teacher is with the students in a class which lasts 45 or 90 minutes, once or twice a week. Besides this period of time the teacher doesn’t know clear and profoundly who his/her students are, do, think or feel. The students are constantly changing subjects, classrooms and teachers, but they are always being evaluated, “measured”, analysed. Evaluating in general is very difficult, oral assessment is even harder.

I tried to elaborate some instruments that help me in my classes in order to evaluate my students fairly and objectively, although I comprehend and accept the Herculean task that this process leads me. I have concentrated in oral assessment because is harder to do and sometimes is overlooked by some of us due to the inexistence of good measurable instruments.

With this scheme I have tried to present 2 tables: one for Oral Production (Role-Play) and the other for Oral Interaction. I have tried to give a detailed description due to my difficulty of evaluating my students concerning oral production. These should be achievable in loco only if we have a smaller class, if not it should be done after.

Oral assessment

Oral assessment is based on different texts and varied communicative situations. The teacher tries to put a cross in the grid or write the evaluation scale.

Oral interaction 1

This grid helps the teacher to fill in the next grid.

Oral interaction 2

Lesson number: _____ Class: _____ Year: _____Date: _____

Oral production (pair / group work)

In this grid, the teacher evaluates his/her students of each group writing on each space of the grid a number from the grid above.

Conclusion

These grids shouldn’t be considered definitive but they can be a must do item for us teachers, because they can help us in the task of evaluating our students. They are just suggestions of good practices I use in everyday school work.

Evaluating, like I mentioned before, it’s not an easy task, but it can be achievable with hard work. More and more, being an Educator is so much more than assessing… But there are things that we can do and instruments that we can use, I have only shown you a few, I hope it will be worth your while!

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