Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 4; July 02

Making Oral Test more human and less anxiety-generating

Dr Fernando Rubio Alcala, University of Huelva, Spain

We, as teachers, know how anxious students can get when performing in oral tests.
In such situations they frequently fail to reach their potential and therefore their marks do not fully reflect their knowledge of the foreign language. What's more, the experience they live through can be traumatic which results in a lowering of their own self-esteem, which as a whole makes the academic evaluation system inhuman.

This leads us to search for a system that allows the students to take their tests without high levels of anxiety and in an atmosphere which is affectively positive. This can be done by focussing on the conditions the students experience in these three periods:
before the test
during the test
after the test

During their preparation phase the students should find out accurately what types of activities they will be required to perform during the test. Their teachers should let them know who will sit on the examining board and the rating scale that will be used to evaluate them. These simple clarifications should reduce the students' level of anxiety prior to the test, since the situation they are about to enter is, then, not a novel one. Knowing who the examiners are going to be makes the situation more personal.

The waiting time just before the test is critical. If it is too long , then student anxiety, both physical and mental is likely to soar. When the candidate enters the examination room the examiners should welcome them and exchange a few words, adding something like " we know you are going to do your best."

There should be two to three examiners, neither more nor less. With one examiner the marking is too subjective, whereas more than three could inhibit the candidate's performance.

The type of oral test used will affect anxiety levels. The most usual tests are either interactive or monologic. The former involves negotiation of information between the examiners and the candidate, while in the latter the student is the only one to talk. Research so far shows that interactive tests will often cause lower levels of anxiety than monologues ( Rubio, 1995. Not all interactive task follow this pattern: roleplay, for instance, my cause high levels of anxiety in introverted students. Interviews, on the other hand, provoke only low levels of anxiety.

Another way of making oral tests less anxiety-provoking and more humane is for the examiners to be careful with their own words. It is very important that they should accommodate their speech to the candidate's FL. level as the following list shows ( Ross and Berwick, 1992, 165)

Display question: The interviewer asks for information that is already known to the interviewer or that the interviewer believes the interviewee ought to know.

Comprehension check: the interviewer checks on the interviewee's current understanding of the topic or of the interviewee's immediately preceding utterance.

Clarification request: the interviewer asks for a restatement of an immediately preceding utterance produced by the interviewee.

Fronting: The interviewer provides one or more utterances to foreground a topic and set the stage for the interviewee's response.

Grammatical Simplification: the interviewer modifies the semantic and syntactic structure of an utterance so as to facilitate comprehension.

Slowdown: the interviewer reduces the speed of an utterance.

Over-articulation: the interviewer exaggerates the pronunciation of words and phrases.

Other-expansion: the interviewer draws on the perceived meaning of the interviewee's utterance and elaborates on the words and phrases within the utterance.

Lexical simplification.

Another way of helping to reduce anxiety is to make sure that the topic spoken about is one of interest to the candidate. Sometimes testers ask the students about boring topics they have met in tests a thousand times, like their likes and dislikes etc….

Instead, the examiner can launch into a real conversation about what the student intends to do when they have finished their studies, about their concerns about foreign language learning and teaching etc….

When the test is finished, it adds a human touch to tell the candidate something that to make them feel more secure for future oral tests, like:
We can see that you are taking foreign language learning seriously, we hope that you carry on like this and that you improve yet further. Thanks for your cooperation.

In the period after the oral, the examiners, apart from communicating the candidate's marks, should let them know which oral skills they need to do more work on.

All the above outlined ideas and techniques aim to make the oral exam less anxiety provoking and to render the atmosphere in which it is taken more humane and friendly.

Bibliography:

Ross, S. and Berwick, R. 1992 The discourse accomodation. Studies for Second Language Acquisition,14. [ 159-176 ]

Rubio Alcala, F. 1995 La Ansiedad en los Exames Orales de Ingles en la Facultad de Filologia de la Universidad de Sevilla. Unpublished Thesis Dissertation. University of Seville, Spain.