Spoken English Assessment Strategies
Introduction
As observed, ESOL learners always have challenges with spoken English and this is often manifested in their performance and presentations. The current strategies used in the testing of oral English abilities of the learners also have a number of disadvantages that include creation of anxiety amongst learners during the testing process, leading to poor performance (Paradis, 2016). Moreover, the present strategies also present the challenge of inaccurate results and the inability to follow-up on the learners’ progression.
Discussion
To effectively assess the students’ spoken English abilities, there is a need for the teachers to evaluate the oral performance and presentation made by the learners. To attain this, aspects such as interviews, role-plays, oral reports, as well as the ability to paraphrase and summarize texts should be tested. In instances where the above aspects are employed in a continuous basis, the strategy tends to be a great means of monitoring the learner’s understanding over a prolonged duration. In this regard, a number of ideas might be integrated into oral performances and presentations as part of spoken English assessment and these include the inclusion of Role plays. According to Mercer, Warwick and Ahmed (2017), role-plays may be effectively employed in the assessment of English learners either as individuals or as groups. Some of the ideas that can be used in the role-play assessment include having the learners write plays and perform them, as well as having the learners teach their tutors as an integral aspect of the review class.
The other notable ideas that can be included in the assessment of the oral English skills include the performance of interviews. The interview as a form of assessment is assistive in instances where the learners tend to be young English learners (Schroeder, 2016). In order for the interview to assist in testing the learners with regards to content knowledge, the teachers should make use of diverse visual cues. For instance, the teacher should ensure that the learners to select a set of images, and subsequently ask questions with the objective of eliciting responses. Thus, the teachers may be able to evaluate the students on the basis of the vocabulary employed and the comparison of concepts.
Further, the other notable means of effectively testing the oral English skills of the ESOL learners will entail requesting the learners to describe, retell, paraphrase, clarify and summarize English texts. As opposed to the written reports and text summaries, the teacher can have the learners describe and retell the plots of the reports and texts either to the teacher or before the class (Mercer, Warwick & Ahmed, 2017). The other ideas that the teacher can incorporate in the testing of the learners’ spoken English may take into account requesting the learners to select characters in the textbooks and tell stories from the chosen characters’ perspectives, and also offer description of their favorite parts within the narratives found in the texts.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, it can be noted that the above ways of testing the spoken English amongst ESOL learners have been proven to be effectual given their ability to ensure that the learners are engaged in the testing process, as well as the ability to get immediate response. It is, however, recommended that in the course of assessing the oral performance, the teachers should make use of checklists that contain various things to seek for, including aspects such as volume, content, pronunciation and pace amongst others. Moreover, the same checklist should additionally be employed in the testing of similar kinds of oral presentations with the objective of being able to observe the learners’ progression with time.