Speaking Assessment

Speaking and Reading Assessment

Sayimova S and

Shirinova M

There are four basic abilities in English that you should learn and master. The skills include listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Listening and reading are inputs to the English learning process, whereas speaking and writing are outputs.
There are five types of speaking assessments: They are Imitative speaking tasks, Intensive speaking tasks, Responsive speaking tasks, Interactive speaking tasks, and Extensive speaking tasks.
1. Imitative
3 Responsive
2 Intensive
4 Interactive
5 Extensive
1. Imitative It is repeating a small stretch of language and focusing on pronunciation. The test maker considers using this type of assessment if she/he is not interested in the test taker’s competence in understanding and conveying meaning or getting involved in an interactive conversation. The competence assessed is that of purely phonetic, prosodic, lexical, and grammatical (pronunciation).
2 Intensive Speaking task frequently employed in this assessment context is the production of stretches of oral language designed to demonstrate competence in a narrow band of grammatical, lexical, phrasal, or phonological relationships. In this type of assessment, comprehending meaning is significant, whereas interaction with counterpart is minimal.
3 Responsive It simply means having a short dialogue. In contrast to the other two categories, responsive speaking requires students to jabber. The conversation should be authentic. Brief conversations with the interlocutor are part of assessing the responsive task. Unlike interactive speaking, responsive speaking requires the test taker to use creativity with limited utterance lengths.
4 Interactive two following categories of speaking: interactive and extensive involve tasks that contain relatively long stretches of interactive discourse (interviews, roleplays, discussions, oral presentations).
Sentence complexity and number of participants are the primary distinctions between responsive and interactive categories. For example, if responsive speaking involves two speakers, interactive speaking involves many people.
Interview Interviews can be face-to-face, one-on-one, or two-on-one, each with its advantage and disadvantage. A two-on-one interview may save time and scheduling and provide authentic interaction between two test-takers, although it poses a risk of one test-taker dominating the other.
5 Extensive (Monologue) It is a monologue. It envelops storytelling, giving long speeches, or oral presentations. Interaction between listener and speaker is minimal. The register is frequently formal. Usually, extensive speaking tasks involve complex, relatively lengthy stretches of discourse.
Reading is when someone looks into a written text and starts to absorb the information from the written linguistic message.
These are the three main genres of reading Academic reading (textbooks, essays, papers Job-related reading (messages, letters, reports, financial documents) Personal reading (Newspaper, magazines, e-mails , greeting cards)
How to Assess Reading If you want to learn how to assess reading skills, you should start by learning the existing types of reading.
Perceptive Reading
Selective Reading
Interactive Reading
Extensive Reading
We can talk about four types of reading:
Perceptive Reading Perceptive reading tasks involve attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse: letters, words, punctuation, and other graphemic symbols. Bottom-up processing is implied.
Selective Reading a selective task is to ascertain one’s reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language. Items such as picture-cued tasks, matching, true/false, multiple-choice, etc. Expected answers include sentences, brief paragraphs, simple charts and graphs, and brief responses as well.
A combination of bottom-up and top-down processing may be both used to assess lexical and grammatical aspects of reading ability. Items include: Multiple-Choice (form-focused criteria) Matching Tasks Editing tasks Picture-cued tasks Gap-filling tasks
Interactive Reading Reading is a process of negotiating meaning; the reader brings to the text a set of schemata for understanding it, and intake is the product of that interaction. The focus of an interactive task is to identify relevant features (lexical, symbolic, grammatical, and discourse) within texts of moderately short length with the objective of retaining the information that is processed.
Extensive Reading extensive reading applies to texts of more than one page up to and including professional articles, essays, technical reports, short stories, and books. Global understanding is the goal for assessment. Top-down processing is assumed for most extensive tasks.

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