The BilBea Learning Journey

I came up with a universal measuring system to collect evidence of a student’s oral English capability. Spoken English is a difficult thing to test for, however everything has aspects to it.

Oral English has:

• pronunciation (are the words clear?)
• flow (hesitation? confidence?)
• tone (word/sentence stress correct? Does it have feeling or is the speech robotic?)
• language (choice of words, grammar, putting meaning together with the right words)

The assessment piece is something based on their context or learning objectives for the course. It could be a debate, speech or simple discussion. More criteria are added based on the learning objectives. For example, for a debate, certain language would want to be present, perhaps critical ability also. What I then do is assign a value or importance to these areas. This
becomes my marking criteria for interpreting my students’ performances.

As the students perform the spoken work, numbers are placed in each criteria for an overall score for that assessment piece. Some form of evaluation needs to take place in order to fill in the numbers for each student. The student might have great pronunciation, tone and generally spoken English, and even be producing some of the required language for the task, but something is missing … heart? feeling? commitment? Whatever it might be the score needs to be lower than someone with perhaps less English but seems to have the task completed with ease and to the enjoyment of the audience (the class and myself).

Something as dynamic as spoken language is a very difficult thing to assess!