Teaching and Assessing Spoken English

Speaking is probably the most difficult skill to teach and test. It is difficult to design a test format as it involves a combination of different skills that do not seem not to have any correlation with each other. There are many different assessment methods used in Higher Education. When deciding which assessment method to use, both the learning outcomes and the learning activities need to be considered. Teacher should incorporate oral assessment into practice of teaching during class. In other words, teacher should help students learn how to think aloud. There are different ways of checking students' speaking abilities, like reading aloud, an interview, picture-based discussion, text-based discussion, listening-based discussion or giving a controversial question to students to discuss in pairs. Whatever the type you use, there is one crucial thing to remember- evaluation needs to follow the rubrics you align beforehand. The work will give an idea of the range of possible ways to help students improve their speaking abilities and it will deal with effective ways what rubrics to use and how to make the oral assessment as objective as possible.