Designing Assessment Tasks: Intensive Speaking

1# Directed Responsive Tasks

The administrator elicits a particular grammatical form or a transformation of a sentence, but they do require minimal processing of meaning in order to produce the correct grammatical output.

-Test-takers hear (L,S)

*Tell me he went home.

*Tell me that like rock music.

*Tell me that you aren’t interested in tennis.

2# Read-Aloud tasks

-Intensive read-aloud tasks include reading beyond the sentence level up to paragraph or two.

-Teachers listening to the recording would then rate students on a number of phonological factors (vowels, diphthongs, consonants, stress, and intonation) by completing a two-page diagnostic checklist on which all error or questionable items were noted.

Some variations on the task of simply reading a short passage:

-Reading a scripted dialogue

-Reading sentences containing minimal pairs

-Reading information from a table or chart

3# Sentence/Dialogue Completion Tasks and Oral Questionnaires

-Test-takers are first given time to read through to get its gist and to think about appropriate lines to fill in. then as the tape, teacher, or test administrator produces one part orally, the test-takers responds:

-The advantages of this technique lies in its moderate control of the output of the test-takers. On the other hand, this techniques is its reliance on literacy and an ability to transfer easily from written to spoken English. In addition, it is contrived, inauthentic nature of this task.

4# Picture-Cued Tasks

-It is more popular ways to elicit oral language performance at both intensive and extensive levels. Its stimulus requires a description from the test-takers.

-Picture-cued elicitation of minimal pairs

-Picture-cued elicitation of comparatives

-Picture-cued elicitation of future tense

-Picture-cued elicitation of nouns, negative responses, numbers, and location

-Picture-cued elicitation of responses and description

-Picture-cued elicitation of giving directions

-Picture-cued elicitation of multiple-choice description for two test- takers

5# Translation (of Limited Stretches of Discourse) 

Translation is a meaningful communicative device in contexts in which the English-user is called on to be an interpreter. The test-taker is given a native-language word, phrase, or sentence and is asked to translate it.