Designing Assessment Tasks: Interactive Speaking

#1 Interview 

A test administrator and a test-taker sit down in a direct face-to-face exchange and proceed through a protocol of questions and directives. 

Four level stages: 

1. Warm-up, preliminary small talk to make test-taker become comfortable with the situation. No scoring of this phase takes place. 
2. Level check, a series of pre-planned questions. 
3. Probe, probe questions and prompts challenge test-takers to go to the heights of their ability, to extend beyond the limits of the interviewer’s expectation through increasingly difficult questions. 
4. Wind-down, a final phase of interview. No scoring for this part.

The success of an oral interview will depend on: 

• Clearly specifying administrative procedure of the assessment. (practically) 
• Focusing the questions and probes on the purpose (validity) 
• Appropriately eliciting an optimal amount and quality of oral production from the test-taker (biased for best performance) 
• Minimizing the possibly harmful effect of the power relationship between interviewer and interviewee (biased for best performance) 
• Creating a consistent, workable scoring system (reliability)

#2 Role Play 

It frees students to be somewhat creative in their linguistic output. In some versions, role play allows some rehearsal time so that students can map out what they are going to say. It also has the effect of lowering anxieties as students can, even for few moments, take on the persona of someone other than themselves. 

The test administrator must determine the assessment objectives of the role play then devise a scoring technique that appropriately pinpoints those adjectives.

#3 Discussion and Conversation 

Discussion may be especially appropriate tasks through which elicit and observe such abilities:

• Topic nomination, maintenance, and termination 
•  Attention getting, interrupting, control 
• Clarifying, questioning, paraphrasing 
• Comprehension signals 
• Negotiating meaning 
• Intonation patterns for pragmatic effect 
• Kinesics, eye contact, proxemics, body language 
• Politeness, and other sociolinguistics factors

 #4 Games 

Assessment games:

• Tinkertoy game 
• Crossword puzzles 
• Information gap 
• City maps 

As assessments, the key is to specify a set of criteria and a reasonably practical and reliable scoring method.

5# ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) 

Originally known as the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) test. 

In a series of the structured tasks, the OPI is carefully designed to elicit pronunciation, fluency and integrative ability, sociolinguistic and cultural knowledge, grammar and vocabulary. 

Valdman (1988) summed up the complaint: 

    “The OPI forces test-takers into a closed system where, because the interviewer in endowed with full     social control, they are unable to negotiate a social world….. In short, the OPI can only inform us         how learners can deal with an artificial social imposition rather than enabling us to predict how they     would be likely to manage authentic linguistic interactions with target language native speaker.”