Designing Assessment Tasks: Responsive Speaking

1# Question & Answer 

-Question & answer can consist of one or two questions from an interviewer or they can make up a portion of a whole battery of questions and prompts in an oral interview.

-The first question is intensive in its purpose; it is a display question intended to elicit a predetermined correct response. 

-Questions at the responsive level tend to be genuine referential questions in which the test-taker is given more opportunity to produce meaningful language in response.

Responsive question may take following forms: 

Questions eliciting open-ended responses.

Test takers hear: 

1. What do you think about the weather today? 
2. Why did you choose your academic major?
3. What kind of strategies have you used to help you learn English? 

Test-takers respond with a few sentences at most.

2# Giving Instructions and Directions

The technique is simple: the administrator poses the problem, and test- taker responds. Scoring is based primarily on comprehensibility, and secondary on other specified grammatical or discourse categories. The choice of topics needs to be familiar enough so that the test is not general knowledge but linguistic competence. Finally, the task should require the test-taker to produce at least five or six sentences. 

-Eliciting instructions or direction 

Test-takers hear:

     Describe how to make a typical dish from your country? 

     How do you access e-mail on a PC? 

Test-takers respond with appropriate instruction.

3# Paraphrasing 

The test-takers read or hear a short story or description with a limited number of sentences (perhaps two or five) and produce a paraphrase of the story. The advantages is they elicit short stretches of output and perhaps tap into test- takers’ to practice the conversational art of conciseness by reducing the output/ input ratio.

4# Test- of Spoken English (TSE Test) 

The Test of Spoken English are designed to elicit oral production in various discourse categories rather than in selected phonological, grammatical, or lexical targets. Tasks include description, narration, summary, giving instruction, comparing and contrasting. 

From their findings, the researchers were be able to report on the validity of the tasks, especially the match between the intended task functions and the actual output of both native and non-active speakers.