Assessing Speaking

Start with the main ideas

The Assessing Speaking mind map with branches on strategic, discourse, grammatical and sociolinguistic competence is a useful starting point. It also introduces assessment design and techniques, including warm-up, level check, probe and wind-down. Follow those branches to see how the map brings aspects of speaking and assessment together.

Several maps share the title Assessing Speaking, so check their branches when choosing one. Another focuses on imitative speaking and describes repetition of a word, phrase or sentence.

Explore tools and speaking performance

After the overview, move to Assessing Speaking Skills. It covers checklists, rating scales and rubrics as tools for recording observations of an individual, a group or a whole class. Compare those tools as you study how speaking can be observed.

The Oral ability map covers choosing techniques, planning and structuring testing, and scoring. Another map looks at factors in evaluating students' speaking, including pronunciation, stress and intonation, grammatical usage and vocabulary. Read these alongside the tools map to consider what an observer might attend to and how observations might be recorded.

Use the maps together

There are no quizzes on this page. Instead, use the maps to check your understanding: review a branch, then explain its main idea in your own words before looking back. You can also compare the assessment techniques in the overview with the tools in Assessing Speaking Skills.

Assessing Speaking is a section of the Language Assessment and Testing unit in Education and pedagogy (incl. teaching methods, curriculum, educational psychology). The maps connect the unit's assessment and testing focus to speaking, from designing assessments to observing performance and considering scoring. Choose a map and follow its branches through an aspect you want to study.