Factors that affect evaluating speaking in students

Factors that affect evaluating speaking in students

1. Pronunciation

   • Is hard to evaluate this because when they are in this age they are starting to get the ability to enunciate consonants, vowels, words, etc., and it might be hard to understand what they are trying to say

2. Stress and Intonation

   • Kids might confuse the stress and intonation of many words because they write the same way, and they might not know that word can have different meanings and can be used in different contexts. Also, because they might know there are different intonation patterns but not when to use it

3. Volume of Voice

   • This may differ with the kids because some of them are introvert and some other extrovert, and this will make the tone of voice different on each one. Also, if they are confident or not, can be another factor when evaluating because this will interfere with how loud or soft they speak

4. Responses to Oral and Graphic Stimuli

   • As they are learning, their responses might not be as fast as we want or maybe they answer another thing because they did not get the right question. Using visual aids can help them to relate the context and the questions

5. Grammatical Usage

   • Children, at this age, know many nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., but sometimes they are not completely capable of understanding certain grammatical parts when speaking. They might confuse “were” with “where” or “was”. Also, because they do not know all the grammatical rules that exist, and they struggle with misunderstandings, information, tenses, etc

6. Tone of Voice

   • This one is related to the volume of voice. Depending on the personality of the child this will depend. Another factor is that every kid has its own tone of voice and their self esteem

7. Usage of Vocabulary

   • Children may not recognize many words because they are still in an age where they are learning new vocabulary, so they may not be able to use it while speaking. We need to make sure to review vocabulary constantly so that they can remember and use the new vocabulary

8. Fluency

   • When kids are this little, they are learning how to read, write and be fluent at this. We will be working on their fluency by practicing a lot, so this is something that we do not expect to be perfect when evaluating

9. Kinesthetic Expressions

   • This is a lot easier to evaluate if we are good at analyzing body language. As teachers we should be able to identify gestures, facial expressions, etc. Some kids are used to use a lot of kinesthetic expressions when speaking because it allows them to express themselves better. On the other hand, there are kids that do not make a lot of expressions. We need to remember that even though the kid does not move a lot, that is another body language signal

10. Sentence Structure

    • As we know, kids of this age get confused when structuring sentences by mixing the parts of that sentence. So, if they make mistakes in their native language, it will be obvious that they will get a lot more confused when making a sentence in a second language because the order of some things change and have a specific order