How to Assess Interpersonal & Presentational Speaking in Your World Language Class
It makes sense that if we have our students engage in interpersonal and presentational speaking tasks, we should also assess these two modalities in our French, Spanish, and Italian World Language classes. I have heard some language teachers assert the notion that we should not assess speaking—especially at the novice levels—but I believe that we are doing our students a disservice if we never measure their speaking proficiency and growth over time…even in and perhaps most especially in our level 1 courses.
In this blog post, you will learn tips and strategies for assessing your students’ speaking proficiency in a fair and accurate manner; you will glean ideas for streamlining the assessment process so that you spend less time assessing and grading; and finally, I will share some simple yet effective speaking rubrics that you can use to highlight your students’ strengths as well as areas in which they can improve, and speed up the grading process so that you can devote more time to other teaching tasks.
Why even assess speaking?
No matter how you look at it, speaking is one of the four communication modes we expect students to improve throughout the school year and their language-learning journey. When assigning speaking assessments to students, we convey in no uncertain terms that speaking is a critical skill of which we expect them to demonstrate mastery. The students of today’s generation tend to focus on what will move the needle forward in terms of their grades; therefore, if we never assess their speaking progress, they are likely to receive the false impression speaking is an unimportant, secondary skill that they don’t need to pay much attention to.
It’s no secret that most students at the middle and high school levels don’t love speaking in the target language: it’s scary, uncertain, cognitively and linguistically demanding, and there can be so much shame and insecurity wrapped around attempting to speak another language, especially in front of their peers. But just like most other skills, the more they practice, the better students will get. We don’t want students to be “forced” to speak French, Spanish, or Italian extemporaneously for the very first time when they travel abroad: we should enrich our World Language classrooms with plentiful opportunities for students to produce the target language—in both low-stakes, reduced-stress settings as well as high-stakes settings that might be a bit more stressful for our students.
It’s clear to anyone who has ever traveled abroad to a country in which the native language is not one that he/she speak natively or even fluently… speaking CAN be stressful, and so we want to enrich our instruction and assessment practices with authentic opportunities for students to grapple with and ultimately overcome the anxiety of speaking in the target language.
How to Assess Speaking
There are a few practical ways for you to assess speaking. I’m going to divide them into two categories: no tech, some tech, or high tech.
No-Tech: Interpersonal conversation between students or between teacher and student. Have students come up to your desk or meet you in the hallway (individually, in pairs, or in small groups) on the day of the assessment.
Some Tech: Presentational speaking task in which students deliver an oral presentation in the target language. You can do this in a small group or whole-class setting. Students will have access to a Google Slides presentation that you will either project on the board (for a whole-class presentation) or have students present on their Chromebooks (for small group presentations).
High Tech: Digitize your speaking assessment using websites like Flipgrid or Vocaroo. You can create short audio clips in which you ask students to answer a question or discuss a given topic. They will listen to the audio clip, have a few minutes to prepare a response, and then record their answers. They will then save their audio file and submit.
I recommend experimenting with all of these different assessment strategies, and ideally, cycling through most (if not all) of them so that you differentiate and provide students with multiple opportunities throughout the school year to demonstrate their speaking proficiency. A student who may be shy or reluctant to speak in person may be able to produce quite a bit of spontaneous language when they are in front of their Chromebook and in a less overtly stressful situation. On the flip side, some students need the interpersonal prompting and linguistic scaffolding that comes with a face-to-face conversation and may find digital speaking assessments to be daunting, uncomfortable, and pretty challenging.
For the sake of efficiency, I almost always do either short, interpersonal Q&A assessments or presentational speaking assessments so that I can evaluate students’ strengths & weaknesses on the spot. If you assign a digital speaking assessment, you will need to spend quite a bit of your prep time listening to the audio clips, providing feedback, filling out rubrics, etc. Just something to be mindful of.
Save Time and Assess Fairly & Accurately with Speaking Rubrics
I love speaking rubrics because they allow me to pinpoint my students’ strengths as well as areas in which my students can improve. It is so important for speaking rubrics to be simple yet accurate.
Go for simplicity. Students tend to understand simple rubrics better than more complicated ones. We also want rubrics that are simple because they save us time. If you, like me, have 150 students a year, spending 5-10 minutes per rubric is unfeasible. We don’t need to leave students three paragraphs worth of comments, because let’s face it: they want to know their grade, and they want a general understanding of where they excelled and what areas they need to work on. Keep your rubrics simple for both your sake as well as your students’.
Prioritize accuracy. We want our rubrics to fairly and equitably assess student proficiency. There is an inherent level of subjectivity and bias associated with speaking assessments, but a high-quality rubric can help to minimize this so that you are ensuring that your students are being assessed fairly.
It is for these two reasons that you absolutely need to consider taking a look at my World Language Speaking Rubrics. This resource contains SIX different rubrics with TWO different scoring methods for each, adding up to a total of TWELVE unique, versatile rubrics to choose from. All of the rubrics are FULLY EDITABLE, so that you can customize them to best suit your needs as well as those of your students. And lastly, this resource includes a Speaking Practice & Rehearsal Checklist that you can distribute to your students prior to a speaking assessment so that they have a concrete game plan for how they can best prepare themselves for your speaking task.
Intrigued and want to learn more? Click on any of the thumbnails
below to take a closer look at my World Language Speaking Rubrics.
I also have a FREE SPEAKING RUBRIC in my Free Resource Library (click here!). Feel free to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter to access it!
Practical Tips for Implementing Speaking Assessments
Be sure to embed plentiful speaking activities and tasks in your instruction. If students do not have informal opportunities to practice speaking with each other and with you, then speaking assessments will be incredibly challenging. If you’re looking for ways to increase opportunities for your students to speak in class, check out my blog post, Effective Interpersonal Speaking Activities to Get Your French, Spanish, Italian Students Speaking in Class!
Be mindful of the hyper-anxious students. For some students, a speaking assessment could be the most stressful thing you have them do in your class. Be sure to work with students, their parents, guidance counselors, and even the administration to ensure that your speaking assessment is developmentally appropriate for these anxious students.
Consider alternating between speaking and writing assessments. You do not need to assess speaking every week, every month, or even every marking period/semester. You can alternate your assessments so that students are able to target their speaking proficiency as well as their writing proficiency. It also gives them (and you!) some much-needed variety, as well.
Collaborate with team teachers and departmental colleagues. We all have the task of assessing speaking, but it can be really wonderful to bounce ideas off of your colleagues, or to plan and co-create assessments with your team language teacher. Don’t feel like you need to bear the burden of speaking assessments on your own—use the resources available to you to help streamline the experience!
I hope this post has helped you think about the importance of assessing speaking proficiency, and that you are walking away with a few more tools in your toolbox for ways in which you can assess your students fairly, accurately, and in a time-efficient manner. You can assess your students’ speaking proficiency formatively throughout the marking period/semester, or at the end of a thematic unit as a summative assessment. Using the rubrics that I linked above will for sure save you time and energy in the grading process, which is what we want as World Language teachers in order to ensure our students are receiving the feedback they deserve but that we are not burning ourselves out in the process.
Do you assess interpersonal and/or presentational speaking proficiency? If so, what works best for you in your World Language classroom? Feel free to share your experience in the comment section below! I’d love to hear all about it.
Happy language teaching,
~ Michael
