Abstract:

The presentation is devoted to assessment of oral skills in FLA and provides examples of evaluation scales. The assessment of speaking is a tough thing, especially in an exam-situation, where students may be so paralysed with anxiety that it becomes difficult to give an objective evaluation of their utterances even if the speech is subdivided into smaller categories, e.g. range, accuracy, fluency, coherence, interaction and/or others. Being so ‘troublesome’ both to master and to evaluate, speaking is regarded as the best indicator of language proficiency – the determinant of success ,of what it means to be able to use a foreign language. There is a whole range of different scales for speaking evaluation – more descriptive scales and numerical ones, rating checklists and performance scales – some of which will be included in the presentation.
Speaking in a foreign language is the skill which not only is the most difficult to gain competence in by learners but which is also very difficult to assess by teachers/ instructors. When it comes to oral performance in a foreign language – all features connected with individuality/ personality are ‘mirrored’ in spoken attainments. Being able to speak in a foreign language students must learn many things – they have to know pronunciation, they have to acquire the necessary lexicon, and they have to be able to put their utterances together grammatically correct in order to gain intelligibility and to minimise hesitation phenomena.
When people speak – unlike to the situation when people write – they usually do not do it in sentences. Spoken language tends to consist of utterances built with “idea units” (Buck 2001: 9), namely short phrases or clauses loosely connected giving an impression of being totally ungrammatical. Since the speaker’s utterance is constructed in real time it frequently lacks the preparation time to organise and control the flow of speech. Spoken language is rather connected by the coherence of the idea units mentioned above than by any formal grammar.
Teachers should bear in mind that assessment of speaking is a tough thing. Especially in an exam-situation, students may be so paralysed with anxiety that it becomes difficult to give an objective evaluation of their utterances even if they are subdivided into smaller categories (range, accuracy, fluency, coherence and interaction).

Keywords:

SLA, Speaking Skill, Evaluation Scales.