Diagnostic Oral Skills Assessment

Communicative language teaching is based on the notion that involving learners in interactive tasks where meaningful dialogue and functional language is transferred will promote learning. Curriculum development, which includes assessment, must integrate information, skills, objectives and training to meet the challenges facing the students now and in the future. Many teachers feel ill equipped to assess spoken language though they acknowledge the importance of assessing their students' communicative competence. This book describes comprehensive research undertaken to identify critical components of formative speaking tests, investigates whether diagnostic oral skills tests are available, and leads to the development of a framework for designing formative oral speaking tests which reflect previous teaching / learning in the classroom. Altogether 246 teachers, trainers, and language testing experts, and 110 students participated in the study.

Autorentext

Jo Ann Salvisberg currently lectures at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Business, Luzern, Switzerland, and works as a freelance trainer. She has been involved in TESOL since 1990, primarily teaching adult learners, and began doing teacher training in 2001. In addition to the CTEFLA (Certificate for Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults), she completed her studies with an M.Ed. in ELT in 2001, and a PhD in TEFL (Teaching English to Speakers fo Other Languages) and Social Psychology in Education in 2007 with a primary research focus on communicative skills assessment in the EFL classroom.

Inhalt

Contents: Critical Components of Effective Instruments of Diagnostic Oral Skills Assessment: Content validity, authentic language tasks, summative versus formative evaluation, norm- versus criterion-referencing - Current Methods of Oral Skills Assessment: criteria, method, validity, reliability, frequency - Availability of Diagnostic Testing Material - Implementation and Evaluation of Guidelines.