Teaching English in a Secondary School !

The evaluation of the success or failure of our work is similar to the evaluation of the conversation performance of our students; both are a difficult job.

Everyone knows that in a conversation there is a variety of factors which include: the speaker’s accent, the control of the grammar and vocabulary, an overall fluency…and all of them contribute to have a good oral production.

Having obtained a sample of a learner’s speaking, there are two ways of assessing it: we can either give a holistic score that’s to say based on an overall impression or give a different score for different aspects of the task, the analytic score. The first case is quicker and adequate for informal testing progress. The analytic scoring takes longer, teachers have to take into account a variety of factors like the ones mentioned before, this way of testing seems fairer and more reliable but it has the disadvantage of having too many factors into account we can lose the sight of the overall picture.

On the other hand, it is also very important to give our students a feedback so that they get the information they need to improve in their performance. It needs to be staged and selective as to avoid demoralizing the students. To achieve this we think that we must to decide on which areas of the communicative performance we and the students need to focus on, from our point of view some of the most important could be:

– Appropriate use of vocabulary or “chunks” phrases.

– Fluency, turn-taking skill… that’s to say communication strategies.

– Pronunciation.

– And to a certain extent the grammatical correctness.

For this reason we chose to use an analytic method to test our students’ production, but not to mark the oral activities done in class, we find quite difficult to correct mistakes made during every speaking activity. It is not the same correcting either a drill aimed to improve pronunciation or a passionate discussion about a hot topic…on some other activities we give our students an assessment sheet in which we tell them beforehand the most relevant aspects we are going to have into account.

It has been particularly interesting to see how our point of view is also shared by other teachers (even other languages teachers) when asked in a forum about this hot topic: Click on top of the page iF you want to read it.