It's that time of year: ESL Speaking Tests!

ESL Speaking Tests

It's that time of year again: speaking tests!  I've blogged about speaking tests already over on my other site, ESL Speaking.

ESL speaking test rubric
ESL speaking tests- 3 ways to do it

But, I will add this. This semester, I set up my tests so that students talk to 1-1 with a random partner (chosen by me) and with random topics from a list of 10 (chosen by me). My role is just that of an observer.

Ideally, I never like to do more than assign partners, hand out topics, tell which student to begin and then signal a topic change and then the end of the test. But, I will intervene if necessary if one partner is clearly weaker than the other one.

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The weaker student's mark is never in question-low, but for the higher level student, it can be hard to show their true abilities if the weak student is not asking them any questions, or is asking terrible ones. In this case, I'll interrupt and ask the higher level student a couple difficult questions and see how they handle it. If they handle them well, then they'll get a higher score. If not, they'll probably fall into the mid-range category and not get the highest marks.

I would never want to punish a higher level student with a low score simply because their partner was bad at asking them interesting, or appropriate questions.

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Some oldies but goodies

Oldies but Goodies From My Life! Teaching in a Korean University

I went back in the archives for you, my readers and pulled out some of the best posts from way back in the day when I started this blog. Can you believe it's been 7 years and that the same stuff that I was thinking about back then is still what I'm thinking about today?

Student Evaluations

Physical Activity in the Classroom

The First Day of Class (still haven't really figured this one out yet!)

Speaking Tests (am still changing this one almost every semester!)

Social Interactions with your Bosses and Co-workers

A Group Project Speaking Idea

Enjoy!

ESL Speaking: Activities, Games and Resources

2 pieces of  news for you, my readers. The first is: ESL Speaking. If you teach a conversation, discussion or 4-skills English class, this is the site for you. It has games, activities and resources all designed to help you plan your speaking classes. Plus, I think the design is wicked cool, if I do say so myself (it's my site! Ha!).

The second thing is that if you want to get 40 of my favorite ESL games and activities, you should sign up and get it delivered straight to your inbox. I promise only goodness for you and none of the badness that is spam.

40 ESL Games and Activities-Classroom Tested and Approved

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Classes are done for the semester

Classes are Done!

Happy, happy times here in Busan as I've just finished teaching my last class of the semester, which is actually my last class until March since I've decided to have a mental health break this vacation and spend some time in Canada visiting the family and then to Vietnam for some beach therapy with friends.

Next week is speaking tests/presentations which are pretty low stress for me this time around because I'm not actually interacting with students and instead just observing.  (Check out this blog post for my run down of various kinds of speaking tests and the pros and cons of each).

Then the Monday after that is the final written exam for all my classes, which is even lower stress and pretty easy marking (1-2 minutes/student).  No 1/2 points here!  It's all or nothing.

Some final grade calculating which will be reasonably easy due to my diligent upkeep of that throughout the semester.

Anyway, long story short is that I've done all the hard work of the semester and only the easy stuff remains!  Yeah.

Like the sounds of working at a Uni in Korea and not having any classes until March?  Want to know how to get this job?  Check out this most fabulously helpful book (written by me!)

Speaking Tests: what went down

The other day, I talked about the various kinds of speaking tests for English language learners, but I didn't specifically talk about what I did this semester.  Here's what happened in my course for first year students in the English major at my uni:

I gave the students 6 possible topics, which were very general in nature and included things like, "Home and Family" or "Health and Exercise" and they were essentially what we had covered in class during the previous weeks.

The students came to my office in groups of 4, and then I randomly assigned them a partner and a topic.  The first 2 students had to talk about their first topic for a total of 2-3 minutes, and then the other topic for another 2-3 minutes.  Each person in the group had to start off one of the mini-conversations.  I only listened and quite rarely had to intervene (only in the case of someone giving 1-2 word answers and not asking any questions in return). Then the next set of partners had their conversation about their 2 topics.

I graded them on a 5 point scale on 3 things:

1. Grammar/Vocab use (only what we had studied in class).

2. Interesting, detailed answers (sentences +an extra detail or two)

3. Appropriate questions/ability to keep the conversation going.

Overall, this round of tests went very well. I was able to evaluate about 25 students in just under 2 hours. I finished not feeling totally exhausted, like I would have if I had had individual conversations will all those students. 

I think it was a good balance between random and predictable.  It was predictable in that the students had the 6 possible topics before the test, and they knew their 3 potential partners beforehand.  But, it was random in that the topics were randomly assigned, as well as the partner, so although students could prepare to some degree, they couldn't just memorize a dialogue.

One thing I didn't like was that the weaker students who gave one or two word answers and didn't ask a lot of questions made the test quite difficult for their partner, although I definitely took this into account during the grading. But, the students are all English majors so there are actually no truly terrible students in the class and most of them have at least a basic proficiency in English, as is not always the case in classes like mandatory Freshman English.