Job Discussion Forums

[7969]

in the past i was required to give an oral exam to college students. the overall ability of these students was between bad and worse, with a few decent students in each class. as a result, my oral exam consisted of:

a. tell me about yourself:
b. tell me about your family; and
c. tell me what you like to do in your free time.

i was generous with the marks and still failed 30% of my students, not because i wanted to, but because i felt i had to. they just couldn't manage this simple task, despite being given a copy of the questions i was to ask a week beforehand.

now, at a much better school, a middle school, i need to do the same thing starting next month. the kids here are better, and i expect fewer problems. however, i wonder what kinds of questions other esl teachers have on their list for oral exams. other than the mundane questions listed above, are there any questions that are a bit mroe challenging and that will allow me to get a better idea of how a student is performing?

warmest regards ~ 7969

[Roger]

A very thrilling discussion or presentation topic: Cheating at school/during exams...
And: How schools/teachers should stop it!

[7969]

thanks roger. an interesting idea, and i might try that one.

[latefordinner]

Roger:
Great tip! I'll certainly use it soon.

The last two weeks I put together an oral test for my grade 6 classes. The first week I had the class read a story and answer simple comprehension questions, as part of a review class. The second week I reviewed the story, then had an open book test on it; however I dictated the questions. They were the same questions that I had asked the previous week, but no one remembered. I got everything from near-perfect papers to blank pages. Just goes to show...

[randyj]

Oral exams are tough! Consider administering an oral exam to the students in pairs, allowing about twenty minutes per pair. In the past, I have broken the exam into three parts: 1) telling about oneself; 2) describing a picture, one per student; 3) a dialog on a subject. The pictures came from a group that I used for various exercises during the year. For the exam I assigned pictures randomly, without warning. For the dialog, I posted topics beforehand and allowed students to choose and prepare beforehand. Any serious oral exam should be videotaped, especially if the teacher acts as both grader and proctor.

[7969]

thanks randy. i actually did administer my last exam in pairs or threes, and it makes it a bit easier on the students. however, as i have 700 students, i will be allotting about 2-4 minutes per pair, not twenty minutes per student. even at this tiny amount of time, it will take me nearly three weeks (seeing each class once a week) to finish everyone. no other way around it really.

[Brian Caulfield]

I have a fairly easy way of doing this test. And whatever you do don't fail any of your students . You will just pass the bad problem student on to another teacher .
What I do is make about thirty questions like , What time is it ?, Can you tell me how to get to the washroom? What's the weather forcast?
You put these questions on cards and put them in groups of five or six students and have them turn over cards and ask the next student the question . You grade them on pronunciation, grammar and appropriatness or whatever else you consider important . Each studnet should answer five questions .
This is a fast efficient way of getting them talking . And they seem to enjoy it .

[millie]

Hello 7969

You are faced with a few very obvious problems:

Pair/ group assessment hides a lot of shortcomings as stronger Ss carry the weaker. It is not especially reliable.

You seem to be unsure what to test – surely you should test what you have taught.

If you have 700 students to assess in 2 minutes each over 3 weeks, you have an absolutely ridiculous and meaningless exercise in futility in front of you.

Next, how are you going to assess: Pron /Grammar /Vocab /Communicative Ability/ Content ...
and whatever else you think is important all in 2 minutes? What are your benchmarks?
It is just not realistic – probably not even for an experienced oral examiner.

“Cheating” or pre-knowledge of the test will also favour those attending the exam later.

Anyway, your results are of no real consequence in the larger scheme of the college so why put everyone through unnecessary pain.

Why not spend the 3 weeks teaching them – it really will be far more useful and meaningful for all concerned.

Allow the students to self assess themselves.
Give the monitors and class capitans a class list and say there are (for example):

25% A
25% B+
25% B
25% C

The Ss decide what they get according to the prescribed ratios. If there are any problems, the individuals concerned can arrange a one-to-one test with you.

Easy and sensible, surely?

Good luck
M

[Old Dog]

Encore, Millie! Encore! At long last, some good sense is spoken in this matter. To those wondering about oral assessment, listen to Millie most attentively.

She asks you the question - Which is more valuable to your students, 3 weeks of good teaching or 3 weeks of meaningless assessment that no one is really interested in anyway?

[7969]

millie, you're right. of course i agree fully with you. if the school says i should examine the students, i feel i should oblige them. they are the boss.....

regarding the exam in pairs, thats precisely why i pair them up. stronger students can assist the weaker ones. i try to encourage them to work together and help one another, and this is jsut an extension of that idea. weak students on their own flounder too much, and often would say nothing unless paired up with another Ss.

another point, i have thought about what the other students will be doing while i'm examining two students at a time. absolutely nothing. so i havent figured out how to solve that.

ultimately i suspect i will simply abandon the idea of an oral exam because the idea is just too unwieldy and meaningless with this number of students and so little time. your idea of self-assessment is good. i'll consider that.

thanks for all the replies.

[Roger]

700 students in one exam?

One more example to show how ridiculous China's exams are!

But, frankly, I do believe an FT's assessment should NOT reflect his STUDENTS' dream marks. I believe, an FT should be that final hurdle that Chinese have to pass before they can actually claim they have "studied English for ten years". Your grade should reflect whether they can communicate in this new medium. NOt whether they have memorised all the stuff they were given over those years...

It is true, unfortunately, that whatever you taught them durithose few months has entered their heads by one ear and gone out the other. I just noticed it in my exams; there were some rather memorable phrases and words, and most students couldn't handle them with pre-warming them.

But, I was pleased to note that all my students - luckily not that many, just a little over 120 - had acquired a certain competency, some even flamboyancy, call it self-assuredness, in talking about something to someone, and it wasn't talking about themselves but talking about some issue of general import.
They knew they had to organise their thoughts, they also expected to be assessed for grammar slipups and other tricky things thacause miscommunication.
On the whole, my students did fairly well this time. I have larnt a bit during this and the previous semester. And so have my students.

As an asterisk, I wish to add that I would vary the topic from student 1 to student 5, then perhaps begin aith topic one to topic 5, so that no any two students know they are going to have the same one.
With so many students, perhaps you cannot expect them to talk about cheating or something equally lofty; how about describing some picture? IT would be easy to find cartoons or other illustrations and have students imagine captions, wouldn't it?

[Roger]

I am so chatty... I forgot something:

One of my colleagues told me how she grades her students' performance:
- 25% for their presence (no absences);
- 25% for their participation (volunteering for a presentation during the semester);
- 50% for the actual talk during the examination;

[Talkdoc]

I also have to provide some sort of oral exam to well over 200 students during finals week.

I decided to fashion the exam to something resembling the IELTS format and to roughly base the grading on the IELTS Band criteria with Band 5 representing an "A" (as not one of my students has a level of English greater than that). Students who attended regularly and attempted to participate will receive extra credit. The other caveat here is that my university president has issued a decree that no less than five percent of the students will fail and it is her expectation that closer to 15 percent should fail. (My understanding of this is that it is an attempt to improve the university's overall rating although I am not quite sure how that translates to same.)

To stack the deck in the students' favor, they had to think of their own topic and turn that into me in writing this week. (And some of them came up with some very interesting and original topics, e.g., "I will talk about what happiness means to me in my life," "...the problems I have been feeling as a college student," "...the type of love and boyfriend I am looking for," etc.) They will talk freely about their topic for two minutes and then I will interview them for two additional minutes. After listening to Chinglish for 15 months now, and testing many IELTS candidates, that's more than enough time for me to reliably assess their performance across the criteria I selected.

Attached are the criteria they will be graded on and how that translates to placement (grading).

Doc

PS. These same criteria were used to place over 200 students of a corporate client (in my last school) into nine different level classes with great success and with a good degree of interrater reliability.

[randyj]

I have experienced limited success in applying detailed oral evaluation criteria. Chalk it up to my own incompetence, but I have decided to simplify my marks as much as possible. So I use the following 1 to 5 scale:

5 - intelligible without difficulty,
4 - intelligible with minor difficulty,
3 - intelligible with some difficulty,
2 - major difficulty,
1 - take me to your leader.

The marks can be shaded with a "+" or "-" as the spirit moves.

[millie]

Hello TalkDoc,

While you have put together quite a neat view of IELTS speaking criteria from available texts, one of my concerns with this exam is that it does not explicitly test for communicative ability or capacity. While many of the criteria are somewhat interdependent, IELTS oral does not address communicative ability directly.
It may be a more useful or meaningful factor to consider for lower ability students.

Cheers and good luck.
M