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[Glenski]

I've asked this about conversation schools in the past. Let's see what happens if we narrow it down to mainstream schools instead.

In Japan, Japanese teachers provide the majority of grammar lessons to students. Foreign teachers are either ALTs, or they emphasize more of the oral/aural components. Sometimes their classes parallel the Japanese teachers' classes; sometimes they are independent of them.

It is not usual for oral communication classes to give homework, but some of us foreigners do this. It keep the students on their toes, it offers them something to refer to later (because they don't get oral/aural lessons with Japanese teachers), and it provides some measure of material for us to give grades. Otherwise, all you have is an occasional 60-second "speech" for the whole year.

The homework we give at my school is usually just an extension of a classroom drill sheet. It may be a matching exercise, but that just begs for cheaters. What is better is to have students write their own original sentences for the grammar points for that day. They get prompts or suggestions, and they must complete the work by themselves. Copiers get zero points. Pretty easy to see word-for-word examples of that. All in all, the HW is not grandiose, but it helps both parties, as I've explained.

What do you do?

As for tests, we give a rare quiz or review handout to be completed, but the school itself already has 5 major tests during the year, so that is what the kids really must prepare for. (Many don't, but that's another story.) How do you test oral communication on a test? At my school, the approach, all designed by the Japanese teachers, is somewhat like what kids see on their eventual college entrance exams.
1. Unjumble some sentences.
2. Fill in the blanks with words or expressions they learned in class.
3. Write replies of 3 or more words to taped questions. (We have recently changed this to selecting the right multiple choice answer. It avoided lots of ambiguity in their essay-type answers, and it forced kids to see exactly the point we were aiming at.)
4. Listen to a story (2-3 minutes) from a tape, then answer multiple choice questions (the Qs are also on tape, but only the answers are on paper).

P.S. As an edit to this thread, a late thought occurred to me. We used to have a speech building class for second year HS students. It was pretty bad after several years, and I was glad to see it canceled. We also used to give first year students one-on-one interview tests a few times a year to assess their abilities. VERY time-consuming and fairly unproductive.

Looking forward to hearing what others do, and with what success.

[denise]

In my listening and speaking classes, the homework is usually a weekly log. In the speaking class, students must tape record themselves speaking about a topic of their choice. I initially set a time frame of 2-3 minutes, but I never enforced it. I would take the tapes home and then record my response--I would spend most of my time trying to carry on a conversation and ask them further questions, but I would throw in a grammar correction or two as well. Last term, I had a class with only three students, so I had plenty of time to listen to their logs. In larger classes (which at my school is 12-16 students), it got really time consuming!

For listening classes, they had to do weekly eavesdropping logs--find an English conversation on campus or elsewhere, listen, and answer some questions about the content and vocabulary. Some students really got into it and did a very detailed job, but we have a lot of students who participate in a basketball program and have no time to hang out in the library or elsewhere on campus or socialize with the teachers or American students, so they very rarely do the log because they are very rarely exposed to real-life English conversations.

As for testing--short quizzes in listening classes (discriminating between sounds--r/l, s/th), nothing in the speaking class. My speaking class grades are based on their projects (speeches, debates, etc.), logs, and class participation.

d

[Roger]

Denise,
I very appreciated your point about students tape-recording their own speeches! It's been my own idea for years that students should listen to their own voices... but it's so novel few accept my advice, thiniking "there is no new word for me to memorise in this..."
Actually, I am borrowing other ideas from some of my colleagues, after years of feeling that my Chinese students are a tad lazy in never, never doing homework unless you take special measures to enforce that.

One of my colleagues gives them occasional writing assignments, usually to a small number of all the students, not the whole class, thus keeping the number of papers to read at a comfortable level. She asks them to write on a topic they discuss in class; she grades the papers with an eye on how the students express themselves, grammar and whether the writing fulfills format requirements.
She gives them a bonus in her grading for handing in homework. This because she too is relatively disillusioned about their enthusiasm. But it seems to work very well in her class, and so I am going to adopt this for my students as well.
There is an aside: this is her absolute minimum threshold that her students must fulfill; She also expects each and everyone to make a class presentation on a topic she chooses for them. These presentations too earn her students a bonus.