Dear colleagues,

The importance of testing oral communication skills is always emphasized by ESL/EFL specialists every where. But there is a controversial belief concerning the methods/approaches of testing these skills, especially speaking skills.

 Genrally, there are two approaches of assessing speaking skills in teaching and learning a foreign/second language.The first is the observational approach; in which the student is asked to perform one or more specific oral communication task - as in IELTS speaking test – the student is given a task that is focused on a particular topic and asked to talk about it.  The student's performance on the task(s) is observed by the tester, and then evaluated according to a certain rating system.

 The observational and structured approaches assess the student's performance in two ways of scoring which are;

-  A holistic assessment; by assessing the students' ability of achieving a specific communication objective.

- An analytic assessment; by analyzing the student's language competence and communicative/pragmatic competence.

Dear ELT colleagues, do you know other types of methods/approaches of testing speaking skills? - do you think, there are more  weaknesses  than  strengthens of the two mentioned approaches of assessingspeakingskills in foreign/second language- specially the ways of scoring and rating . I would like to know/share your experiences of testing/assessing speaking skills.

I am looking forward to have your comments.

Thanks

Badri Abbas