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Chapter 8
Testing Oral Skills
Speaking skill refers to one’s ability to interact successfully in communication. Since communication is essentially a two-way process, speaking involves both comprehension and production. This makes speaking the most challenging area of testing. The tester cannot merely ask the student to speak in an oral test. The candidate is required to respond to natural situations as participants of spoken discourse.
Speaking involves a number of sub-skills. The candidate should possess knowledge of vocabulary and grammar to speak properly but this is not sufficient. His pronunciation matters. He should plan the content appropriately to suit the given context. He should comprehend what the other person says to respond in any situation. He should understand the role relationships of participants: he cannot speak to his principal in the same way he speaks to his mother. Thus the tester should measure fluency, accuracy and appropriacy of language use in a speech test.
This chapter discusses main issues of testing oral skills.

1. 
   The Challenges faced by the Tester
   

Speaking can be considered as the most challenging area of English Language Testing. There are a number of reasons:

1. 
   Speaking involves of a combination of a number of sub-skills that may have no connection with each other. For example, grammatical accuracy is not directly connected with pronunciation⁷. These two sub-skills should be measured in different ways.
   
2. 
   How to measure some of these sub-skills explicitly is a problem. Fluency, for example, is not easy to define or convert into measureable entity: is it the number of words produced by a candidate in a specified time?
   
3. 
   Perfect reliability in speech test is never achievable. Speech performances are measured by personal judgment of individual examiner.
   
4. 
   Content validity of a speech test is also a problem a tester has to encounter. If thirty language functions such as asking information, making complaints, advising are included in a syllabus, it is not possible to take a representative sample of language items for the test purpose. If a candidate does well in a few language functions selected, can we be sure that he also does well in other functions which were not tested?
   
5. 
   Communication is a two-way process and success of communication depends on the listener as well. It is unfair to assess speech performances ignoring the other party.
   
6. 
   If a learner has great difficulty in pronunciation or grammar but gets across his message very well, how should the tester score his performances?
   
7. 
   There are a number of practical problems in speech tests. It is a time consuming activity to take candidates one by one in an examination. It is also very difficult to provide identical testing conditions in each testing context. Acoustic conditions and other environmental factors are likely to interrupt the testing process in different degrees in different places.
   
8. 
   The examiner has to judge many sub-skills simultaneously. In this judgment, it is most likely that personal interests play a part.
   
9. 
   The performances of the same candidate may vary considerably from one task to the other. In most cases, candidates are under pressure when they perform something for immediate assessment. Their true performances may not be revealed in such occasions.
   
10. 
    The techniques used in speech tests will also present some problems to the examiner. For example, group discussions are used as a technique to elicit language. In these discussions, one member is likely to dominate the group and thus ‘score better’.
    

Despite all these problems, it is important to include oral component in English language tests. Otherwise, teachers will simply ignore this component in classroom teaching – a harmful backwash effect of testing.

2.