Testing Speaking Skills

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Testing Oral Proficiency: Difficulties and Methods 
 
Elihami 
 
Introduction: 
Although testing language has traditionally taken the form of testing knowledge 
about language, the idea of testing communicative competence is becoming recognized as 
being of great importance in second language learning. In testing communicative 
competence, speaking and listening tasks are commonly used. Those require tasks such as 
the completion of an information gap and role play (Kitao & Kitao, 1996). 
As language teachers, it is important for us to enhance the students’ delivery 
skills, increase their confidence, and develop their methods of organization and critical 
thinking skills. On the other hand, as language testers, it is necessary to establish a careful 
research design and conduct a precise measurement to determine f these goals have been 
met. The oral communication field needs a clear-cut method of evaluation as can be 
found in discrete language skill classes such as listening comprehension (Nakamura & 
Valens, 2001). Language teachers and language testers need a method which takes 
subjective qualitative observations and then transforms them into objective quantitative 
measures. 
In testing oral proficiency, or oral skills of second language learning, four 
components are emphasised. These include: vocabulary, grammar, semantics, and 
phonology. Accurate assessment of limited-English speaking learners requires a total 
description of the communication skills, linguistic structures, and functional usage of the 
learner’s language within all social domains (Silverman, Noa, & Russel, 1977). 

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A critical issue in the assessment is the selection of criteria for evaluating 
performance. Stiggins (as cited in Butler & Stevens, 1997) points out that the selection of 
these criteria should be one of the first steps in designing performance assessments. 
Students should understand ahead of time what is expected of them and whenever 
possible, actually help them determine on what basis their performance will be judged. 
When students are actively involved in establishing assessment criteria for tasks, they do 
not only have a better understanding of what is expected of them when they perform the 
tasks, but they will be able to more fully appreciate why the criteria are important (Butler 
& Stevens, 1997). 
This paper is divided into two sections. The first provides a brief description of 
the difficulties that testers of speaking skills encounter. The second presents different 
methods and approaches to testing speaking skills and oral proficiency in second 
language learning.