Speaking Assessment

The aim of this Speaking Assessment App is to help English teachers with their speaking and oral evaluations through technology and the use of rubrics. After 20 years of experience with speaking interviews and presentations, staying clear and objective on the difficult task of assessing communicative skills has become easier and easier for me by the year.

I believe that thanks to the process of "trial error", or "learn by doing" as we call it, practice and repetition has allowed me to have some insight into what methodologies work better, more efficiently and more accurately. Obviously, accompanied by the proper formal training and further studying, I've been able to put the theories into practice.

Using rubrics allow us to organize the criteria to consider when we conduct any sort of evaluation, which for English teachers is communicative and language skills. Once the base criteria is established, a range of points and descriptors help identify the student's level of competence which, when added together, delivers an objective assessment of the student's performance.

According to some recent research, I can certainly agree with the description that states that "rubrics are more effective for judging the quality of student learning against pre-set criteria" (Grainger and Weir, 2020).

Finally, one power statement that clearly summarizes this tool is that "the generality of the rubric is perhaps the most important characteristic, because general rubrics can be shared with students and used for learning as well as for grading" (Brookhart, 2018), so I can only finish by saying that the usefulness of rubrics cannot be overstated.