Assessing Speaking at KS3

 Without having one-to-one speaking tests, how can we assess pupils' speaking at KS3, either for a grade or for formative marking? Here is what I do and how it works.

On The ALL London Branch webpage, you can find this Speaking Self Assessment sheet. This one is for Year 7 Spanish talking about the weather and opinions/plans for activities that depend on the weather.

So things like:

Me gusta jugar al tenis con mis amigos en el parque, sobre todo si hace sol. Pero no me gusta si llueve. Si llueve tengo que hacer los deberes. Entonces el fin de semana quiero ir al parque a jugar al tenis si hace sol.

Before we get onto assessment, you have to get the pupils talking in the first place. I've written about this in other posts for example here and here. And now here on the Being Ben activity. You will see ideas such as practising keeping talking using dice for conjunctions. Or one partner feeding ideas of what to say to the other partner, for them to say in Spanish. You can practise this with a series of partners in a speed Spanish activity. And encourage the pupils to use their support materials less and less as they move on from one partner to another.

This is from the early 2000s. I was using what are now called Sentence Builders - on the same ALL London Branch site you can see examples, here called "Talk Challenge" sheets. But actually, this sheet makes reference to pupils' "Emergency Sheet" or in this picture, a "Starter Kit". This was a sheet we used that was independent of topics. It had key transferable language for giving opinions, reasons, and examples in past and future. It was a step away from sentence builders, requiring pupils to build their own sentences. Pupils could use it for the assessment, but if they do refer to it, they have to declare it on the sheet.

So throughout the lesson, the teacher is there watching as pupils work with different partners, aware of anyone not participating or struggling. And aware of those who challenge themselves to speak spontaneously and without support. At the end, the pupils return to their original partner, ready to do the assessment. Now they can choose if they just want to speak spontaneously, or if they want to have the sheet for support, or if they want a partner to tell them what to say. All this information will be declared on the Self Assessment sheet.

The first half of the Self Assessment sheet is a ticklist of the sort of Spanish expected. This isn't the most important in terms of the information needed for giving a grade. It is there for the pupil to make sure they are using all the "ingredients" at their disposal. 

The most important part of the sheet is the second half, "Using Spanish", where the pupil declares how much they needed to use the support, how fluently they could think up what to say, and how much they interacted with their partner's follow up questions.

So all pairs of pupils are speaking at the same time. You don't do individual speaking exams. You are there listening and watching throughout the lesson. All pupils are using very similar Spanish, but what you are assessing is how fluently and independently they do it. This information is given by the pupils on the Self Assessment Sheet. They don't just tick, they annotate and comment. So it is excellent formative assessment too. And the information you get is very detailed. When we used to have to give National Curriculum Levels, it was very useful for being able to justify a level, with pupils often being more self-critical than you might think.

I've been doing it for 20 years now, and it works well and would work well with the current fashions for Sentence Builders and spontaneous speaking.