Preparing for an oral assessment, a number of things to consider. Some of them could perhaps be seen as common sense, others are not so obvious or may vary in relevance depending on who is designing the test. Read on if you would like to know more about how to prepare for your oral test.
If you are attending a course, you surely have a table of contents which gives you an overview of what you will cover over a number of weeks. This list of topics is a good anchor for your preparation as it highlights what you need to learn about.
The materials you are provided with in your seminars are normally to focus on the tools you need to have to tackle a particular content orally. This means relevant vocabulary and key phrases. In the time you are in class you have opportunities to say and use some or all of these words. This gives you an idea of how to use them to achieve the communicative objective of the session. This reason alone makes it really important to attend your oral seminars. However, this is not enough to really have the skills and knowledge you need to be able to tackle a given oral task.
Once you have an idea of what was covered in class you need to go over these key words and phrases and learn them in your own time. The earlier you start the more consolidated they will be by the time to do your oral test.
A typical mistake is to leave learning key words and phrases too late. This will show in your oral test in the form of hesitation, mispronunciation, the inability to remember some key phrases when faced with a particular topic, and a mounting feeling of unease as you start realising that you do not know your phrases well enough to be able to use them when and as needed.
Part of your self-study work should involve developing a system that works for you in order to learn your key words and phrases. The old approach of pen and paper is an option, but these days you can also use online tools that will ease your way into practicing adding a bit of variation to your job. Quizlet is one of those tools. And one of its advantages is that you can organise the key words and key phrases by topics, by creating different folders. When it comes to practice Quizlet helps you to test yourself. But it also reads those words and phrases to you, which helps your pronunciation. Give this tool a go if you have not tried it yet.
Besides Quizlet or similar tools, you can also record yourself. You may want to test yourself whether you remember a list of key words, or phrases. If you record it, not only you can check later whether you did or not, but focus on the pronunciation and self-correct. In any doubt you can use Quizlet, or for some quick one-offs to google translate, which can also read back to you whichever chunk of text you enter.
Let’s move on now into considering typical marking criteria for oral output in a test context. Whilst this may vary across institutions or schools, usually there are a number of aspects that the examiner is usually going to pay attention to, to a greater or lesser extent. The following are a good summary:
1. Organisation and presentation of material.
2. Accuracy
3. Range of expression
4. Pronunciation and fluency
Organisation and presentation of material would matter particularly when it comes to presentations. It may be less obvious to matter when it comes to topics such as shopping or ordering food in a restaurant, however in cases such as these it does play a role too. This is about producing content that fits well sequentially and in the case of interactive outputs, that fits well as a response to what your test partner may have said.
Accuracy also matters, because it does show that you know about grammar and about which words are to be used. If you have to make a physical description of some people in a photo, part of what the examiner would be looking at is whether you can come up with words that fit what can be seen in that photo, or is somehow fitting with the image, and whether you are using those words correctly. Grammatical agreement between words (nouns, adjectives and verbs) is very important to get accuracy right.
Range of expression means that you can avoid repetition. In a more positive way, it also means that you can show that you know a variety of words or phrases that are fitting with the topic at hand. You can keep a conversation to do with shopping extremely simple or you may add phrases such as “can I pay with a credit card?”, “how much is the kilo of potatoes?” etc. If you do not introduce those phrases in your dialogue, you may be correct and it may still count as you having tackled the topic, but the range may be perceived as limited and this in turn may have a knock on effect on other criteria, as the evidence you provide to assess your output is limited compared to what you could have produced instead.
Pronunciation and fluency play indeed an important role when it comes to assessing oral outputs. The more you know your topic, meaning your phrases and key words, the easier it would be for you to be fluent and to come across as such. Fluency has to do with timing and with pace. Whilst silence can be part of communication, too much silence impairs it. If you are involved in a dialogue with a test partner it does matter how timely you produce your phrases or words. Fluency is something you can build up by regular practice. This can be as simple as rehearsing a situation where you are playing the two roles required: shopkeeper/customer, asking for directions/giving directions etc.
Pronunciation is also important. It does not come necessarily with learning your words. You have to make a conscious effort to pay attention on how those words you need to say are pronounced. Repetition makes perfect, so the more you give some time to practice the better. As mentioned earlier, recording yourself is a good strategy to give yourself the chance to self-correct, but also to notice where you may not sound too good and realise what words are giving you problems when it comes to saying them.
Regardless of the value attached to the above criteria, these are worth keeping in mind when preparing your oral topics. Therefore, give yourself plenty of time to prepare your topics taking these various dimensions of your developing speaking skills into account.
If you would like to share any strategies or tools that work for you, please use the comment section to do that, this would surely be of help to somebody else!
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