Teaching Spanish: Assess Conversational Spanish

Interview Learners to Hear Their Listening and Speaking Proficiency

Jun 12, 2008

What can Spanish students understand and say in a conversation? Figuring this out seems challenging, but an oral proficiency interview reveals speaking ability best.

Students' listening and speaking skills in Spanish have to be assessed so that both the teacher and the students know how well they communicate in conversation. And, students need to do just - speak Spanish - for the teacher in an organized fashion that uses little time. In addition to traditional paper and pencil tests that don't measure conversational proficiency, teachers can follow some simple steps to create, implement, and evaluate a basic Spanish interview to assess conversational skills.

Old School Spanish Assessments

Most Spanish teachers have been trained to create and evaluate tests on grammar and vocabulary groups because this is efficient, objective, and it appears logical. Students write their answers in Spanish onto tests, and they are evaluated on their overall Spanish knowledge and the written application of this.

Memorizing vocabulary and figuring out grammatical structures like algebra have little to do with speaking practical Spanish in everyday situations. These old school tests are really deficiency tabulations where they total up what students don't know about Spanish grammar and vocabulary.

Oral Proficiency

Teaching students to speak and use Spanish consistently invites risk taking and inherent mistakes; most traditionally trained teachers are unfamiliar with evaluating imperfect evolution. Teachers need to evaluate what students can do in Spanish, their oral proficiency, instead of what they don't know.

The best way to figure out a student's Spanish speaking proficiency is to give the student an interview. The interview combines the conversational basics with course content. The teacher listens carefully to the student and takes brief notes.

The American Council for the Teachers of Foreign Language has developed official proficiency levels and interview techniques for students of all. The best training is for Spanish teachers to attend official ACTFL workshops.

Creating the Interview

The interview contains familiar conversational questions and vocabulary or content that the students have used frequently in class. The key is flexibility; the most authentic interviews contain spontaneous questions and answers; a hard and fast script won't elicit the most natural language.

Jot down the following as a general template that can be deviated from. Make sure to include questions including greetings and salutations, daily life, preferences, and if the student's proficiency is advanced enough, actions in the past, future plans, and conditional situations.

Interviewing the Student

Let the students know a few days before hand that you, or you and another Spanish teacher will be conducting interviews. Allow for time in class for plenty of practice. Teachers can draw names from a hat, start alphabetically, or take volunteers to begin.

Evaluating the Student's Speaking Proficiency

Again, the definitive training source for assessing and evaluating Spanish speaking proficiency is ACTFL. Teachers can, though, develop their own ways to evaluate the student's proficiency. Evaluating what a student can do while speaking requires a wide, forgiving lens.

Students should be evaluated for speaking with clear communication as opposed to grammatical mastery. The message is the priority, not necessarily the way it is said. If an answer is understood it is correct if the meaning and intent are there.

Students can be ranked in superior, excellent, high, average, and not there yet categories according to the clarity of their answers and the chances they took in conversation. Narrative descriptors are best to describe speaking proficiency, but if teachers must assign A-B-C grades to the interviews than they could be:

Understanding and speaking Spanish should be the priorities of Spanish classes, so they must be assessed. Creating, implementing, and evaluating a Spanish interview to assess conversational skills just takes a little thought, planning, and an open mind.

The copyright of the article Teaching Spanish: Assess Conversational Spanish in Learning Spanish is owned by Catherine Fortin. Permission to republish Teaching Spanish: Assess Conversational Spanish in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.