A Study Of Classroom-based Oral English Assessment Practices For Non-English Majors In Chinese Higher Education Institutions

With the deepening of the reform and opening-up policy, China has more and more frequent communications with the outside world. English has undoubtedly played an important role in the cross-cultural communication, and oral English in particular has enjoyed inherent advantages in communication for its direct nature. Consequently, the importance of oral English has been gradually realized by more and more people. In order to meet requirements of various levels in social and economic development, the Ministry of Education issued the College English Curriculum Requirements (for trial) in 2004, clearly pointing out that the goal for college English teaching is to cultivate students' comprehensive capacity in using English (listening and speaking abilities in particular), which has positively promoted the college English teaching and testing reforms in Chinese higher education:the separate listening and speaking course has been set up in many universities; the computer- and classroom-based multimedia teaching model has come into being; the assessment of oral English for non-English majors has also been established.However, oral ability has been widely acknowledged as the most difficult to measure among the four language skills. In language assessment field, a majority of research has focused on large-scale standardized oral tests such as the TOEFL Speaking, the IELTS Oral, CET-SET, etc., while little attention has been drawn on classroom-based oral assessment, which in fact has more direct and beneficial backwash effects on teaching and learning. Therefore, the present study chose classroom-oral assessment as the research body and intended to provide a whole picture of the current oral assessment practices contextualized in classroom conducted in Chinese higher education institutions.The present study selected two nationally prestigious universities (A and B) in Hubei as the research settings, investigating their classroom-based oral assessment practices and examining teachers and students'perceptions of various aspects involved in the oral assessment, namely, overall design, format, content, task, scoring, participation, etc. by the use of questionnaires and interviews. The results suggested that the oral assessment conducted in A was better than that in B almost in an all-round way. Accordingly, the oral assessment had more positive reflections from teachers and students in A than their counterparts in B. Moreover, the teacher group generally responded more positively to various aspects in the oral assessment than the student group.However, despite the efforts and progress the two universities has made in promoting college English oral teaching and assessment, the study shows there were not a few problems with the current classroom-based oral assessment practices:unclear assessment objectives and purposes, inadequate task variety and disinteresting oral topics, subjective scoring of oral samples, unspecific feedback to students, lack of self-evaluation mechanism, absence of students' involvement, teachers' deficient expertise of oral assessment, and few training opportunities. In light of all these problems appearing in the current oral assessment practices, the study suggests that efforts should be made from the following aspects so as to improve the oral assessment practices in the future:decoding standards into specific and measurable assessment objectives; increasing oral task varieties and topic interest; providing detailed and descriptive feedback to students timely; embedding formative assessment in daily oral instruction; encouraging students'involvement in the oral assessment process; establishing assessment database and self-evaluation mechanism; creating more advanced platforms of oral assessment training and exchanging for teachers.