How to Test Speaking Skills in Japan

37 Chapter 4: Holistic or analytic? Decide your overall approach

What is holistic marking? Holistic marking is quite easy to understand—you do this all the time when giving a single grade based on your overall impression of a performance Letter and numerical grades of various types are most common:

Letter

Numerical

A

9-10

80-100

5

B

4

7-8

70-79

C

3

6

60-69

D

2

5

50-59

F

1

<5

<50

Common forms of holistic grades

The key advantages of holistic marking are speed and efficiency Giving one overall mark takes much less time than assessing vari ous aspects of a conversation, and there is no need to bother with any special computations or calculations (Weir, 2005) As a result, holistic marking is great for when you have a lot of students to get through and not much time, or if you want to test your students frequently An efficient holistic marking scheme would make it pos sible to test speaking skills in nearly every class, thus ensuring your students are keeping up with the material you teach them (Azra, Ikezawa, Rowlett, & Vannieuwenhuyse , 2005) It’s also a useful ap proach when you’re employing a testing technique that requires you to take part in the conversation, like during an interview Talking to a student while trying to track multiple constructs is really hard to