How to Test Speaking Skills in Japan

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Chapter 7: Write & Speak a Conversation

productive lessons takes up much of our time and attention Simply getting these sorts of students to remain active and engaged requires a great deal of effort The following assessment activity, dubbed Write & Perform a Conversation , provides a task-based approach to assessing speak ing skills that encourages productive, collaborative learning Stage 1: Pair-write for 25 minutes In Stage 1, random pairs of students have 25 minutes to pair-write and transcribe to L1 an English conversation based on parameters you set out for them Pair-writing is a collaborative process where both partners produce their English conversation on a single sheet of paper In order to facilitate a better performance later on in Stage 3, they can also simultaneously produce a Japanese version of this text Here’s how this process works: 1 Students are given two sheets of paper, one for writing the En glish text, and one for the Japanese 1

The first step is to pair-write and transcribe an English conversation

1 Tip : Official test forms consisting of blank lines and slots for student names and numbers can lend an of ficial air to this task and produce neater, more legible results See Appendix A and B for sample test forms