ASSESSMENT OF TECHNICAL ORAL PRESENTATIONS

It is essential for both teachers and students to have a clear idea of what constitutes a good oral presentation, and of the assessment criteria which will be applied to the speakers’ performance. It is also necessary to agree on the purpose of the assessment. What is its role? Inevitably, both teachers and students often regard assessment simply as a matter of putting marks in a register, and ignore its formative role in improving students’ speaking performance by providing valuable feedback. Teachers often fail to ask themselves the question, "Will my students be responsible enough to improve themselves in the areas of weakness identified in the assessment of their oral presentation?"

Assessment should be viewed as a means of improving students’ performance and encouraging them to do better in the future. The challenge is to use a scheme of assessment which is not only reasonably reliable despite its inevitable subjectivity, but also provides diagnostic feedback which can be used to improve both the learning and the teaching process.

In order to design an effective assessment scheme, it is necessary to consider a range of evaluative factors which measure communicative effectiveness as well as linguistic correctness. The major items to keep in mind when assessing technical presentations deal with whether the presentation was pitched at the right level for the audience, adherence to the time limit set, organization, clarity, technical content, delivery, posture, use of visual aids, as well as linguistic features such as pronunciation, correct use of grammatical structures, discourse markers, etc. What is essential is to select items which teachers and students agree are important criteria for delivering a good oral presentation. In ESP classroom situations, it is common practice to group the factors agreed upon into an analytic rating scheme with a performance scale attached. An example of a rating scheme of this type is given below (Ryan, 1979):

Alternatively, the teaching team may prefer to use a rating scheme based on an overall assessment of communicative excellence using bands of performance such as those in the oral interview section of the ELTS Test (Carroll, 1980). A sample scheme of this type is provided below (Ryan, 1979):

The real challenge is to apply the assessment criteria uniformly and reliably, particularly in situations where students in different classes are rated by individual teachers. Students do tend to compare the marks given by different members of staff . Hence, there needs to be parity of assessment so that there is inter-marker reliability. Somehow, the team of teachers needs to get together and practice applying the rating scheme they have agreed upon. Thus they can standardize the way they allocate marks. Otherwise there is real danger that students will lose confidence in the ability of their teachers to rate their presentations reliably.

Conclusion

Delivering an effective scientific oral presentation is essentially a partnership between the student and the teacher, whereby the student gathers information, processes it and presents it, while the teacher guides.

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