Oral exams and how to mark them

One of the most difficult issues of this subject is how to evaluate our students’ oral productive skill.

First of all, I`d like to point out that I am going to use different types of oral activities: recordings in class both of prepared and spontaneous speech given a certain topic ot deal wih, and recodings the students are going to prepare at home and send via email, video or mp3. I think it's important to take into account all these aspects so student can gain confidence and increase fluency and accuracy little by little.

Talking about the marking of oral exams, I firstly thought of using a single mark to evaluate every student, but I realized that it wasn’t fair. Finally, I decided to mark five different aspects:

1. Pronunciation and intelligibility
2. Fluency
3. language: appropriate grammar and vocabulary
4. The project and its content
5. Accuracy (errors and mistakes)

At the end of each project students get 5 different marks (the final mark comes from finding the average) and that helps them to know which parts they have done well and which areas need to improve.