Assessing Academic Oral Presentations in English Medium Education: Navigating Linguistic and Social Justice Implications of Decision Making

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Oral communication skills facilitate learning, thinking and empower individuals to participate in society. Through talk we generate new ideas in collaboration with others (Littleton and Mecer, 2013) meaning oracy skills have become key to professional life. Crucially, oratorial prowess provides citizens with the communicative means by which to have their voices heard in civic arenas. However, not all verbal and non-verbal communicative practices are judged as equal and there is a pressing need for intensified action in education to prevent communicative inequality from undermining civic agency (Coleman, 2012).Pedagogical interventions are needed to develop oracy skills in a way which addresses unequal communicative status.Therefore, it is vital that tasks which facilitate oral communication skills development feature as learning and assessment tools in educational settings. Academic oral presentations (AOPs) are one genre used widely as learning and assessment tasks in UK Higher Education, often to provide oratory arenas in which students can develop and display disciplinary knowledge and oracy skills (Palmour 2020). However, the oracy demands involved in producing and evaluating AOPs may not be adequately recognised and not taught in ways which tackle communicative inequality.My doctorate investigated how AOP assessments are constructed and evaluated on English for Academic Purposes programmes and degree programmes in a range of disciplines in UK HE. Crucial insights were generated into the decision-making processes involved in navigating AOP events from student and teacher assessor perspectives. Surveys of content degree module practice raised significant questions regardingthe 'hidden assessment of oracy' (Doherty et al, 2011) in AOPs. The majority of HE practitioners surveyed rated delivery as highly important and the majority reported that they provide feedback on oracy skills which they see as vital to a successful AOP performance, but that oracy skills were not part of the assessment criteria. As part of the fellowship, I will conduct a contained fieldwork study which investigates how learning is assessed on content degree programmes through AOPs, particularly what judgements are made on oracy skills.This new research coupled with my doctoral findings will secure comprehensive data and sharper insights on AOP events to generate a manuscript on Assessing AOPs in Higher Education. Furthermore, the fieldwork findings on oral assessment contribute to English Medium Education research (Baker and Hüttner, 2019 and Jenkins et al., 2019) which deepens understandings of communicative practices in diverse linguacultural settings in international universities.My doctoral fieldwork, which investigated AOPs used as assessments for gatekeeping purposes on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses, demonstrated that the assessment criteria in many cases does not reflect the social and communicative reality of the task. For instance, in EAP AOP assessment which includes 50% spoken linguistic criteria, students significantly downplayed speaking skills because of the opportunity to use slides and non-verbal communication. The fieldwork also generated a comprehensive model of decision-making processes enacted by teacher assessors when engaged in rating AOPs. The range of tools represented in the model demonstrates the complex cognitive, social and emotional demands AOP assessment places on teacher assessors. During the fellowship, such doctoral findings will be disseminated through a series of written publications, further data-led reflection workshops with HE practitioners and academic talks. These events will promote critical reflection and action on the validity concerns associated with the ways oracy is developed and assessed in AOP tasks.The fellowship is a wonderful opportunity to foster communicative awareness and confidence among staff and students in academia and beyond.