This book takes teachers and language testers through the research on the assessment of speaking.

This book takes a critical perspective of research on assessing speaking in second and foreign languages. Chapters focus on the complexity brought about by actual interactional competence in speaking tasks and discuss how testing and assessment models and practices can incorporate recent research on the dynamic and situated nature of language use.

This edited volume investigates the nature and possible applications of an expanded and reconceptualized theoretical construct of speaking as a dynamic socially-constructed endeavour. It addresses both theoretical perspectives and methodological procedures to define and circumscribe the assessment of contextualized speaking. The chapters focus on the complexity brought about by actual interactional competence in speaking tasks and discuss how testing and assessment models and practices can incorporate recent research findings on the inherently dynamic and situated nature of language use. The volume presents research on language assessment in a variety of languages other than English, including French, Chinese and Japanese. It also examines the role that embodied action (gaze, gesture, orientation to materials and texts in the environment) plays in assessment practices, an area that has heretofore remained under-explored. Chapter 6 is free to download as an open access publication. You can access it here: https://zenodo.org/record/5163340#.YQvJ0IhKjcs

An up-to-date review of the relevant literature on assessing speaking.

This book presents an in‐depth study of assessment innovation and its impact on teaching and learning. The context is New Zealand, and the focus is additional languages other than English and the recent introduction of a radical new assessment of students’ spoken proficiency, called interact. The book crosses the traditional theoretical and methodological boundaries associated with language testing research, which focuses on assessment performance, and presents an alternative approach where stakeholders become the centre of interest. It advances our understanding of how assessment innovation impacts on two key groups - teachers and students in schools - based on data collected from a substantial two‐year research project. It presents an account of these stakeholders’ perceptions of the validity and usefulness of the new assessment in comparison with the more traditional test that it has replaced.Assessing Foreign Language Students' Spoken Proficiency makes an outstanding and original contribution to the field of second and foreign language teaching, providing a theory and research-based account of the development of a learner-centred approach to oral proficiency assessment. It is an important resource for teachers and teacher educators as well as assessment and curriculum specialists worldwide. It deserves to be widely read.

This book provides language teachers with guidelines to develop suitable listening tests

The volume constitutes a state-of-the-art account of issues related to teaching, learning and testing speaking in a second language. It brings together contributions by Polish and international scholars which seek to create links between theory, research and classroom practice, report the findings of studies investigating the impact of linguistic, cognitive and affective factors on the development and use of speaking skills, and provide concrete pedagogic proposals for instruction and assessment in this area. As such, the book will be of interest not only to second language acquisition theorists and researchers, but also to foreign language teachers willing to enhance the quality of speaking instruction in their classrooms.

"Drawing on wide-ranging literature from a variety of relevant disciplines, as well as their own extensive experience in teaching spoken English, the authors give a fascinating, comprehensive, and insightful account of the nature of second language speaking skills. The research and theory they survey then serves as the basis for the principles, strategies, and procedures they propose for the teaching of spoken English. This book will, therefore, provide an invaluable resource for teachers, teachers in training, and researchers, providing both a state-of-the-art survey of the field as well as a source of practical ideas for those involved in planning, teaching, and evaluating courses and materials for the teaching of spoken English"--

Over the last few decades, the use of virtual technologies in education, including foreign/second language instruction, has developed into a substantial field of study. Through virtual technologies, language learners can develop metacognitive and metalinguistic skills, and they can practice the language by interacting with real/virtual users or virtual objects, a very important issue for language learners who have no or little contact with native or target language speakers outside the classroom. Assessing the Effectiveness of Virtual Technologies in Foreign and Second Language Instruction provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of virtual technologies and applications in engaging language learners both within and outside the classroom. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as game-based learning, online classrooms, and learning management systems, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, scholars, educators, graduate-level students, software developers, instructional designers, linguists, and education administrators seeking current research on how virtual technologies can be utilized and interpreted methodologically in virtual classroom settings.