ENGLISH TEACHERS’ ASSESSMENT MECHANISM OF SPEAKING SKILLS IN ASEBOT AND MIESO SECONDARY SCHOOLS: GRADE 9 IN FOCUS

Abstract

This paper reassesses the mainstream tasks used by English teachers’ assessment mechanism of speaking skills in the case of Asebot and Miesso secondary schools. The qualitative methods and quota sampling were employed to achieve this goal. The participants were five teachers. Questionnaires are open ended items; interviews for teachers and classroom observation check-list with semi-structured items were employed as data collection instruments. The findings of the study revealed that teachers have positive attitude towards to speaking assessment. Amazingly, however, the result of the study indicated that speaking assessment is a neglected area of practice. Among the factors affecting the English teachers’ assessment mechanism of speaking skills; students’ linguistic background, structural constraints, absence of high school level assessment policy, inadequacies in the use of informal oral assessment methods, negligence of formative assessment were found to be the major ones, The recommendations were put forward based on the major findings so as to minimize the problems touching the English teachers’ assessment mechanism of speaking skills. Assessing oral communications (speaking and listening) properly can helps students to have a good oral language development as well as their language literacy. Therefore, this study aimed at finding out the answer of a question: “How the respondents’ assessment mechanism may be described in the term of methods to evaluate the students’ skills in oral communications (speaking)” Survey using questionnaire was used to answer the research questions. The participants of this study were taken from two high schools of Asebot and Miesso West Hararghe. The research result showed that English teachers’ were highly used teachers made assessment methods in assessing oral communication (speaking). Answering multiple-choice test items following a listening passage was the most methods preferred by Asebot and Miesso high schools of English teachers. Based on the findings, it was suggested that for the successful English teachers’ assessment mechanism of speaking skills, the concerned bodies have to solve challenges English teachers’ encountered, follow up and provide support for English teachers to plan and present assessment tasks of speaking in the teacher’s guide and provide training on the assessment of speaking skills to facilitate them play their roles to assess speaking skills of students. Furthermore, teachers have to develop sense of responsibility not to cut off the assessment tasks of speaking and play their roles to assess speaking skills.