The Challenges of Assessing Oral Expression Skills in Romanian as a Foreign Language of Study

Abstract

Learning a foreign language means, first of all, knowing how to speak it, knowing how to use it to communicate in different situations in everyday life. A foreign language is, above all, a means of interaction with others. Therefore, the assessment of oral expression skills plays an essential role in the development of students’ communication skills.

We chose to develop this subject in this paper for two main reasons: the first is purely subjective and it results from a reality observed during the experience we had during the RFL courses, as an RFL lecturer who faced the sensitive situation of assessment of students’ oral performances. And the second reason is objective and it refers to the difficulty of evaluating oral production. So, the purpose of this paper is to provide an answer to the question: How do we evaluate the oral productions of learners studying RFL?

We propose two solutions that we have verified during our experience, namely: designing grids to evaluate the oral productions of RFL learners and establishing specific criteria to evaluate students’ oral performances.

This paper will focus on the presentation of the different forms of oral assessment, its difficulties, as well as the assessment grid that we propose for the assessment of this skill. This mini-research might be of interest because it could inspire teachers to give more importance to the assessment of oral production, which will also have an impact on learners, making them more motivated and aware of their learning process.