"Speaking assessments." Those words…ugh! They make me shiver.
Maybe you’ve been there: sitting in the back of the room with a clipboard while one nervous student stumbles through a prompt, their eyes flicking to your pen, while the rest of the class slowly descends into chaos. Or maybe you decided to record speaking assessments instead, only to find yourself with 30 hours of student audio to grade.
Nightmare!
I’ve been there too. I remember assessing my Spanish 2 Honors class and feeling crushed. My students, who could confidently develop a topic with connected sentences and strong paragraph structure in writing, barely managed a few hesitant sentences during the speaking assessment. Sitting across from them, I could see in their eyes that they felt like they were failing, and I felt like I had failed them, too.
If 2025 Elicia could go back and talk to my younger teacher self, here’s what I would say:
How to Assess Speaking Without the Stress
One of the most common questions language teachers ask is:
"How do I assess speaking, accurately, without overwhelming my students or myself?"
It’s a good question. If we’re serious about building proficiency, we need assessments that reflect real communication: not memorized scripts or forced output.
Here is the advice I’d share with my past self, and with you:
- SET REASONABLE GOALS.
- DON’T ADD THINGS TO THE RUBRICS THAT AREN’T THERE.
- REMEMBER THAT IMMEDIATE MASTERY IS NOT A REASONABLE GOAL!
Set Reasonable Goals
Many of my struggles with speaking assessments came from having unrealistic expectations. As a new teacher, I didn’t fully understand how proficiency develops or how slowly speaking skills emerge.
The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines are your best friend here.
For Novice learners, don’t expect perfect sentences. Don’t grade based on accuracy with vocabulary lists, subject-verb agreement, or gender agreement. Those aren’t reasonable expectations at this level. They aren’t markers for a Novice learner. They aren’t even listed anywhere in the Proficiency Guidelines!
A Novice speaker doesn’t have perfect control of grammar, not even with selected forms. In fact, even Intermediate speakers make mistakes: without mistakes, the learner isn’t at the Intermediate level! Expecting a Novice speaker to speak without errors–even with familiar tasks–is not a reasonable goal.
Proficiency is about communicating meaning, not producing flawless grammar.
Don’t Add to the Rubrics
If your rubric is based on ACTFL performance descriptors, stick to what’s actually listed.
Don’t sneak in expectations like “uses the words we have been working with” or “subject - verb agreement” or “gender agreement” (if you have languages that do that). That’s not fair to students because it doesn’t align with how language acquisition works. Use ACTFL’s performance descriptors as your guide, and stick to them, without adding more.
A Novice speaker isn’t someone who can speak a perfect, error-free sentence about a familiar topic, like stating their name or other personal information. It’s also not someone who can speak a perfect, error-free sentence using a grammar pattern usually found in Level 1 textbooks (like present tense verb endings). And actually… neither is an Intermediate speaker!
That’s right: even an intermediate speaker isn't expected to speak without errors. A quick look at ACTFL’s Proficiency Guidelines tells us that we can expect “Basic errors in grammar, word choice, and more” for students who are at Intermediate Low (that’s the end of Spanish 3, by the way!). As students grow in proficiency, they tend to have a wider range of vocabulary, topics, and better control of the language, but errors don’t disappear.
What’s worse, when we penalize students for language errors, we are discouraging exactly what we want: communication. Furthermore, we are actually penalizing the natural process of acquiring language. Study the Proficiency Guidelines, and stick to them when assessing!
Speaking Develops Naturally Over Time
Speaking develops naturally over time. It doesn’t come from practice alone; it emerges from engagement with lots of meaningful input. That’s why input-rich classrooms are so powerful! Because it develops naturally, not through practice, immediate mastery is not a reasonable goal. Forcing students to practice speaking (what we call “forced output”) will not achieve the results you’re looking for. They need to build language in their heads through input before they can produce true output.
Instead of forcing output, give students frequent, low-stakes chances to speak at their level: whether that’s one word, a phrase, or a sentence. Look for ways to assess the spontaneous language that students are ready to offer! When we push students to produce more than they’re ready for, we don’t get a true picture of their proficiency. We get a picture of their conscious knowledge of the language. And those are not the same thing.
For example: Instead of assigning a memorized dialogue, ask students an open-ended question like "Tell me about your weekend." Then, listen to them and celebrate whatever language they are able to produce, even if it's choppy or repetitive. Remember, crawling isn’t bad walking! Choppy speech isn’t bad speech, it’s a developmental stage of speaking.
Speaking Develops Last
Speaking is the last skill to emerge. It usually lags behind listening, reading, and even writing. In fact, speaking is often a full sublevel below writing in terms of proficiency.
So if your students are in their first or second year of language study, they’re probably at Novice Mid or High in writing. In speaking, that may mean Novice Low or Mid. Even your Honors students aren’t expected to be speaking at an Intermediate level yet.
Do You Have to Assess Speaking?
Let’s be honest. Sometimes we assess speaking simply because we think we should. But unless your school or district requires it, you may not need to formally assess speaking, at least not in Years 1 and 2.
If you’re not required to do it, consider holding off until students are consistently writing at an Intermediate level. That’s often when you’ll see more spontaneous, accurate speaking emerge too.
Just because students can speak doesn’t mean you have to grade it. Let them speak! But remember: "Weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter."
Practical solutions for speaking assessments
If you are required (or choose) to assess speaking early on, here are low-stress strategies that work.
Unobtrusive Speaking Assessments
These are assessments that happen throughout class time in the context of whatever you are doing. They are relatively simple to do. Here’s some ideas.
Doing some kind of “chat” activity? Chit chat, weekend chat, etc.? Pull out your stack of speaking rubrics and start noticing who is talking. As students speak, note their production level on the rubric. Do this until you have grades for every one. Want something even more simple?
Try AnneMarie Chase’s Magic Cards.
Each day at the door, ask the students a question. As they answer the question, note their response. Simplify it even more by giving them a check plus (wow, I’m impressed), check (good!), and check minus (almost there) on a clipboard with all their names on it. (Credit: Bess Hayles)
For me, the thought of trying to keep the conversation going AND assessing them feels kind of overwhelming, so you could do this instead:
Pair Assessments: In pairs, have Student A face the projector board and Student B face away. Put a picture up that students can describe using familiar language. Have Student A describe the picture to Student B. You could even have Student B draw what they hear on a whiteboard. As they are speaking, you are moving around the room and listening, and marking grades on the rubrics. Do this with two different pictures a few times, until you have heard everyone.
Some variations on this idea:
- During fan-n-pick that requires students to share opinions or otherwise create with language, you can listen to each group and assess on the speaking rubric.
- As you read (a story, a chapter), students draw a mural (no words!) to depict what happens. Read it again, and let them add details. Put them in groups of 2 (inside outside circles maybe?) and listen to them describe their mural, retelling the story, to each other.
- Create stacks of questions that will prompt responses on the topic of your choice. In groups of 4-5 students, each student gets to draw three cards and discard one or two. Then they read the question, and answer it. Meanwhile, you listen in from group to group. I love this because they can decide what questions they feel most confident about answering.
From writing to speaking: Finally, there is one more speaking assessment type that I’d like to share that I first learned about from Dual Language Immersion teacher of Portuguese Pricila Prestes in Utah at the Dual Language Immersion Conference in 2024.
After giving students tons of input that they understand, mentor texts, and opportunities to read, listen to, and interact with that (comprehensible) input, students create their own paragraph (or letter, or text). First, they write it down - often using a mentor text as a model. Maybe they use sentence stems. Maybe they have time to edit or peer edit. Then they practice speaking it - to themselves, maybe, the first time. Ms. Prestes teaches her students to “copy/paste” and I love this idea. What she means is that they are to look at their writing, copy the first few sentences into their heads, and then when they speak, they are “pasteing” them in the air. Then they look again, “copy” again, and paste. This gets them out of the habit of just reading what they wrote.
Ms. Prestes described a “speed dating” activity: Put students in two lines and have Partner A share for 90 seconds. Then Partner B. Then they switch partners, and have a new Partner A and a new Partner B.
One thing that really appeals to me about this is that the input comes first, and the output is heavily scaffolded with mentor texts, sentence starters and stems, peer editing, and more. Then students get a chance to say it again and again, developing confidence and fluency.
Will it be 100% native like and accurate? NO! Probably not. That’s ok!
Proficiency takes time
Proficiency is a long-term process. Speaking ability develops slowly, and that’s okay! Proficiency takes time, and there are no shortcuts. When we assess speaking, we are simply checking in on what has emerged naturally from the input-rich environment we've created. It’s a snapshot of a student's progress, not a judgement on their capability. So take a deep breath, revisit the ACTFL guidelines, trust the process, and find ways to celebrate what students can do!
Elicia Cárdenas is the Director of Professional Learning for The Comprehensible Classroom, as well as the founder of the Deskless Classroom. Elicia travels throughout North America to work with districts and organizations that represent teachers who are ready to transform their classroom instruction through Comprehension-based instruction.
