A weekly online speech ‘contest’ as a means of speaking assessment
During the pandemic, speaking time in university classrooms was often reduced to as little as 15-20 minutes per class. I assigned weekly speaking homework in my English-speaking classes to address this problem. The goal was to improve their English speaking skills by reading aloud a short section of text as many times as necessary before submitting a recording of their voice. The students were instructed to treat the activity like a speech contest to encourage focussed practice, with only the teacher as an audience. Students received weekly grades via an e-learning platform with personalised feedback for ongoing improvement. This method offers a promising approach for future speaking classes facing similar speaking time constraints. This project is still in its early stages, and formal data has yet to be gathered. However, numerous students reported spending a lot of time practising with the goal of improvement. Furthermore, the weekly speaking tests appeared to improve the students' general English speaking skills over the semester. This online assessment method effectively solved the problem of limited speaking time in the classroom.