Holistic versus communicative approach in assessing oral production in English

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show the different communicative outputs in role-plays in two contrastive groups: students trained in integrative learning and students trained in communicative learning. The assessment of oral production carried out through a task-based approach to role-plays has shown that, even though communicative students master communicative techniques better than the integratively-taught group, the latter are more skilled in grammar. The students mean marking in the integrative group is not too far from the one obtained by the communicative group. We believe the reason for this is that integrative teaching fosters the use of linguistic skills which interact mutually.