Oral debates in Spanish as an Additional Language classroom: assessment criteria to improve student performance

Resumen

The oral debate is a classroom discourse genre commonly used to assess the interactional competence of language learners. Nevertheless, its multidimensional features are often not explicitly spelled out to students, and empirical data related to student performance of this genre has thus far received little attention in the literature. With these two issues in mind, a group of Australian students of Spanish as an Additional Language were audio-recorded as they performed during two oral debates, one a practice session, the other a final debate intended to showcase their oral interaction skills for assessment purposes. Between the two debates, the students received feedback from classmates and their instructor on their preliminary debate performance, and the criteria and indicators of achievement by which their final debate performance would be judged were discussed with them. Transcripts of the two debates were subjected to thematic analysis and the results compared. This comparison revealed improvements in student debate performance, especially in terms of effective turn-requesting and turn-alternation. A second outcome was the elaboration of a revised, more detailed set of criteria for assessing the performance in oral debates of upper intermediate-level students, an instrument which will be useful in any Additional Language context