This post will bore most of my readers but maybe those who teach languages will find this useful.
One activity that is often used in language courses that I hate and never conduct is an oral presentation. I see no point in having students prepare a dialogue in English, translate it in Google Translate, and read it aloud (or memorize it and recite it) in front of the classroom. For one, students only get to speak for 5 minutes at most and then have to sit there looking bored while other people deliver their pre-fab presentations. Also, this format doesn’t replicate any real situation they are likely to encounter while interacting with native speakers.
So instead, I created oral exams. This is what my oral exams are like: I prepare activities based on all of the vocabulary and grammar we covered throughout the semester. Let’s say we covered job interviews, the airport, the doctor’s office, and giving advice to a friend who has problems in his personal life.
At the beginning of the exam, students are split into pairs and receive the first activity.
1. You are interviewing for a job. Make sure you talk about your work experience (using past tenses) and plans for the future (future tenses.) If you use one word in English, your grade drops to a B, two words in English, the grade drops to a C, four words and you can go home because you have failed the exam.
2. When 15 minutes are up, students move to a new partner and get a new activity. You are at the airport and are talking to a customs officer.
3. 15 minutes later, you get a new partner and a new topic, etc.
In the meanwhile, I run around the classroom, approaching every group, listening, and taking notes. I also interrupt students with unexpected questions because 10% of the grade goes to knowing how to react to unexpected situations.
For the first 30 minutes or so, students suffer hellish torture. They pout, grunt, wave their hands, moan, and send me hateful glances.
By the end of the activity, however, every single student begins to speak. When I tell them the exam is over, it’s impossible to make them stop speaking.
Students think that the purpose of the activity is to grade them but, in reality, this is simply a method to force them to speak, break the mental barrier that makes them believe that they are not ready to speak the language.
Of course, this is harder if we are talking about Beginners’ Spanish, but I did this exam in my Spanish 101 course yesterday and it worked. The students’ suffering was intense but so was their joy at the end of the activity. One student actually cried at the beginning. At the end, though, she was hooting with laughter.
In every group, there is at least a couple of refuseniks, that is, people who are profoundly opposed to saying a single word in Spanish. They react with self-righteous indignation to any suggestion that it is impossible to learn Spanish by speaking about Spanish in English. The oral exam breaks through their resistance. There is nobody there to listen to their explanations of why they should not be using Spanish. The partners they get assigned pressure them into speaking because they know they will let down their partners if they just sit there in a sulky silence.
This is one of the most productive activities I have ever designed.
Clarissa's Blog 
See, if I knew the language teachers at my local community college did that, I would have signed up for that instead of even considering language software.
I literally didn’t get to use French like that until I went on an exchange trip in high school. Of course, native speakers are 50% faster.
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I do both presentations and oral exams (and an oral interview). Students don’t use Google Translate for the presentation bc they are only allowed to use five words not covered in the semester and they have to explain what these mean in Arabic or with a picture. Their classmates grade their comprehensibility and part of their grade is also asking questions on their classmates presentations. I actually often have the problem that they get so into each other’s presentations they won’t stop asking questions and I have to stop them so we have time for the other presentations!
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There is another problem I have with oral presentations: some people feel intensely miserable when forced to perform in front of the class. Somebody I’m close to had to seek medical help to deal with oral presentations when she was in college. She had severe panic attacks and had to be medicated to go through the presentations. So now I’m wary of causing this reaction in the students. Maybe I’m being overly cautious.
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I don’t feel too bad about this bc I think most jobs require presentational speaking skills, and no one has ever complained. My students usually think the oral exam is more terrifying.
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Back when I still taught German, I did ollllld-skool 15-minute content-based oral exams in my upper-level classes. They were *awesome,* by which I mean killer. The great students adored them. The bad students begrudgingly went through with them. They were very easy to grade. THUMBS UP.
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Hummm, this concept of “oral presentation” in language courses makes no sense for me.
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What a great idea! Now… I can I manage that sort of exam in my Spanish 101 class filled with 80 students. Sigh…
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I have 25, and I barely managed to pull it off. 80 makes it absolutely impossible.
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It is awful… and for the first time in my life I feel like a terrible teacher.
Their *oral exam* consists of teaching a grammar concept and creating an activity on it, in groups of 8.
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I give each group recorders, but I still think it would be impossible with 80! That’s awful.
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What kind of an IDIOT decides that it’s Ok to teach language courses to such enormous groups? I can’t stop feeling appalled.
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My absolute best language experience was my high school french class, because we met every day for 50 minutes for a full year and we had to speak only French. To this day my french is quite good despite using it only occasionally for years.
When I got to University my French professor (you might know him haha ) told me I spoke too fast in French because it’s better to speak less often and make less errors! Imagine that.
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” told me I spoke too fast in French because it’s better to speak less often and make less errors! ”
– This is the exact opposite of my teaching philosophy. I try to do the opposite: make students speak as much as possible without fearing mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes when they speak, that is perfectly fine. You can’t hope to improve if you sit there silent and afraid.
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