1. Abstract

The most important aim of this research project was to develop an apparatus with which to assess the speech skills of English learners in the primary school, and to test and evaluate the tools’ practicability. This research is of vital necessity, as a serious gap currently exists in English teaching methodology in the primary school, a gap which leads to a great deal of uncertainty among teachers. For this reason, the summer semester of 2002 saw the launch and development of the TAPS assessment model (Testing and Assessing Spoken English in Primary Schools), specific to the primary classroom. Subsequently, several primary schools in the Heidelberg area have co-operated actively in the development, trialling and evaluation of the TAPS model.

Between April and July 2005 the research group, working both with the basic principles of TAPS developed by Diehr and with current educational guidelines, developed a conceptual model for assessing oral competence in the primary classroom. The teachers of English participating in the research were provided with exemplar exercises for assessing the spoken English of pupils in the third and fourth classes, which they were to trial between September and December 2005. A questionnaire study was carried out among the participating English teachers in November 2005 and March 2006, and a formal discussion on the trialling process was held in March 2006: both the discussion and the evaluation of the responses to the questionnaire clearly indicated that the assessment tools which had been developed had proved themselves to be feasible, fair and reliable. This was confirmed in a thorough, wide-ranging test of inter-rater consistency, in which the individual assessments of each of three independent raters were carefully compared. The results showed conclusively that the assessment tools which had been put to the test proved altogether reliable in the objective assessment of oral competence in a foreign language at primary school level.

In the process of gathering data from the ten participating primary schools (seven classes in the third year and three in the fourth), at the end of six task-based teaching units the spoken texts of 216 pupils were recorded; then, between December 2005 and February 2006 these texts were digitised and transcribed. Quantitative evaluation of these pupil texts shows that the oral achievements of pupils in the third and fourth school year turned out to be surprisingly extensive – significantly above the horizon of expectation of the most primary school-specific programmes and going significantly beyond the stated Baden-Württemberg targets. Records of the pupils’ performances show that the amount of text produced by these learners ranges from 20 to 350 words, depending on the type of discourse.

What is quite remarkable is that the majority of the pupil texts demonstrate speech production which progresses beyond mere repetition and rote learning. This becomes particularly obvious in those utterances where the children improvise on and deviate from expressions from the original source text. For example, one child moves on from a description of an animal in the source text (‘She [a sheepdog] has black and white hair and blue eyes. She has a black nose.’), and says: ‘And his hairs are black, white. And his nose is black.’ A modification like that shows that children are able independently to move beyond simple understanding, and can shape for themselves new syntactic patterns not present in the source text. Additionally, moreover, they demonstrate that they can independently come to produce the agreement between subject and (copulative) verb. In this kind of re-narrating, the children’s acquisition of productive speech becomes especially clear, where the children’s responses (pupil texts) vary greatly in the selection and representation of episodes from the original text. Pupil texts consistently exceed the expectations of researchers and teachers collaborating in this project, not only in quantitative terms, but also qualitatively by moving significantly beyond mere imitative speech.