Investigating Oral Presentation Assessment in LSP: Practices, Demands and Challenges

Abstract

Giving an oral presentation is a widely used assessment task in higher education, and is very efficient in preparing LSP students for future professional contexts. Empirical studies have made significant contributions to revealing students’ attitudes towards the benefits of oral presentations, but very few studies have investigated LSP teachers’ attitudes regarding the assessment of such presentations. This paper aims to provide deeper insights into LSP teachers’ assessment practices, needs, demands and challenges when evaluating oral presentations. For that purpose, 103 LSP teachers in Serbia and Croatia were asked to indicate the greatest challenges in the assessment process and the most suitable solutions for improving evaluations. The results show that the teachers have difficulty defining the significance level of each rating criterion that describes a student’s performance. In line with this, developing a unique rating scale specifically for LSP oral presentation assessment is recognized as the most helpful strategy in dealing with the challenges they face.

Keywords

• oral presentation
• assessment
• LSP
• higher education context