Assessing EFL Students Speaking in the classroom from Kurdish Instructors’ perspectives

Abstract

Nowadays, students are required to improve their speaking skill more than any other language skill. Since, speaking skill is difficult to develop in EFL classes teachers need to use effective strategies to teach and assess this skill. A student's ability to speak is determined by their ability to explain something or express themselves verbally. This paper aims at finding out  Kurdish instructors ‘perspectives  on their role on assessing EFL students in the classroom and   the strategies used for assessing speaking in EFL classes. This paper tries to find out an answer to the following question: what is the Instructor’s role in the assessment process? Moreover,  what are the strategies for assessing speaking in EFL classes from instructors’ perspective? Furthermore, the paper has been limited to instructors of Cihan University-Erbil and Salahaddin University-Erbil for the academic year 2022-2023. The population was (21) instructors College of Language, Education and Basic Education. The data has been conducted by questionnaire, the Tool adopted for analyzing the data is SPSS.  It is concluded that the most common strategies applied by the instructors in assessment of speaking sessions were direct question and answer, interview and storytelling. Moreover, the data analysis presented that the main role that majority of the instructors gave importance to were objective assessment and rubric, taking into consideration the students interest in the topic, and the content of the conversation or discussion in addition to the interaction.