TOWARDS DESCRIPTOR-BASED RATING OF SPOKEN PERFORMANCE IN ENGLISH COURSES FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS STUDENTS

Oral components have become a routine part of English courses in Uzbek universities, but the marks they produce are often arrived at by impression, and two teachers listening to the same performance frequently disagree by a wide margin. This article examines what it would take to replace impression marking with a short descriptor-based scale in English courses for students of international relations and economics. Research on rating scales and oral assessment was analysed together with the assessment sections of working syllabi and the descriptive apparatus of the CEFR, and the available approaches were compared on six properties, among them the number of criteria a rater can hold apart, the wording of band descriptors, and the preparation that live rating demands. The analysis indicates that a scale of four criteria and three bands, worded as observable behaviour rather than as evaluative judgement, is the most that can be used reliably by teachers without a testing unit behind them, and that publishing the scale in advance changes what students do in preparation at least as much as it changes how they are marked. A scale of this kind is set out for professional speaking tasks, with a lightweight moderation procedure and an account of what the proposal does not resolve.