FROM LANGUAGE TEACHING TO LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT WITH THE HELP OF TECHNOLOGICAL RESOURCES: HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS AND ORAL PRODUCTION

Abstract

In this paper I present the results of a study carried out in order to assess the oral production skills of distance learning students enrolled in a university degree, and their experience with digital resources to produce their assessment tasks. Both the practice of speaking in a foreign language and the assessment of oral production skills constitute an important endeavor that often meets methodological and technological difficulties in traditional face-to-face learning environments, but more particularly in distance learning ones. After analyzing students’ needs and peculiarities coming from a distance learning context, some research has been conducted in order to test and propose an activity where the students individually design and produce a video in which they explain a topic of their choice as a continuous evaluation task. They then receive the teacher's feedback by means of a rubric which allows them to improve their learning at the same time that it enables teachers to obtain valuable information about students’ progress as regards oral productive skills. The results of the study show how students can improve their oral production skills with self-study and how the preparation of this assessment activity has a positive effect on their language proficiency as well as on their digital competence.