Engaging Young Learners in Conversations: One Way to Assess Their Speaking Skill

Abstract

As teachers, our job is not only teaching students, but also giving assessment as well. It means that teaching cannot be separated from assessing, including teaching to young learners. Assessment is defined as the gathering of information for a specific purpose (Linse, 2006). The assessment of young learners is very different from the assessment of older children and adult in several ways (Guddemi and Case , 2004). Moreover, they stated that in learning, young children must touch and manipulate objects, build and create many media, listen and act out stories and everyday roles, talk and sing, and move and play in various ways and environments. Since young learners' characteristics are different from adult, when teachers give assessment to them, they should pay attention to those things. As a result, the expression of what the children know and can do would be best served in ways other than traditional paper and pencil assessment (Guddemi and Case: 2004). This paper explores how to assess young learners' speaking skill by engaging them in conversations. It also describes the learners' psychological condition being assessed by using this activity. The subjects of this research were 7 students of Teladan Tutoring Agency which is located in Kudus, Central Java Province, Indonesia. The result of this research shows that by engaging the learners in a conversation during assessment, most of the students had positive psychological condition in which they felt confident, and brave to speak English (6 students). However two other students still felt nervous and afraid to make mistakes. Since engaging students in conversation in assessment is .an appropriate activity in assessing young learners, it is suggested that teachers who teach young learners use this activity when giving assessment to their young learner students.