EMPOWERING PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT RUBRICS FOR ORAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS

Abstract

Designing and using rubrics for scoring language skills, particularly oral communication skills, seems to be not a popular job for teachers and lecturers. This is because of several reasons: less confidence in constructing own rubrics, hard to get suitable and feasible rubrics, and time-consuming.  As a matter of fact, most of teachers and lecturers tend to measure students’ works based on the following approaches: participation, honesty, presence, diligence, order, request, friendship, kinship, and seriousness. The implication of this sort of approach is that the given score/mark is not fair even inaccurate. This paper provides a rubric that is known as COLP which is not only current but also integrated for the assessment of oral communication skills. COLP as a current and integrated rubric stands for content, organization, language, and physical performance. It means that for the correction of oral communication skills, a rater is recommended to involve these four major aspects correspondingly. Content refers to whether or not fulfills the problem being discussed (topic); organization refers to whether or not the contents meet the correct rules of public speaking/writing; language refers to whether or not the oral communication as a whole containing accurate language components including grammatical structure, dictions, and fluency; and physical performance refers to the aspect of presentation. This is due to the fact that this rubric has been very useful when it was used for the assessment of Speaking/writing subject and Speech competition at the Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris FKIP Universitas Riau (UR) Pekanbaru.