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ABSTRACT An analysis of the literature on oral assessment in higher education has identified six dimensions of oral assessment: primary content type; interaction; authenticity; structure; examiners and orality. These dimensions lead to a clearer understanding of the nature of oral assessment, a clearer differentiation of the various forms within this type, a better capacity to describe and analyse these forms, and a better understanding of how the various dimensions of oral assessment may interact with other elements of teaching and learning.
Introduction
While written forms of assessment now dominate summative assessment in higher education, oral assessment has had a long history and continues to form an important part of the assessment repertoire of universities (Brown & Knight, 1994, p. 80; Forrest, 1985, p. 3688; Hubbard, 1971, p. 93). Oral assessment is embedded in education for a number of professions, most notably medicine with its clinical assessment, law with its mooting or mock trials, and architecture with its `design juries'. In other discipline areas, oral assessment is less common, often being considered as a form of `alternative assessment'.
Oral assessment can be simply defined as assessment in which a student's response to the assessment task is verbal, in the sense of being "expressed or conveyed by speech instead of writing" (Oxford English Dictionary). As we shall see again later in this paper, the student's oral response may be combined with, or supplementary to, other forms of response such as a written paper or the demonstration of a physical skill. Assessment can be rightly considered as oral as long as a component of the student's response is verbal, and that component is being examined.
It is important to note a basic distinction between two different kinds of qualities that can be measured by oral assessment, namely:
the student's command of the oral medium itself, i.e. the student's oral skills of communication in general or language skills in particular; and
the student's command of content as demonstrated through the oral medium.
Assessment in the first category is a long-established and well-accepted part of the assessment of language learning and oral communication skills. Oral assessment is unavoidable in these fields because that which is being examined is oral in nature. The literature on oral assessment in language...