Influence of Peer Assessment in Students’ Pronunciation during Speaking Activities

Abstract

This innovation was focused on the development of speaking abilities by applying peer-assessment. The unit title was “My life” It was implemented in two synchronous sessions of forty-five minutes each, and two asynchronous hours per week, for five weeks. This innovation was planned to implement backward design (See Appendix A). The transfer goal of the unit was adapted from the A1 overall oral production from the Council of Europe (2020). At the beginning of the innovation, students received an explanation exemplifying what it was expected of them after the five weeks. As a class, they used the speaking checklist (See Appendix B) to assess the content of the mentor text. In this checklist the following aspects were presented as “Do” statements: vocabulary, past tenses structures, possessives pronouns, wh-questions, prepositions of place, adjectives and intelligible pronunciation. Each week focused on a specific aspect that was going to be evaluated in the final performance. The first week was focused on grammar related to past tense, the second one on vocabulary, the third one on adjectives, the fourth one on possessive pronouns. In the last week, students focus on prepositions of place and acquire the ability to produce sentences and keep fluent interaction. The performance activity was a recording conversation between classmates describing two pictures of themselves about their last holiday using audio chats. Learners had to develop speaking tasks about different topics, which they received peer assessment for each task. After the intervention, students learned to use vocabulary related to describing location, past tense properly in irregular verbs, possessive pronouns to specify ownership, wh-questions to seek information in a conversation and prepositions of place to indicate specific location and adjectives to define emotions. Students peer-assess once for each week during classes while teachers monitor the class and give the comments writing in the EVA platform in the assignation of this activity.