What will the new GCSE speaking test look like in 2025?

 As you probably know, there is a consultation taking place at the moment about the proposals for the revised GCSE (first teaching September 2023, first exams June 2025). I have blogged about this a few times before, but in this post I'd like to look at the proposal for the speaking assessment.

The key paragraph relating to this, from the subject content document (p.3) states that students will have to:

1. Read aloud, using clear and comprehensible pronunciation, short sentences from the written form of the language and demonstrate understanding of them (for example by answering questions); 
2. Undertake role play simulating a context such as a social conversation where instructions are unambiguous and there are no unexpected questions; 
3. Answer questions about a visual stimulus such as a photograph. 

For these activities students will have time for preparation (without access to reference materials), and vocabulary and grammar expected will be from the defined content for each tier.

Here is the key document:

MFL GCSE Subject Content (education.gov.uk)

This looks clear enough, so we might envisage a few sentences or short paragraph to read aloud, followed by, say, three questions. This might last around a minute or so, perhaps longer for Higher Tier.

The role play (possibly more than one) with prompts (in English) and no unexpected questions. This might take a minute or so. Higher Tier candidates might get more challenging prompts.

A stimulus card, most likely a photo, or maybe a photo or graphic with a little text. In this case, it looks like there will be no questions provided in advance, so students would have to respond spontaneously. This looks like it approaches what we are familiar with in terms of general conversation. It is not at all clear what the subject matter might be or how the questioning would be structured. This might last around 5 minutes at Higher Tier or 3 minutes at Foundation Tier.

One criticism that has been levelled at the proposal is that it devalues the role of spontaneous conversation. I am not yet clear that this is true. As I read it, the photo/stimulus section (part 3) does have the potential to allow the strongest candidates to take the conversation in directions they would like, possibly introducing elements of pre-learned material (nothing wrong with that up to a point). But we need to see what the awarding bodies (exam boards) come up with, or are allowed to come up with.

I welcome the fact that the role-play looks like it will resemble a social conversation rather rather than an even more contrived transactional situation of the type "You are in a clothes shop...". I also welcome the fact that prompts will be in English. The current format with its L2 prompts, imposed by Ofqual and not the preference of exam boards, is confusing.

Arguably the most controversial element is the reading aloud element, which I have blogged about before. In that post, I argued that, on balance, you could make a case for including reading aloud if the 'backwash effect' is positive, i.e. if it encourages teachers to do more reading aloud in class. My friend Gianfranco Conti has come to the view that we don't need a reading aloud test in Y11 to encourage teachers to do reading aloud at KS3 (age 11.14). He made an appealing analogy that you don't assess a footballer's skill by testing if they can pass. Reading aloud should be sorted out by the end of Y9 at the latest. I am tempted by this perspective, but I confess that my feelings are still mixed.

A fundamental question is this: should it be the role of DfE/Ofqual/GCSE to push teachers towards specific methodologies, techniques and classroom procedures? Let's be clear that to do so would not be new. Previously, translation was added to the roster of GCSE question types with the clear intention of pushing teachers to do more grammar and translation. Mixed skill questions, combining L2 reading with L2 speaking for example, have been included partly to encourage such practice in the classroom. In 1987-88, when GCSE replaced O-level and CSE, the question types were designed to align with a more communicative approach to teaching, with its greater emphasis on listening and speaking. Going back to O-level itself, the inclusion of translation, dictation, multi-choice comprehension, and picture sequence compositions meant that these were practised a lot in class.

No exam can be be said to be "pedagogically neutral" since, in our system, with GCSE being such a high-stakes exam, the exam format will encourage teachers to teach to the test. The DfE want teachers to do more grammar, more phonics and more dictation, so they are pushing for an exam with that in mind. They favour the type of syllabus promoted by NCELP which is based on a structural grammar syllabus (often criticised in the research literature), high-frequency vocabulary (which gets more support) and phonics (for which there is actually little evidence from longitudinal studies, but can easily be justified by other research). The extent to which you like the proposals will reflect your view of NCELP's principles.

As for the oral, let's see what the consultation produces and what exam boards come up with.

Comments, as always, are welcome.