The purpose of this study was to investigate the usefulness of peer assessment in evaluating students speaking performance, and analyze how reliably they could grade students oral proficiency as a rater compared with a teacher. It also sought to find ...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the usefulness of peer assessment in evaluating students speaking performance, and analyze how reliably they could grade students oral proficiency as a rater compared with a teacher. It also sought to find out the feasibility of peer assessment in the EFL settings of Korean primary schools. For this study, the two experimental classes were asked to assess their peers speaking performance after participating in a rater training and a practice session. Each performance was rated by the students and teacher on a three-point scale in terms of four speaking criteria: pronunciation, fluency, accuracy, and interaction. The results showed that most students had a high degree of correlation between the students’ and teacher s assessments and assessed their peers oral performances reliably. Furthermore, students showed high satisfaction with the results of their oral performances by the numerous raters. This study has concluded that peer assessment can be used reliably to supplement teacher assessment under adequate rater training when the students are given simple and authentic evaluation tasks. Therefore, if many students can take part in the task of oral assessment with high reliability, oral assessment could be revitalized in a large class.