This symposium will present recent research on oral assessment in higher education, focusing on the different perspectives of students and examiners in the UK, Australia, Japan and Norway, and addressing undergraduate and postgraduate contexts.

Oral assessment and high stakes postgraduate medical examination: Issues of reliability and validity Ashraf Memon, Gordon Joughin,Breda Memon

This paper examines the complexity of oral assessment as an examination format and highlights concerns about the validity, reliability and fairness of such an assessment procedure for the award of certification of completion of specialist medical training. The authors propose 15 conditions under which oral assessment is valid, reliable and fair.

“Did I say that?” Contextual influences on oral language task performance. Paul Moore

Students in a Japanese undergraduate English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classroom performed three oral presentation tasks over one academic year. Interaction, performance and reflection data revealed complex influences of cultural, situational, interpersonal and intrapersonal factors on individual performance. Implications for language teaching research, pedagogy and assessment are considered.

Orality and learning in oral presentations. Gordon Joughin

Oral assessment can exert a powerful influence on students’ experience of learning. This paper reports a phenomenographic study which highlights contrasting ways in which students can experience one form of oral assessment, the oral presentation, and discusses the findings of this study in light of Walter Ong’s ‘psychodynamics of orality’.