This article explores how teachers, students and other stakeholders collaboratively develop classroom-based assessment procedures for the evaluation of oral skills. By considering crucial issues in assessment such as validity, teacher-learner collaboration, and contextual factors, the authors provide a checklist that will help ESL/EFL teachers develop meaningful assessment procedures for their own classrooms. The checklist addresses 16 questions worth considering in five test-developing stages: (a) identification of course objectives; (b) identification of skills, strategies, tasks and content; (c) design of rating procedures; (d) interpretation of learner performance; and (e) reflection on the impact of the assessment procedure. In all the stages the authors emphasize the significance of involving students in the assessment process, which promotes students' responsibility for their own learning.

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The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of a new coding system that incorporates the various types of metatalk that occurred during paired learners' engagement in a consciousness-raising task. On the basis of previous studies, metalanguage (e.g. with or without terminology), knowledge sources (e.g. intuition), and verbalisation strategies (e.g. rehearsal, reformulation) were integrated into a taxonomy that was used in this study. An analysis of the four dyads' audio-recordings revealed that learner proficiency appeared to have a moderating effect on verbalised strategy use. The importance for learners to sustain their focus on language in paired or small-group tasks is also discussed. This paper aims to extend the research field's understanding of how interactional data can be coded and provide an insight into the nature of how learners discuss linguistic forms in peer-peer classroom settings.