Deconstructing To Construct: Evaluating Speaking Tasks on a Language Proficiency Course to help develop an appropriate Test Design for Assessing Speaking

-Speaking is an important skill that needs to be developed in students to fulfill their academic and professional needs. This paper examines the different kinds of speaking tasks, teachers use to teach speaking skills to students in the English language proficiency course (ELPC) at University of Delhi, Delhi, with the aim of developing appropriate test items for speaking test and also develop an assessment scale to assess the oral competence of learners in speaking the language in a multilingual context. For this purpose, a questionnaire was prepared to elicit responses from the teachers on the issue at hand. The responses provided details about the kind of tasks used to teach speaking, the sub skills of speaking taught through these tasks, and the need to develop more tasks to add variety to the existing tasks. They also shed light on which tasks did not work well and needed to be discarded, and the type of tasks preferred by most students. This feedback from teachers will serve to facilitate the designing a valid test to assess speaking.