research paper in public speaking

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Assessing speaking proficiency: a narrative review of speaking assessment research within the argument-based validation framework.

• 1 Language Testing Research Centre, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
• 2 Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, United States

This paper provides a narrative review of empirical research on the assessment of speaking proficiency published in selected journals in the field of language assessment. A total of 104 published articles on speaking assessment were collected and systematically analyzed within an argument-based validation framework ( Chapelle et al., 2008 ). We examined how the published research is represented in the six inferences of this framework, the topics that were covered by each article, and the research methods that were employed in collecting the backings to support the assumptions underlying each inference. Our analysis results revealed that: (a) most of the collected articles could be categorized into the three inferences of evaluation, generalization , and explanation ; (b) the topics most frequently explored by speaking assessment researchers included the constructs of speaking ability, rater effects, and factors that affect spoken performance, among others; (c) quantitative methods were more frequently employed to interrogate the inferences of evaluation and generalization whereas qualitative methods were more frequently utilized to investigate the explanation inference. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study in relation to gaining a more nuanced understanding of task- or domain-specific speaking abilities, understanding speaking assessment in classroom contexts, and strengthening the interfaces between speaking assessment, and teaching and learning practices.

Introduction

Speaking is a crucial language skill which we use every day to communicate with others, to express our views, and to project our identity. In today's globalized world, speaking skills are recognized as essential for international mobility, entrance to higher education, and employment ( Fulcher, 2015a ; Isaacs, 2016 ), and are now a major component in most international and local language examinations, due at least in part to the rise of the communicative movement in language teaching and assessment ( Fulcher, 2000 ). However, despite its primacy in language pedagogy and assessment, speaking has been considered as an intangible construct which is challenging to conceptualize and assess in a reliable and valid manner. This could be attributable to the dynamic and context-embedded nature of speaking, but may be also due to the various forms that it can assume (e.g., monolog, paired conversation, group discussion) and the different conditions under which speaking happens (e.g., planned or spontaneous) (e.g., Luoma, 2004 ; Carter and McCarthy, 2017 ). When assessing speaking proficiency, multiple factors come into play which potentially affect test takers' performance and subsequently their test scores, including task features, interlocutor characteristics, rater effects, and rating scale, among others ( McNamara, 1996 ; Fulcher, 2015a ). In the field of language assessment, considerable research attention and efforts have been dedicated to researching speaking assessment. This is evidenced by the increasing number of research papers with a focus on speaking assessment that have been published in the leading journals in the field.

This prolonged growth in speaking assessment research warrants a systematic review of major findings that can help subsequent researchers and practitioners to navigate the plethora of published research, or provide them with sound recommendations for future explorations in the speaking assessment domain. Several review or position papers are currently available on speaking assessment, either reviewing the developments in speaking assessment more broadly (e.g., Ginther, 2013 ; O'Sullivan, 2014 ; Isaacs, 2016 ) or examining a specific topic in speaking assessment, such as pronunciation ( Isaacs, 2014 ), rating spoken performance ( Winke, 2012 ) and interactional competence ( Galaczi and Taylor, 2018 ). Needless to say, these papers are valuable in surveying related developments in speaking proficiency assessment and sketching a broad picture of speaking assessment for researchers and practitioners in the field. Nonetheless, they typically adopt the traditional literature review approach, as opposed to the narrative review approach that was employed in this study. According to Norris and Ortega (2006 , p. 5, cited in Ellis, 2015 , p. 285), a narrative review aims to “scope out and tell a story about the empirical territory.” Compared with traditional literature review which tends to rely on a reviewer's subjective evaluation of the important or critical aspects of the existing knowledge on a topic, a narrative review is more objective and systematic in the sense the results are usually based on the coding analysis of the studies that are collected through applying some pre-specified criteria. Situated within the argument-based validation framework ( Chapelle et al., 2008 ), this study is aimed at presenting a narrative review of empirical research on speaking assessment published in two leading journals in the field of language assessment, namely, Language Testing (LT) and Language Assessment Quarterly (LAQ). Through following the systematic research procedures of narrative review (e.g., Cooper et al., 2019 ), we survey the topics of speaking assessment that have been explored by researchers as well as the research methods that have been utilized with a view to providing recommendations for future speaking assessment research and practice.

Theoretical Framework

Emerging from the validation of the revised Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), the argument-based validation framework adopted in this study represents an expansion of Kane's (2006) argument-based validation model, which posits that a network of inferences needs to be verified to support test score interpretation and use. A graphic display of this framework is presented in Figure 1 . As shown in this figure, the plausibility of six inferences need to be verified to build a validity argument for a language test, including: domain definition, evaluation, generalization, explanation, extrapolation , and utilization . Also included in the framework are the key warrants that license each inference and its underlying assumptions. This framework was adopted as the guiding theoretical framework of this review study in the sense that each article collected for this study was classified into one or several of these six inferences in the framework. As such, it is necessary to briefly explain these inferences in Figure 1 in the context of speaking assessment. The explanation of the inferences, together with their warrants and assumptions, is largely based on Chapelle et al. (2008) and Knoch and Chapelle (2018) . To facilitate readers' understanding of these inferences, we use the TOEFL speaking test as an example to provide an illustration of the warrants, key assumptions, and backings for each inference.

Figure 1 . The argument-based validation framework (adapted from Chapelle et al., 2008 , p. 18).

The first inference, domain definition , links the target language use (TLU) domain to test takers' observed performance on a speaking test. The warrant supporting this inference is that observation of test takers' performance on a speaking test reveals the speaking abilities and skills required in the TLU domain. In the case of the TOEFL speaking test, the TLU domain is the English-medium institutions of higher education. Therefore, the plausibility of this inference hinges on whether observation of test takers' performance on the speaking tasks reveals essential academic speaking abilities and skills in English-medium universities. An important assumption underlying this inference is that speaking tasks that are representative of language use in English-medium universities can be identified and simulated. Backings in support of this assumption can be collected through interviews with academic English experts to investigate speaking abilities and skills that are required in English-medium universities.

The warrant for the next inference, evaluation , is that test takers' performance on the speaking tasks is evaluated to provide observed scores which are indicative of their academic speaking abilities. The first key assumption underlying this warrant is that the rating scales for the TOEFL speaking test function as intended by the test provider. Backings for this assumption may include: a) using statistical analyses (e.g., many-facets Rasch measurement, or MFRM) to investigate the functioning of the rating scales for the speaking test; and b) using qualitative methods (e.g., raters' verbal protocols) to explore raters' use of the rating scales for the speaking test. Another assumption for this warrant is that raters provide consistent ratings on each task of the speaking test. Backing for this assumption typically entails the use of statistical analyses to examine rater reliability on each task of the speaking test. The third assumption is that detectable rater characteristics do not introduce systematic construct-irrelevant variance into their ratings of test takers' performance. Bias analyses are usually implemented to explore whether certain rater characteristics (e.g., experience, L1 background) interact with test taker characteristics (e.g., L1 background) in significant ways.

The third inference is generalization . The warrant that licenses this inference is that test takers' observed scores reflect their expected scores over multiple parallel versions of the speaking test and across different raters. A few key assumptions that underlie this inference include: a) a sufficient number of tasks are included in the TOEFL speaking test to provide stable estimates of test takers' speaking ability; b) multiple parallel versions of the speaking test feature similar levels of difficulty and tap into similar academic English speaking constructs; and c) raters rate test takers' performance consistently at the test level. To support the first assumption, generalizability theory (i.e., G-theory) analyses can be implemented to explore the number of tasks that is required to achieve the desired level of reliability. For the second assumption, backings can be collected through: (a) statistical analyses to ascertain whether multiple parallel versions of the speaking test have comparable difficulty levels; and (b) qualitative methods such as expert review to explore whether the parallel versions of the speaking test tap into similar academic English speaking constructs. Backing of the third assumption typically entails statistical analyses of the scores that raters have awarded to test takers to examine their reliability at the test level.

The fourth inference is explanation . The warrant of this inference is that test takers' expected scores can be used to explain the academic English speaking constructs that the test purports to assess. The key assumptions for this inference include: (a) features of the spoken discourse produced by test takers on the TOEFL speaking test can effectively distinguish L2 speakers at different proficiency levels; (b) the rating scales are developed based on academic English speaking constructs that are clearly defined; and (c) raters' cognitive processes when rating test takers' spoken performance are aligned with relevant theoretical models of L2 speaking. Backings of these three assumptions can be collected through: (a) discourse analysis studies aiming to explore the linguistic features of spoken discourse that test takers produce on the speaking tasks; (b) expert review of the rating scales to ascertain whether they reflect relevant theoretical models of L2 speaking proficiency; and (c) rater verbal protocol studies to examine raters' cognitive processes when rating performance on the speaking test.

The fifth inference in the framework is extrapolation . The warrant that supports this inference is that the speaking constructs that are assessed in the speaking test account for test takers' spoken performance in English-medium universities. The first key assumption underlying this warrant is that test takers' performance on the TOEFL speaking test is related to their ability to use language in English-medium universities. Backing for this assumption is typically collected through correlation studies, that is, correlating test takers' performance on the speaking test with an external criterion representing their ability to use language in the TLU domains (e.g., teachers' evaluation of students' speaking proficiency of academic English). The second key assumption for extrapolation is that raters' use of the rating scales reflects how spoken performance is evaluated in English-medium universities. For this assumption, qualitative studies can be undertaken to compare raters' cognitive processes with those of linguistic laypersons in English-medium universities such as subject teachers.

The last inference is utilization . The warrant supporting this inference is that the speaking test scores are communicated in appropriate ways and are useful for making decisions. The assumptions that underlie the warrant include: (a) the meaning of the TOEFL speaking test scores is clearly interpreted by relevant stakeholders, such as admissions officers, test takers, and teachers; (b) cut scores are appropriate for making relevant decisions about students; and (c) the TOEFL speaking test has a positive influence on English teaching and learning. To collect the backings for the first assumption, qualitative studies (e.g., interviews, focus groups) can be conducted to explore stakeholders' perceptions of how the speaking test scores are communicated. For the second assumption, standard setting studies are often implemented to interrogate the appropriateness of cut scores. The last assumption is usually investigated through test washback studies, exploring how the speaking test influences English teaching and learning practices.

The framework was used in the validation of the revised TOEFL, as reported in Chapelle et al. (2008) , as well as in low-stakes classroom-based assessment contexts (e.g., Chapelle et al., 2015 ). According to Chapelle et al. (2010) , this framework features several salient advantages over other alternatives. First, given the dynamic and context-mediated nature of language ability, it is extremely challenging to use the definition of a language construct as the basis for building the validity argument. Instead of relying on an explicit definition of the construct, the argument-based approach advocates the specification of a network of inferences, together with their supporting warrants and underlying assumptions that link test takers' observed performances to score interpretation and use. This framework also makes it easier to formulate validation research plans. Since every assumption is associated with a specific inference, research questions targeting each assumption are developed ‘in a more principled way as a piece of an interpretative argument' ( Chapelle et al., 2010 , p. 8). As such, the relationship between validity argument and validation research becomes more apparent. Another advantage of this approach to test validation it that it enables the structuring and synthesis of research results into a logical and coherent validity argument, not merely an amalgamation of research evidence. By so doing, it depicts the logical progression of how the conclusion from one inference becomes the starting point of the next one, and how each inference is supported by research. Finally, by constructing a validity argument, this approach allows for a critical evaluation of the logical development of the validity argument as well as the research that supports each inference. In addition to the advantages mentioned above for test validation research, this framework is also very comprehensive, making it particularly suitable for this review study.

By incorporating this argument-based validation framework in a narrative review of the published research on speaking assessment, this study aims to address the following research questions:

RQ1. How does the published research on speaking assessment represent the six inferences in the argument-based validation framework?

RQ2. What are the speaking assessment topics that constituted the focus of the published research?

RQ3. What methods did researchers adopt to collect backings for the assumptions involved in each inference?

This study followed the research synthesis steps recommended by Cooper et al. (2019) , including: (1) problem formation; (2) literature search; (3) data evaluation; (4) data analysis; (5) interpretation of results; and (6) public presentation. This section includes details regarding article search and selection, and methods for synthesizing our collected studies.

Article Search and Selection

We collected the articles on speaking assessment that were published in LT from 1984 1 to 2018 and LAQ from 2004 to 2018. These two journals were targeted because: (a) both are recognized as leading high-impact journals in the field of language assessment; (b) both have an explicit focus on assessment of language abilities and skills. We understand that numerous other journals in the field of applied linguistics or educational evaluation also publish research on speaking and its assessment. Admittedly, if the scope of our review extends to include more journals, the findings might be different; however, given the high impact of these two journals in the field, a review of their published research on speaking assessment in the past three decades or so should provide sufficient indication of the directions in assessing speaking proficiency. This limitation is discussed at the end of this paper.

The PRISMA flowchart in Figure 2 illustrates the process of article search and selection in this study. A total of 120 articles were initially retrieved through manually surveying each issue in the electronic archives of the two journals, containing all articles published in LT from 1984 to 2018 and LAQ from 2004 to 2018. Two inclusion criteria were applied: (a) the article had a clear focus on speaking assessment. Articles that targeted the whole language test involving multiple skills were not included; (b) the article reported an empirical study in the sense that it investigated one or more aspects of speaking assessment through the analysis of data from either speaking assessments or designed experimental studies.

Figure 2 . PRISMA flowchart of article search and collection.

Through reading the abstracts carefully, 13 articles were excluded from our analysis, with two special issue editorials and 11 review or position papers. A further examination of the remaining 107 articles revealed that three of them involved multiple language skills, suggesting a lack of primary focus on speaking assessment. These three articles were therefore excluded from our analysis, yielding 104 studies in our collection. Of the 104 articles, 73 (70.19%) were published in LT and 31 (29.81%) were published in LAQ . All these articles were downloaded in PDF format and imported into NVivo 12 ( QSR, 2018 ) for analysis.

Data Analysis

To respond to RQ1, we coded the collected articles into the six inferences in the argument-based validation framework based on the focus of investigation for each article, which was determined by a close examination of the abstract and research questions. If the primary focus did not emerge clearly in this process, we read the full text. As the coding progressed, we noticed that some articles had more than one focus, and therefore should be coded into multiple inferences. For instance, Sawaki (2007) interrogated several aspects of an L2 speaking test that were considered as essential to its construct validity, including the interrelationships between the different dimensions of spoken performance and the reliability of test scores. The former was considered as pertinent to the explanation inference, as it explores the speaking constructs through the analysis of test scores; the latter, however, was deemed more relevant to the generalization inference, as it concerns the consistency of test scores at the whole test level ( Knoch and Chapelle, 2018 ). Therefore, this article was coded into both explanation and generalization inference.

To answer RQ2, the open coding method ( Richards, 1999 ) was employed to explore the speaking assessment topics that constituted the focus of each article in our collection. This means that a coding scheme was not specified a prior ; rather, it was generated through examining the abstracts or full texts to determine the topics and subtopics. RQ3 was investigated through coding the research methods that were employed by speaking assessment researchers. A broad coding scheme consisting of three categories was employed to code the research methods: (a) quantitatively oriented; (b) qualitatively oriented; and (c) mixed methods with both quantitative and qualitative orientations. Next, the open coding method was adopted to code the specific methods that were utilized under each broad category. Matrix coding analysis ( Miles et al., 2014 ) was subsequently implemented in NVivo to explore the relationships between the speaking assessment topics, research methods and the six inferences in the argument-based validation framework. This would enable us to sketch the broad patterns of: (a) which topics on speaking assessment tended be investigated under each of the six inferences; (b) which research methods were frequently employed to collect the backings for the assumptions that underlie each inference.

The coding process underwent three iterative stages to ensure the reliability of the coding results. First, both authors coded 10 articles selected randomly from the dataset independently and then compared their coding results. Differences in coding results were resolved through discussion. Next, the first author coded the rest of the articles in NVivo, using the coding scheme that was generated during the first stage while adding new categories as they emerged from the coding process. Finally, the second author coded 20 articles (19.23%) which were randomly selected from the dataset, using the coding scheme that was determined during the second stage. Intercoder agreement was verified through calculating Cohen's kappa statistic in NVivo ( k = 0.93), which suggested satisfactory coding reliability.

Results and Discussion

Overall, our coding results indicate that a wide range of research was conducted of speaking assessment to interrogate the six inferences in the argument-based validation framework. These studies cover a variety of research topics, employing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed research methods. In this section, we describe and discuss the analysis results through showcasing the broad patterns that emerged from our coding process. Illustrative studies are used as appropriate to exemplify the research that was undertaken in assessing speaking proficiency.

Representation of the Published Research in the Six Inferences

Table 1 presents the representation of the published research in the six inferences. As indicated in this table, most of our collected articles were categorized into the three inferences of evaluation ( n = 42, 40.38%), generalization ( n = 42, 40.38%), and explanation ( n = 50, 48.08%); in contrast, a much smaller number of studies targeted the other three inferences of domain description ( n = 4, 3.85%), extrapolation ( n = 7, 6.73%), and utilization ( n = 5, 4.81%). Despite the highly skewed representation of the published research in the six inferences, the findings were not entirely surprising. According to the argument-based validation framework ( Chapelle et al., 2008 ), backings in support of the assumptions that underlie the three inferences of evaluation, generalization , and explanation relate to almost all key components in the assessment of speaking proficiency, including rater effects, rating scale, task features or administration conditions, interlocutor effects in speaking tasks such as paired oral, interview or group discussion, and features of produced spoken discourse. These components essentially represent the concerns surrounding the development, administration, and validation of speaking assessment (e.g., McNamara, 1996 ; Fulcher, 2015a ). Take the inference of evaluation as an example. In the argument-based validation framework, this inference pertains to the link from the observation of test takers' performance on a speaking test to their observed scores. As mentioned previously (see section Theoretical Framework), backings in support of the key assumptions underlying this inference include an evaluation of rating scales as well as rater effects at the task level. Given the pivotal role that raters and rating scales play in speaking assessment (e.g., Eckes, 2011 ), it is not surprising to observe a reasonably high proportion of studies exploring the plausibility of this inference. Almost half of our collected articles ( n = 50, 48.08%) interrogated the explanation inference. This finding can be interpreted in relation to the centrality of understanding the construct in language test development and validation (e.g., Alderson et al., 1995 ; Bachman and Palmer, 1996 ), which lies at the core of the explanation inference.

Table 1 . Representation of the published research in the six inferences ( n = 104).

One possible explanation for the limited research on domain description is related to the journals that formed the basis for this review study. Both LT and LAQ have an explicit focus on language assessment, whereas in many cases, exploration of language use in TLU domains, which is the focus of domain description , might be reported as needs assessment studies in test development reports, which were beyond the purview of this study. Another plausible explanation, as pointed out by one of the reviewers, might lie in the lack of theoretical sophistication regarding this inference. The reason why few studies targeted the extrapolation inference might be attributable to the challenges in pinpointing the external criterion measure, or in collecting valid data to represent test takers' ability to use language in TLU domains. These challenges could be exacerbated in the case of speaking ability due to its intangible nature, the various forms that it may assume in practice, and the different conditions under which it happens. Similarly, very few studies focused on the utilization inference which concerns the communication and use of test scores. This could relate to the fact that test washback or impact studies have to date rarely focused exclusively on speaking assessment ( Yu et al., 2017 ). Speaking assessment researchers should consider exploring this avenue of research in future studies, particularly against the backdrop of the increasingly extensive application of technology in speaking assessment ( Chapelle, 2008 ).

Speaking Assessment Topics

Table 2 presents the matrix coding results of speaking assessment topics and the six inferences in the argument-based validation framework. It should be noted that some of the frequency statistics in this table are over-estimated because, as mentioned previously, some articles were coded into multiple inferences; however, this should not affect the general patterns that emerged from the results in a significant way. The topics that emerged from our coding process are largely consistent with the themes that Fulcher (2015a) identified in his review of speaking assessment research. One noteworthy difference is many-facets Rasch measurement (MFRM), a topic in Fulcher (2015a) but was coded as a research method in our study (see section Research Methods). In what follows, we will focus on the three topics which were most frequently investigated by speaking assessment researchers, namely, speaking constructs, rater effects, and factors that affect speaking performance, as examples to illustrate the research that was undertaken of speaking assessment.

Table 2 . Matrix coding results of inferences and speaking assessment topics ( n = 104).

Speaking Constructs

Table 2 shows that “speaking constructs” ( n = 47) is the topic that was investigated most frequently in our collected studies. Matrix coding results indicate that this topic area appears most frequently under the inference of explanation ( n = 39, 37.50%). The importance of a clear understanding of the construct cannot be overemphasized in language test development and validation (e.g., Alderson et al., 1995 ; Bachman and Palmer, 1996 ). Indeed, construct definition forms the foundation of several highly influential test validation frameworks in the field (e.g., Messick, 1989 ; Weir, 2005 ). Our analysis indicates that considerable research has been dedicated to disentangling various speaking constructs. Two topics that feature prominently in this topic area are the analysis of spoken discourse and interactional competence.

A common approach to investigate the speaking constructs is through the analysis of produced spoken discourse ( Carter and McCarthy, 2017 ), usually focusing on linguistic features that can distinguish test takers at different proficiency levels such as complexity, accuracy, and fluency (e.g., Iwashita, 2006 ; Gan, 2012 ; Bosker et al., 2013 ). Research in this area can provide substantial evidence concerning speaking proficiency. Iwashita (2006) , for instance, examined the syntactic complexity of the spoken performance of L2 Japanese learners. Results reveal that learner' oral proficiency could be predicted significantly by several complexity indicators, including T-unit length, the number of clauses per T-unit, and the number of independent clauses per T-unit. In another discourse analysis study, Gan (2012) probed the syntactic complexity of test takers' spoken discourse and examined the relationship between syntactic complexity and task type in L2 speaking assessment. Gan's results show that, compared with the group interaction task, test takers' discourses on the individual presentation task featured longer T-units and utterances as well as significantly greater number of T-units, clauses, verb phrases and words. These discourse analysis studies have implications for understanding speaking proficiency as well as its development and maturity among L2 learners.

International competence (IC) is yet another topic which features prominently in this topic area. Despite the recognized need of including IC in speaking assessment (e.g., Kramsch, 1986 , McNamara, 1997 ), how it should be conceptualized remains a contentious issue. Research has shown that this construct consists of multiple dimensions which is susceptible to the influence of a range of personal cognitive and contextual factors ( Galaczi and Taylor, 2018 ). Our review suggests that IC was approached through analyzing test takers' spoken discourse as well as exploring raters' perspectives. Galaczi (2008) , for instance, performed elaborate analyses of test takers' spoken discourse on the paired speaking task in the First Certificate in English (FCE) speaking test. The results led the researcher to conclude that test takers' interactions primarily featured three patterns on paired oral assessment tasks: collaborative, parallel and blended interaction (i.e., a mixture of collaborative/parallel or collaborative/asymmetric features). In a more recent study, Lam (2018) analyzed test takers' spoken discourse on a school-based group oral speaking assessment for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) English Language Examination. Instead of exploring IC more broadly, as in Galaczi (2008) , this study targeted a particular feature of IC, namely, producing responses contingent on previous speakers' contributions. The analyses pointed to three kinds of conversational actions that underpinned a response contingent on previous speaker's contributions: formulating previous speakers' contributions, accounting for (dis)agreement with previous speakers' ideas and extending previous speakers' ideas.

Some other studies explored the construct of IC from raters' perspectives. A typical study was reported by May (2011) who explored the features that were salient to raters on a paired speaking test. The study identified a repertoire of features which were salient to raters, and hence were potentially integral to the IC construct. Such features include, for example, the ability to manage a conversation, ask for opinion or clarification, challenge or disagree with an interactional partner, and demonstrate effective body language, and interactive listening. While suggesting that IC is a highly complex and slippery construct, these studies have significant implications for clarifying the IC construct and promoting its valid operationalization in speaking assessment. The findings are particularly meaningful in the context where interactive tasks are increasingly used in speaking assessment.

Rater Effects

Raters play a significant role in speaking assessment; their performance is affected by a host of non-linguistic factors, which are often irrelevant to the speaking constructs of interest, hence causing construct-irrelevant variance ( Messick, 1989 ) or contamination ( AERA et al., 2014 ). Not surprisingly, the next topic area that was most frequently explored by speaking assessment researchers is rater effects ( n = 39). The studies that focused on this topic were mostly classified into the two inferences of evaluation ( n = 27, 25.96%) and generalization (n =23, 22.12%). Knoch and Chapelle (2018) applied the argument-based validation framework to the analysis of rater effects and rating processes in language assessment research. They observed that several important aspects of rater effects could be mapped onto evaluation and generalization inferences. The key assumptions of the evaluation inference relate to the raters' consistency at the task level, the bias that raters display against task types or other aspects of the assessment situation, and the impact of raters' characteristics on the ratings that they assign. When it comes to the generalization inference, the key assumptions largely concern raters' consistency at the whole test level and the number of raters that is required to achieve the desired level of consistency. Research on rater effects has significant implications for enhancing both the validity and fairness of speaking assessment (e.g., McNamara et al., 2019 ).

Two topics that feature prominently in the study of rater effects are the impact of raters' characteristics on their rating behaviors and rater cognition, that is, the cognitive processes that raters engage when assigning scores to a spoken performance. Raters' characteristics such as language background, experience and qualifications may have appreciable impact on their ratings. This topic has attracted considerable research attention as it has implications for test fairness and rater training programs. One such study was reported by Kim (2009) who examined and compared the rating behaviors of native and non-native English teachers when assessing students' spoken performance. The results indicate that native-speaker (NS) and non-native-speaker (NNS) teachers on the whole exhibited similar severity levels and internal consistency; however, in comparison with NNS teachers, NS teachers provided more detailed and elaborate comments on students' performance. The findings generally concur with Zhang and Elder (2011) who compared the rating behaviors of NS and NNS teachers in the context of the College English Test - Spoken English Test (CET-SET), a large-scale high-stakes speaking test in China. Instead of focusing on raters' L1 background, Winke et al. (2013) examined whether raters' accent familiarity, defined as their L2 learning experience, constituted a potential source of bias when they rated test takers' spoken performance. In other words, if a rater studies Chinese as his or her L2, is he or she biased toward test takers who have Chinese as their L1? Their findings indicate that the raters with Spanish or Chinese as their L2 were significantly more lenient toward L1 Spanish and Chinese test takers than they were toward those from other L1 backgrounds. However, in both cases, the effect sizes were small, suggesting that such effect had minimal impact in practice. The results are largely consistent with some other studies in our collection (e.g., Yan, 2014 ; Wei and Llosa, 2015 ), which explored a similar topic.

Rater cognition or rating processes constitute yet another important topic under the topic area of “rater effects”. Studies along this line are typically implemented through analyzing raters' verbal protocols to explore their cognitive processes when applying the rating criteria or assigning scores to a spoken performance. Research into raters' cognitive processes can generate valuable insights into the validity of the rating scales as well as the speaking constructs that are being assessed in a speaking test. Findings from these studies have important implications for the revision of rating scales, improving rater training programs, and enhancing the validity and usefulness of the speaking test in focus. In a qualitative study, Kim (2015) explored the rating behaviors of three groups of raters with different levels of experience on an L2 speaking test by analyzing their verbal reports of rating processes. The study revealed that the three groups of raters exhibited varying uses of the analytic rating scales, hence suggesting that experience was an important variable affecting their rating behaviors. Furthermore, an analysis of their performance over time revealed that the three groups of raters demonstrated different degrees of improvement in their rating performance. It should be noted that several studies in our collection examined raters' rating processes with a view to either complementing or accounting for the quantitative analyses of speaking test scores. For instance, both Kim (2009) and Zhang and Elder (2011) , two studies which were reviewed previously, investigated raters' rating processes, and the findings significantly enriched our understanding of the rating behaviors of raters from different backgrounds.

Factors That Affect Spoken Performance

The third topic area that emerged from our coding process is “factors that affect spoken performance” ( n = 30). As shown in Table 3 , most of the studies in this topic area were classified into the inference of generalization ( n = 19, 18.27%). This is understandable as factors such as task features, administration conditions, and planning time might affect the generalizability of speaking test scores. Indeed, understanding factors that affect test performance has long since been one of the central concerns for language assessment research as a whole (e.g., Bachman, 1990 ; Bachman et al., 1995 ). Research along this line has implications for speaking test development and implementation, and for test score interpretation and use. Our coding analyses indicate that a range of factors have been explored by speaking assessment researchers, of which ‘interlocutor effects' features most prominently. This could be related to the increasingly widespread use of interviews, paired oral or group discussion tasks to assess speaking ability in applied linguistics and language pedagogy. A notable advantage with these assessment formats lies in the unscripted and dynamic nature of the interactions involved, which is key to increasing the authenticity of speaking assessments. Nonetheless, interlocutor characteristics, such as gender, proficiency levels, personality, and styles of interaction might have considerable impact on test takers' spoken performance, thus impinging on the validity, fairness and overall usefulness of these tasks.

Table 3 . Matrix coding results of research methods and inferences ( n = 104).

An earlier study on interlocutor effects was reported by McNamara and Lumley (1997) who examined the potential impact of interlocutor characteristics on test scores in the context of the Occupational English Test (OET), a high-stakes speaking test for health professionals in Australia. Their study indicated that interlocutor characteristics had some influence on the ratings that test takers received. For example, they found that raters tended to compensate for interlocutors' incompetence in conducting the speaking test; in other words, if an interlocutor was perceived as less competent, test takers tended to receive higher ratings than expected. In addition, they also observe that an interlocutor's ability to build rapport with test takers had a positive effect on the ratings that test takers received. In another study, Brown (2003) probed the effects of interlocutor characteristics on test takers' performance in the context of a conversational interview. She performed elaborate analyses of the interactions between the interviewers (i.e., interlocutors) and test takers, revealing that the interlocutors differed quite significantly in terms of: (a) how they structured topical sequences; (b) their questioning technique; and (c) how they provided feedback and built rapport with test takers. Further analyses uncovered that interviewer styles had quite significant impact on the ratings that test takers received. Resonating with McNamara and Lumley (1997) , the findings of this study again call for the reconceptualization of speaking proficiency.

Several other studies focused on the effects of interaction partners in paired or group oral tasks on spoken performance. ( Ockey, 2009 ), for instance, investigated the potential effects of group member's assertiveness levels on spoken performance on a group discussion task. Results confirmed that test takers' assertiveness levels had an impact on the scores that they received. Specifically, assertive test takers were awarded higher scores than expected when grouped with non-assertive test takers; this trend, however, was reversed when they were grouped with test takers with similar assertiveness levels. A plausible explanation could be that raters viewed assertive test takers more positively when other members in the groups were non-assertive, whereas more negatively when other group members, who were also assertive, competed to be the leaders in the interactions. This study reiterates the co-constructed nature of speaking proficiency. Despite the research that has been undertaken of interlocutor effects, controversy remains as to whether this variation is part of the speaking construct and therefore should be incorporated in the design of a speaking test or it should be controlled to such an extent that it poses minimal threat to the reliability and fairness of speaking test scores ( Fulcher, 2015a ).

In addition to the three topics above, researchers also explored speaking test design ( n = 14) in terms of the task features (e.g., Wigglesworth and Elder, 2010 ; Ahmadi and Sadeghi, 2016 ) and the use of technology in speaking test delivery (e.g., Nakatsuhara et al., 2017 ; Ockey et al., 2017 ). The next topic is test score generalizability ( n = 7), typically investigated through G-theory analysis (e.g., Lee, 2006 ; Sawaki, 2007 ; Xi, 2007 ). Furthermore, six studies in our collection evaluated the rating scales for speaking assessments, including comparing the effectiveness of different types of rating scales (e.g., Hirai and Koizumi, 2013 ), and examining whether a rating scale functioned as intended by the test developer (e.g., Isaacs and Thomson, 2013 ). Finally, five studies focused on the use of speaking assessments, mainly relating to test takers' perceptions of speaking assessments (e.g., Scott, 1986 ; Qian, 2009 ) and standard setting studies to determine the cut scores for certain purposes (e.g., Pill and McNamara, 2016 ).

Research Methods

Table 3 presents the matrix coding results of research methods and inferences. As indicated in this table, quantitative research methods were more frequently employed by speaking assessment researchers ( n = 50), in comparison with qualitative methods ( n = 23). It is worth noting that a number of studies ( n = 31) utilized mixed methods design, which features a combination of both quantitative and qualitative orientations.

Table 3 indicates that quantitative methods were most frequently used to collect backings in support of the evaluation ( n = 21, 20.19%) and generalization inferences ( n = 27, 25.96%). This finding can be interpreted in relation to the key assumptions that underlie these two inferences (see section Theoretical Framework). According to the argument-based validation framework, the assumptions of these two inferences largely concern rater consistency at task and whole-test level, the functioning of the rating scales, as well as the generalizability of speaking test scores across tasks and raters. Understandably, quantitative methods are widely used to collect the backings to test these assumptions. In addition to the overall representation of quantitative methods in speaking assessment research, we also went a step further to examine the use of specific quantitative methods. As shown in Table 3 , while traditional data analysis methods such as ANOVA or regression ( n = 34) continued to be utilized, mainly in the interrogation of the inferences of evaluation ( n = 13, 12.50%), generalization ( n = 14, 13.46%), and explanation ( n = 15, 14.42%), Rasch analysis methods were also embraced by speaking assessment researchers ( n = 28). Note that Rasch analysis is an overarching term which encompasses a family of related models, among which the many-facets Rasch model (MFRM) is frequently used in speaking assessment (e.g., McNamara and Knoch, 2012 ). As an extension of the basic Rasch model, the MFRM allows for the inclusion of multiple aspects or facets in a speaking context (e.g., rater severity, task difficulty, difficulty of rating scales). Furthermore, compared with traditional data analysis methods such as correlation and ANOVA which can only provide results at the group level, the MFRM can provide both group- and individual-level statistics ( Eckes, 2011 ). This finding concurs with Fulcher (2015a) who identified the MFRM as an important theme in speaking assessment. It also resonates with the observation of Fan and Knoch (2019 , p. 136) who commented that Rasch analysis has indeed become “one of the default methods or analysis techniques to examine the technical quality of performance assessments.” The power of Rasch analysis in speaking assessment research is best illustrated by studies such as Bonk and Ockey (2003) , Eckes (2005) , and Winke et al. (2013) , among others, all of which examined rater effects on speaking assessments in different contexts. Finally, G-theory ( n = 7) and structural equation modeling ( n = 5), two complicated quantitative methods, were also utilized by speaking assessment researchers.

In terms of qualitative research methods, discourse analysis is the one which was most frequently employed by speaking assessment researchers ( n = 25). Matrix coding results indicate that this method features most prominently under the inference of explanation ( n = 20, 19.23%). This finding is aligned with the key assumptions that underlie the explanation inference, namely, (a) features of the spoken discourse produced by test takers can effectively distinguish L2 speakers at different proficiency levels, and (b) raters' cognitive processes are consistent with the theoretical models of L2 speaking, both entailing the use of discourse analysis method to explore test takers' spoken responses and raters' rating processes. Importantly, our analysis results indicate that conversation analysis (CA) was the method that appeared frequently under the category of “discourse analysis.” This is best represented by studies such as Galaczi (2008) , Lam (2018) , and Roever and Kasper (2018) , all endeavoring to elucidate the construct of interactional competence. As a data analysis method, CA provides speaking researchers with a principled and intricate approach to analyze the interactions between test takers and examiners in interview, paired oral, or group discussion tasks. Table 3 shows that some other qualitative methods were also quite frequently used by speaking researchers, including interview/focus groups ( n = 11), written comments ( n = 11), and verbal protocol reports ( n = 10). These research methods were typically adopted following the quantitative analyses of test takers' scores, which explains the increasingly widespread use of mixed methods in speaking assessment research ( n = 31). The finding could find resonance in the observation that mixed method research has been gaining momentum in language assessment research more broadly (e.g., Turner, 2013 ; Jang et al., 2014 ; Moeller et al., 2016 ). As shown in Table 3 , mixed-methods design is most frequently employed to collect backings in support of the inferences of evaluation ( n = 17, 16.35%) and explanation ( n = 16, 15.38%). For the evaluation inference, mixed method design was often utilized to research rater effects where quantitative and qualitative analyses were used sequentially to examine rating results and processes. When it comes to the explanation inference, researchers tended to use a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the differences in test takers' speaking scores as well as the spoken discourse that they produced.

Conclusions and Implications

In this study, we conducted a narrative review of published empirical research on assessing speaking proficiency within the argument-based validation framework ( Chapelle et al., 2008 ). A total of 104 articles on speaking assessment were collected from LT (1984–2018) and LAQ (2004–2018), two highly influential journals in the field of language assessment. Following the coding of the collected articles, matrix coding analyses were utilized to explore the relationships between the speaking assessment topics, research methods, and the six inferences in the argument-based validation framework.

The analysis results indicate that speaking assessment was investigated from various perspectives, primarily focusing on seven broad topic areas, namely, the constructs of speaking ability, rater effects, factors that affect spoken performance, speaking test design, test score generalizability, rating scale evaluation, and test use. The findings of these studies have significantly enriched our understanding of speaking proficiency and how assessment practice can be made more reliable and valid. In terms of research methods, it was revealed that quantitative research methods were most frequently utilized by speaking assessment researchers, a trend which was particularly pronounced in the inferences of evaluation and generalization . Though traditional quantitative methods such as ANOVA, regression, and correlation continued to be employed, Rasch analysis played a potent role in researching speaking assessment. In comparison, qualitative methods were least frequently used, mainly for the interrogation of the explanation inference. Mixed-methods design, recognized as “an alternative paradigm” ( Jang et al., 2014 , p. 123), ranked in the middle in terms of frequency, suggesting its increasingly widespread use in speaking assessment research. This is noteworthy when it comes to the evaluation and explanation inference.

Despite the abundance of research on speaking assessment and the variety of research topics and methods that emerged from our coding process, we feel that there are several areas which have not been explored extensively by language assessment researchers, and therefore warrant more future research endeavors. First, more studies should be conducted to interrogate the three inferences of domain description, extrapolation , and utilization in the argument-based validation framework. As indicated in our study, only a small fraction of studies have been dedicated to examining these three inferences in comparison with evaluation, generalization , and explanation (see Table 2 ). Regarding domain description , we feel that more research could be undertaken to understand task- and domain-specific speaking abilities and communicative skills. This would have significant implications for enhancing the authenticity of speaking assessment design, and for constructing valid rating scales for evaluating test takers' spoken performance. The thick description approach advocated by Fulcher et al. (2011) could be attempted to portray a nuanced picture of speaking ability in the TLU domains, especially in the case of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) speaking assessment. When it comes to the extrapolation inference, though practical difficulties in collecting speaking performance data in the TLU domains are significant indeed, new research methods and perspectives, as exemplified by the corpus-based register analysis approach taken by LaFlair and Staples (2017) , could be attempted in the future to enable meaningful comparisons between spoken performance on the test and speaking ability in TLU domains. In addition, the judgments of linguistic layperson may also be employed as a viable external criterion (e.g., Sato and McNamara, 2018 ). The utilization inference is yet another area that language assessment researchers might consider exploring in the future. Commenting on the rise of computer-assisted language assessment, Chapelle (2008 , p. 127) argued that “test takers have needed to reorient their test preparation practices to help them prepare for new test items.” As such, it is meaningful for language assessment researchers to explore the impact of computer-mediated speaking assessments and automated scoring systems on teaching and learning practices.

Next, though the topic of speaking constructs has attracted considerable research attention from the field, as evidenced by the analysis results of this study, it seems that we are still far from achieving a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of speaking proficiency. The results of this study suggest that speaking assessment researchers tended to adopt a psycholinguistic approach, aiming to analyze the linguistic features of produced spoken discourse that distinguish test takers at different proficiency levels. However, given the dynamic and context-embedded nature of speaking, there is a pressing need for a sociocultural perspective to better disentangle the speaking constructs. Using pronunciation as an example, Fulcher (2015b) argued convincingly the inadequacy of a psycholinguistic approach in pronunciation assessment research; rather, a sociocultural approach, which aims to demystify rationales, linguistic or cultural, that underlie (dys)fluency, could significantly enrich our understanding of the construct. Such an approach should be attempted more productively in future studies. In addition, as the application of technology is becoming prevalent in speaking assessment practices ( Chapelle, 2008 ), it is essential to explore whether and to what extent technology mediation has altered the speaking constructs and the implications for score interpretation and use.

We also found that several topics were under-represented in the studies that we collected. Important areas that received relatively limited coverage in our dataset include: (a) classroom-based or learning-oriented speaking assessment; (b) diagnostic speaking assessment; and (c) speaking assessment for young language learners (YLLs). The bulk of the research in our collection targeted large-scale high-stakes speaking assessments. This is understandable, perhaps, because results on these assessments are often used to make important decisions which have significant ramifications for stakeholders. In comparison, scanty research attention has been dedicated to speaking assessments in classroom contexts. A recent study reported by May et al. (2018) aimed to develop a learning-oriented assessment tool for interactional competence, so that detailed feedback could be provided about learners' interactional skills in support of their learning. More research of such a nature is needed in the future to reinforce the interfaces between speaking assessment with teaching and learning practices. In the domain of L2 writing research, it has been shown that simply using analytic rating scales does not mean that useful diagnostic feedback can be provided to learners ( Knoch, 2009 ). Arguably, this also holds true for speaking assessment. In view of the value of diagnostic assessment ( Lee, 2015 ) and the call for more integration of learning and assessment (e.g., Alderson, 2005 ; Turner and Purpura, 2015 ), more research could be conducted to develop diagnostic speaking assessments so that effective feedback can be provided to promote L2 learners' speaking development. Finally, young language learners (YLLs) have specific needs and characteristics which have implications for how they should be assessed (e.g., McKay, 2006 ). This is particularly challenging with speaking assessment in terms of task design, implementation and score reporting. This topic, however, has rarely been explored by speaking assessment researchers and therefore warrants more future research.

In terms of research methods, we feel that speaking assessment researchers should consider exploring more the potentials of qualitative methods which are well-suited to investigating an array of research questions related to speaking assessment. Our analysis results indicate that despite the quite frequent use of traditional qualitative methods such as interviews and focus groups, new qualitative methods that are supported by technology (e.g., eye-tracking) have only recently been utilized by speaking assessment researchers. For example, a recent study by Lee and Winke (2018) demonstrated the use of eye-tracking in speaking assessment through examining test-takers' cognitive processes when responding to computer-based speaking assessment tasks. Eye-tracking is advantageous in the sense that as opposed to traditional qualitative methods such as introspective think-aloud protocols, it causes minimal interference of the test taking process. Our final comment concerns the use of mixed-methods design in speaking assessment research. Despite it being applied quite frequently in researching speaking assessment, it appears that only the sequential explanatory design (i.e., the use of qualitative research to explain quantitative findings) was usually employed. Speaking assessment researchers may consider other mixed methods design options (e.g., convergent parallel design or embedded mixed methods design, see Moeller et al., 2016 ) to investigate more complex research questions in speaking assessment.

We acknowledge a few limitations with this study. As mentioned previously, we targeted only two highly influential journals in the field of language assessment, namely, LT and LAQ while aware that numerous other journals in applied linguistics or educational evaluation also publish research on speaking and its assessment. As such, caution needs to be exercised when interpreting the relevant research findings that emerged from this study. Future studies could be undertaken to include more journals and other publication types (e.g., research reports, PhD dissertations) to depict a more representative picture of speaking assessment research. In addition, given the sheer volume of published research on speaking assessment available, our research findings can only be presented as indications of possible trends of the wider publishing context, as reflected in the specific articles we explored. Arguably, the findings might be more revealing if we zoomed in on a few key topics in speaking assessment (e.g., rater effects, speaking constructs), analyzed specific studies on these topics in detail, and compared their findings. Finally, it would be worthwhile to explore how the research on some key topics in speaking assessment has been evolving over time. Such analysis could have provided a valuable reference point to speaking assessment researchers and practitioners. Such a developmental trend perspective, however, was not incorporated in our analysis and could be attempted in future research.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

Author Contributions

JF designed the study, collected and coded the data, and drafted the article. XY collected and coded the data, and drafted this article together with JF.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The handling editor declared a past collaboration with one of the authors JF.

Acknowledgments

The preparation of this manuscript was supported by the National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences (NPOPSS) of the People's Republic of China under the project title Reform of English speaking assessment and its impact on the teaching of English speaking (19BYY234). We would like to thank Angela McKenna and three reviewers for their insightful and perspicacious comments on the previous draft of this article.

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Keywords: speaking assessment, speaking proficiency, argument-based validation framework, research methods, narrative review

Citation: Fan J and Yan X (2020) Assessing Speaking Proficiency: A Narrative Review of Speaking Assessment Research Within the Argument-Based Validation Framework. Front. Psychol. 11:330. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00330

Received: 20 November 2019; Accepted: 11 February 2020; Published: 27 February 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Fan and Yan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Jason Fan, jinsong.fan@unimelb.edu.au ; Xun Yan, xunyan@illinois.edu

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

• Public Speaking Research Paper

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In everyday language, public speaking refers to the communication practice of a speaker sharing ideas with an audience primarily through speech. The term encompasses a great many communication contexts, including events as different as delivering an oral report on company profits to a closed meeting of a board of trustees, addressing millions of listeners around the globe during a U.S. presidential inauguration ceremony, and giving a toast at a wedding. The fundamental notion underlying public speaking as a form of communication is that it is an embodied and oral act. Associated expectations that signal that a communication interaction is an example of public speaking are that the oral communication is shared with more than one listener and there is one person in the interaction who does most of the communicating. Like written communication, public speaking is complicated because sharing meanings with others through language is difficult. The challenges of public speaking are heightened, however, since the speaker shares meaning not only through words but also through body, voice, and visuals.

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Furthermore, the public-speaking experience, traditionally, is transitory; a speaker has only one opportunity to accomplish his or her goal—to be understood by the listeners. While readers can re-read documents until they understand the gist of the message, listeners, typically, cannot hear a speech again. Another challenge particular to the publicspeaking experience is anxiety. In fact, 70% to 75% of the U.S. population report experiencing public-speaking anxiety (McCroskey, 2000; Richmond & McCroskey, 1998). Challenges such as these make public speaking a communication practice that continues to interest researchers and everyday practitioners and have made public-speaking classes a common requirement for undergraduate degrees and public-speaking titles popular in the self-help sections of bookstores.

It is perhaps surprising that the demand for public speakers persists in our increasingly mediated age.While information can be shared through many other means and persuasive appeals are pervasive on television, billboards, and the Internet, there remains a significant role for public speaking as a means for sharing ideas and motivating others. Political speaking is particularly visible in U.S. culture as we watch candidates participate in debates and see legislators and citizens speak about civic affairs on news shows, C-Span, community access television, and Internet sites such asYouTube. Public speaking also happens at pep assemblies; in board rooms; during parents’ night at public schools; in assembly halls and civic centers; at state fairs and trade shows; as part of award shows such as the Oscars; at commencements; at religious gatherings, inaugurations, and weddings; in classrooms, prisons, and legislatures; and even during meetings of 4-H or Rotary Clubs. U.S. culture is rife with contexts that call for public speaking.

Organizations such as the All American Speaker’s Bureau arrange for celebrities and professional speakers to address audiences at corporate meetings, trade shows, conventions, and major community events. Though sometimes these appearances may include a chance to shake hands or get an autograph, their central purpose is to arrange to have someone with significant understanding of an issue, someone with a deep passion for a cause, or someone with a fascinating experience to share speak before an audience. The speakers’ bureau understands the potential impact of this speaking situation for listeners and for the organization arranging the event and knows its market value. Groups will pay speaking fees ranging from around $5,000, to hear, for example, Amy Henry from NBC’s The Apprentice , to more than $200,000, to hear Donald Trump himself. Another organization, TED, originally devoted to sharing ideas about Technology, Entertainment, and Design, meets annually to showcase 50 speakers, who address a crowd of 1,000 for about 18 minutes each. These speakers share their exceptional ideas on topics ranging from open-source textbooks for college classrooms to innovations in wind power, to how the mind works, to the nature of romantic love. The 4-day conference regularly sells out a year in advance, but the speeches are digitally captured and the best are posted at www.ted.com. The organizers adopted the slogan “ideas worth spreading” and devote significant resources to their goal of “giving everyone on-demand access to the world’s most inspiring voices.” Such examples underscore the fact that public speaking remains a significant mode of communication in contemporary culture.

Public speaking has evolved as a form of communication, and it overlaps many of the other types of communication discussed in this handbook. Individuals engaged in the specific tasks of interviewing, deliberating, debating, mediating conflict, demonstrating, or communicating with visuals are likely to engage in public speaking as well. This research paper, therefore, will focus on the fundamental concepts of public speaking as a type of communication. While public-speaking theory and pedagogy are deeply rooted in the classical period, it is important to recognize how cultural developments, ways of understanding communicative processes, and even theories of language have revitalized and complicated the classical concepts. Even as U.S. cultural expectations have expanded such that today there is a belief that all citizens should be prepared to express themselves through public speaking, the ideas about how public speaking functions have grown increasingly complex. As a result, it has become clear that public speaking, like other complex skills, is one that can continue to develop across a lifetime. Though technological developments bring new challenges as well as opportunities, there are a handful of primary concepts that can guide public speakers to success in the 21st century.

Public-Speaking Goals

Public speaking is a form of communication that seeks an outcome; public speakers seek not simply to express themselves but to have an effect on their listeners. Humans have long sought to understand more about the ways language can shape circumstances and help them accomplish their goals. The first formal discussions on communication and public speaking in the Western tradition emerged in the 5th century BCE in Greece, though more ancient texts of Chinese and Jewish origin as well as the works of Homer indicate an even earlier interest in effective speech making. In Western cultures, public-speaking instructors were among the first people to be paid to share their knowledge with others. Early legal systems required citizens to speak on their own behalf when presenting arguments on issues such as property ownership. Those who listened to these speeches and saw their varying levels of effectiveness began to codify the strategies that were most successful in particular situations. In Greece, ancient teachers of what was commonly known as “rhetoric” included well-known figures such as Gorgias and Aristotle in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, respectively. In Rome, the first systematic rhetoric handbook, the Ad Herennium , dates to the 1st century BCE.

These early texts identify three central goals related to the different contexts for public speaking: to persuade judges to support your position in a court of law (known as forensic discourse, as in “I am not guilty of murder”); to persuade decision makers to support your position about what action should be taken by the community or state (known as deliberative discourse, as in “We should build a new wall for the city”); and to persuade people with arguments that a person or event is worthy of either praise or blame (known as epideictic discourse, as in “Helen of Troy’s beauty is beyond all comparison”). These goals were related by their common goal or outcome: the persuasion of a listener.

According toAristotle, the differences among these goals emerged in large part due to the specific context within which the speech took place and the role played by the audience during the exchange. Forensic discourse referred to the speeches given in legal settings where listeners would judge whether someone was guilty of a crime or whether a wrong was done in the past that required redress. Deliberative discourse was the discourse that took place in the senate, within bodies of decision makers for the state, who argued for certain policies, inviting listeners to judge whether such policies should be implemented in the future. Epideictic discourse took place in public spaces before popular audiences who made judgments about the object of praise or blame and also rendered judgments about the talents of the speakers. The situation within which speakers shared their ideas determined the kinds of materials, arguments, vocabulary, and delivery that were appropriate. For this reason, early rhetoric handbooks often divided their guidelines into chapters devoted to each different context.

In the 100 years preceding and following the beginning of the Common Era, debate about the goals of public speaking was vigorous.As the Roman theorist Quintilian summarized the issue in his landmark work the Institutes of Oratory (95 CE), which is the most detailed account of the education of a public speaker from the ancient world, what began as a debate about whether a speech of praise was significantly different from a speech of blame soon developed into claims that the goals of speaking were innumerable:

Indeed, if we distinguish praising and blaming in the third part of oratory, in what kind of oratory shall we be said to employ ourselves when we complain, console, appease, excite, alarm, encourage, direct, explain obscure expressions, narrate, entreat, offer thanks, congratulate, reproach, attack, describe, command, retract, express wishes or opinions, and speak in a thousand other ways? (Quintillian, 2006, Book 3, chap. 4, para. 1)

But if the goals of speakers were as numerous as the goals any individual speaker might set for himself or herself, there would be no way to generalize about the skills needed by a speaker, and it would become impossible to teach others to be successful in addressing audiences.

Some agreement about the genres of discourse became necessary as a way to identify what public speakers needed to know and what they needed to be able to do in order to be successful. The categories of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic speech remain salient today; but they fail to encompass other essential functions of public discourse within a culture. By the 5th century, rhetoric handbooks, such as Book IV of Augustine’s (1958) On Christian Doctrine , encouraged teachers and students of rhetoric to accept a broad set of three goals for public speaking: to teach, to please, and to persuade. Today the majority of public speaking textbooks concentrate on the same three central goals of public speaking to inform, to entertain and to persuade an audience. Persuasive speaking is the most complex of the goals and remains an umbrella term for diverse discourses such as those aiming to change belief, to move to action, to inspire, to sell, to convert, and to motivate. In response to recent critiques of the fundamentally coercive nature of these kinds of persuasive speeches, whose aim is to change listeners, some theorists are exploring a new genre called “invitational speaking.” This alternative goal for public speakers aims to initiate dialogues with listeners about issues and aims to share perspectives. The goal is to invite consideration of change rather than speaking with the intention of changing audience members (Foss & Griffin, 1995; Griffin, 2009).

Identifying the genre or the general goal of a speech within a particular situation helps a speaker understand a great deal about the strategies available to achieve the outcome for that kind of speaking situation. Informative speeches rely on clarity and thoroughness so that listeners can remember the information. Persuasive speeches are built on the speaker’s credibility, the use of evidence and reasoning, as well as engaging the emotions of the audience to produce change. Invitational speeches aim to establish and sustain conditions of equality, value, and self-determination with listeners. Speeches to entertain rely on strategies that use humor to make their point. While these broadly defined goals govern the study of the discipline of public speaking, each speaker also needs to determine his particular goal within a particular speech situation. Those goals, like the long list developed by Quintilian, are innumerable, and identifying those goals requires careful consideration of many factors. While technology has expanded the potential impact of public speaking and added complications to the communicative process, the fundamental concerns and resources of the public speaker have remained remarkably consistent over time.

Fundamental Principles: The Dynamic Process of Public Speaking

Mid-20th-century efforts to visualize the components and processes of communication were dominated by what is called the transmission model (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). This was an information transfer model that seemed to suggest that communicators send information across some medium (such as telephone wires) to a receiver, who takes in the information as sent unless some kind of noise interferes to make the transmission problematic. This understanding of the public communication model has changed over time and is currently being influenced by postmodernists, who point out the indeterminacy of each of the parts of the model. Nevertheless, most teachers and publicspeaking practitioners continue to find value in thinking about the distinct parts of the communication process to better accomplish their communicative goals. There are seven essential parts to the model: speaker, audience, message, channel, feedback, interference, and context.

The speaker is perhaps the most obvious part of the public-speaking transaction, but there are complexities in the role that must not be overlooked. Communication begins within the mind of the speaker as he or she perceives and processes his or her own experiences and learning and makes decisions about the goal(s) of a speech and the strategies best suited to accomplishing those tasks. In fact, Aristotle does not define rhetoric as a product. It is not a speech or a specific strategy; it is not the outcome or effect a speaker has on an audience. Rhetoric, he says, is “the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion.” Developing one’s rhetorical skill, then, is about training the mind to see all the possibilities for persuasion or, in contemporary theory, to see all the possibilities for engaging audiences. Much of the work of a successful public-speaking interaction is the mental work of the speaker, who must sift through the possible goals, materials, information, and organizational and delivery strategies to select the best for a particular speaking context.

In addition, from the listener’s point of view, the presence of the speaker is meaningful even before the speaker begins a presentation. The very fact that a presidential candidate chose to speak at a particular event conveys a message about the value of that event to that audience and to the listener as well as to those looking at the event from outside the immediate situation. The reputation of the speaker, his ethos or credibility, may also be known to the listener before the start of the speech. Announcements about the speech, the speech of introduction before a presentation or audience knowledge about earlier speeches, books or appearances by the speaker all serve to help listeners construct ideas about the speaker before the talk. These preexisting attitudes about the speaker can support or interfere with the speaker’s goals depending on the listener.

Listener/Audience

The presence of an audience is essential to the publicspeaking situation. Philosophers may debate the nature of “sound” when arguing about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is there to hear it, but theorists agree that the communicative act of public speaking requires the presence of a listener to be meaningful. Listeners bring their own experiences, languages, expectations, and ways of making meaning into the public-speaking interaction. The meanings taken away from a public-speaking presentation depend on the audience member’s work in creating them. The more researchers investigate the ways people learn, the more it becomes clear that complex biological and social processes are at work as audience members construct their own meanings in communication contexts. Public communication is a participatory process; a speaker cannot make himself or herself understood without the willing participation of the listener in the process. The complexities of the mental landscapes of audience members—individually and as groups—is part of what makes public speaking a creative challenge that is never fully mastered.

A third complex feature of the public-speaking process is the message itself. By definition, the message is the meaning received and understood by the members of the audience. In general, the closer the message received is to the message intended by the speaker, the more effective the presentation. For this reason, public-speaking instruction is typically focused on the construction of the speaker’s message—such as the content, the structure, the word choices, but it is also the case that audience members are actively engaged in constructing their own sense of the message. The messages from which they construct meanings are intentional and unintentional, verbal and nonverbal.As individuals, listeners have varying degrees of attentiveness; still, the speaker must assume that audience members are constructing impressions of the speaker’s character, beliefs, age, class, race, gender, and even sexual orientation even before the speaker begins to address them orally. Contemporary public speakers are increasingly aware of this and work to manage these impressions to the best of their ability.

The intended and unintended messages projected by speakers come to listeners through some line of communication that we typically call a channel or medium. In the public-speaking context, air is the typical carrier of our verbal cues, and lines of sight carry nonverbal cues. These channels can be complicated by the presence of something that amplifies the sound, such as a microphone (as in a presidential state-of-the-union address) or a bull horn (as when President Bush stood in the rubble of the 9/11 attacks and addressed the rescue workers). Even poor stage lighting or a podium too large for the speaker can make it more difficult to “read” the visual cues. In recent decades, public speeches have become increasingly mediated, such that one speech may be available through various channels. Today, not only are speech texts, such as the Gettysburg Address, available to new readers who are separated from the context by many years, but complete recordings of speeches are available to be viewed by individuals and groups around the globe. New technologies have also expanded the kinds of channels available to speakers to share their messages; whether using PowerPoint and embedding videos in presentations or publishing presentations via YouTube or blogs, today’s speakers have new challenges and opportunities when considering the media through which their messages are created and shared.

Feedback is the element of the communication process that makes it a transactional experience. Rather than messages running only one way, from speaker to listener, theorists conceptualize public-speaking interactions as having a feedback loop. Parallel to the messages speakers communicate, feedback messages can be verbal and nonverbal, intentional and unintentional. Successful public speakers must be able to take in these messages and adapt to them. Audience members may communicate their enthusiasm or anger, the trouble they are having hearing or understanding, their agreement or disagreement, their willingness to give their attention or to ignore, and they may show their appreciation of the presentation with applause. Responding to feedback by restating, rephrasing, or elaborating a point; speaking up; slowing down; or even moving to an interactive moment of the speech to regain audience attention are all marks of the mature public speaker who is aware of the importance of audience feedback as a way to gauge whether an audience is continuing to work with the speaker to create shared meanings.

Within the immediate speaking situation, feedback is simultaneous with the delivery of the speaker’s message. However, in colloquial use, feedback also refers to information solicited by public speakers after public-speaking events. In classrooms, peers and instructors may offer feedback to a speaker about a presentation, asking questions or commenting on the public-speaking choices made. Mediated public messages, such as a speech posted on YouTube, will collect feedback by way of comments posted. Audience researchers can use new technologies to measure the feedback responses of listeners. During a presidential debate, focus groups may press triggers to indicate their level of agreement or how much they like a candidate at any particular moment in the debate. Processing such data helps political advisers and speech writers capture a glimpse of the meaning-making process at work within listeners so that later efforts to communicate similar messages can be made more successful.

Interference

When something prevents our messages from reaching those with whom we are communicating, interference is the culprit. In the transmission model of communication, this idea is typically conceived of as literal noise. For example, a public speaker’s message might not get through to listeners if there was a baby crying in the room, a bus passing by the rally at the park, or a conversation being carried on among some members of the audience. This part of the model is based on the analogy that compares such noise with the kind of static that can interfere with a phone connection. Certainly such noise can make it hard for a speaker’s message to be heard, thus, at a very fundamental level, preventing meanings from being shared with audiences.

As our conceptualization of speech making has shifted from the simplistic notion of transmitting sound from one person to an audience, so has the understanding of interference become much more complex. Hearing, listening, and understanding are different physiological and psychological tasks that we ask of audiences, and while public speakers are rightly concerned about being heard, they are also deeply concerned with being understood. An expanded notion of interference for the 21st-century speaker can include a wide range of possible distractions for audiences that can block, or make it harder for, messages to be understood. Today’s speakers continue to be concerned about external distractions, such as noisy speaking venues or cell phone interruptions. In addition, new research about brain processing demonstrates the special challenges facing a speaker who is addressing listeners experiencing a sugar low or audience members who are present but are preoccupied with worries about needing to catch a plane, finish a project, or repair a relationship strained by an argument earlier that day. These internal distractions are usually outside the control of speakers, but the challenges they present to the success of a presentation are real and demand creative responses. Some points of internal interference in listeners can be unwittingly encouraged by speakers. Speakers who commit a faux pas, whether it be dressing inappropriately for the occasion, mispronouncing the name of the person who introduced them, or using terms unfamiliar to the audience, can send unintentional messages that interfere with the audience’s ability or willingness to construct the meaning intended by the speakers. Similarly, speakers who incorporate poor visual aids, weak evidence, or a provocative word choice can invite listeners in whole or in part to disregard the rest of the presentation or to engage in a mental debate that interferes with their ability to understand what follows.

In its most specific sense, context refers to the situation within which the public-speaking exchange occurs. This situation involves the reason the group constituting the audience is called together, whether it is a political convention where the room is filled with credentialed delegates, a monthly meeting of the Rotary club, or a rally to protest a decision to cut funding for a university program. It also involves the actual setting for the speech—a comfortable, climate-controlled board room; an overheated, crowded schoolboard meeting running late into the night; or an outdoor rally where it is hoped that the audience will grow during the presentation. Within the setting, speakers also consider the size of the audience, the arrangement of space, the presence or absence of means of amplification, the visual aid support available, and even whether there will be other speakers at the event. Understanding the situation is paramount for the speaker to make decisions that will lead to a successful presentation.

Context issues, however, extend beyond the specifics of the particular speaking situation. Cultural and institutionalized differences will affect the norms of the speakeraudience relationship. U.S. senators know that their presentations on the floor of Congress will be listened to politely, though sometimes by only a handful of fellow senators. Members of the British Parliament, in contrast, can expect colleagues to make their agreement and disagreement clear throughout the speech with shouts, feet stomping, or hisses. The conventions governing delivery and language use vary widely among cultures and subcultures, complicating the challenge facing speakers as they aim to adapt to those norms. Professional speakers know that every new speaking situation requires some adjustment if their message is to be successful.

Public speaking is a radically situated communicative act. Delivered to a particular audience at a particular time in a particular space, speeches have been recognized as among the most transitory of the arts. Prior to the invention of recording technologies, a speech might persist as a written text, but that text represented a mere shadow of the experience of the speech as delivered. Though a speech can now experience an extended life span through recording, it remains, in the nature of public speaking, fundamentally linked to the context that called it into being, what Lloyd Bitzer (1968) called the rhetorical situation. Though listeners around the world continue to view Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” address, their understanding of the speech and the meanings they construct are not identical to those constructed by the listeners at the march or by people watching television coverage of the event. While some of the meanings of the speech persist over time and are shared by the millions of listeners who experience the speech today through various channels and in many different contexts, each listener lends his or her own life experiences and interpretive lenses to the meaning-making process. When listeners have the opportunity to add a deep understanding of the historical context within which the speech was given, their interpretive lenses change and new possible meanings of the text begin to emerge. Context persists as one of the most powerful influences on the public communication process, and our understanding of its significance continues to evolve.

Fundamental Principles of Public Speaking: Effective Characteristics of Speakers

Speakers have various tools with which to respond to the dynamic complexities of the parts of the public-speaking interaction. Significantly, the skills required to respond effectively have not changed dramatically since the earliest theories of public speaking were being set forth. When today’s students are asked what public speakers need to know in order to succeed, their responses are very similar to the ideas set forth in what communication educators call the Roman rhetorical canon. These five areas of instruction for public speakers have governed the topics studied in classrooms and mastered by remarkable speakers across the centuries. They include invention (creating the materials of the speech), arrangement (creating the order of the ideas in the speech), style (creating the expression of the ideas of the speech), delivery (embodying and speaking the ideas of the speech), and memory (strategies for recalling the ideas of the speech during delivery). In addition, today’s students will often list more abstract concepts such as “confidence” as essential for the successful public speaker. Public-speaking instruction is typically founded on the assumption that mastery of the elements in the rhetorical canon added to experience will support the development of speaker confidence.

Invention, Arrangement, and Style Generate Ideas to Foster Connections With Audiences

While often treated as distinct areas of study, these first three parts of the rhetorical canon are coming to be understood as integrated because each of them lends generative power to the speaker. Invention includes tasks such as setting goals for a speech, identifying the major ideas the speaker hopes to convey, doing the research work necessary to select and develop those ideas, creating lines of thought and reasoning to powerfully attach the main ideas to the evidence at hand, considering ways to engage the particular audience to be addressed, and imagining points of opposition or confusion and ways to overcome those challenges. In other words, invention has long been recognized as the area of study concerned with creating and identifying the heart of the public speaker’s message.

Arrangement, in contrast, has often been understood to involve the somewhat mechanical task of outlining the ideas and materials gathered and created in the inventional process. Distinct tasks such as structuring the main points; connecting the main ideas to one another; and understanding the conventions necessary to develop a good introduction, body, and conclusion for a particular situation are often taught as the fundamental aspects of this canon. In practice, the work of arrangement is dynamically linked with invention. For any particular speech topic, the consideration of strategies for organizing the speech to enhance its impact on listeners will lead to insights about engaging those listeners, responding to objections, or refining the goal of the presentation. A speaker addressing recycling efforts in the community would produce a very different speech if he or she used a chronological structure (which would require addressing the steps in the process or offering a historical perspective) than if a topical structure was used (which might lead to an exploration of current options for local citizens or addressing the advantages and disadvantages of competing proposals). In this way, arrangement becomes more than putting together the pieces in the puzzle of a speech; it becomes a way to determine the very shape and look of the puzzle in its final form.

Similarly, current work at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and communication identifies the deep impact that stylistic choices—speakers’ ways of expressing themselves, or their use of style—are often constrained by habits of the mind and worldviews that have dramatic effects on the inventional process. Theorists such as Michael Osborn (1967) have identified the important ways in which metaphor functions not simply as a stylistic device that is used to clothe the thoughts of speakers but as a mode of thought that shapes our ideas and ways of thinking. Kenneth Burke (1966) explored the notion of terministic screens, arguing that a choice of terminology is “a selection of reality” and so, in some way, also functions to deflect us from some other perspective on reality (p. 45). Public speakers have long been aware that the connotations words carry have great power. The terms prolife and antichoice ostensibly refer to the same social movement, but the use of one term or the other offers an important insight into the attitudes of the speaker and may attract or repel listeners as a result. Linguists such as George Lakoff (2004) press the point further, arguing that connotations of words are not just suggestive but can constrain the ways in which we see the world. One example he offers is the phrase tax relief . When people hear the word relief , he argues, a mental frame is triggered. This frame, or way of understanding the world, sees relief as something good, something necessary for one to escape an affliction. When the frame of relief is brought together with the word tax , then that word is understood to be the source of the affliction and whoever can bring tax relief is understood to be a hero. Lakoff argues that discussions about tax policies would be significantly different if the term tax triggered a frame related to paying dues or to making an investment. Debates over the nature of language and its effects on the brain are ongoing, but successful public speakers of the 21st century must become increasingly aware of the power of language choices and the ways they influence not only audiences but the speakers’own ways of understanding the world.

Delivery and Memory Guide Nonverbal Connections With Audiences

The canons of delivery and memory address what, for many, are the most anxiety-provoking aspects of public speaking. The dynamic communication process relies on the speaker prompting the interaction by orally and visually sharing the ideas generated through the processes of invention, arrangement, and stylistic considerations. Giving an embodied presence to these ideas is the only way public speakers have to initiate the meaning-making process with their audience, and it has an impact on the audience’s ability and willingness to share in that process. Since a large part of the public speaker’s success depends on the speaker’s ability to use his or her voice and body and visual aids to project the message, teachers of public speaking have long invested energy in identifying and offering training in the factors that contribute to successful delivery. Eye contact, gesture, stance, facial expression, posture, appearance, volume, rate, pitch, and inflection all play significant roles in the delivery of the presentation and affect the success of the message. Indeed, if listeners cannot hear the message because the speaker is too soft or cannot understand the message because the speaker rushes, no appropriate meaning can be shared. Besides a few fundamental guidelines such as doing nothing that will prevent the audience from hearing and understanding the message, there are few delivery rules that enjoy universal application. Even direct eye contact between speaker and audience, which in mainstream U.S. culture is typically considered an essential feature of successful public speaking, would be considered inappropriate in some other cultures. Since there is no one-size-fits-all practice of delivery suitable for all speakers in all situations, wise speakers take constant note of the successful choices of the speakers they see and work to integrate those behaviors into their own repertoire, reinterpreting a choice to fit their own style and so expanding the possibilities for their delivery in future presentations.

Likewise, strategies for recall during delivery vary widely from speaker to speaker. While there has always been a tradition of impromptu speaking—training speakers to competently deliver ideas with little or no time for preparation, the classical tradition emphasized the need for the orator to develop a knack for memorizing speeches and reciting them as planned. In the United States, writing speeches and committing them to memory or delivering them from a manuscript remained a common practice well into the 20th century. While those kinds of preparation behaviors persist—most often supported by technology such as a teleprompter, other strategies such as outlining and focusing on key words and ideas have a strong following today. Current communication norms put a high premium on the authenticity of speakers. A conversational delivery style supported by brief notes, a rarely consulted outline, and, in some situations, a PowerPoint slide show that blends words and visuals is the most commonly implemented set of delivery and memory strategies.

Evolutions of Public Speaking in the 21st Century

Conceptualizations of public speaking have evolved over time. Today’s speakers recognize that they do not simply transfer words and ideas to listeners but rather are engaged in a complex process of attempting to share meanings among diverse members of an audience. This collaborative process means that public speakers must surrender the belief that they exercise entire control over the meanings constructed by audience members. The greatest challenge facing the contemporary public speaker is to adapt to the changing expectations and needs of their audiences. Emerging technologies are creating new opportunities for speakers to adapt to audiences, but they may also be changing the way audiences process information and create meanings.

The mental landscape of today’s audience members has been shaped by regular interaction with a wide range of electronic technologies that may be altering their expectations of public speakers. In industrialized nations, a generation of multitaskers with fragmented attention spans that embrace distractions has come of age; it is also a generation accustomed to easy electronic information access and sophisticated visuals. This is a group whose members have constructed their own homepages and social networking pages with personalized links and in doing so have exercised great power in determining the information, communication styles, and worldviews they see. There is research to suggest that developing strong multitasking skills has both costs and benefits and that immersion in technology affects how people access and process information. For example, a recent study (Adam, Edmonds, & Quinn, 2007) looked at newsreading habits and discovered that today’s consumers of online news read as much as the traditional newspaper reader, but they read very differently. The online readers gravitated to innovative structures of information; they were more apt to read a question-and-answer column or a set of bullet points; they also tended to jump from place to place on the screen and follow links. In this way, they created their own narratives from the information rather than taking in the narrative structures created by the reporters. These new habits of mind may mean that speakers need new organizational skills to adapt to listeners who want to, and who have learned to, process information less linearly.

Public speakers also need to develop new strategies for gaining and maintaining audience attention. Integrating more visual elements and more audience interaction into their presentations will help public speakers accomplish their goals. Instead of just talking about the structure of the pyramids of ancient Egypt, today’s speakers can offer something like a guided tour to audiences by using a series of images along with oral descriptions. In his lectures on global warming, Al Gore doesn’t use a long list of statistics to indicate the historical relationship between carbon in the atmosphere and temperature changes; instead, he illustrates a suggestive relationship with animated lines that are drawn on a screen before the very eyes of his listeners.Anyone with an MP3 player and speakers can incorporate sound to help an audience of naturalists learn to distinguish between the calls of the barred owl and the great horned owl. Asking for a show of hands, using call-andresponse strategies, or having listeners participate in other ways will help speakers engage audiences, increasing the likelihood that the message they are trying to share will be understood.

With so many avenues for gathering information and for communicating ideas open to the citizens of the 21st century, the central questions for an aspiring speaker must be “What is the added value of using public speaking as the means of communication for a particular message? What is it that public speaking can offer that would be absent from a documentary, a narrated PowerPoint slide show, an e-mail, or a blog or vlog posting?” The answer, of course, is the presence of the speaker. There is high demand for the opportunity to experience firsthand the ideas, voice, facial expressions, gestures, energy, and, in a sense, the character of a speaker through the public-speaking context. The physical presence of a speaker conveys a level of attention of the speaker for that particular audience, which is a gift every bit as desired as is the attention that audience is offering to the speaker. The possibility of an authentic connection continues to bring audiences together. In professional contexts, the possibility of interaction with the speaker, through comments or a questionand-answer session, adds value to the presentations of a sales or research team. In civic contexts, the transitory moment of public speaking, though changing somewhat with the advent of recordings and rebroadcasts, remains a real thing for the audience present in the room, who, by sharing the physical space with the speaker and other listeners at that moment, experience something that cannot be re-created. Live public speaking is no more likely to disappear than live music concerts or movie theaters. DespiteYouTube, concert videos, DVDs, and home theater systems, the community-building exercise of sharing the experience of a speech, music, or a film is likely to persist.

Technology has and will continue to influence the choices of public speakers and the impact potential of public speaking in various ways. Whether using technology to engage audiences or eschewing it entirely to stand out as a different and still compelling presenter, speakers will continue to exercise a wide range of rhetorical choices. With audience research tools, demographic data, online surveys, and even opinion polling data all at the fingertips of the contemporary public speaker, there have never been more opportunities to “know” things about the audience a speaker intends to address. But making use of this information continues to depend both on training in the fundamental skills of the rhetorical canon and on developing what Aristotle called the faculty of mind that can see the various options for building bridges of meaning between speakers and listeners.

Bibliography:

• Adam, P. S., Edmonds, R., & Quinn, S. (2007). Eyetracking the news: A study of print and online reading. Petersburg, FL: Poynter Institute.
• (1954). Rhetoric. In F. Solmsen (Ed.), The rhetoric and the poetics of Aristotle (pp. 1–218) (W. Rhys Roberts, Trans.). NewYork: Modern Library. (Original work from ca. 350 BCE)
• (1958). On Christian doctrine (D. W. Robertson Jr., Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. (Original work from ca. 397, 427 CE)
• Bitzer, L. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1, 1–14.
• Burke, K. (1966). Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Carnegie, D. (2005). Public speaking for success. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
• Foss, S., & Griffin, C. (1995). Beyond persuasion: A proposal for an invitational rhetoric. Communication Monographs , 62 , 2–19.
• Griffin, C. (2009). Invitation to public speaking (3rd ed.). Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.
• Jaffe, C. (2006). Public speaking: Concepts and skills for a diverse society (5th ed.). Boston: Wadsworth.
• Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate—The essential guide for progressives. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.
• Lucas, S. E. (2007). The art of public speaking (9th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
• McCroskey, J. C. (2000). An introduction to rhetorical communication (8th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Osborn, M. (1967). Archetypal metaphor in rhetoric: The lightdark family. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 53, 115–126.
• Osborn, M., & Osborn, S. (2006). Public speaking (7th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• (2006). Institutes of oratory (L. Honeycutt, Ed.; J. S. Watson, Trans.). Retrieved June 1, 2008, from http://honeyl.public.iastate.edu/quintilian (Original translation published 1856; original work from 95 CE)
• Richmond, V. P., & McCroskey, J. C. (1998). Communication: Apprehension, avoidance, and effectiveness (5th ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
• Sellnow, D. (2004). Confident public speaking (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thompson Learning.
• Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Tufte, E. R. (2006). Beautiful evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
• Zarefsky, D. (2007). Strategic public speaking: A handbook. Boston: Pearson.

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Transcript: Read Biden’s Remarks at a Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony

Here is the president’s complete speech, which lasted about 16 minutes.

By The New York Times

• May 7, 2024

President Biden delivered these remarks on Tuesday at the Capitol for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance.

Thank you, Stu, for that introduction, for your leadership of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. You’re a true scholar and statesman and a dear friend. Speaker Johnson, Leader Jeffries, members of Congress and especially the survivors of the Holocaust. If my mother were here, she’d look at you and say, “God love you all. God love you all.”

Abe Foxman and all of the survivors who embody absolute courage and dignity and grace are here as well. During these sacred days of remembrance, we grieve. We give voice to the six million Jews who were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. We honor the memory of victims, the pain of survivors, the bravery of heroes who stood up to Hitler’s unspeakable evil. And we recommit to heading and heeding the lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history, to revitalize and realize the responsibility of never again.

Never again, simply translated for me, means never forget. Never forget. Never forgetting means we must keep telling the story, must keep teaching the truth, must keep teaching our children and our grandchildren. The truth is, we are at risk of people not knowing the truth. That’s why growing up, my dad taught me and my siblings about the horrors of the Shoah at our family dinner table. That’s why I visited Yad Vashem with my family as a senator, as vice president, as president. And that’s why I took my grandchildren to Dachau, so they could see and bear witness to the perils of indifference, the complicity of silence, in the face of evil they knew was happening.

Germany 1933, Hitler and his Nazi Party’s rise to power by rekindling one of the oldest forms of prejudice and hate: antisemitism. His role didn’t begin with mass murder; it started slowly across economic, political, social and cultural life. Propaganda demonizing Jews. Boycotts of Jewish businesses. Synagogues defaced with swastikas. Harassment of Jews in the street and the schools, antisemitic demonstrations, pogroms, organized riots. With the indifference of the world, Hitler knew he could expand his reign of terror by eliminating Jews from Germany, to annihilate Jews across Europe through genocide, the Nazis called the final solution. Concentration camps, gas chambers, mass shootings. By the time the war ended, six million Jews — one of every three Jews in the entire world — were murdered.

This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust. It didn’t end with the Holocaust either. Or after — even after our victory in World War II. This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world and requires our continued vigilance and outspokenness. That hatred was brought to life on October 7th of 2023. On the sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the Earth, over 1,200 innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents, slaughtered in a kibbutz, massacred at a music festival, brutally raped, mutilated and sexually assaulted.

Thousands more carrying wounds, bullets and shrapnel from a memory of that terrible day they endured. Hundreds taken hostage, including survivors of the Shoah. Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven and half months later and people are already forgetting. They are already forgetting. That Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten nor have you. And we will not forget.

As Jews around the world still cope with the atrocity and the trauma of that day and its aftermath, we have seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world. Vicious propaganda on social media. Jews forced to keep their — hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts. On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class. Antisemitism, antisemitic posters, slogans, calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.

Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews. It’s absolutely despicable, and it must stop. Silence and denial can hide much, but it can erase nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be married — buried — no matter how hard people try.

In my view, a major lesson of the Holocaust is, as mentioned earlier, it is not — was not — inevitable. We know hate never goes away; it only hides. Given a little oxygen, it comes out from under the rocks. We also know what stops hate. One thing: All of us. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs described antisemitism as a virus that has survived and mutated over time. Together, we cannot continue to let that happen. We have to remember our basic principle as a nation.

We have an obligation, an obligation to learn the lessons of history so we don’t surrender our future to the horrors of the past. We must give hate no safe harbor against anyone. Anyone. From the very founding, our very founding, Jewish Americans represented only about 2 percent of the U.S. population and helped lead the cause of freedom for everyone in our nation. From that experience, we know scapegoating and demonizing any minority is a threat to every minority and the very foundation of our democracy.

It’s in moments like this we have to put these principles that we’re talking about into action. I understand people have strong beliefs and deep convictions about the world. In America, we respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech. To debate, disagree, to protest peacefully, make our voices heard. I understand, that’s America. But there is no place on any campus in America — any place in America — for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind. Whether against Jews or anyone else. Violent attacks, destroying property is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. And we are not a lawless country. We’re a civil society. We uphold the rule of law, and no one should have to hide or be brave just to be themselves.

The Jewish community, I want you to know: I see your fear, your hurt, your pain. Let me reassure you, as your president, you’re not alone. You belong. You always have and you always will. And my commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad even when we disagree.

My administration is working around the clock to free remaining hostages. Just so we have freed hostages already. And we will not rest until we bring them all home. My administration, with our second gentleman’s leadership, has launched our nation’s first national strategy to counter antisemitism that’s mobilizing the full force of the federal government to protect Jewish community, but we know it’s not the work of government alone or Jews alone.

That’s why I’m calling on all Americans to stand united against antisemitism and hate in all its forms. My dear friend, he became a friend, the late Elie Wiesel said, quote: “One person of integrity can make a difference.” We have to remember that now more than ever. Here in the Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol, among the towering statues of history, is a bronze bust of Raoul Wallenberg. Born in Sweden, as a Lutheran, he was a businessman and a diplomat. While stationed in Hungary during World War II, he used diplomatic cover to hide and rescue about 100,000 Jews over a six-month period.

Among them was a 16-year-old Jewish boy who escaped a Nazi labor camp. After the war ended, that boy received a scholarship from the Hillel Foundation to study in America. He came to New York City penniless but determined to turn his pain into purpose, along with his wife, also a Holocaust survivor. He became a renowned economist and foreign policy thinker, eventually making his way to this very Capitol on the staff of a first-term senator.

That Jewish refugee was Tom Lantos, and that senator was me. Tom and his wife, Annette, and their family became dear friends to me and my family. Tom would go on to become the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, where he became a leading voice on civil rights and human rights around the world. Tom never met Raoul, who was taken prisoner by the Soviets, never to be heard from again. But through Tom’s efforts, Raoul’s bust is here in the Capitol. He was also given honorary U.S. citizenship, only the second person ever after Winston Churchill.

The Holocaust Museum here in Washington is located on a roll — road — in Raoul’s name. The story of the power of a single person to put aside our differences, to see our common humanity, to stand up to hate and its ancient story of resilience from immense pain, persecution, to find hope, purpose and meaning in life we try to live and share with one another. That story endures.

Let me close with this. I know these days of remembrance fall on difficult times. We all do well to remember these days also fall during the month we celebrate Jewish American heritage. A heritage that stretches from our earliest days to enrich every single part of American life today. Great American — great Jewish American — Tom Lantos used the phrase the veneer of civilization is paper-thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest.

My fellow Americans, we must, we must be those guardians. We must never rest. We must rise against hate, meet across the divide, see our common humanity. And God bless the victims and survivors of the Shoah. May the resilient hearts, courageous spirit and eternal flame of faith of the Jewish people shine their light on America and all around the world. Praise God. Thank you all.