INTO EUROPE The Speaking Handbook - Lancaster University

Chapter 4:
The Individual Long Turn
Another common elicitation technique in oral examinations aims to provide
candidates with an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to produce long turns
by describing or comparing and contrasting visual prompts. Pictures are the most
widely used prompts for eliciting language from candidates. The reason for this
can be found in the advantages of this technique:
• Pictures can be obtained quite easily, they are part of our everyday life. Newspapers,
magazines, books, leaflets, postcards, photographs, drawings and pictures
from the internet provide inexhaustible and immensely varied sources
for test designers and item writers.
Well-chosen pictures can offer economic and effective ways to elicit a long
turn from the candidates without providing them with any language input in
the target language to copy.
While the topic of the test is determined by the picture, candidates have the
freedom to show their mastery of the target language. Pictures provide excellent
opportunities for personal reactions and interpretations.
Deficiencies in reading comprehension cannot prevent candidates from doing
well at such speaking tasks: they produce language about what they see.
However, this apparently easy technique is beset with pitfalls. Picture selection
is one of the hardest tasks for item writers. It is very easy to choose a “nice” picture
which will not elicit the required quality and amount of language because it is not
suitable for testing purposes. The most common problems with pictures are the
following:
The picture is not challenging enough, and does not contain enough stimuli to
elicit language from the candidate.
The picture is culture-dependent, requiring special background knowledge
from the candidate.
The topic of the picture is distressing, offensive, violent or taboo, which may
affect the candidate’s performance.
Surreal, abstract and symbolic pictures can prevent candidates, especially at
lower levels, from performing instead of facilitating their language output.
Bizarre, unrealistic situations in the pictures are unlikely to elicit appropriate,
life-like language output from candidates.
Using too many pictures to compare and contrast for one task makes the candidate’s
task very difficult, often impossible to carry out. Instead of producing
more and more varied language, the candidate might be incapable of coping
with the quantity of information.
Using only one picture without the opportunity to compare and contrast
might lead to a simplistic physical picture description instead of exploring the