Teachers of Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) can sign up to use CLEAR’s Virtual Oral Interview Classroom-based Exam System (VOICES) to assess or monitor their students’ progress in speaking. It’s free and easy to use! Teachers sign up their classes to take two online virtual assessments per semester. Students can take the online virtual assessments in class (on computers or tablets) or can be assigned to take the tests at home. There are a total of 16 oral assessments available. Students take them according to the year and semester of language study that they are in.

Teachers and students can listen to and download the oral responses. Teachers can grade them, and use them to provide feedback to their students. Students can also download their speech samples. For example, they may want to include them in an e-portfolio to document their growth over time in oral proficiency. With up to 16 assessments available for first through fourth-year students, anything is possible!

In addition, if students would like, they can click a button to make their oral speech samples available for researchers to use. The oral responses made available to LCTL researchers are searchable according to basic speaker demographics, such as age and level of LCTL study (first year, first semester; second year, second semester, etc.). A single student can be followed through several years of study. The prompts are designed to elicit a range of linguistic data, including various types of agreement; tense, aspect and mood marking; person and number marking; and questions.

For more information and a list of the languages currently available, please visit LCTL VOICES.