From (mis)perceptions to (mis)practices: The assessment of oral skills in primary English education in Portugal

In a recent state-of-the-art, Nikolov and Timpe-Laughlin (2020) highlight how little is known about teachers’ actual practices and approaches to classroom assessment and recommend that more research focus on this aspect of foreign language education with young learners. This chapter focuses on the assessment of oral skills, and addresses this lacuna by presenting data from a nationwide study that investigated assessment of English in primary education in Portugal. Before presenting the study we briefly discuss oral skills and classroom assessment in early language learning and present the specificities of the Portuguese educational system in order to familiarize readers with the context.