When preparing our students for a speaking part of any exam, we typically provide them with some models, words and phrases, pictures, listening tasks and preparatory reading before moving to a speaking task rather than jumping in at the deep end with the speaking task unprepared for that. We tend to use loads of various techniques like activating schemata, brainstorming, scaffolding, working in pairs and groups and peer correction. Every point here is necessary and each of them makes the way to the following speaking task easier and gives support and background knowledge as well as vocabulary.

The standard rough plan of working on a speaking task looks like that: 

1. teacher gives the task;
2. students do the task;
3. teacher gets feedback from students;
4. teacher gives feedback to students.

At the last stage mentioned above, our students find out about how successful they are in speaking – we tell them what they have done well and what they need to work on in the future. However, practically every student dreams of full understanding of their own success during the task. The question is how can we, teachers, teach a student to gauge their success while doing the speaking task? How can we teach them to evaluate and analyse themselves? That is what we are going to concentrate on in this article.