# Digital Technologies for the Assessment of Oral English Skills
## 2 Context of the Research: The AROSE Project  
AROSE is a project funded by Eramus+ (2019-1-ES01-KA201-065597) to promote the assessment of English oral skills (speaking and listening) in Secondary Education students. Participants from four different countries are involved (Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Turkey), all of them southern European countries, where the need to reinforce English skills in our students is more necessary. We have technical partners and secondary education schools in every country. A total of nine organizations have participated. As an external expert, we have the participation of Language Cert, as their expertise on online exams in English has been widely proven. Specifically, the AROSE project aims to:  
* Develop a model about the assessment of the oral competences in English as a second language of secondary education students. * Design resources to assess oral English skills. * Look for Open Educational Resources to assess oral English skills. * Design and develop a web tool to carry out the assessment of these skills in secondary education. * Create a toolkit for secondary education teachers to help them use these digital resources and the web tool developed in AROSE. * Design, implement, and share an open online course to learn about the AROSE model and the AROSE tools and resources. The target group of this project was secondary education English teachers, but indirectly, the participants included secondary school students, stakeholders, educational administration, and families. One of the first steps carried out in the project was the design of a methodological model, on which the rest of the results would be based. This model was based on the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) and was designed to establish a pedagogical framework to help English teachers evaluate their students. Starting with pedagogy and moving on to technology is one of the keys for instructional design with digital technologies. Another important achievement of the AROSE project was the design and implementation of an online library of open educational resources (OER). These open resources are accessible to anyone interested in the assessment of the English language and aims to serve as support, especially for teachers and students in the assessment of English oral skills of secondary-school students. The AROSE project partners decided to choose A2 and B2 levels, since these are the levels taught at secondary schools in different countries. Although some resources, such as the assessment rubrics, could be adapted to other levels. The resources bank is divided into audio files, texts, and activities, and it also includes assessment rubrics, examples, and task generators for the resources bank. This repository includes resources created by the project's teachers and open resources found on the Internet. The design process was interesting because it started from the work of teachers who know the actual practice of oral skills assessment, and this is one of the most valuable aspects of these materials. The cornerstone of the AROSE project is the web tool. The platform was developed with free software. It was built in PHP8 using Laravel 9 as the framework and MariaDB database. The AROSE web tool is available to everybody on [[https://arose.programaseducativos.es/](https://arose.programaseducativos.es/)]([https://arose.programaseducativos.es/](https://arose.programaseducativos.es/)) (accessed on 10 November 2022) (see Figure 1). The number of registered users on the platform is increasing, as is the number of resources. Currently there are more than 150 registered teachers. This educational platform was evaluated in a long process, which is described in this article (evalative research based on \"Design Based Research-DBR\" model), and lastly, the web platform includes the following tools:* A digital repository of public resources to assess English oral skills (mentioned above). At this moment, there are a total of 132 AROSE resources and 32 open educational resources.