The article discusses the difficulties of diagnosing speaking skills in the situation of matriculation examination, resulting from the specific nature of spoken language varieties and texts implementation in these variants. Factors that should be taken into account when formulating criteria for assessing speech and conversation exams are: complex and holistic structure of spoken speech, transience of audible text, the spontaneity of live speech, the power of nonverbal codes, a significant stigma of a dialog, and the influence of situational context on the course of communicative interaction. The analysis of speaking skills assessment tools prepared for the oral examination in the year 2015 revealed that some of them had a significant impact on the criteria developed for this purpose.
The article presents the results of an educational diagnosis. The study it describes analyses the style of invitations prepared by the Polish middle school pupils and its significant variation despite the fact that the subjects did identical tasks in identical conditions. The author is interested in the pupils’ awareness of style, which is why the study analyses only the texts whose writers have made a deliberate and conscious choice of stylistic models. The diversity of style has turned out to be the most pronounced on the level of register, and the main reason behind the style variation among the texts was rooted in the clash between opposing stylistic systems (formality vs. informality) and the overlapping of several discourses: the school, internet and colloquial discourse. The pupils have shown much creativity, choosing one of the three strategies to cope with the paradoxes of style designed by the authors of the task. None of the variants of style employed by the pupils in their invitations can be judged as incorrect or artificial. In such a situation, the basic category evaluating the style of