Speaking and Oral Interaction (Sprechen / mündliche Prüfung)
Format and criteria
The oral examination in English usually lasts about twenty minutes after roughly twenty minutes of preparation on a task: a short text, a cartoon, a statement or a statistic. It has two parts - a monologue presenting and analysing the material, and a Prüfungsgespräch in which the examiners probe, challenge and extend. Assessed are content, structure, fluency, range, accuracy, pronunciation and, crucially, interaction. The same competences appear in the presentation-based fifth examination component, where you defend a self-chosen topic.
The monologue
- Open by naming the material, source, date and topic, then state your line or thesis.
- Signpost explicitly:
I would like to start with what the cartoon shows, then examine how it makes its point, and finally ask whether the criticism is justified. - Describe briefly, interpret at length. Visual detail is evidence, not content.
- Close with a clear judgement rather than trailing off.
The colloquium
- Answer in two to four sentences: position → reason → example.
- Use interactive moves:
That is a fair point, but ...,Could you clarify what you mean by ...?,Building on that .... - Paraphrase around gaps instead of falling silent:
the thing you use to charge a phone on the move - a power bank. - Self-correction is credited as strategic competence; silence and German are not.
Worked example
Cartoon: a family at dinner, everyone staring at a phone; the speech bubble reads Together time.
Opening: The cartoon, published in a British daily, shows a family at the dinner table, each member absorbed in a screen. The caption is ironic, and that irony is the entire argument: physical proximity is not communication. I will first describe the visual rhetoric, then ask what it assumes about technology, and finally test that assumption.
Reasoning: in sixty seconds the opening identifies the material, interprets it, and announces a structure - which is precisely the criterion strukturierte Darstellung. The description that follows then has a function instead of being a list of details.
Traps that cost marks
- Reciting a memorised essay; examiners interrupt with questions a script cannot answer.
- Describing the material for five minutes and never interpreting it.
- One-word or one-sentence answers in the colloquium.
- Ignoring or not reacting to the examiner's counter-argument.
- Switching into German when a word is missing.
- Answering only the first half of a two-part question.