In 2014, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology issued ‘English Education Reform Plan Corresponding Globalization.’ The plan emphasized the necessity to nourish the students’ attitude toward English to which they are not afraid of making common mistakes in communication as much as possible and try to use English at elementary, junior, and senior high schools. The reform also accentuates the need for students to have more experience in English communication. Furthermore, it encourages that in junior high school, educators should build evaluation tools that integrate the four macro skills of language (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and consider using performance tests. To solve the presented issues, this research focused on ‘impromptu speech,’ that is, ‘delivering speech or utterances without preparing.’ The author hypothesized that ‘impromptu speech’ will improve the speaking ability of students. Under this hypothesis, the research was conducted in one junior high school third-year class by introducing ‘impromptu one-minute speech’ and ‘impromptu two minutes dialog’ at the beginning of every lesson. In this study, the evaluation process of students’ impromptu speech performances by using rubrics properly was also examined. Individual impromptu speech tests were conducted twice throughout the year, and impromptu dialog tests (in a pair) were also conducted twice. On the result of the individual impromptu tests, there was no difference between the first and second ones. However, the students who got lower points were able to improve their points in the second test. In impromptu dialog (in a pair), the second test average was two points higher than that of the first one. The second test topics were controversial ones that mandated the students’ ability to think, judge, and express themselves. Over the year, some improvement was observed in both presentation and dialog activities. The hesitation in speaking English became lowered. However, the author found that presentation fluency was easily affected by the topics, and this was the most challenging issue to address in the study. Keywords: impromptu speech, impromptu dialog, rubrics, fluency
