The article deals with the issues of cognitive and pragmatic aspects of assessing speech activity in a foreign language dialogical speech. The authors investigate the advantages of criteria-based assessment, which include: the ability to track students’ individual achievements in the educational process (as opposed to the formal statement of the result based on standard reference norms); the possibility of informal expert assessment of educational results, for example, by employers, parents, teachers, as well as independent and mutual assessment (as opposed to assessment only by the teacher); focus on the student's achievements, on what he knows and is able to, that is, the presence of the “success effect” (as opposed to the “loser effect”, which states that the student is not able to); qualitative, rather than quantitative (normative) assessment of the achieved learning outcomes; visual presentation of the achieved learning outcomes and personal achievements in the form of project products, presentations.