Assessing Listening

In earlier articles, a number of foundational principles of language assessment were introduced. Concepts like practically, reliability, validity, authenticity, washback, direct and indirect, and formative and summative assessment has been well explained here.

Now, we will shift away from those principles to the classroom assessment of listening.

Observing the Performance of the Four Skills
The two interacting concepts;

1. Performance
2. Observing

When you propose to assess someone's ability in one or a combination of the four skills(which is listening, speaking, reading and writing), you assess that person's competence, but you observe the person's performance. Sometimes the performance does not indicate true competence:illness, an emotional distraction, test anxiety, or other student-related reliability factors could affect performance, thereby providing an unreliable measure of actual competence.

So, the one important principle for assessing a learner’s competence is to consider the fallibillity of the results of a single performance, such as that produced in a test. As with any attempt at measurement, it is your obligation as a teacher to triangulate the measurements: consider at least two (or more) performance or contexts before drawing a conclusion. That could take the form of one or more of the following designs :

• Several tests that are combined to form an assessment
• A single test with multiple test tasks to account for learning styles and performance variables
• In-class and extra-class graded work
• Alternative forms of assessment (e.g., journal, portofolio)

Multiple measures will always give you a more reliable and valid assessment than a single measure.
The second principle is we must rely as much as possible on observable performance in our assessments of students.

Basic Types of Listening
Designing appropriate assessment tasks in listening begin with the specifiation of objectives, or criteria. The bjectives may be classified in terms of several types of listening performance.
The 4 stages in processing to flash through your brain:

1. Comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes, words, intonation, or a grammatical category
2. Understanding of pragmatic context
3. Determining of pragmatic context
4. Developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding

From these stages, we can derive four commonly identified types of listening performance such as;
1. Intensive

• Listening dor perception of the components (phonemes, words, intonation, etc) of a larger stretch of language.

2. Responsitive

• Listening to a relatively short stretch of language ( a greeting, question, command, etc) in order to make an equally short response.

3. Selective

• Processing stretches of discourse such as short monologues for several minutes in order to scan for certain information. The purpose of such performance is to comprehend designated information in a context of longer stretches of spoken language (such as classroom directions from a teacher, stories, news, etc). Assessment task in selective listening could ask student, for example, to listen for name, numbers, directions, or certain facts and events.

4. Extensive

• Extensive performance ranges from listening to lengthy lectures to listening to a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose. Listening for the gist, for the main idea, and making inferences are all part of extensive listening.

Micro- and Macroskills of Listening
Microskills are attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language while macroskills are focusing on the larger elements. It is provided 17 different objectives to assess in listening.

8 reasons for what makes listening difficult :

1. Clustering : attending to appropriate chunks of language - phrases, clauses, constituents.
2. Redundancy : recognizing the kinds of repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations, and insertions that unrehearsed spoken language often contains, and benefiting from that recognition.
3. Reduced forms : understanding the reduced forms that may not have been a part of an English learner's past learning experiences in classes where only formal textbook language has been presented.
4. Performance variables : being able to weed out hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections in natural speech.
5. Colloquial language : comprehending idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge.
6. Rate of delivery : keeping up with the speed of delivery, processing automatically as the speaker continues.
7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation : correctly understanding prosodic elements of spoken language, which is almost much more difficult that understanding the smaller phonological bits and pieces.
8. Interaction : managing the interactive flow of language from listening to speaking to listening, etc.

Designing Assessment Tasks
- Investing Listening

• Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements
• Pharaprase recognition

- Reponsive Listening
- Selective Listening

• Listening Cloze
• Information Transfer
• Sentence Repetition

- Extensive Listening

• Dictation
• Communicative Stimulus-Response Tasks
• Authentic Listening Tasks

You can download this material for your presentation here.
Further reading :
Brown, D. (2004). Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices. New York: Pearson Longman.

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