ASSESSING LISTENING

ASSESSING LISTENING

Observing the Performance of the Four Skills

When you try to assess someone ‘ability in a combination of four skills, you assess person’s competence, but you observe the person’s performance. Sometimes the performance does not indicate true competence such as a bad night’s rest, illness, an emotional distraction test if anxiety, a memory block, or other student related reliability factors could affect performance, thereby, providing an unreliable measure the actual competence.

Second principle is one that we teachers often forget. We must rely as much as possible on the observable performance in our assessment of students. Observable means able to see or hear the performance of the learner such as the sense of touch, taste, and smell don’t apply very often to language testing. What then is observable among the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and listening.

 THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING

One reason for this emphasis is that listening is often implied as a component of speaking. Every teacher of language knows that one’s oral production ability are monologues, speeches, reading aloud, and the like is only as a good as one’s listening comprehension ability. Further impact is the likelihood the input in the aural-oral mode account for large proportion of successful language acquisition.

BASIC TYPES OF LISTENING

Ø  INTENSIVE. Listening for perception of the components (phonemes, words, ect) of a larger stretch of language.

Ø  RESPONSIVE. Listening to a relative short stretch of language (a greeting, question, ect) in order to make an equally short response.

Ø  SELECTIVE. The purpose of such performance is not necessarily to look for global or general meanings, but to be able to comprehend designed information in a context of longer stretches of spoken language. For example, to listen for names, numbers, direction.

Ø  EXTENSIVE. Extensive performance ranges from listening to lengthy lectures to listening to a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose.

MICRO- AND MACROSKILLS OF LISTENING

Micro skills

1.      Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English.

2.      Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.

3.      Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonation contours, and their role in signaling information.

4.      Recognize reduced forms of words.

5.      Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.

6.      Process speech at different rates of delivery.

7.      Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.

8.      Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g. tense, agreement, pluralization, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.

9.      Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.

10.  Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.

11.  Recognize cohesive devices in spoken language.

Macro skills

1.      Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals.

2.      Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge.

3.      From events, ideas, and so on, described, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effect, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, generalization, and exemplification.

4.      Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.

5.      Use facial, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal cues to decipher meanings.

6.      Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for help, and signaling comprehension or lack thereof.

Consider the following list that makes listening difficult:

Ø  Clustering

Ø  Redundancy

Ø  Reduced forms

Ø  Performance variable

Ø  Colloquial language

Ø  Rate of delivery

Ø  Stress, rhythm, and intonation

Ø  interaction

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: INTENSIVE LISTENING

Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements

A typical form of intensive listening at this level is the assessment of recognition of phonological and morphological elements of language. A classic test task gives a spoken stimulus and asks test-takers to identify the stimulus from two or more choices.

Example:

Phonemic pair:

Test-takers hear: He’s from California.

Test-takers read: (a) He’s from California.

                             (b) She’s from California.

Paraphrase Recognition

The next step up  on the scale of listening comprehension micro skills is words, phrases, and sentences, which are frequently assessed by providing a stimulus sentence and asking the test-taker to choose the correct one.

Example:

Test- takers hear: Hello, my name’s Keiko. I come from Japan.

Test- takers read: (a) Keiko is comfortable in Japan

                             (b) Keiko wants to come to Japan

                             (c) Keiko is Japanese

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASK: RESPONSIVE LISTENING

Ø  Appropriate Response to a question.

Ø  Open - ended response to a question.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASK: SELECTIVE LISTENING

Ø  Listening Cloze

Ø  Information transfer

Ø  Information Transfer: single - picture cued verbal multiple choice

Ø  Information Transfer: Chart filling

Ø  Sentence Repetition

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASK: EXTENSIVE LISTENING 

Ø  Dictation

Ø  Communicative Stimulus - Response Tasks

Ø  Dialogue and Multiple Choice Comprehension Item

Ø  Dialogue and Authentic questions on details.