Assessing Listening

Assessing Listening

1. You need to understand that assessing listening will come hand-to-hand with assessing other language skills especially the speaking skill. This is why multiple measures are needed instead of one.

   • Basic Types of Listening
     • Stages
       • Comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes, words, intonation, or a grammatical category.
       • Understanding of pragmatic context
       • Determining meaning of auditory input
       • Comprehensive understanding
     • Types
       • Intensive
         • Listening for perception
       • Responsive
         • Listening to a relatively short stretch of language as greetings, questions, etc
       • Selective
         • Processing stretches of discourse such as short monologues
       • Extensive
         • Listening to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language.
   • Micro- and Macroskills of Listening
     • Microskills
       • Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English
       • Retaing chunks of language in short-term memory
       • Recognize English stress patterns
       • Recognize reduced form of words
       • Distinguish word boundaries
       • Process speech at different rates of delivery
       • Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections.
       • Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns,verbs, etc)
       • Detect sentence constituents and distinguish
       • Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different forms
       • Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse
     • Macroskills
       • Recognize communicative utterances
       • Infer situations, participants, goals
       • Infer links and connections between events
       • Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
       • Use facial kinesic, body language and ohter nonverbal clues
       • Develop and use battery of listening strategies
   • Designing Assessment Tasks
     • Intensive Listening
       • Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements
       • Paraphrase recognition
     • Responsive Listening
       • Recognizing -wh questions and responses
     • Selective Listening
       • Listening Cloze
       • Information transfer
       • Sentence Repetition
     • Extensive Listening
       • Dictation
       • Communicative Stimulus-Response Tasks
       • Authentic Listening Tasks