Assessing Listening

Assessing Listening

1. Cautionary Observations on Assessing Language Skills Spearately

   • Integration of Skills in Language Assessment
     • Real world
       • Use of skills in isolation
         • Single-skill: few athentic manifestations in everyday language performance
     • Classroom
       • Integration of skills (most of the time)
         • Engage in parallel processing of at least two skills simultaneously
       • Assessing language
         • Skill Integration as a priority
           • Achieve the authenticity of language
   • Assessing Grammar and Vocabulary
     • Tests
       • Invoke two or more of the skills
     • Communicative Language Teaching Approach
       • Focus; Spontaneous Communication
         • Implicit focus on form
       • Effective communicative classroom
         • Appropriate and proptious explicit focus on form
   • Observing the Performance of the Four Skills
     • Performance
       • To assess competence
         • Observe performance
         • Consider falliability of thew four skills
           • Triangulate measurements
     • Observation
       • Performance must be observable
         • Productive Skills
           • Allow to hear or see the process as it is performed
         • Receptive skills
           • More enigmatic as it cannot be observed the act of listening or the actual product.

2. Basic Types of Listening

   • Listening process
     • Recognition
       • Context and Content
         • Interpretation
           • Retention of meaning
             • Conceptual retaining
           • Linguistic decoding
         • Determine the type of speech event and the content of the message
       • Recognize speech sounds
   • Types
     • Intensive
       • Responsive
         • Selective
           • Extensive
             • Listening to develop a top-down, global undertanding of spoken language.
           • Processing stretched of discourse to 'scan' for certain information
         • Listen to a relatively short of language to make a short response
       • Perception of components of a larger stretch of language

3. Micro and Macroskills of Listening

   • Mircroskills
     • Discriminate among the distinctive sounds
       • Retain chunks of language
         • Recognize stress patterns
           • Recognize reduced forms
             • Process speech (pauses, errors, corrections)
               • Process different rates of delivery
                 • Recognize grammatical word classes
                   • Detect sense of constituents
                     • Recognize particular meanings
                       • Recognize cohesive devices (spoken)
   • Macroskills
     • Recognize communicative functions
       • Infering using real-world knowledge
         • Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
           • Use facial, kinesic and body language to decipher meaning
             • Develop and use listening strategies
   • What makes listening difficult?
     • Clustering
       • Redundancy
         • Reduced forms
           • Performance variables
             • Colloquial languages
               • Discourse markers
                 • Rate of delivery
                   • Stress, rhythm and intonation
                     • Interaction
                       • Manage interacting flow of language
                     • Understanding prosodic elements (spoken)
                   • Speed of delivery
                 • E.g. my first point, secondly, etc
               • Idioms, slangs, reduced forms
             • Be able to 'weed out' hesitations, false starts, corrections
         • Repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations and insertions
       • Attending to appropriate chunks

4. Designing Assessment Tasks: Intensive Listening

   • Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements
     • Recognition of phonological and morphological elements of language
     • Descontextualized tasks
       • Not very authentic
   • Paraphrase Recognition
     • Next scale of listening comprehensiton
       • Words, phrases and sentences.
         • Assessed by providing stimulus

5. Designing Assessment Tasks: Responsive Listening

   • Question-answer format provides interactivity
     • Appropriate response to a question
     • Open-ended responses
       • Those have a small amount of authenticity

6. Designing Assessment Tasks: Selective Listening

   • Listening Cloze
     • Listen to a story, monologue or conversation and simultaneously read the written text in which selected phrases have been deleted
     • Weakness
       • They can become reading comprehension tasks
     • Scoring
       • Exact-word method
   • Information Transfer
     • Aurally processed information must be transfered to a visual representation
     • Reflect grater authenticity
       • Use of charts, maps, grids, timetables and other artefacts of daily life.
   • Sentence Repetition
     • Test-takers retain a stretch of language long enough to reproduce it and then respond with an oral repetition
       • Far from flawless listening assessment task.
       • Can be easily contaminated by lack of short-term memory ability
         • Should be used with caution

7. Designing Assessment Tasks: Extensive Listening

   • Dictation
     • Widely researched genre of assessing listening comprehension.
       • It has been used as assessment tools for decades
     • Difficulty
       • Can be easily manipulated by the lenght of the word groups
         • Complexity of the discourse
   • Communicative Stimulus-Response Tasks
     • Test takers are presented with a stimulus monologue or conversation
       • Respond a set of comprehension questions
     • It is necessary to create an authentic stimuli
   • Authentic Listening Tasks
     • Notetaking
       • Editing
         • Interpretive Tasks
           • Retelling
             • Test-takers Listen to a story or news event and simply retell it or sumarize it
               • It can be either written or spoken
           • It extends the stimulus material to a longer stretch of discourse
             • It forces the test taker to infer a response
         • Provides both written and a spoken stimulus
           • Requires the test taker to listen for discrepancies.
       • 15- Minute Lecture as a stimulus
         • The process of scoring is time-consuming
           • Lacks of reliability