Assessing Listening

Cautionary Observations on Assessing Language Skills Spearately
1. Integration of Skills in Language Assessment
  1. Real world
    1. Use of skills in isolation
      1. Single-skill: few athentic manifestations in everyday language performance
  2. Classroom
    1. Integration of skills (most of the time)
      1. Engage in parallel processing of at least two skills simultaneously
    2. Assessing language
      1. Skill Integration as a priority
        Achieve the authenticity of language
2. Assessing Grammar and Vocabulary
  1. Tests
    1. Invoke two or more of the skills
  2. Communicative Language Teaching Approach
    1. Focus; Spontaneous Communication
      1. Implicit focus on form
    2. Effective communicative classroom
      1. Appropriate and proptious explicit focus on form
3. Observing the Performance of the Four Skills
  1. Performance
    1. To assess competence
      1. Observe performance
      2. Consider falliability of thew four skills
        Triangulate measurements
  2. Observation
    1. Performance must be observable
      1. Productive Skills
        Allow to hear or see the process as it is performed
      2. Receptive skills
        More enigmatic as it cannot be observed the act of listening or the actual product.
Basic Types of Listening
1. Listening process
  1. Recognition
    1. Context and Content
      1. Interpretation
        Retention of meaning
        Conceptual retaining
        Linguistic decoding
      2. Determine the type of speech event and the content of the message
    2. Recognize speech sounds
2. Types
  1. Intensive
    1. Responsive
      1. Selective
        Extensive
        Listening to develop a top-down, global undertanding of spoken language.
        Processing stretched of discourse to 'scan' for certain information
      2. Listen to a relatively short of language to make a short response
    2. Perception of components of a larger stretch of language
Micro and Macroskills of Listening
1. Mircroskills
  1. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds
    1. Retain chunks of language
      1. 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)
2. Macroskills
  1. Recognize communicative functions
    1. Infering using real-world knowledge
      1. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
        Use facial, kinesic and body language to decipher meaning
        Develop and use listening strategies
3. What makes listening difficult?
  1. Clustering
    1. Redundancy
      1. 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
      2. Repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations and insertions
    2. Attending to appropriate chunks
Designing Assessment Tasks: Intensive Listening
1. Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements
  1. Recognition of phonological and morphological elements of language
  2. Descontextualized tasks
    1. Not very authentic
2. Paraphrase Recognition
  1. Next scale of listening comprehensiton
    1. Words, phrases and sentences.
      1. Assessed by providing stimulus
Designing Assessment Tasks: Responsive Listening
1. Question-answer format provides interactivity
  1. Appropriate response to a question
  2. Open-ended responses
    1. Those have a small amount of authenticity
Designing Assessment Tasks: Selective Listening
1. Listening Cloze
  1. Listen to a story, monologue or conversation and simultaneously read the written text in which selected phrases have been deleted
  2. Weakness
    1. They can become reading comprehension tasks
  3. Scoring
    1. Exact-word method
2. Information Transfer
  1. Aurally processed information must be transfered to a visual representation
  2. Reflect grater authenticity
    1. Use of charts, maps, grids, timetables and other artefacts of daily life.
3. Sentence Repetition
  1. Test-takers retain a stretch of language long enough to reproduce it and then respond with an oral repetition
    1. Far from flawless listening assessment task.
    2. Can be easily contaminated by lack of short-term memory ability
      1. Should be used with caution
Designing Assessment Tasks: Extensive Listening
1. Dictation
  1. Widely researched genre of assessing listening comprehension.
    1. It has been used as assessment tools for decades
  2. Difficulty
    1. Can be easily manipulated by the lenght of the word groups
      1. Complexity of the discourse
2. Communicative Stimulus-Response Tasks
  1. Test takers are presented with a stimulus monologue or conversation
    1. Respond a set of comprehension questions
  2. It is necessary to create an authentic stimuli
3. Authentic Listening Tasks
  1. Notetaking
    1. Editing
      1. 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
      2. Provides both written and a spoken stimulus
        Requires the test taker to listen for discrepancies.
    2. 15- Minute Lecture as a stimulus
      1. The process of scoring is time-consuming
        Lacks of reliability

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Assessing Listening

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	Created by Melanie Diaz almost 2 years ago