Assessing listening

Assessing listening

1. Micro and Macroskills of listening

   • Microskills
     • Discriminate among the distinctive sounds
       • Retain chunks of language
         • Recognize reduced forms
           • Process different rates of delivery
             • Recognize grammatical word classes
               • Detect sense of constituents
                 • 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 deciher meaning
             • Develop and use listening strategies
   • What makes listening difficult
     • Clustering
       • Attending to appropriate chunks
       • Redundancy
         • Repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations and insertions
         • Reduce forms
           • Performance variables
             • Colloquial languages
               • Discurse markers
                 • Rate of delivery
                   • Stress, rhythm and intonation
                     • Understanding prosodic elements
                   • Speed of delivery
               • Idioms, slangs
             • Be able to weed out hesitations false starts, corrections

2. Designing Assessment Task: Intensive Listening

   • Recognizing Phonological and morphological elements
     • Descontextualized tasks
       • Not very authentic
   • Paraphrase Recognition
     • Next scale of listening comprehension
       • Words phrases and sentences
         • Assessed by providing stimulus

3. Designing Assessment Task : Responsive Listening

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

4. Cautionary observations on assessing language skills spearately

   • Integration of skills in language assessment
     • Real world
       • Use of skills in isolation
         • Single-skills :few athentic manifestations in everyday language performance
     • Classroom
       • Integration of skills
         • 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
     • Test
       • Invoke two or more of the skills
     • Communicative language teaching approach
       • focus;spontaneous communication
       • Effective communicative classroom
   • Observing the performance of the four skills
     • Performance
       • To assess competence
         • Observe performance
     • Observation
       • Performance must be observable
         • Productive skills
         • receptive skills

5. Basic types of listening

   • Types
     • Intensive
       • Responsive
         • Selective
           • Extensive
   • 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

6. Designing assessment task: selective listening

   • Listening cloze
     • Listening to a story, monogue or conversation and simultaneously read the written text in which selected phrases have been delated
       • Weakness
         • They can become reading comprehenion
       • Scoring
         • Exact- word method
   • Information transfer
     • Aurally processed information must be transfered to a visual representation
     • Reflect grater authenticity
       • Use of charts maps, grids, timetable 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 task: Extensive listening

   • Dictation
     • Widely researched genre of assessing listening comprehension
     • Difficulty
       • Can be easily manipulated by the lengt of the word groups
   • Authentic listening task
     • Notetaking
       • 15-minute lecture as a stimulus
         • ThThe process of scording is time-consuming
     • Editing
       • Provides both written and a spoken stimulus
         • Requires the test taker to listen for discrepancies
     • Interpretive task
       • It extends the stimulus material to a longer stretch of discourse
         • It forces the test taker to infer a response