ASSESSING LISTENING

ASSESSING LISTENING

OBSERVING THE PERFORMANCE OF THE FOUR SKILL

Before focusing on listening itself, think about the two interacting concepts of performance and observation. All language users perform the acts of listening. Speaking, reading & writing. They of course rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish these performances. When you propose to asses that person’s competence, but you observe the person’s performance.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING

Listening has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking in the standardized testing industry, a number separate oral production test are available (Test of spoken English, Oral proficiency inventory and phone pass. to name several that are described chapter 7 of this book, but it is rare to find just a listening test. on reason for this emphasis is that listening is often implied as a component of speaking. in addition the overtly observable nature of speaking renders it more empirically measurable than listening.
We therefore need to pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroom in this chapter we will begin with basic principals and types listening, than move to a survey of task that can be used to assess listening.

BASIC TYPES of LISTENING

Ass all with effective test, designing appropriate assessment tasks in listening begins wait the specification of objectives, or criteria those objective may be classified in term of several types of listening performance.

1. You recognize speech sounds and hold a temporary “imprint” of them in short term memory.
2. You simultaneously determine the type of speech event (monologue, interpersonal dialogue, transactional dialogue) that is being processed and attend to its context (who the speakers is location purpose)
3. You use (bottom up) listening decoding skill and /or (top-down) background schemata to bring a plausible interpretation to the message and assign a literal and intended meaning to the utterance.
4. In most cases (expect for repetition task, which involve short-term memory only)

Each of these stages represents a potential assessment objective:
 Comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes word intonation, or a grammatical category
 understanding of pragmatic context
 determining meaning of auditory input
 developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding


From these stages we can derive four commonly identified types of listening performance, each of which comprises a category within which to consider assessment tasks and procedures.

1. intensive
2. Responsive
3. selective
4. extensive


INTENSIV LISTENING

Once you have determined objectives, your next step is to design the task including making decisions about how you will elicit performance and how you will expect the test-taker to respond. We will look at tasks that range from intensive listening performance, such as minimal phonemic pair recognition to extensive comprehension of language in communicative context. The focus in this section is on the micro skill of intensive listening.

Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements

A typical form of intensive listening at this level is the assessment of recognizing 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.

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 sentences and asking the test-taker to choose the correct paraphrase from a number of choices.

RESPONSIVE LISTENING

A question and answer format can provide some interactivity in these lower end listening tasks. The test-taker’s response is the appropriate answer to a question.

SELECTIVE LISTENING

A third type of listening performance is selective listening in which the test-taker listens to a limited quantity of aural input and must discern within it some specific information. A number of techniques have been used that require selective listening.




Listening Cloze

Listening cloze tasks (sometimes called cloze dictations or partial dictations) require the test-taker to listen to a story, monologue, on conversation and simultaneously read the written text in which selected words or phrases have been deleted. Cloze procedure is most commonly associated with reading only (see chapter 9). In its generic form, the test consists of a passage in which every nth word (typically every seventh word) is deleted and the text-taker is asked to supply an appropriate word. in a listening cloze task, test-taker see a transcript of the passage that they are to listening to and fill in the blanks with the words or phrases that they hear.

Information Transfer

Selective listening can also be assessed through an information transfer technique in which aurally processed information must be transferred to a visual representation, such as labeling a diagram, identifying an element in a picture, completing a form, or showing routes on a map.

SENTENCE REPETITION

Sentence repetition is far from a flawless listening assessment task. buck (2001 p. 79) noted that that such tasks “are not just tests of listening, but tests of general oral skills”. Further, this tasks may tests only recognition of sounds, and it can easily be contaminated by lack of short-term memory ability, thus invalidating it as an assessment toning comprehension error from an oral production error. therefore, sentence repetition tasks should be used with caution.

EXTENSIVE LISTENING

Drawing a clear distinction between any two of the categories of listening referred to hear is problematic, but perhaps the fuzziest division is between selective and extensive listening. As we gradually move along the continuum from smaller to larger stretches of language, and from micro- to macro skill of listening. the probability of using more extensive listening task increases.

DICTATION

Dictation is a widely researched genre of assessing listening comprehension. in a dictation, test takers hear passage, typically of 50 to 100 word, recited three times: first at normal speech; than, with long pauses between phrases or natural word groups, during which time test takers write down what they have just heard; and finally, at normal speech once more so they can check there work and proofread.
Scoring criteria for several possible kinds of errors:
 Spelling error only, but the word appears to have been heard correctly
 Spelling and / obvious misrepresentation of word, illegible word
 Grammatical error (for example, test-takers hears I can’t do it, writes I can do it)
 skipped word or phrase
 permutation words not in the original
 replacement of a word with an appropriate synonym

Communicative stimulus – response tasks

Example of extensive listening is found in a popular genre of assessment tasks in which the task-takers is presented with a stimulus monologue or conversation and than is asked to respond to a set of comprehension questions.

Authentic listening tasks

Ideally, the language assessment field would have a stockpile of listening test types that are cognitively demanding, communicative, and authentic, not to mention interactive by means of integration with speaking. The nature of test as a sample of performance and a set of task with limited time frames implies an equally limited capacity to mirror all the real-world contexts of listening performance.

There is no such thing as a communicative test, “stated back (2001.p92).”Every test requires some components of communicative language ability, and no test covers them all similarly, with the nation of authenticity every task shares some characteristics with target-language tasks, and no test is completely authentic.

1. Note-taking. in the academic world, classroom lectures by professors are common features of a non-native English-user’s experience . These notes are evaluated by the teacher on a 30-points system, as follows:

Scoring system for lecture notes

0-15 points

Visual representation: Are your notes clear and easily to read? Can you easily find and retrieve information from them? Do you use the space on the paper to visually represented ideas? Do you use indention headers, numbers, etc?

0-10 points

Accuracy: Do you accurately indicate main ideas from lectures? Do you note important details and supporting information and examples? Do you leave out unimportant information and tangents?

0-5 points

Symbols and abbreviations: Do you use symbols and abbreviations as much as possible to save time? Ado you avoid writing out whole words and do you avoids writing down every single word the lectures say?

2. Editing. Another authentic task provides both a written and a spoken stimulus, and requires the test-taker to listen for discrepancies. Scoring achieves relatively high reliability as there are usually a small number of specific differences that must be identified. Here is the way the task proceeds.

3. Interpretive tasks. One of the intensive listening tasks described above was paraphrasing a story or conversation. An interpretive task extends the stimulus material to a longer stretch of discourse and forces the test – takers to infer a response potential stimulus include.

 Song lyrics
 (recited) poetry
 radio/television news reports and
 an oral account of an experience

4. Retelling. in a related task, tasks takers listen to a story or news event and simply retell it, or summarize it, either orally (on an audiotape) or in writing. In so doing, test takers must identify the gist, main idea, purpose, supporting points.