How to evaluate listening skills

Things that we can observe during listening as

the receptive skills are process and product (invisible, audible)

Observing the Performance of the

Four Skills

Listening is often implied as a component of

speaking

The Importance of Listening

Types of ListeningIntensive: phonemes, words, intonation Responsive: a greeting, command, question Selective: TV , radio news items, stories Extensive: listening for the gist, the main idea, making inference

Micro and Macro Skills of Listening

Micro Skills Attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of bottom-up process

Macro Skills Focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach

What Makes Listening Difficult

1.Clustering Chunking-phrases, clauses, constituents

2.Redundancy Repetitions, Rephrasing, Elaborations and Insertions

3. Reduced FormsUnderstanding the reduced forms that may not have been a part of English learner’s past experiences in classes where only formal ” textbook” language has been presented

4. Performance variables Hesitations, False starts, Corrections, Diversion

5. Colloquial Language Idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge

6. Rate of Delivery Keeping up with the speed of delivery, processing automatically as the speaker continues

Correctly understanding prosodic elements of spoken language, which is almost always much more difficult than understanding the smaller phonological bits and pieces.

7. Stress, Rhythm, and Intonation

8. InteractionNegotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn taking, maintenance, termination

Designing Assessment TasksNegotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn taking, maintenance, termination

Intensive Listening Recognizing Phonological & Morphological Elements Phonemics pair, consonants Test

takers read : a. He’s from California b. b. She’s from California

Designing Assessment Tasks:

Responsive Listening

Appropriate response to a question Test-takers read : a. In about an hour. b. b. About an hour c. c. About $10 d. d. Yes, I did

Designing Assessment Tasks:

Designing Assessment Tasks: Selective Listening Selective listening, in which the test-taker listen to a limited quantity of aural input and must discern within it some specific information

It requires the test-taker to listen a story monologue, or conversation and simultaneously read the written text in which selected words or phrases have been selected In a listening cloze task, test-takers see a transcript of the passage that they are listening to and fill in the blanks with the words or phrases that they hear

Listening Cloze (cloze dictations or partial dictations)

Test-takers write the missing words or phrases in the blanks

Information Transfer

Information transfer: multiple-picture-cued-selection

Information Transfer

Information transfer: single-picture-cued-verbal-multiple-choice

Information transfer: Chart - Filling

Sentence Repetition

The task of simply repeating a sentence or a partial sentence, or sentence repetition, is also used as an assessment of listening comprehension

Designing assessment Test:

Extensive Listening Listening to develop a top down, global understanding of spoken language

Some extensive / quasi-extensive listening comprehension tasks

Dictation: widely researched genre of assessing listening comprehension 50 – 100 words recited 3 times: normal speed, long pauses between phrases, normal speed

Communicative stimulus-response tasks Listen to a monologue or conversation and respond to a set of comprehension questions.

Disadvantages: some of the multiple-choice questions don’t mirror communicative real-life situations.

Authentic listening tasks Ideally, listening tests are cognitively demanding, communicative, authentic, and interaction.

Test as a sample of performance/tasks implies an equally limited capacity to mirror all the real-world context of listening performance

Note taking Listening to a lecturer and write down the important ideas. Disadvantage: scoring is time consuming Advantages: mirror real classroom situation it fulfills the criteria of cognitive demand, communicative language & authenticity

Alternatives to assess comprehension in a truly communicative context

Editing Editing a written stimulus of an aural stimulus

Interpretive tasks paraphrasing a story or conversation

Potential stimuli include: song lyrics, poetry, radio, TV, news reports, etc.

The stimuli can be directed through questions like: “why was the singer feeling sad?”, “what do you think the political activists might do next?” Difficulties: The task conforms to certain time limitation, and the questions might be quite specific, there may be more than one correct interpretation

Retelling Listen to a story or news event and simply retell it either orally or written show full comprehension

Difficulties: scoring and reliability validity, cognitive, communicative ability, authenticity are well incorporated into the task. Interactive listening (face to face conversations)