Assessing Listening

Observing the Performance of the Four Skills Things that we can observe during listening as the receptive skills are process and product (invisible, audible)

The Importance of Listening Listening is often implied as a component of speaking

Types of Listening Intensive: 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 Forms Understanding 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

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

8. Interaction: Negotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn taking, maintenance, termination

Designing Assessment Tasks : Intensive Listening Recognizing Phonological & Morphological Elements a. Phonemics pair, consonants Test-takers read : a. He’s from California b. She’s from California

b. Phonemics pair, vowels c. Morphological pair, -ed ending Test-takers read : a. Is he leaving ? b. Is he living? Test-takers read : a. I missed you very much b. I miss you very much

d. Stress Pattern in can’t e. One-word stimulus Test-takers read : a. My girlfriend can’t go to the party b. My girlfriend can go to the party Test-takers read : a. vine b. wine

2. Paraphrase Recognition Sentence paraphrase Test-takers read : a. Keiko is comfortable in Japan b. Keiko wants to come to Japan c. Keiko is Japanese d. Keiko likes Japan

Dialogue paraphrase Test-takers read : a. Tracy lives in the United States b. Tracy is American c. Tracy comes from Canada d. Maria is Canadian

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

Test-takers read write or speak :_______________ Open-ended response to a question Test-takers read write or speak :_______________

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

A number of techniques have been used that require selective listening. Listening Cloze Information Transfer Sentence Repetition

Listening Cloze (cloze dictations or partial dictations) 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

Test-takers write the missing words or phrases in the blanks Flight to Portland will depart from gate at P.M Flight to Reno will depart at P.M from gate seventeen

Information Transfer Information transfer: multiple-picture-cued-selection Information transfer: single-picture-cued-verbal-multiple-choice Information transfer: chart-filling

Information transfer: multiple-picture-cued-selection

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

Information transfer: chart-filling Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Weekends 8:00 get up 10:00 12:00 2:00 4:00 6:00

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

Difficulty can be manipulated by: The length of the word group The length of pauses The speed Complexity of the discourse, grammar and vocabulary Scoring (spelling, grammatical, additional words, replacement)

Dictation is a practical valid method for integrating listening and writing skills, but the authenticity is questioned.

2. 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. The conversation is authentic, but listening to a conversation between a doctor and a patient is rarely done (p.133)

3. 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

Buck (2001: p. 92)  p.136 “Every test requires some components of communicative language ability, and no test covers them all”

Alternatives to assess comprehension in a truly communicative context 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

Editing a written stimulus of an aural stimulus Test-takers read : the written stimulus material Test-takers hear: a spoken version of the stimulus Test-takers mark: the written stimulus by circling any words

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 (scoring)

Difficulties: scoring and reliability 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)