HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER TRAINING WORKSHOP Assessing receptive skills Listening

What is listening? Listening is more than merely hearing words. Listening is an active process by which students receive, construct meaning from, and respond to spoken messages (Emmert, 1994).

Why should you listen? To understand To evaluate To build and maintain relationships To help others To entertain …

Discussion Authentic reasons for listening Macro/micro skills for listening Types of listening texts How to select listening texts Listening item types Consideration when designing listening tests

1. Assessing listening skills *What are authentic listening situations? Interviews Instructions Loudspeaker announcements Radio news Committee meetings Shopping Theater Telephone Lectures Conversation Television Story-telling Jokes

*Characteristics of authentic listening situations Informal Spontaneous Short chunks/clusters Reductions (pronunciation) Colloquial language Ungrammatical Unclear/incomprehensible items Rate of delivery Stress, rhythm, and intonation Redundancy (rephrasings, repetitions, elaborations) Performance variables (hesitations, false starts, pauses, corrections) Listener expectation and purpose Visual stimuli Body language Turn-taking/interaction Attention to speaker

2. Macro-skills for Listening recognize the communicative function of utterances identify main ideas from supporting details make inferences using real-world knowledge predict outcomes and infer connections distinguish between literal and implied meanings use non-verbal clues to assist comprehension use listening strategies (guessing vocabulary, signaling comprehension etc.)

3. Micro-skills for Listening discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English retain chunks of language in short-term memory recognize English stress patterns, rhythm, intonation recognize reduced forms of words distinguish word boundaries interpret word order patterns process speech at different rates of delivery process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections recognize grammatical word forms, patterns, rules recognize cohesive devices recognize meaning expressed through different grammatical patterns

4. Types of Listening a. You hear only what you want to hear. You hear some of the message and immediately begin to formulate your reply or second guess the speaker without waiting for the speaker to finish. 1. Inactive listening 2. Selective listening b. This is active listening when you also work to clarify what the speaker is saying and make sure there is mutual understanding. 3. Active listening c. You hear the words, but your mind is wandering and no communication is taking place. 4. Reflective Listening d. You listen closely to content. You try to block out barriers to listening. Most importantly, you are non-judgmental and empathetic.

5. How to select listening texts Webpages (Elllo.org - Học tiếng Anh online + Audacity: Trình ghi âm và biên tập âm thanh tự do) Radio, television, …. CD/ VCD…

6. Listening item types 1. Matching tasks 2. Completion tasks (fill-in-the-blanks/gap exercises) Form completion Sentence completion Notes completion 3. Plan/ Map/ Diagram labeling 4. Multiple choice 5. Short – answer questions

7. Considerations for creating listening tests Text types (narrative, descriptive etc.) Speech types (dialogues, monologues) Mode of listening: audio, video, reader Varieties of English Scripted or unscripted Length of listening, number of exchanges in dialogues

Listening Assessment Tips Make sure students have enough contextualization to understand the listening text Provide a communicative purpose for the listening Focus on assessing the listening skills, not spelling, grammar etc. Include both detail questions and meaning questions Don’t expect full comprehension Consider integrating skills in the types of questions: discrimination of phonemes, paraphrase recognition, short answers, cloze, dictation, information transfer tasks, note-taking

Listening sample task ( FCE listening test )

A perfect listening material…. Japan suggests that the following are among the reasons for teachers' satisfaction with particular listening materials: 1) good for starting discussions 2) can be used for self-access learning 3) contains a variety of tasks 4) entertaining and amusing 5) easy to use 6) practices guessing from context 7) uses authentic material 8) integrates different skills