Assessing Listening

Problems of Lang. Assessment A problem: performance = competence? In language assessment we intend to assess a person’s competence or language ability, but we do it through observing the person’s performance. Also taking into account learners’ multi- intelligence Important to have multiple measures

Observable performance Can the four skills be directly observed? (Brown 118) – Listening – Speaking – Reading – Writing All assessment of receptive performance must be made by inference.

Purposes What is included in listening comprehension? (Brown 121) – Micro-skills of listening (bottom-up) – Macro-skills off listening (top-down) What do we listen for in real life? – Communication of meaning – Exchange of facts, ideas – Interpreting speaker’s intentions

Four Types of Listening Tasks (Brown 120) Intensive – Phonological/morphological elements – paraphrase Responsive Selective Extensive

Dictation Factors to determine level of difficulty – The speed and clarity with which the text is read – The complexity of, and the learners’ familiarity with, the syntactic structures in the passage – Vocabulary, topic, discourse genre – The lengths of the bursts and the pauses between bursts (Bailey 14)

Auditory Discrimination Reasons against auditory discrimination – Phoneme discrimination even difficult for NSs Different dialects Many Eng. dialects fail to make some vowel and consonant contrasts – Ability to distinguish between phonemes vs. ability to understand verbal messages – Occasional confusion over selected pairs of phonemes doesn’t matter much. In real life situations, listener has contextual clues

Issues of Concern What do you really want the testees to demonstrate in the listening test? – Ability to discriminate phonemes? – Ability to recognize stress/intonation patterns – Structural understanding? – Comprehension of continuous speech in an authentic context? – Ability to handle academic lectures?