1. Assessing Listening

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

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

4. 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

5. 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

6. What Makes Listening Difficult
1. Clustering
Chunking-phrases, clauses, constituents
2. Redundancy
Repetitions, Rephrasing, Elaborations and
Insertions

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

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

18. 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

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

20. 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

21. 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

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

23. Information transfer: multiple-picture-cued-selection

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

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

26. 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

27. Designing assessment Test: Extensive Listening
Listening to develop a top down, global understanding of spoken language

28. 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

29. 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)

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

31. 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)

32. 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

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

34. 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

35. 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

36. Interpretive tasks:
paraphrasing a story or conversation
Potential stimuli include: song lyrics, poetry, radio, TV, news reports, etc.

37. 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)

38. 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)