Assessing Listening

1

• Assessing Listening

2
Problems of Lang. Assessment

• A problem performance competence?
• In language assessment we intend to assess a
  persons competence or language ability, but we
  do it through observing the persons performance.
• Also taking into account learners
  multi-intelligence
• Important to have multiple measures

3
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.

4
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 speakers intentions

5
Four Types of Listening Tasks

• (Brown 120)
• Intensive
• Phonological/morphological elements
• paraphrase
• Responsive
• Selective
• Extensive

6
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)

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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 doesnt matter much.
• In real life situations, listener has contextual
  clues

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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?