how to assess listening

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

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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.

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

10. 1.Listening to locate specific data is required:
1. by general listeners to locate items of interest in, e.g.,
announcements and news programmes
2. for academic purposes to locate the part of a lecture or
address or programme which focuses on what needs to
be learned
3. in the workplace to make the identification and
absorption of heard data efficient and focused
2.Listening to obtain the gist is needed:
1. by general listeners who simple want to get the gist of a
text and don't need detailed understanding
2. by students to judge whether a comment or section of a
lecture is relevant to their studies and current concerns
3. by busy people in their occupations so they can judge
whether something they are hearing is relevant or
ignorable in part or whole

11. 3. Following directions and instructions:
1.by general listeners needing to know what to do
or where to go in response to an enquiry which
may be as simple as Where's the toilet? or much
more complicated
2.by students to find what to do, what to read
and when to submit work
3.by people in the workplace to allow them to
follow an instruction and organise their working
time

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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 2. Paraphrase Recognition
a. 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

16. b. 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

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

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

19. 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

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

21. 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

22. 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

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

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

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

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

27. 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

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

29. Some extensive / quasi-extensive
listening comprehension tasks
1. Dictation: widely researched genre of assessing listening
comprehension
> 50 – 100 words
> recited 3 times: normal speed, long pauses between
phrases, normal speed

30. 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)

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

32. 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

33. 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

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

35. 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

36. Editing
• 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

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

38. • 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)

39. 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)