This document discusses assessing listening skills for language learners. It explains that listening is an important but difficult receptive skill to master, as it involves quickly processing multiple elements of spoken conversation or recordings. When assessing listening, teachers should design tasks that match students' levels but encourage associating what they hear with what they see, to help decode information and understand the intended meaning. The key is for teachers to recognize that different skills require customized assessment and to apply new strategies to boost students' confidence during testing.

1. ASSESSING LISTENING
It has been explained in previous articles the importance that assessment has
during the teaching-learning process, and how a well-assessed procedure can help
improving students’ understanding and knowledge. However, taking into account
that learning a language involves both productive (speaking &writing) and receptive
(listening& reading) skills each one of them should have a different assess
methodology.
Regarding to assessing listening is important for teachers to bear in mind that this
skill is often used as a component of speaking, second language learners consider
it as one of the most difficult abilities to achieve due to the variety of elements
involved when a conversation is carried out personally or even when it is listened
through a recording. Listeners have to process different steps such as clustery,
redundancy, colloquial language etc. in a matter of seconds to identify what the
task is about.
For that reason, the importance of designing assessment taskstaking into
consideration the test-taker level but encouraging listeners to make up
associations from what they are hearing and from what they are seeing in the
paper, helpingthem to decode the information but the most important fact
understanding what they are listening to.
To sum up, I consider that if we as English teachers realize that every skill has its
own assessment process and apply new strategies, test-takers feel more confident
at the moment of presenting a test.