Assessing Listening Comprehensive Notes

Assessing Listening - Chapter 6

Foundational Principles of Language Assessment

• Earlier chapters introduced foundational principles like practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity, washback, direct and indirect testing, and formative and summative assessment.
• The focus shifts to classroom assessment of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
• The next four chapters provide guidelines and hands-on practice in testing within an English curriculum.

Caveats

• The four language skills are discussed in separate chapters, but they should not be assessed in isolation.
• Integration of skills is of paramount importance in language learning and assessment.
• Skills are treated independently to identify principles, test types, tasks, and issues associated with each one.
• Form-focused assessment (grammar and vocabulary) is treated within the context of skills areas, as a test of grammar or vocabulary invokes one or more of the separate skills.
• Linguistic forms (phonology, morphology, lexicon, grammar, and discourse) are treated within the context of skill areas.

Observing the Performance of the Four Skills

• Language users perform listening, speaking, reading, and writing, relying on their underlying competence.
• Assessing someone's ability involves observing their performance, which may not always indicate true competence due to factors like fatigue, illness, or test anxiety.
• It is important to consider the fallibility of a single performance and triangulate measurements by considering multiple performances and contexts.

Triangulation Designs include

• Combining several tests
• Using a single test with multiple test tasks
• Incorporating in-class and extra-class graded work
• Employing alternative forms of assessment (journal, portfolio, conference, observation, self-assessment, peer-assessment).
• Observable performance is crucial in assessments. Observable means being able to see or hear the performance of the learner.

Observable Performance of the Four Skills (Table 6.1)

*Except in the case of an audio or video recording that preserves the output.

• Receptive skills (listening and reading) do not allow observation of the process or a product. You can only observe learners while they are listening or reading.
• Assessment of listening and reading must be based on observing the test-taker's speaking or writing (or nonverbal responses).
• All assessment of receptive performance must be made by inference.
• Good assessment tasks are needed to make the jump from unobservable reception to a conclusion about comprehension competence.

Importance of Listening

• Listening has often been secondary to speaking.
• Speaking is overtly observable, making it more empirically measurable than listening.
• Oral production ability is only as good as one's listening comprehension ability.
• Input in the aural-oral mode accounts for a large proportion of successful language acquisition.
• We do measurably more listening than speaking in a typical day.
• Aural comprehension far outstrips oral production in terms of time, number of words, effort, and attention.
• Close attention should be paid to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroom.

Basic Types of Listening

• Designing appropriate assessment tasks in listening begins with the specification of objectives or criteria.
• Objectives may be classified in terms of several types of listening performance. The following processes occur when you listen:
  1. Recognize speech sounds and hold them in short-term memory.
  2. Determine the type of speech event and attend to its context and content.
  3. Use linguistic decoding skills and background schemata to interpret the message and assign a literal and intended meaning.
  4. Delete the exact linguistic form in favor of retaining important information in long-term memory.
• Each stage represents a potential assessment objective.
• From these stages we can derive four commonly identified types of listening performance:
  1. Intensive: Listening for perception of the components of a larger stretch of language.
  2. Responsive: Listening to a short stretch of language to make an equally short response.
  3. Selective: Processing stretches of discourse to