Assessing Listening

-Assessment is more authentic and provides more wash-back when skills are integrated.

-When you propose to assess someone’s ability in once or a combination of the four skills, you
assess that person’s competence, but you observe the person’s performance. Sometimes the
performance doesn’t indicate true competence, because any distraction that could be in the
classroom, or an emotional distraction. So, one important principle for assessing a learner’s
competence is to consider the fallibility of the results of a single performance, such as that
produced in a test. As a teacher, the obligation is to triangulate the measurements: Consider at least
two or more performances and/or contexts before drawing a conclusion. The importance of
listening is paramount because as Brown put it, “one’s oral production ability is only as good as
one’s listening comprehension ability.”

The process of listening may be classified in the following stages:

• Comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes, words, intonation, etc.

• Understanding of pragmatic context: Determine the type of speech event and the content
of the message.

• Determining meaning of auditory input: You use bottom-up and top-down in order to
interpretate the message and assign a literal and intended meaning to the utterance.

• Developing the essence a global understanding.

From those stages derive the types of listening performance, which are Intensive, Responsive,
Selective and Extensive

1. Intensive: Listening for perception of components. Recognizing phonological and

morphological elements.

2. Responsive: Listening to a relatively short stretch of language in order to make an equally

short response (appropriate respond to a question)

3. Selective: Listening to develop a bottom-up. Scanning certain information in order to

assign a global meaning or specific meaning.
4. Extensive: Listening to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language.
Listening for the essence, for the main idea and making inferences are part of extensive listening.

Micro and Macroskills of Listening.

Microskills:

1. Discriminate among the different sounds of English.

2. Retain chunk of language in short-term memory.

3. Recognize English stress patterns (intonation, rhythm)

4. Recognize reduced forms of words.

5. Distinguish word boundaries and core of words, recognizing their significance.

6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.

7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, etc.

8. Recognize grammatical word classes, systems, patterns, rules and forms.

9. Recognize sentence constituents.

10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.

11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken language.

Macroskills

12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances.

13. Infer situations, participants and goals using real-world knowledge.

14. Predict, infer, deduce causes and effects, detect relations, new given information from
different events and situations.

15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.

16. Use facial, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.
17. Develop listening strategies such as detecting key words or guessing the meaning of words
from context, etc.

Listening Taxonomy: List of what makes listening difficult.

1. Clustering: Attending to appropriate chunks of language, phrases, clauses.

2. Redundancy: Recognizing the kinds of repetitions.

3. Reduced forms: Understanding the reduced forms.

4. Performance variables: Being able to eliminate false starts, pauses and corrections in
natural speech.

5. Colloquial language: Comprehending idioms, slangs, reduced forms.

6. Rate of delivery: Maintain the speed of delivery, processing automatically as the speaker
continues.

7. Stress, rhythm and intonation: Correctly understanding of elements from spoken language.

8. Interaction: Managing the interactive flow of language from listening to speaking to

listening, etc.

Designing Assessment Tasks

Intensive Listening: Recognizing phonological and morphological elements, Paraphrase

recognition.

Responsive Listening: question-and-answer format. Response to a question.

Selective Listening: Learner must discern some specific information. Listening cloze tasks deals
with that student have to listen to a story, a monologue or a conversation and simultaneously read
written text in which selected words have been deleted. Information transferring to a visual
representation. Sentence repetition in which you can evaluate the intonation.

Extensive Listening: Dictation. Communicative Stimulus-Response task (multiple choice

comprehension items), authentic listening tasks.