Chapter 6: Assessing Listening (Brown) -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. 2. 3. 4. 5.
11.Recognize cohesive devices in spoken language.
Discriminate among the different sounds of English. Macroskills Retain chunk of language in short-term memory. 12. Recognize the communicative functions of Recognize English stress patterns (intonation, rhythm) utterances. Recognize reduced forms of words. 13. Infer situations, participants and goals using realDistinguish word boundaries and core of words, world knowledge. recognizing their significance. 14. Predict, infer, deduce causes and effects, detect 6. Process speech at different rates of delivery. relations, new given information from different 7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, events and situations. etc. 15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings. 8. Recognize grammatical word classes, systems, patterns, 16. Use facial, kinesics, body language, and other rules and forms. nonverbal clues to decipher meanings. 9. Recognize sentence constituents. 17. Develop listening strategies such as detecting key 10.Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in words or guessing the meaning of words from different grammatical forms. context, etc.
Listening Taxonomy: List of what makes listening difficult. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Clustering: Attending to appropriate chunks of language, phrases, clauses. Redundancy: Recognizing the kinds of repetitions. Reduced forms: Understanding the reduced forms. Performance variables: Being able to eliminate false starts, pauses and corrections in natural speech. Colloquial language: Comprehending idioms, slangs, reduced forms. Rate of delivery: Maintain the speed of delivery, processing automatically as the speaker continues. Stress, rhythm and intonation: Correctly understanding of elements from spoken language. 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. Summary The assessment of listening or speaking, reading and writing of a student involves the assessment of their competence, but what we observe is the performance. Performance is not always a true indication of a person’s competence, and observing listening and reading can be as Brown would say, seeing the wind blowing. 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.” Brown goes on to discuss the stages of listening which we can then derive the types of listening, which are Intensive, Responsive, Selective and Extensive. Richard synthesizes the stages and types of listening into 17 different micro and macro-skills which provide objectives for test makers to assess listening. With objective in hand test makers can now begin the work of designing assessment tasks for the different types of listening. Phonological and morphological elements of language are a typical form of intensive listening, followed by paraphrasing recognition which both deals with the micro-skill objectives. To assess the responsive listening a question-and-answer format provides the interactivity required. The third type of listening performance is selective listening which can be assessed through a listening cloze task or an information transfer task. The forth type of listening performance, extensive listening which the division between selective and extensive tasks are less clear as we move along the micro macro continuum can be assess through dictations, communicative stimulus-response tasks and
authentic
listening
tasks.
