Assessing Listening

Summary

Chapter 5

As teachers we know that is important to assess listening skills, but sometimes we are unable to do this effectively. Nunan(2002) calls listening comprehension "the poor cousin amongst the various language skills."

Listening skill is not passive, it is an active process where students receive, construct meaning form, and respond to spoken messages.

Models of Listening

The two models are:

1. Bottom - up: comprehension occurs when the listener successfully decodes the spoken text. It also occurs when students take in a word, decode it and link it with other words to form sentences.

2. Top- down: the listener is directly involved with constructing meaning from input. The students uses background knowledge of the context and situation to make sense of what is heard.

                                                                              

Approaches to Listening Assessment

Buck(2001) identified three major approaches to the assessment of listening abilities: discrete point, integrative, and communicative approaches.

The discrete point broke listening into component elements and assessed them separately.

The integrative approach assess a learner's capacity to use mani bits at the same time. The whole of the language is greater than the sum of its parts.

The communicative approach. The listener must be able to comprehend the message and then use it in context. Communicative question formats should be authentic in nature.

Background Knowledge

Background or prior knowledge needs to be taken into account because research suggests that it affects comprehension and test performance. An attempt to standardize the presence or absence of backgroung knowledge should be made in any listening text that purports to be a valid indicator of comprehension.

 

                                                                                     

Techniques for Assessing Listening Comprehension       

1. Phonemic discrimination: students listen to one word in isolation and then tries to identify which word was said. Like in minimal pairs (ship/sheep).

2. Cloze: they listen to a passage while referring to a written transript of the text in which several words have been deleted. Students are asked to fill in the blanks while listening.

3. Dictation: it assess a wide range of skills, do it with short text that you will read three times.

4. Information transfer tasks: it requires students to transfer information they have heard to a chart or visual.

                                          

Important Aspects

1. Unknown vocabulary should never occur as the correct answer.

2. Good sources of authentic speech to assess listening are: radio, television, pre-recorded teaching materials, pod casts, internet, and teacher produced materials.

3. For structure purposes in any test start with an easy question. Also ordered the questions as they are heard in the passage.

4. The timing of a test will be determined by how many times the test - takers are permitted to hear each passage. Remember to give time for pre - reading.

5. The way a listening test is administered and delivered can impact the results.

6. Give credit for students know, don't deduct for spelling or grammar mistakes when your focus is on listening comprehension.

7. Give students a reason for listening.