Lecture Ten Assessing Listening Chapter Six Pages: 116-139 Brown, 2004

1. Lecture Ten Assessing Listening Chapter Six Pages: 116-139 Brown, 2004

2. Lecture’s objectives: - The coming four chapters will provide guidelines and hands- on practice in testing within a curriculum of English as a second or foreign language. (Although we are going to present the four skills in separate chapters, assessment is more authentic and provides more washback when skills are integrated). - This specific chapter will discuss: - The importance of listening. - Principles and types of listening. - Tasks that can be used to assess listening.

3. Observing The performance of the four skills: • All language users perform the acts of listening, speaking, reading and writing. They rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish these performances. • Competence: Someone ‘s ability in one or a combination of the four skills. • Performance: the observable behaviors. • ****Discuss why sometimes the performance does not indicate true competence. (p, 117)

4. Principles for assessing a learner’s competence: Teachers should triangulate their measurements. (Consider at least two or more performances before drawing a conclusion). (p, 117) ***Multiple measures will always give you a more reliable and valid assessment than a single measures. 2. Teachers must rely as much as possible on observable performance in their assessment of students. ****What does observable mean? (p, 117) ****Discuss the observable performance of the four skills in table 6.1 By comparing between receptive and productive skills. (p, 118)

5. The importance of listening: • Listening is often implied as a component of speaking. • (How could you speak the language without listening)? • ** You should know that one’s oral production ability is as good as listening comprehension ability. • **You should pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroom.

6. Basic types of listening: • Think about what you do when you listen. Read the processes that flash through your brain while listening. (p,119) • Potential Assessment objectives: • - Comprehending of surface structure elements. • - Understanding of pragmatic context. • - Determining meaning of auditory input. • Developing the gist. • Types of listening performance: • Intensive • Responsive • Selective • Extensive • ****What is the purpose of each one of the mentioned types? Provide examples.(p,120)

7. Test takers may at the extensive level need to invoke interactive skills (note- taking, questioning, discussion) listening that includes all the four types. Their listening performance must be integrated with speaking in the authentic give and take of communicative interchange. Micro and Macro skills of listening: Micro skills( attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of a bottom-up process). Macro skills( focusing on the larger elements involved in a top- down approach to a listening task). **Read the micro and macro skills page 121 which provides 17 objectives to assess listening.

8. What makes listening difficult? (p,122) Clustering Redundancy Reduced forms Performance variables Colloquial language Rate of delivery Stress, rhythm, and intonation Interaction

9. Designing assessment tasks • Once you have determined objectives, your next step is to design the tasks. • *Intensive listening: (p, 123-124) • Recognizing phonological and morphological elements. • Paraphrase recognition. • *Responsive listening: (p, 125) • Appropriate response to a question. • Open- ended response to a question.

10. * Selective listening: (p, 125-130) • Listening cloze • Information transfer • Sentence repetition • * Extensive listening: (p, 130-138) • Dictation • Communicative stimulus-response tasks • Authentic listening tasks (note-taking, editing, interpretive tasks, and retelling)