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Assessing Listening

Assessing Listening. Problems of Lang. Assessment. A problem: performance = competence? In language assessment we intend to assess a person’s competence or language ability, but we do it through observing the person’s performance.

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Assessing Listening

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  1. Assessing Listening

  2. Problems of Lang. Assessment • A problem: performance = competence? • In language assessment we intend to assess a person’s competence or language ability, but we do it through observing the person’s performance. - teachers triangulate the measurements (multiple measures will give you a more reliable and valid assessment) - rely as much as possible on observable performance in assessments of students. • Also taking into account learners’ multi-intelligence • Important to have multiple measures

  3. Observable performance • Can the four skills be directly observed? (Brown 118) • Listening • Speaking • Reading • Writing • All assessment of receptive performance must be made by inference.

  4. Purposes • What is included in listening comprehension? (Brown 121) • Micro-skills of listening (bottom-up) • Macro-skills off listening (top-down) • What do we listen for in real life? • Communication of meaning • Exchange of facts, ideas • Debates, discussion • Interpreting speaker’s intentions

  5. Micro- and Macro- skills of listening • Microskills • Interpretation of intonation patterns • Used in linguistic decoding skills • A bottom-up process • Macroskills • Listening for specific information • Following direction • Following instruction • A top-down process • (Brown, p. 121)

  6. What makes listening difficult? • Clustering • Redundancy • Reduced forms • Performance variables • Colloquial language • Rate of delivery • Stress, rhythm, and intonation • Interaction

  7. Four Types of Listening Tasks (Brown 120) I. Intensive - Phonological/morphological elements - paraphrase II. Responsive (TOEFL – short conversation) III. Selective (TOEFL – short monologues; listening for names, numbers, a grammatical category, directions, or certain facts and events.) IV. Extensive (TOEFL – lecture; listening for the gist, for the main idea and making inference)

  8. I. Intensive listening – recognizing phonological and morphological elements • Phonemic pair Q: He’s from California. (a) He’s from California. (b) She’s from California. 2. Morphological pair Q: I missed you very much. (a) I missed you very much. (b) I miss you very much.

  9. I. Intensive listening – paraphrase recognition • Q: Hello, my name is Keiko. I come from Japan. (a) Keiko is comfortable in Japan. (b) Keiko wants to come to Japan. (c) Keiko is Japanese. (d) Keiko likes Japan.

  10. II. Responsive listening – question-and-answer format • Q: How much time did you take to do your homework? (a) In about an hour (b) About an hour (c) About $10 (d) Yes, I did

  11. III. Selective listening – 1. Listening Cloze p.126 e.g. www.esl-lab.com 2. Information Transfer p.127 • Multiple-picture-cued selection

  12. IV. Extensive listening – • Sentence Repetition p.131 - hear a passage recited three times - first reading (natural speed, no pauses, test-takers listen for gist) - second reading (slowed speed, pause at each break, test-takers write) - third reading (natural speed, test-takers check their work)

  13. III. Extensive listening – 2. Communicative Stimulus-Response Task • Monologues, lectures, and brief conversations p. 133 (multiple-choice question)

  14. At the extensive level • Authentic listening task p. 136 • Note-taking • Editing • Interpretive tasks. e.g. TOEFL – IBT http://www.free-english.com/TOEFL-iBT-practice-test.aspx#listening

  15. Dictation • Factors to determine level of difficulty • The speed and clarity with which the text is read • The complexity of, and the learners’ familiarity with, the syntactic structures in the passage • Vocabulary, topic, discourse genre • The lengths of the bursts and the pauses between bursts (the length of the word groups) (Bailey 14)

  16. Recording or Live Presentations • Using recordings when administering a listening test. • The greatest uniformity will be achieved if presentations are to be live.

  17. Auditory Discrimination • Reasons against auditory discrimination • Phoneme discrimination even difficult for NSs • Different dialects • Many Eng. dialects fail to make some vowel and consonant contrasts • Ability to distinguish between phonemes vs. ability to understand verbal messages • Occasional confusion over selected pairs of phonemes doesn’t matter much. • In real life situations, listener has contextual clues

  18. Issues of Concern • What do you really want the testees to demonstrate in the listening test? • Ability to discriminate phonemes? • Ability to recognize stress/intonation patterns • Structural understanding? • Comprehension of continuous speech in an authentic context? • Ability to handle academic lectures?

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