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. - 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 Sometimes the performance does not indicate true competence: a bad night’s rest, illness, and emotional distraction, test anxiety, a memory block or student related reliability factors could affect performance. - One important principle for assessing a learner’s competence is to consider the fallibility of the results of a single performance, such that produced in a test. It is teachers’ obligation to triangulate your measurements; consider at least tow or more performances and contexts before drawing the conclusion.

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. The productive skills of speaking and writing allow us to hear and see the process as it is performed. Writing gives s permanent product in the form of a written piece. But unless you have recorded speech, there is no permanent observable product for speaking performance because all those words you just heard haven vanished form your perception and you have been transformed into meaningful intake somewhere in your brain. Receptive skills, are clearly the more enigmatic of the two modes of performance. You cannot observe the actual act of listenig only while they are listening or reading. The upshot is that all assessment of listening and reading must be made on the basis of observing the test-taker’s speaking or writing. And not on the listening or reading itself. So all assessment of receptive performance must made by inference.

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 Listening that includes all four of the types as test-takers actively participate in discussion, debates, conversations, role plays, and pair and group work. Their listening performance must be intricately integrated with speaking. In the authentic give-and-take of communicative interchange.

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) Microskills might include: interpretation of intonation patterns (recognition of sarcasm) recognition of function of structures. (such as interrogative as request, for example, Could you pass the salt?) Macroskill- would be directly related to candidates’ needs or to course objectives, and might

What makes listening difficult? Clustering Redundancy Reduced forms Performance variables Colloquial language Rate of delivery Stress, rhythm, and intonation Interaction clustering: attending to appropriate chuncks of language –phrases, clauses, constituents Redundancy: recognizing the kinds of repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations, and insertions that unrehearsed spoken language often contains, and benefits from that recognition Reduced forms: understanding the reduced forms that may not have been a part of an English.

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) Intensive – listening for perception of the components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers) of a larger stretch of language. - microskills of intensive listening – the typical form of intensive listening at this level is the assessemnt of recognitions of phonological and morphological elements of language. Responsive- listening to relatively short stretch of language ( a greeting, question, command, comprehension check) in order to make an equally short response. Selective/ processing stretches of discourse such as short monologues for several minutes in order to scan for

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.

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. The next step up on the scale of listening comprehension microskills is words, phrases, and wentences, which are frequently assessed by providing a stimulus sentence and asking the test-taker to choose the correct paraphrase form a number of choices.

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 The objective of this item is recognition of the wh-question how much and its appropriate response.

III. Selective listening – 1. Listening Cloze p.126 e.g. www.esl-lab.com 2. Information Transfer p.127 Multiple-picture-cued selection A third type of listening performance is selective listening, in which the test-taker listens to a limited quantity of aural input and must discern within it some specific information. Listening cloze – require the test-taker to listen to a story, monologue, or conversation and simultaneously read the written texsst in which selected words or phrases have been deleted. 2. An information transfer techniques in which aurally processed infromation must be trnasferred to a visual representation, such as labeling a diagram, identifying an element in a picture, completing a form. Picture-cued

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)

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

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 Test-takers may at the extensive level need to invoke interactive skills/

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) While partial dictation may not be a particularly authentic listening activity, it can be useful. It is maybe possibl eot administer a partial dictation when no other test of listening is practical. It can also be used diagnostically to test students’ ability to cope with particular difficulties.

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

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

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?