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Assessing Listening

This document discusses assessing listening skills. It begins by outlining four basic types of listening: intensive, responsive, selective, and extensive. It then defines the microskills and macroskills involved in listening comprehension. Microskills include discriminating sounds, recognizing stress patterns, and processing at different rates. Macroskills include inferring situations, predicting outcomes, and using strategies. The document also provides examples of designing listening assessment tasks for the different listening types, such as cloze exercises, information transfer tables, and dictation. Finally, it discusses issues to consider in listening assessment like validity, reliability, authenticity, and washback.

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Hoài An
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1K views26 pages

Assessing Listening

This document discusses assessing listening skills. It begins by outlining four basic types of listening: intensive, responsive, selective, and extensive. It then defines the microskills and macroskills involved in listening comprehension. Microskills include discriminating sounds, recognizing stress patterns, and processing at different rates. Macroskills include inferring situations, predicting outcomes, and using strategies. The document also provides examples of designing listening assessment tasks for the different listening types, such as cloze exercises, information transfer tables, and dictation. Finally, it discusses issues to consider in listening assessment like validity, reliability, authenticity, and washback.

Uploaded by

Hoài An
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ASSESSING

LISTENING
Table of contents
01
02 Micro- and
Basic types macroskills
of listening of listening

03 04 Issues in
Designing listening
assessment assessment
tasks
01
Basic types of
listening
1 Intensive

2
4 Responsive
types
3
Selective

4 Extensive
1. Intensive
Intensive-listening for perception of
the components (phonemes, word
intonation, discourse markers,
etc.) of a larger stretch of language.
2. Responsive
Responsive-listening to a relatively short
stretch of language ( a greeting , question,
command, comprehension ,
comprehension check etc.) in order to
make short response.
3. Selective
Selective- the teacher asks the students
for example, to listen for names, numbers,
a grammatical category , directions(in a
map exercise), or certain facts and events.
4. Extensive
Extensive-listening for the gist , for
the main idea, and making
inferences are part of extensive
listening.
02
Micro- and Macro
skills of listening
Microskills
Index

1. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English


2. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory
3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed
positions, rhythmic structure. intonation contours, and their role in
signaling information.
4. Recognize reduced forms of words.
5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and
interpret word order patterns and their significance.
6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.
7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other
performance variables
8. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems
(eg, tense, agreement pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical
forms
9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and
minor constituents
10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different
grammatical forms
11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse
05
Macroskills
12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to
situations, participants, goals
13. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge.
14. From events, ideas, and so on, described, predict outcomes, infer
links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and
detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information,
given information, generalization, and exemplification.
15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
16. Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues to
decipher meanings.
17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting
key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for
help, and signaling comprehension or lack thereof.
03
Designing assessment
tasks
Intensive listening
1. Recognizing Phonological & Morphological Elements

Students hear: "I talked on the phone for hours."


Students read:
A: I talked on the phone for hours.
B: I talk on the phone for hours.

2. Paraphrase recognition

Students hear: "I'm so busy. I have to study hard for my


test."
Students read:
A: She is a worker.
B: She is a student.
Responsive listening
1. Question and answer
Students hear: "How long did it take you to get here?" Students read:
A: In about 30 minutes.
B: Yes, I did.
C: About 30 minutes.
D: About $30.00.

2. Open-ended responses

Students hear: "How long did it take you to get here?"

Students write or say the answer.


Listening cloze Seletive listening Index

Students hear: "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I regret to inform you that flight 928 to Baltimore,

Maryland has been delayed for 54 minutes. The new departure time is 10:17 a.m. Please remain close to

gate 39 in case of further changes."

Students read and complete:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I regret to inform you that flight _________ to Baltimore, Maryland

has been delayed for ________ minutes.

The new departure time is _________ a.m. Please remain close to gate___________ in case of further

changes.

☐ Note: This is a fairly simple cloze because the students must only attend to the numbers and where they

occur. Cloze exercises can be more difficult for more advanced learners.
Seletive listening
Information transfer

Students hear:

"Sally has a very busy day today. She has to wake up early, at 6:00 a.m., and be at school by 7:30 a.m. She

has a test in Biology class at 8:00 a.m., a presentation in Math class at 10:15 a.m., and a quiz in History

class at 11:45 a.m. After she eats lunch at noon, she has English class at 1:00 p.m. School ends at 2:30 p.m.

and then she has dance practice until 5:00. What a busy day!"

Students complete the table


Extensive listening

1.Dictation

In a traditional dictation, the first reading is done at normal speed and students listen for the gist

(the main ideas). The second reading is at a slowed pace with pauses between phrases and students

write. The third reading is again at normal speed and students check their answers.

2.Communicative stimulus-response

Students hear a longer conversation, story or lecture and then answer comprehension questions

about it.
Extensive listening
3.Authentic listening tasks

- Students listen to an actual news story or lecture (which can be found online at sites

such as http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/or

at http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/).

- Students are asked to do one of the following tasks:

• take notes which are collected and scored for accuracy and completeness.

• identify the differences between the listening and a reading about the same story with some

different details.

• retell the main points of the lecture or story.


04
Issues in
listening
assessment
Index

Validity in listening
assessment
● Measure comprehension (not hearing, spelling, prior
knowledge of a topic, or reading long multiple-choice
questions)
● Reflect the learning objectives and listening tasks of the
unit/course
Reliability in listening
assessment
● Minimize anxiety
● Ensure all learners can hear/see the text/video equally and that
there are no distracting noises
● Avoid ambiguous or ‘trick’ test items
● Ensure more than one scorer for correcting open- ended test items
● Critical to high-stakes exams
Authenticity in listening
assessment
● Use texts with authentic, real-life speech
● Avoid using texts that are dense and cognitively demanding
(meant to be read and not listened to)
● Choose comprehension tasks that reflect real- life purposes for
listening
● Avoid difficult accents and dialects
Washback in listening
assessment
● Impact of assessment on classroom teaching
● Potential of assessment to provide feedback for future
learning
Thank you for
listening

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