Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter V Assessing Listening

As reading, listening is an invisible and interactive skill, again bottom up and top down processes are involve actively constructing meaning.  However, this skill has been neglected emphasizing productive skills. There are 3 approaches to listening: discrete point (brakes the listening in to components assessed separately), the integrative approach (like in dictation and cloze tasks, it integrates the components) and the communicative approach (understand the message and use it in context).

Before designing assessment tasks, is important to differentiate academic and general listening.  In  general listening 33 micro skills have been identified, such as: clustering, recognizing, redundancy, comprehending reduced forms and hesitations, pauses, false starts and corrections, understanding colloquial language, processing prosodic features, understanding and using rules of conversation interaction, etc.  For academic listening there are some higher micro skills that include: identifying the purpose of a lecture and its logical development, understand the relationship among discourse units, recognize lexical terms, etc.

It is important to take in to account that in spite of the difficulties of assessing the skill, it has to be assessed. Reading aloud must be changed for real listening texts (conversations for example), give credit for what the students know ( focus on listening comprehension only), give importance to the background knowledge, Focus on meaning, give a purpose for listening, don’t expect full comprehension, use listening task in which reading or writing is done a little, assess all types of listening.

Good techniques assessing listening are: are: phonemic discrimination, paraphrase recognition, objective formats: (Multiple Choice (three options only), T/F, Short Answer, cloze, dictation, information transfer and note taking.