Chapter 6: Assessing Listening (Brown)

-Assessment is more authentic and provides more wash-back when skills are integrated.

-When you propose to assess someone’s ability in once or a combination of the four skills, you assess that person’s
competence, but you observe the person’s performance. Sometimes the performance doesn’t indicate true
competence, because any distraction that could be in the classroom, or an emotional distraction. So, one important
principle for assessing a learner’s competence is to consider the fallibility of the results of a single performance, such as
that produced in a test. As a teacher, the obligation is to triangulate the measurements: Consider at least two or more
performances and/or contexts before drawing a conclusion. The importance of listening is paramount because as
Brown put it, “one’s oral production ability is only as good as one’s listening comprehension ability.”

The process of listening may be classified in the following stages:

 Comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes, words, intonation, etc.

 Understanding of pragmatic context: Determine the type of speech event and the content of the message.
 Determining meaning of auditory input: You use bottom-up and top-down in order to interpretate the message
and assign a literal and intended meaning to the utterance.
 Developing the essence a global understanding.

From those stages derive the types of listening performance, which are Intensive, Responsive, Selective and Extensive

1. Intensive: Listening for perception of components. Recognizing phonological and morphological elements.
2. Responsive: Listening to a relatively short stretch of language in order to make an equally short response
(appropriate respond to a question)
3. Selective: Listening to develop a bottom-up. Scanning certain information in order to assign a global meaning
or specific meaning.
4. Extensive: Listening to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language. Listening for the essence,
for the main idea and making inferences are part of extensive listening.

Micro and Macroskills of Listening.

Microskills: 11.Recognize cohesive devices in spoken language.

1. Discriminate among the different sounds of English. Macroskills

2. Retain chunk of language in short-term memory.
3. Recognize English stress patterns (intonation, rhythm)
4. Recognize reduced forms of words.
5. Distinguish word boundaries and core of words,
recognizing their significance.
6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.
7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections,
etc.
8. Recognize grammatical word classes, systems, patterns,
rules and forms.
9. Recognize sentence constituents.
10.Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in
different grammatical forms.
12. Recognize the communicative functions of
utterances.
13. Infer situations, participants and goals using real-
world knowledge.
14. Predict, infer, deduce causes and effects, detect
relations, new given information from different
events and situations.
15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
16. Use facial, kinesics, body language, and other
nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.
17. Develop listening strategies such as detecting key
words or guessing the meaning of words from
context, etc.
Listening Taxonomy: List of what makes listening difficult.

1. Clustering: Attending to appropriate chunks of language, phrases, clauses.

2. Redundancy: Recognizing the kinds of repetitions.
3. Reduced forms: Understanding the reduced forms.
4. Performance variables: Being able to eliminate false starts, pauses and corrections in natural speech.
5. Colloquial language: Comprehending idioms, slangs, reduced forms.
6. Rate of delivery: Maintain the speed of delivery, processing automatically as the speaker continues.
7. Stress, rhythm and intonation: Correctly understanding of elements from spoken language.
8. Interaction: Managing the interactive flow of language from listening to speaking to listening, etc.

Designing Assessment Tasks

Intensive Listening: Recognizing phonological and morphological elements, Paraphrase recognition.

Responsive Listening: question-and-answer format. Response to a question.

Selective Listening: Learner must discern some specific information. Listening cloze tasks deals with that student have to
listen to a story, a monologue or a conversation and simultaneously read written text in which
selected words have been deleted. Information transferring to a visual representation. Sentence
repetition in which you can evaluate the intonation.

Extensive Listening: Dictation. Communicative Stimulus-Response task (multiple choice comprehension items), authentic
listening tasks.

Summary

The assessment of listening or speaking, reading and writing of a student involves the assessment of their
competence, but what we observe is the performance. Performance is not always a true indication of a person’s
competence, and observing listening and reading can be as Brown would say, seeing the wind blowing. The
importance of listening is paramount because as Brown put it, “one’s oral production ability is only as good as one’s
listening comprehension ability.” Brown goes on to discuss the stages of listening which we can then derive the types
of listening, which are Intensive, Responsive, Selective and Extensive. Richard synthesizes the stages and types of
listening into 17 different micro and macro-skills which provide objectives for test makers to assess listening. With
objective in hand test makers can now begin the work of designing assessment tasks for the different types of
listening. Phonological and morphological elements of language are a typical form of intensive listening, followed by
paraphrasing recognition which both deals with the micro-skill objectives. To assess the responsive listening a
question-and-answer format provides the interactivity required. The third type of listening performance is selective
listening which can be assessed through a listening cloze task or an information transfer task. The forth type of
listening performance, extensive listening which the division between selective and extensive tasks are less clear as
we move along the micro macro continuum can be assess through dictations, communicative stimulus-response tasks
and authentic listening tasks.