Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Over and Out: 6 Creative ESL Listening Assessment Ideas: 1. Assessing The Listening of Absolute Beginners
Over and Out: 6 Creative ESL Listening Assessment Ideas: 1. Assessing The Listening of Absolute Beginners
Done the wrong way, assessments can destroy students’ self-esteem. They’ll
start to doubt their language proficiency and become reluctant to participate in
class exercises.
But done right, assessments can be one of the most effective ways to build up
your students’ confidence and motivation.
Listening assessments are great for determining students’ comprehension or
their ability to communicate. What’s more, the way your students perform on
their listening assessments can help you look at how to improve lesson plans
and address the needs your learners more closely.
Sounds good, right? So, how do you give a listening assessment
that empowers your students?
Here are some activities that can be used to evaluate listening at all levels.
Activity: The teacher will call out each verb. Students will be asked to
mimic each verb called out. This time, the teacher won’t participate in the
activity.
Post-activity: The teacher will remove all visuals and only call out
each action. Students will then mimic each action the mentions. As this is
happening, the teacher should take note to make sure students mimic each
verb correctly.
What’s more, this activity can be turned into a game. Simply call out verbs for
students to mimic. Every student that does the wrong action is out until there
is a winner.
At the end of class, have your learners read their sentences and have their
classmates identify which images they’re talking about.
If you have time after the assessment, have your students role play a job
interview in pairs using the answers from their information sheets.
4. Assessing the Listening of Intermediate Students
Activity: Minimal pairs
Minimal pairs are great for isolating troublesome sounds, especially when
focusing on listening comprehension and accent reduction. If you’d like to
learn more about minimal pairs, this article provides plenty of examples you
can use in your assessment. Once you’ve got a list of minimal pairs you want
to introduce, begin the activity.
At the end of the lesson, go over the answers with your students and look at
which sounds they had the most trouble identifying. This will help you when
preparing the class for future listening exercises.
The great thing about this assessment is that it doesn’t only test your students’
listening capabilities, it also gives them an opportunity to practice their
speaking as well. And if you’re planning on giving a more comprehensive
assessment, you can even have them write a short essay on the debate topic
after the assessment is over.
As you can see, listening assessments don’t have to follow the same listen-
and-answer format that students are accustomed to. With a little bit of
planning and creativity, you can turn your listening assessments into a fun and
engaging exercises that students enjoy.