Tes Of Listening Compotence

Lecturer: Cut dara ilfa rahila, M.Pd. BI

Written By:
Linda Dayanti : 18010410463
Sri Wahyuni : 18010410467
Sri Widia Rahma : 18010410468

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

NATIONAL ISLAMIC INSTITUTE OF TAKENGON
2020/2021
 PREFACE

Assalamu’alaikum Wr. Wb.

Thanks to Allah SWT for all the things that were given to us, without him we could
not finish the paper.

Thank you very much to all partners who helped me a lot to write this paper which
makes the paper can be finished on time. As the author of the paper, we realize that there is
so much imperfect and incorrect thing on the grammatical or content that we have written.
Because of that, we hope that the reader could give some feedback to correct the paper, so in
the future paper, we could make it better.

We hope that the paper could give some benefit to the reader and of course the
authors themselves.

Wassalam.

Takengon, 31 March 2021

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ........................................................................................................................... i
TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................. ii

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background ............................................................................................................ 1
B. Formulation of The Problems ................................................................................ 1
C. purpose ................................................................................................................... 1

BAB II
THEORICAL STUDY
A. The definition of assessment and listening................................................................
..................................................................................................................................2
B. The important of listening........................................................................................... ..5
C. The principles behind teaching listening........................................................................6
D. The basic types of listening............................................................................................7
E. The designing tasks........................................................................................................8

BAB III
CONCLUSION
A. Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 9

BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................. 10
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background
Language tests are formal instruments of assessment. They can be used either
to measure proficiency without reference to a particular programme of learning or to
measure the extent to which learners have achieved the goals of a specific course. The
language tests that adult migrants are sometimes required to take in order to secure
entry to their host country, permanent residence or citizenship, may fall into either of
these categories.
B. Questions of The Problems
a. The Definition of Assessment & Listening?
b. The Important Of Listening?
c. The Principles Behind Teaching Listening?
d. The Basic Types Of Listening?
e. The Micro And Macro Skill Of Listening?
f. The Designing Tasks?
C. Objectives
a. To Understand The Definition of Assessment & Listening
b. To Understend The Important Of Listening
c. To Understend The Principles Behind Teaching Listening
d. To Understend The Basic Types Of Listening
e. To Understend The Micro And Macro Skill Of Listening
f. To Understend The Designing Tasks
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background
Listening is more than merely hearing words. Listening is an active process by which
students receive, construct meanig from, and respond to spoken and or nonverbal messages
(Emmert, 1994). As such, it forms an integral part of the communication process and should
not be separated form the other language arts.

Listening comprehension complements reading comprehension. Verbally clarifying

the spoken message before, during. And after a presentation enhances listening
comprehension. Writing, in turn, clarifies and documents the spoken message.

Teacher may use several listening test to check comprehension, evaluate listening
skills and use of listening strategies, and extend the knowledge gained to other contexts such
as predicting, may expand on the topic or the language of the listening text or may transfer
what has been learned to reading, speaking, or writing activities.

Furthermore, several activities or types of test and assessment will be discussed more
in this paper in emphasizing how teacher assess’ students’ listening comprehension with
paper entilted “Assessing Listening”
 CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

A. Definition of Assessment Listening

1. Definition of Assessment

Assessment is an ongoing pedagogical process that includes a number of evaluative

acts on the part of the teacher.

2. Definition of Listening Skill

Listening is an active and interactional process in which a listener receives speech

sounds and tries to attach meaning to the spoken words. The listener tries to understand the
itended message of the oral text to respon effectively to oral communication.

So, from the above two definitions we can conclude that assessing listening is a
process of assessment conducted by a teacher to the students on the ability of students in
listening.

The reason why we should teach the listening students One of the main reasons for
getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different varieties and accents
rather than just the voice of their teacher with is own idiosyncrasies. in todays world, they
need to be exposed not only to one variety of English (British, for example) but also to
varieties such as American English, Australian English, Caribbean English, Indian English,
or West African English.

B. The Important Of Listening

Listening has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking. In the
standardized testing industry, a number of separate oral production test are available (tes of
spoken english, oral proficiency inventory, and phonepass, to name several that are described
chapter 7 of this book), but it is rare to find just a listening test.

One reason for this emphasisi is that listening is often implied as a component of
speaking. How could you speak a language without also listening? In addition, the overtly
observable nature of speaking renders it more empirically measurable the listening.
 Every teacher of langunge knows that’s one oral production ability-other than
monologues, speeches, reading aloud, and the like-is only as good as one’s listening
comprehension ability. But of even further impact is the likehood that input in the aural-oral
mode accounts for a large proportion of succesful language acquisition. In a typical day, we
do measurably more listening than speaking (with the exceptionof one or two of your friends
who may be nonstop chatterboxesl). Whether in the workplace, educational, or home
contexts, aural comprehension far outstrips oral production in quantifiable terms of time,
number of words, effort, and attention.

We therefore need to pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for

assessment in the classroom.

C. The Principles Behind Teaching Listening

However good our tape is, it will be useless if the tape recorder has a poor speaker or
if the motor speed keeps changing and the tape goes faster or slower.

1. We need to be sure that the tape recorder is just as important as the tape.

2. Preparation is vital. Teacher and student need to listen to the tape all the way through
before they take it into class. That way, they will be prepared for any problems, noises,
accents etc, that come up. Students need to be made ready to listen. This means that they will
need to look at pictures, discuss the topic, or read the question first.

3. Once will not enough. There almost no occasions when the teacher will play a tape only
once students will want to hear it again to pick up the tings they missed the first time.

4. Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of listening, not just to the
language. As with reading, the most important part of listening practice is to draw out the
meaning, what is itended, what impression it makes on the students. Question like “do you
agree?” are just important as question like “what language did she use to invite him?”

5. Different listening stages demand different listening tasks. Because there are different
things we want to do with a listening text for different stages.

6. Good teachers exploit listening texts to the full. If teachers ask student to invest time and
emotional energy in a listening task, and if they themselves have spent time choosing and
preparing the listening, then it makes sense to use the tape for as many different listening
applications as possible. After an initial play of a tape, teacher can play it again for various
kinds of study before using the subject matter, situation or tape script for a new activity

D. Basic Types Of Listening

As with all effective test, designing appropriate assessment task in listening begins
with the specification of objectives, or criteria. Those objectives may be classified in terms of
several types of listening performance. Think about what you do when you listen. Literally in
nanosecond, the following processes flash through your brain :

1.You recognize speech sounds and hold a temporary “imprint” of them in short-term
memory.

2.You simultancously determine the type of speech event (monologue, interpersonal

dialogue, transactional dialogue) that is being processed and attend to its context (who the
speaker is, location, purpose) and the content of the message.

You use (bottom-up) linguistic decoding skills and/or (top-down) background schemata to
bring a plausible interpretation to the message, and assign a literal and intended meaning to
the utterance.

4. In most cases (except for repetition tasks, which involve short-term memory only) you
delete the exact linguistic form in which the message was originally received in favor of
conceptually retaining important or relevant information in long term memory.

5.Understanding spoken discourse: bottom-up and top-down processing

6. Two different kinds of processes are involved in understanding spoken discourse.

7. These are often referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing.

Bottom-up processing and Top-down Processing.

1. Bottomp Up Processes

Bottomp up processes to the listener ability to distinguish sounds heard in speech to

reconstruct the spekers’s message. Flowder and miller(2005:24).

Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the
message. Comprehension begins with the received data that is analyzed as successive levels
of organization – sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts – until meaning is derived.
Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding.
 The listener’s lexical and grammatical competence in a language provides the basis
for bottom-up processing. The input is scanned for familiar words, and grammatical
knowledge is used to work out the relationship between elements of sentences. Clark and
Clark (1977:49) summarize this view of listening in the following way:

 Listeners take in raw speech and hold a phonological representation of it

in working memory.
 They immediately attempt to organize the phonological representation
into constituents, identifying their content and function.
 They identify each constituent and then construct underlying propositions,
building continually onto a hierarchical representation of propositions.
 Once they have identified the propositions for a constituent, they retain
them in working memory and at some point purge memory of the
phonological representation. In doing this, they forget the exact wording
and retain the meaning.

We can illustrate this with an example. Imagine I said the following to you: “The guy
I sat next to on the bus this morning on the way to work was telling me he runs a Thai
restaurant in Chinatown. Apparently, it’s very popular at the moment.”

To understand this utterance using bottom-up processing, we have to mentally break it

down into its components. This is referred to as “chunking.” Here are the chunks that guide
us to the underlying core meaning of the utterances:

- the guy

- I sat next to on the bus

- this morning

- was telling me

- he runs a Thai restaurant in Chinatown

- apparently it’s very popular

- at the moment

The chunks help us identify the underlying propositions the utterances express, namely:

-  I was on the bus.

-  There was a guy next to me.

- We talked.

-  He said he runs a Thai restaurant.

- It’s in Chinatown.

- It’s very popular now.

- It is these units of meaning that we remember, and not the form in which we

-  initially heard them. Our knowledge of grammar helps us find the appropriate

-  chunks, and the speaker also assists us in this process through intonation and pausing.

2. Top-Down Processing

Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge
in understanding the meaning of a message. Whereas bottom-up processing goes from
language to meaning, top-down processing goes from meaning to language. The background
knowledge required for top-down processing may be previous knowledge about the topic of
discourse, situational or contextual knowledge, or knowledge in the form of “schemata” or
“scripts” – plans about the overall structure of events and the relationships between them. For
example, consider how we might respond to the following utterance: “I heard on the news
there was a big earthquake in China last night.”

On recognizing the word earthquake, we generate a set of questions for which we

want answers:

- Where exactly was the earthquake?

- How big was it?

- Did it cause a lot of damage?

- Were many people killed or injured?

- What rescue efforts are under way?

These questions guide us through the understanding of any subsequent discourse that
we hear, and they focus our listening on what is said in response to the questions. Each of
these stages represent a potential assessment objective :
  Comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes, words,
intonation, or grammatical category.
 Understanding of pragmatic context
 Determining meaning of auditory input
 Developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding.

From this stages we can derive four commonly identified types of listening
perfomance, each of which comprises a category within which to consider assesment tasks
and procedures.

1. Intensive, listening for perception of the components (phonemes, words, intonations,

discourse markers, etc) for a larger stretch p language.

2. Responsive. Listening to a relatively short stretch of language (a greeting, question,

command, comprehension check, etc.) in orser to make an equaly short respponse.

3. Selective. Processing stretches of discourse such as short monologues for sveral minutes in
order to “scan” for certain information. The purpose of such performance is not neccessarily
to look for global or general meanings, but to be able to comprehend designated information
in a context of longer streches of spoken language (such as Classroom directions from a
teacher, TV or radio news items, or stories). Assessment tasks in selective listening could ask
students, for example, to listen names, numbers, a grammatical category, direction (in a map
exercise) or certain facts and events.

4.Extensive. Listening to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language.

Extensive performance ranges from listening to lengthy lectures to listening to a conversation
and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose. Listening for the gist, for the main idea,
and making inferences are all part of extensive listening.

E. Micro And Macro Skill Of Listening

A useful way of synthesizing the above two list is to consider a finite number of
micro- and macroskills implied in the performance of listening comprehension. Richard
(1983) list of microskills has proven useful in the domain of specifing objectives for learning
and may be even more useful in forcing test makers to carefully identify specific assessment
objectives. In the following box, the skills are sub-devided into what I prefer to think of as
microskills (attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of a bottom-up
process) and macroskills (focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach to
a listening task). The microskills and macroskills provide 17 different objectives to assess in
listening. Micro- and microskills of listening (adapted from Richard, 1983). Microskills

1) Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English

2) Retain chunks of language of differrent length in short-term memory.

3) Recognize English stress patterns, word 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 interpre 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 (noun, verbs, etc) system (e.g. tense, agreement,
pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.

9) Delect 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.

Macroskills

1. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances. According to situations,

participants, goals.

2. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge.

3. From events, ideas, and so on, describe, 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.[13]

4. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings

5.Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.
6. 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.

Implied in the taxonomy above is a nation of what makes many aspects of listening
different, or why listening is not simply a linear process of recording strings of language as
they are transmitted into our brains. Developing a sense of which aspects of listening
performance are predictably difficult will help you to challenge your students appropriately
and to design weights to items. Consider the following list of what makes listening difficult
(adapted from Richard, 1983; Ur, 1984; Dunkel 1991).

1. Clustering : attending to appropriate “chunks” of language-phrases, clauses, constituents

2. Redundancy; recognizing the kind of repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations, and insertions

that unrehearsed spoken language often contains, and benefiting from that recognition

3.Reduced forms: understanding the reduced forms that may not have been a part of an
English learner’s past learning experience in classes where only formal “textbook” language
has been presented

4.Performance variables: being able to “weed out” hesitations, false starts, pauses, and
correctionsin natural speech

5.Colloqual language: comprehending idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural

knowledge

6. Rate of delivery: keeping up with the speed of delivery, processing automatically as the
speaker continues

7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation: correctly understanding prosodic elements of spoken

language, which almost always much more difficult than understanding the smaller
phonological bits and pieces

8.Interaction: meaning the interactive flow of language from listening to speaking to

listening,
F. Designing Tasks

The task will not only require a spoken text, but may also require written information,
question, picture, diagrams, a grid to be filled in or a transcript or part of the text.[16]

1. Intensive Listening

Once you have determined objectives, your next step is to design the task including
making decisions about how you will elicit performance and how you will expect the tes-
taker to respond. We will elicit look at tasks that range from intensive listening performance,
such as minimal phonemic pair recognition, to extensive comprehension of language in
communicative contexts. The focus in this section is so on the microskills of intensive
listening.

Ex. Intensive Listening :

a. Distinguish phonemic pairs

Ex : (Grass – Glass); (Leave – Live)

b. Distinguish morphological pairs

Ex : (Miss- Missed)

c. Distinguish Stress patterns

Ex : (I can go – I can’t go)

d. Paraphrase recognition

Ex : ( Icome from Taiwan – I’m Taiwanese

e. Repetition

Ex : (a repeat a word).

2. Responsive Listening

A question and answer format can provide some interactivity in these lower end
listening tasks. The test-taker’s response is the appropriate answer to a quetion. Appropriate
response to a question. The objective of this item is recognition of the Wh-Question how
much and its appropriate response. Distractors are chosen to represent common learner
errors :
a. Responding to how much vs how much longer

b. Confusing how much in reference to time vs. More frequent reference to money.

c. Confusing a Wh-question with a yes/no question.

None of the tasks so far discussed have to be framed in a multiple-choice

format. They can be offered in a more open-ended framework in which tes-takers write or
speak the response. The above item would then look like this :

Open-ended response to a question. In open-ended response formats gain a small

amount of authenticity and creativity they of course suffer some in their practically, as
teachers must then read students response and judge their appropriateness, which takes time.

3. Selective Listening

A third type of listening perfomance is selective listening. In which tes-taker listens to

a limited quantify of aural input and must discern within it some specific information. A
number of techniques have been used that require selective listening.

Ex. Selective Listening :

a. Listening Cloze

(Students Fill in the blanks)

b. Verbal information transfer

(students give MC verbal response)

c.Picture Cued Information transfer

(students choose a picture)

d. Chart complection

(Students feel in a grid)

e. Sentence repetition

(students repeat stimulus sentence)

4. Extensive Listening
 Drawing a clear distinctionbetween any two of the categories of listening referred to
here is problematic, but perhaps the fuzziest division is between selective and extensive
listening.

Ex. Extensive Listening :

a. Dictation

(students listen (usually 3 times) and write a paragraph)

b. Dialogue

(students hear dialogue – Multiple Choise comperehension question)

c. Dialogue

(students hear dialogue – open-ended response)

d. Lecture

(students hear dialogue – open ended response)

(students take a summarize, list main points, etc)

e. Interpretive tasks

(students hear a poem – interpret meaning)

f. Stories, narrative

(students retel a story).

 CHAPTER III

CONCLUTION

A. Conclution
From the above discussion we can conclude that assessing listening is one of
step a teacher in assessing the ability of students in listening. Of course, as a teacher
not only assessing the listening ability of student but also a teacher is required to
improve the ability of student in English aspects, such as aspects of reading, writing,
spiking and especially listening.
From the above discussion we know that teaching students in listening aspects
there are many teaching methods that aim to improve the ability of children. examples
of task-giving methods in listening aspects such as:

1. Intensive listening
2. responsive listening
3. selective listening
4. Extensive listening
From the example example of the method can be believed that the method can
increase the interest of students in learning listening at the same time can improve the
student’s ability to listening aspect. with this paper we as the author expects that a teacher can
improve creativity in teaching and assessing listening to students.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Douglas, Brown, Teaching by Principles san Francisco state University, (Third Edition
2007)

Assoc. Prof. Ekrem SOLAK”Teaching language Skills For prospective English teachers

Jeremy Harmer “how to Teach English”, (Addision Wesley Longman Limited 1998)

Leon Townsend-cartwright”Adapting teaching to improve listening instruction for a business

english class in japan2014”pg.7

Jack C Richard “Teaching Listening and Speaking”(Cambride: Cambride University Press

2008).

Kristanti Ayunita (Jurnal Assessing listening in the language classroom 2013)

Gery Buck”assessing listening”(Cambridge University Pres, 2001)p.123.