Assessing Listening

This paper deals with the topic of listening assessment, which is understood
as all the cognitive processes that the listener employs to develop listening
comprehension skills in second language speakers. This document is made for the
interest of knowing the factors that influence and affect the skill of listening.

The objective of the document is to analyze all those circumstances that affect or
improve English skills, especially listening. To differentiate the decoding processes
that occur in the process and to distinguish the levels that can be used to develop
activities that help listeners.

Celeste Medina, Abigail Delgado and Ariadna Yebra contributed ideas for activities,
improvements according to the information collected and the description of the steps
to follow.

One of the biggest challenges for the assessment of listening is that this skill is often
related to and can even become intertwined with other skills, especially reading. This
is because both skills are considered interpretive skills. The main differences
between listening and reading skills are described below.

Listening is transient: This means that the skill of listening is based entirely on
memory, there is no record of it except what your short-term memory can identify
and retain, generating confusion or distortion on the part of the listener or receiver. In
contrast to what we read, listening occurs in real time, regardless of whether it is an
audio or a conversation, what the listener is receiving is happening in the moment,
which forces the listener to process the information, construct concepts and add new
information on the fly in order to build a clear understanding.
Speech variability: When speaking, people use different types of sentences, change
the sound of words or express differently what they want to communicate with the
rest of the world. This variability occurs in every language and depends on many
factors which can make it difficult to understand the conversation.

The way we interpret the flow of sounds can be represented as a pyramid

(APPENDIX 1). It contains three steps. First the listener receives and identifies the
phonemes and syllables. Second the listener converts these phonemes into
something meaningful, the last step is based on decoding the sounds to give the
meaning.
Decoding can be described as the most important part of the listening process. The
listener searches for the meaning of the words in his or her vocabulary while
identifying the grammar to put the words together. Once these steps are completed,
the next phase is to complete this information with the context of the world. To
identify which is the correct meaning, the listener will have to use their world
knowledge, and also decide how to handle the information, identify what is relevant,
and which part of the string of words is important. We call this meaning construction.
In a listening activity there are several factors that the listener must employ. Starting
with an input decoding that begins by isolating the phonemes, the next step is to
identify the words from the phonemes, then a syntactic structure is created to a
group of words to create utterances, the last step is to link the utterances giving them
meaning with the previous ones. Listening tests should generate cognitive processes
at the level of knowledge of the listeners. The CEFR can provide contextual
information to help us design appropriate tasks (Appendix 2) . They start at A1 with
being able to recognise familiar words and basic phrases and a slow and clear
speech, which is the decoding and parsing we looked at earlier. By C2, learners are
expected to be able to understand basically anything. This requires the construction
of meaning and discourse in those higher-level processes.

Cognitive processing demands are not the only factors which affect difficulty,
however a variety of other factors such as speech rate, and the variety of accents
used in a test can affect difficulty. These factors need to be controlled carefully.

Factors relating to the test and the recording:

● Cognitive processing required
● Working memory load imposed
● The complexity of the language
● The types of grammatical Structures used
● The vocabulary
● The organizational features
● All need to be appropriate for the level of the listener.
 ACTIVITY: SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY

● Purpose: Students will be able to hear and identify the meaning and the
veracity of some statements, related to a known Holiday, based on a seen
video.
● Level: Students in A1 or A2 level - Secondary school
● Develop: The teacher will play the video (Appendix 3) one or two times,
without subtitles.
The teacher will hand a little worksheet (Appendix 4) with statements
students will decide if are true or false based on the video.
The teacher will check the right answers (Appendix 5) with the students, and
to close, will play the video again, but with subtitles.
● Improving suggestions: Use videos in a real context (realia) to challenge
the students in a way to improve their listening. Use videos with just a little or
nothing of words, just images, to avoid students reading and just hearing the
words.

Appendixes:
Appendix 1 :

Appendix 2

Appendix 3
Link of the video: https://youtu.be/neb7dbPW0Sk
Appendix 4
Appendix 5
Answers

REFERENCES:

● English with Cambridge. (2017). Understanding listening assessment:

what every teacher should know. YouTube. Retrieved March 23, 2023,
from https://youtu.be/cogZwogtfwo.