ASSESSING LISTENING

CHAPTER 6

Listening is a vital skill for

language learning.
 Basic Types of Listening.
Literally in nanosecond processes
flash through your brain when you listen.

 You recognize speech sound.

 You determine the type of speech
event. ( speaker, location,
purpose)
 Use decoding skills for
interpretation the message.
 Four types of listening
 Intensive: Listening for perception of
components (phonemes, words,
intonation)
 Responsive: Responsive. Listening to
a relatively short stretch of
language
( a greeting, question, command,
comprehension check, etc.).
Micro and Macro Skills of
Listening
Selective: Assessment tasks could
ask to listen for names, numbers,
directions, or certain facts and
events. TV , radio news items, stories.
 Extensive: Listening to develop a top-
down, global understanding of spoken
language. Performance ranges from
lengthy lectures, a conversation, to a
comprehensive message. Listening for the
main idea, and for making inferences-
 MicroSkills
Attending to the smaller bits and
chunks of language, in more of
bottom-up process
 Microskills
 Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English
 .Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short term memory.
 Recognizese English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed
positions, rhythmic structures,intonation concourse, and their roles in
signaling information.
 Recognize reduced forms of words.
 Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret
word order patterns and theirsignificance.
 Process speech at different rate of delivery.
 Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other
performance variables.
 Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verb etc.) systems (e.g. tense,
agreement, pluralisation), patterns, rules, and elliptiacl forms.
 Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor
constituents.
 Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different
grammatical forms.
 Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discours
 MacroSkills

Focusing on the larger elements

involved in a top-down
approach
 Macroskills
 Recognize the communicative functions of utterance
according to situations, participants, goals.
 Infer situations, participants, goals using real-word
knowledge.
 From events, ideas, and so on, describes, 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, generalisation, and
exemplification.
 Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
 Use facial, kinetic, body language, and other nonverbal clues
to decipher meanings.
 Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as
detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from
context, appealing for help, and signalling comprehension or
lack thereof.
What makes listening difficult
 1. Clustering Chunking-phrases, clauses,
constituents
 2. Redundancy : Repetitions, Rephrasing,
Elaborations and Insertions
 3. Reduced Forms Understanding the
reduced forms that may not have been
a part of English learner’s past
experiences in classes where only formal
”textbook” language has been presented
What makes listening difficult
 4. Performance variables: Hesitations,
False starts, Corrections, Diversion
 5. Colloquial Language: Idioms, slang,
reduced forms, shared cultural
knowledge
 6. Rate of Delivery: Keeping up with the
speed of delivery, processing automatically
as the speaker continues
 Designing Assessment Tasks :
Intensive Listening
 Recognizing Phonological &
Morphological Elements
 a. Phonemics pair, consonants
 Test-takers hear: He’s from California
 Test-taken read:
 a. He’s from California
 b. She’s from California
 Designing Assessment Tasks :
Intensive Listening .
 b. Phonemics pair, vowels
 c. Morphological pair, -ed ending.
 Test -taken hear: Is he living?
 Test-takers read : a. Is he leaving ?
b. Is he living?
 Designing Assessment Tasks :
Intensive Listening
 7. Stress, Rhythm, and Intonation:
Correctly understanding prosodic
elements of spoken language, which is
almost always much more difficult than
understanding the smaller phonological
bits and pieces.
 Interaction: Negotiation, clarification,
attending signals, turn taking, maintenance,
termination
 Designing Assessment Tasks :
Intensive Listening
 Morphological pair, -ed ending
 Test-takers read :
 a. Is he leaving ?
 b. Is he living?
 Test-takers read :
 a. I missed you very much
 b. I miss you very much