ASSESSMENT

LISTENING COMPREHENSION
ASSESSMENT
MICRO AND MACRO SKILLS OF LISTENING
Brown states that listening comprehension assessment involves
two main aspects: language aspects (micro skill) and contents
understanding (macro skill).
Micro skill can be formulated in the following items:
1.Discriminating among the distinctive sounds of English;
2.Retaining chunks of language at different lengths in short-term
memory;
3.Recognizing English stress and intonation patterns to signal
information;
4.Recognizing reduced forms of words;
5.Distinguishing word boundaries, recognizing a core of words,
and interpreting word order;
6.Processing speech at different rates of delivery
7. Processing speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and
other performances;
8. Recognizing grammatical word classes, systems, and pattern
rules;
9. Detecting sentence constituents and distinguishing between
major and minor ones;
10. Recognizing meanings by different grammatical forms;
11. Recognizing cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
Macro skill can be formulated in the following items:
1. Recognizing the communicative functions of utterances
according to situations;
2. Inferring situations, goals, and participants using real-world
knowledge;
3. Predicting outcomes, inferring links and connection between
events;
4. Distinguishing between literal and implied meanings;
5. Using facial, kinesics, body language to decipher meaning;
6. Developing and using a battery of listening strategies.
 TYPES OF LISTENING ASSESSMENT TASKS I
Discriminative Listening
• Discriminative Listening is an awareness of changes in pitch
and loudness of sounds and it is determining if sounds are
different or the same.
For example
Difference sounds is identified
• “I would rank it first” and “I drank it first”
• bat/ bat, bat/bet.
• Safe/save
• Made/mate
• Age/h
Comprehension Listening
It is also known as content listening, informative listening, and
full listening.
For example
On the recording, you will hear:

In your test book, you will read:

1. What is the subject of the announcement?
a) The school will be adding new classes.
b) Three new teachers will be working at the school.
c) Some students have received an award.
TYPES OF LISTENING ASSESSMENT TASKS II

Intensive Listening Tasks

• Distinguishing phonemic pairs. Ex. Grass – glass; leave – live
• Distinguishing morphological pairs. Ex. Miss – missed;
• Distinguishing stress patterns. Ex. I can go; I can’t go
• Paraphrase recognition. Ex. I come from Taiwan; I’m
Taiwanese
• Repetition (s repeat a word)
Responsive Listening Tasks
• Question.
Ex. What time is it? – Multiple choice responses
• Question.
Ex. What time is it? – Open-ended response
• Simple discourse sequences.
Ex. Hello, nice weather. Tough test
Selective Listening Tasks
• Listening cloze (students fill in the blanks);
• Verbal information transfer (students give MC verbal
response);
• Picture cued information transfer (students choose a picture);
• Chart completion (students feel in a grid);
• Sentence repetition (students repeat stimulus sentence).
Extensive Listening Tasks
• Dictation (students listen (usually 3 times) and write a
paragraph);
• Dialogue (students hear dialogue – MC comprehension
questions);
• Dialogue (students hear dialogue – open – ended response);
• Lecture (students take notes, summarize, list main points,
etc);
• Interpretive tasks (students hear a poem – interpret meaning);
• Stories, narrative (students retell a story).
References and Recommended Reading
• Brown, H. Douglas. (2004). Principles of Language Learning
and Teaching. London: Longman.
• Brown, H. Douglas. (1994). Teaching by Principles: An
Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. New Jersey:
Prentice Hall Regents.