Week 9

Assessment for Teaching Listening

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• LEARNING OUTCOME:

• Students should be able to identify

key ideas about listening
assessment.

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

Listening Assessment
• Satisfactory tests of listening assessment have to fulfil three criteria—
reliability, validity, and practicality

• Reliability
• A reliable test is one whose results are not greatly affected by a change in
the conditions under which it is given and marked. For example, if a test is
given on different days by different people it should still give the same
results. If the same answer paper is marked by different people, the score
should be the same

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• Checking on reliability

• 1. test/retest
• 2. split halves
• 3. two equivalent forms of the same test.

• A reliable test is not necessarily a valid test, but an unreliable test cannot
be valid.

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• A listening test will be more reliable if the material that the learners listen to
is on tape. The tape recording ensures that whenever the test is used, the
speed of speaking and the accent will be the same.
• This assumes that the quality of the tape-recorder playing the tape and the
room in which the tape is played provide consistent conditions.
• Note that tape-recording the listening input could make the test less valid.

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• A test is more reliable if it has several points of assessment.

• This means, for example, that a listening test consisting of 50 separate
multiple-choice or true-false items is likely to be more reliable than a test
involving 12 questions based on a listening text.

• A test is more reliable if it can be marked in relation to a set of correct

answers or if the marking is based on clearly understood criteria.
Sometimes it is worth giving markers some training if several are involved.
Marking a dictation or scoring a role play, for example, requires a good
understanding of the marking criteria plus some marking practice and
discussion

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• A test will be more reliable if the learners are all familiar with the format of
the test. It is worth giving a little practice in answering a particular type of
test before it is used for testing.

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• Validity
• A test is valid if it measures what it is supposed to measure and when it is
used for the purpose for which it is designed. This last part of the definition
of validity is important because a test may be valid when it is used for a
particular purpose but not valid when it is used for another purpose

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• Content Validity

• Content validity involves considering whether the content of the test

reflects the content of the skill, language, or course being tested.
• For example, in order to decide if a test of academic listening skill has
content validity, we would need to decide what are the components of the
academic listening skill and how is this skill used.
• We might decide that academic listening involves note-taking, dealing with
academic vocabulary, and seeing the organisation of the formal spoken
discourse.

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• Typically the listener has had some opportunity to read on the topic or it is
one of a series of related lectures. Lectures are typically delivered at a
certain speed (data on speech rates can be found in Tauroza and Allison
(1990)).
• The next step is to see how well the test includes these components and
to see if it includes components that are not part of normal academic
listening. If the content of the test matches well with the content of the skill,
the test has high content validity.

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Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• Practicality
• Tests have to be used in the real world where there are limitations of time,
money, facilities and equipment, and willing helpers. There is no point in
designing a one hundred item listening test that is too long to fit into the 40
minutes which are available for testing

• Practicality can be looked at from several aspects: (1) economy of time,

money, and labour; (2) ease of administration and scoring; and (3) ease of
interpretation.

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• Practicality can only be accurately determined in relation to a given

situation, but generally a practical test is:
• short (notice that this may conflict with reliability),
• does not require lots of paper and equipment,
• does not require many people to administer it,
• is easy to understand,
• is easy to mark,
• has scores or results which are easy to interpret,
• and can be used over and over again without upsetting its validity

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Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• The Effect of a Test on Teaching

• One further criterion for a test is the influence of the form and the content
of the test on the classroom (this is sometimes called the “washback”
effect).
• For example, if the listening test is made up of true/false statements, this
could have the effect of very little work being done on listening beyond the
sentence level. A good test sets a good model for what should happen in
the classroom

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Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

Types of Listening Feedback

• Where possible, get learners to keep a record of their performance on
regular classroom activities.
• For example, learners could record their dictation scores on their own
graphs. To do this the number of errors per 100 words of dictation would
have to be calculated, but this is not difficult if the length of each dictation
passage is known.
• Similarly, learners could also record their scores on 50-item split
information activities

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Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• The teacher uses simple observation checklists when learners are

performing listening and speaking activities.
• The teacher gets learners to do regular self-assessment of their progress
as well as gathering evaluative feedback from them regarding the course.
• There are good reasons for getting the learners involved in making self-
assessment criteria regarding their participation in speaking activities.

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Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

• The teacher crosses items off a syllabus list when satisfied that the
learners are able to cope with that part of the syllabus.

• The learners build up a sequenced portfolio of completed activities and

feedback, where this is possible. This can show improvement during the
course.
• The teacher does regular testing.

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 EEAL3153 – Teaching Listening and Speaking
Chapter 8 – Assessment for Teaching Listening

REFLECTION
What have you learned today?

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