Assessing Listening
Problems of Lang. Assessment

A problem: performance = competence?
 In language assessment we intend to assess
a person’s competence or language ability,
but we do it through observing the person’s
performance.
 Also taking into account learners’ multiintelligence
 Important to have multiple measures
Observable performance

Can the four skills be directly observed?
(Brown 118)
– Listening
– Speaking
– Reading
– Writing

All assessment of receptive performance must be
made by inference.
Purposes

What is included in listening comprehension?
(Brown 121)
– Micro-skills of listening (bottom-up)
– Macro-skills off listening (top-down)

What do we listen for in real life?
– Communication of meaning
– Exchange of facts, ideas
– Interpreting speaker’s intentions
Four Types of Listening Tasks

(Brown 120)
 Intensive
– Phonological/morphological elements
– paraphrase

Responsive
 Selective
 Extensive
Dictation

Factors to determine level of difficulty
– The speed and clarity with which the text is
read
– The complexity of, and the learners’ familiarity
with, the syntactic structures in the passage
– Vocabulary, topic, discourse genre
– The lengths of the bursts and the pauses
between bursts
(Bailey 14)
Auditory Discrimination

Reasons against auditory discrimination
– Phoneme discrimination even difficult for NSs
 Different dialects
 Many Eng. dialects fail to make some vowel and
consonant contrasts
– Ability to distinguish between phonemes vs.
ability to understand verbal messages
– Occasional confusion over selected pairs of
phonemes doesn’t matter much.

In real life situations, listener has contextual clues
Issues of Concern

What do you really want the testees to
demonstrate in the listening test?
– Ability to discriminate phonemes?
– Ability to recognize stress/intonation patterns
– Structural understanding?
– Comprehension of continuous speech in an
authentic context?
– Ability to handle academic lectures?