Observing the Performance of the Four Skills
Things that we can observe during listening
as the receptive skills are process and product
(invisible, audible)
The Importance of Listening
Listening is often implied as a component of
speaking
Types of Listening
Intensive: phonemes, words, intonation
Responsive: a greeting, command, question
Selective: TV , radio news items, stories
Extensive: listening for the gist, the main
idea, making inference
Micro and Macro Skills of Listening
Micro Skills
Attending to the smaller bits and chunks
of language, in more of bottom-up process
Macro Skills
Focusing on the larger elements involved in
a top-down approach
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
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
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.
8. Interaction:
Negotiation, clarification, attending
signals, turn taking, maintenance,
termination
Designing Assessment Tasks : Intensive Listening
1. Recognizing Phonological & Morphological
Elements
a. Phonemics pair, consonants
Test-takers read :
a. He’s from California
b. She’s from California
b. Phonemics pair, vowels
Test-takers read : a. Is he leaving ?
b. Is he living?
c. Morphological pair, -ed ending
Test-takers read : a. I missed you very much
b. I miss you very much
d. Stress Pattern in can’t
Test-takers read : a. My girlfriend can’t go to the party
b. My girlfriend can go to the party
e. One-word stimulus
Test-takers read : a. vine
b. wine
2. Paraphrase Recognition
a. Sentence paraphrase
Test-takers read : a. Keiko is comfortable in Japan
b. Keiko wants to come to Japan
c. Keiko is Japanese
d. Keiko likes Japan
b. Dialogue paraphrase
Test-takers read : a. Tracy lives in the United States
b. Tracy is American
c. Tracy comes from Canada
d. Maria is Canadian
Designing Assessment Tasks :
Responsive Listening
1. Appropriate response to a question
Test-takers read : a. In about an hour.
b. About an hour
c. About $10
d. Yes, I did
2. Open-ended response to a question
Test-takers read write or speak :_______________
Designing Assessment Tasks:
Selective Listening
Selective listening, in which the test-taker
listen to a limited quantity of aural input
and must discern within it some specific
information
A number of techniques have been used that
require selective listening.
Listening Cloze
Information Transfer
Sentence Repetition
Listening Cloze
(cloze dictations or partial dictations)
It requires the test-taker to listen a story
monologue, or conversation and
simultaneously read the written text in which
selected words or phrases have been selected
In a listening cloze task, test-takers see a
transcript of the passage that they are
listening to and fill in the blanks with the
words or phrases that they hear
Test-takers write the missing words or
phrases in the blanks
Flight
gate
Flight
to Portland will depart from
at
P.M
to Reno will depart at
P.M from gate seventeen
Information Transfer
Information transfer: multiple-picture-cuedselection
Information transfer: single-picture-cuedverbal-multiple-choice
Information transfer: chart-filling
Information transfer:
multiple-picture-cued-selection
Information transfer: single-picturecued-verbal-multiple-choice
Information transfer: chart-filling
8:00
10:00
12:00
2:00
4:00
6:00
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
get up
get up
get up
get up
get up
Weekends
Sentence Repetition
The task of simply repeating a sentence or a
partial sentence, or sentence repetition, is also
used as an assessment of listening
comprehension
Designing assessment Test:
Extensive Listening
Listening to develop a top down, global
understanding of spoken language
Some extensive / quasi-extensive
listening comprehension tasks
1. Dictation: widely researched genre of
assessing listening comprehension
> 50 – 100 words
> recited 3 times: normal speed, long
pauses between phrases, normal speed
Difficulty can be manipulated by:
The length of the word group
The length of pauses
The speed
Complexity of the discourse, grammar and
vocabulary
Scoring (spelling, grammatical, additional
words, replacement)
Dictation is a practical valid method for
integrating listening and writing skills,
but the authenticity is questioned.
2. Communicative stimulus-response tasks
Listen to a monologue or conversation and
respond to a set of comprehension questions.
Disadvantages: some of the multiple-choice
questions don’t mirror communicative reallife situations.
The conversation is authentic, but listening
to a conversation between a doctor and a
patient is rarely done (p.133)
3. Authentic listening tasks
Ideally, listening tests are cognitively
demanding, communicative, authentic, and
interaction.
Test as a sample of performance/tasks
implies an equally limited capacity to
mirror all the real-world context of listening
performance
Buck (2001: p. 92)  p.136
“Every test requires some components of
communicative language ability, and no
test covers them all”
Alternatives to assess comprehension in a
truly communicative context
Note taking
Listening to a lecturer and write down the
important ideas.
Disadvantage: scoring is time consuming
Advantages: mirror real classroom situation
it fulfills the criteria of cognitive demand,
communicative language & authenticity
Editing
Editing a written stimulus of an aural
stimulus
Test-takers read : the written stimulus material
Test-takers hear: a spoken version of the stimulus
Test-takers mark: the written stimulus by circling any words
Interpretive tasks:
paraphrasing a story or conversation
Potential stimuli include: song lyrics, poetry,
radio, TV, news reports, etc.
The stimuli can be directed through
questions like: “why was the singer feeling
sad?”, “what do you think the political
activists might do next?”
Difficulties: The task conforms to certain
time limitation, and the questions might be
quite specific, there may be more than one
correct interpretation (scoring)
Retelling
Listen to a story or news event and simply retell it
either orally or written  show full comprehension
Difficulties: scoring and reliability
validity, cognitive, communicative ability,
authenticity are well incorporated into the
task.
Interactive listening (face to face
conversations)