A. Assessing Listening
OBSERVING THE PERFORMANCE OF THE FOUR SKILL
Before focusing on listening itself, think about the two interacting concepts of performance and observation. All language users perform the acts of listening. Speaking, reading & writing. They of course rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish these performances. When you propose to asses that person’s competence, but you observe the person’s performance.
THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING
Listening has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking in the standardized testing industry, a number separate oral production test are available (Test of spoken English, Oral proficiency inventory and phone pass. to name several that are described chapter 7 of this book, but it is rare to find just a listening test. on reason for this emphasis is that listening is often implied as a component of speaking. in addition the overtly observable nature of speaking renders it more empirically measurable than listening.
We therefore need to pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroom in this chapter we will begin with basic principals and types listening, than move to a survey of task that can be used to assess listening.
BASIC TYPES of LISTENING
Ass all with effective test, designing appropriate assessment tasks in listening begins wait the specification of objectives, or criteria those objective may be classified in term of several types of listening performance.
1. You recognize speech sounds and hold a temporary “imprint” of them in short term memory.
2. You simultaneously determine the type of speech event (monologue, interpersonal dialogue, transactional dialogue) that is being processed and attend to its context (who the speakers is location purpose)
3. You use (bottom up) listening decoding skill and /or (top-down) background schemata to bring a plausible interpretation to the message and assign a literal and intended meaning to the utterance.
4. In most cases (expect for repetition task, which involve short-term memory only)
Each of these stages represents a potential assessment objective:
Comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes word intonation, or a grammatical category
understanding of pragmatic context
determining meaning of auditory input
developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding
From these stages we can derive four commonly identified types of listening performance, each of which comprises a category within which to consider assessment tasks and procedures.
1. intensive
2. Responsive
3. selective
4. extensive
INTENSIVE LISTENING
Once you have determined objectives, your next step is to design the task including making decisions about how you will elicit performance and how you will expect the test-taker to respond. We will look at tasks that range from intensive listening performance, such as minimal phonemic pair recognition to extensive comprehension of language in communicative context. The focus in this section is on the micro skill of intensive listening.
Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements
A typical form of intensive listening at this level is the assessment of recognizing of phonological and morphological elements of language. A classic test task gives a spoken stimulus and asks test-takers to identify the stimulus from two or more choices.
PARAPHRASE RECOGNITION
The next step up on the scale of listening comprehension micro skills is words, phrases and sentences which are frequently assessed by providing a stimulus sentences and asking the test-taker to choose the correct paraphrase from a number of choices.
RESPONSIVE LISTENING
A question and answer format can provide some interactivity in these lower end listening tasks. The test-taker’s response is the appropriate answer to a question.
SELECTIVE LISTENING
A third type of listening performance is selective listening in which the test-taker listens 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
Listening cloze tasks (sometimes called cloze dictations or partial dictations) require the test-taker to listen to a story, monologue, on conversation and simultaneously read the written text in which selected words or phrases have been deleted. Cloze procedure is most commonly associated with reading only (see chapter 9). In its generic form, the test consists of a passage in which every nth word (typically every seventh word) is deleted and the text-taker is asked to supply an appropriate word. in a listening cloze task, test-taker see a transcript of the passage that they are to listening to and fill in the blanks with the words or phrases that they hear.
Information Transfer
Selective listening can also be assessed through an information transfer technique in which aurally processed information must be transferred to a visual representation, such as labeling a diagram, identifying an element in a picture, completing a form, or showing routes on a map.
SENTENCE REPETITION
Sentence repetition is far from a flawless listening assessment task. buck (2001 p. 79) noted that that such tasks “are not just tests of listening, but tests of general oral skills”. Further, this tasks may tests only recognition of sounds, and it can easily be contaminated by lack of short-term memory ability, thus invalidating it as an assessment toning comprehension error from an oral production error. therefore, sentence repetition tasks should be used with caution.
EXTENSIVE LISTENING
Drawing a clear distinction between any two of the categories of listening referred to hear is problematic, but perhaps the fuzziest division is between selective and extensive listening. As we gradually move along the continuum from smaller to larger stretches of language, and from micro- to macro skill of listening. the probability of using more extensive listening task increases.
DICTATION
Dictation is a widely researched genre of assessing listening comprehension. in a dictation, test takers hear passage, typically of 50 to 100 word, recited three times: first at normal speech; than, with long pauses between phrases or natural word groups, during which time test takers write down what they have just heard; and finally, at normal speech once more so they can check there work and proofread.
Scoring criteria for several possible kinds of errors:
Spelling error only, but the word appears to have been heard correctly
Spelling and / obvious misrepresentation of word, illegible word
Grammatical error (for example, test-takers hears I can’t do it, writes I can do it)
skipped word or phrase
permutation words not in the original
replacement of a word with an appropriate synonym
Communicative stimulus – response tasks
Example of extensive listening is found in a popular genre of assessment tasks in which the task-takers is presented with a stimulus monologue or conversation and than is asked to respond to a set of comprehension questions.
Authentic listening tasks
Ideally, the language assessment field would have a stockpile of listening test types that are cognitively demanding, communicative, and authentic, not to mention interactive by means of integration with speaking. The nature of test as a sample of performance and a set of task with limited time frames implies an equally limited capacity to mirror all the real-world contexts of listening performance.
There is no such thing as a communicative test, “stated back (2001.p92).”Every test requires some components of communicative language ability, and no test covers them all similarly, with the nation of authenticity every task shares some characteristics with target-language tasks, and no test is completely authentic.
1. Note-taking. in the academic world, classroom lectures by professors are common features of a non-native English-user’s experience . These notes are evaluated by the teacher on a 30-points system, as follows:
Scoring system for lecture notes
0-15 points
Visual representation: Are your notes clear and easily to read? Can you easily find and retrieve information from them? Do you use the space on the paper to visually represented ideas? Do you use indention headers, numbers, etc?
0-10 points
Accuracy: Do you accurately indicate main ideas from lectures? Do you note important details and supporting information and examples? Do you leave out unimportant information and tangents?
0-5 points
Symbols and abbreviations: Do you use symbols and abbreviations as much as possible to save time? Ado you avoid writing out whole words and do you avoids writing down every single word the lectures say?
2. Editing. Another authentic task provides both a written and a spoken stimulus, and requires the test-taker to listen for discrepancies. Scoring achieves relatively high reliability as there are usually a small number of specific differences that must be identified. Here is the way the task proceeds.
3. Interpretive tasks. One of the intensive listening tasks described above was paraphrasing a story or conversation. An interpretive task extends the stimulus material to a longer stretch of discourse and forces the test – takers to infer a response potential stimulus include.
Song lyrics
(recited) poetry
radio/television news reports and
an oral account of an experience
4. Retelling. in a related task, tasks takers listen to a story or news event and simply retell it, or summarize it, either orally (on an audiotape) or in writing. In so doing, test takers must identify the gist, main idea, purpose, supporting points.
Before focusing on listening itself, think about the two interacting concepts of performance and observation. All language users perform the acts of listening. Speaking, reading & writing. They of course rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish these performances. When you propose to asses that person’s competence, but you observe the person’s performance.
THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING
Listening has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking in the standardized testing industry, a number separate oral production test are available (Test of spoken English, Oral proficiency inventory and phone pass. to name several that are described chapter 7 of this book, but it is rare to find just a listening test. on reason for this emphasis is that listening is often implied as a component of speaking. in addition the overtly observable nature of speaking renders it more empirically measurable than listening.
We therefore need to pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroom in this chapter we will begin with basic principals and types listening, than move to a survey of task that can be used to assess listening.
BASIC TYPES of LISTENING
Ass all with effective test, designing appropriate assessment tasks in listening begins wait the specification of objectives, or criteria those objective may be classified in term of several types of listening performance.
1. You recognize speech sounds and hold a temporary “imprint” of them in short term memory.
2. You simultaneously determine the type of speech event (monologue, interpersonal dialogue, transactional dialogue) that is being processed and attend to its context (who the speakers is location purpose)
3. You use (bottom up) listening decoding skill and /or (top-down) background schemata to bring a plausible interpretation to the message and assign a literal and intended meaning to the utterance.
4. In most cases (expect for repetition task, which involve short-term memory only)
Each of these stages represents a potential assessment objective:
Comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes word intonation, or a grammatical category
understanding of pragmatic context
determining meaning of auditory input
developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding
From these stages we can derive four commonly identified types of listening performance, each of which comprises a category within which to consider assessment tasks and procedures.
1. intensive
2. Responsive
3. selective
4. extensive
INTENSIVE LISTENING
Once you have determined objectives, your next step is to design the task including making decisions about how you will elicit performance and how you will expect the test-taker to respond. We will look at tasks that range from intensive listening performance, such as minimal phonemic pair recognition to extensive comprehension of language in communicative context. The focus in this section is on the micro skill of intensive listening.
Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements
A typical form of intensive listening at this level is the assessment of recognizing of phonological and morphological elements of language. A classic test task gives a spoken stimulus and asks test-takers to identify the stimulus from two or more choices.
PARAPHRASE RECOGNITION
The next step up on the scale of listening comprehension micro skills is words, phrases and sentences which are frequently assessed by providing a stimulus sentences and asking the test-taker to choose the correct paraphrase from a number of choices.
RESPONSIVE LISTENING
A question and answer format can provide some interactivity in these lower end listening tasks. The test-taker’s response is the appropriate answer to a question.
SELECTIVE LISTENING
A third type of listening performance is selective listening in which the test-taker listens 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
Listening cloze tasks (sometimes called cloze dictations or partial dictations) require the test-taker to listen to a story, monologue, on conversation and simultaneously read the written text in which selected words or phrases have been deleted. Cloze procedure is most commonly associated with reading only (see chapter 9). In its generic form, the test consists of a passage in which every nth word (typically every seventh word) is deleted and the text-taker is asked to supply an appropriate word. in a listening cloze task, test-taker see a transcript of the passage that they are to listening to and fill in the blanks with the words or phrases that they hear.
Information Transfer
Selective listening can also be assessed through an information transfer technique in which aurally processed information must be transferred to a visual representation, such as labeling a diagram, identifying an element in a picture, completing a form, or showing routes on a map.
SENTENCE REPETITION
Sentence repetition is far from a flawless listening assessment task. buck (2001 p. 79) noted that that such tasks “are not just tests of listening, but tests of general oral skills”. Further, this tasks may tests only recognition of sounds, and it can easily be contaminated by lack of short-term memory ability, thus invalidating it as an assessment toning comprehension error from an oral production error. therefore, sentence repetition tasks should be used with caution.
EXTENSIVE LISTENING
Drawing a clear distinction between any two of the categories of listening referred to hear is problematic, but perhaps the fuzziest division is between selective and extensive listening. As we gradually move along the continuum from smaller to larger stretches of language, and from micro- to macro skill of listening. the probability of using more extensive listening task increases.
DICTATION
Dictation is a widely researched genre of assessing listening comprehension. in a dictation, test takers hear passage, typically of 50 to 100 word, recited three times: first at normal speech; than, with long pauses between phrases or natural word groups, during which time test takers write down what they have just heard; and finally, at normal speech once more so they can check there work and proofread.
Scoring criteria for several possible kinds of errors:
Spelling error only, but the word appears to have been heard correctly
Spelling and / obvious misrepresentation of word, illegible word
Grammatical error (for example, test-takers hears I can’t do it, writes I can do it)
skipped word or phrase
permutation words not in the original
replacement of a word with an appropriate synonym
Communicative stimulus – response tasks
Example of extensive listening is found in a popular genre of assessment tasks in which the task-takers is presented with a stimulus monologue or conversation and than is asked to respond to a set of comprehension questions.
Authentic listening tasks
Ideally, the language assessment field would have a stockpile of listening test types that are cognitively demanding, communicative, and authentic, not to mention interactive by means of integration with speaking. The nature of test as a sample of performance and a set of task with limited time frames implies an equally limited capacity to mirror all the real-world contexts of listening performance.
There is no such thing as a communicative test, “stated back (2001.p92).”Every test requires some components of communicative language ability, and no test covers them all similarly, with the nation of authenticity every task shares some characteristics with target-language tasks, and no test is completely authentic.
1. Note-taking. in the academic world, classroom lectures by professors are common features of a non-native English-user’s experience . These notes are evaluated by the teacher on a 30-points system, as follows:
Scoring system for lecture notes
0-15 points
Visual representation: Are your notes clear and easily to read? Can you easily find and retrieve information from them? Do you use the space on the paper to visually represented ideas? Do you use indention headers, numbers, etc?
0-10 points
Accuracy: Do you accurately indicate main ideas from lectures? Do you note important details and supporting information and examples? Do you leave out unimportant information and tangents?
0-5 points
Symbols and abbreviations: Do you use symbols and abbreviations as much as possible to save time? Ado you avoid writing out whole words and do you avoids writing down every single word the lectures say?
2. Editing. Another authentic task provides both a written and a spoken stimulus, and requires the test-taker to listen for discrepancies. Scoring achieves relatively high reliability as there are usually a small number of specific differences that must be identified. Here is the way the task proceeds.
3. Interpretive tasks. One of the intensive listening tasks described above was paraphrasing a story or conversation. An interpretive task extends the stimulus material to a longer stretch of discourse and forces the test – takers to infer a response potential stimulus include.
Song lyrics
(recited) poetry
radio/television news reports and
an oral account of an experience
4. Retelling. in a related task, tasks takers listen to a story or news event and simply retell it, or summarize it, either orally (on an audiotape) or in writing. In so doing, test takers must identify the gist, main idea, purpose, supporting points.
B. Assessing Reading
Assessing Reading Proficiency
Reading ability is very difficult to assess
accurately. In the communicative competence model, a student's reading
level is the level at which that student is able to use reading to
accomplish communication goals. This means that assessment of reading
ability needs to be correlated with purposes for reading.
Reading Aloud
A student's performance when reading aloud is not a reliable
indicator of that student's reading ability. A student who is perfectly
capable of understanding a given text when reading it silently may
stumble when asked to combine comprehension with word recognition and
speaking ability in the way that reading aloud requires.
In addition, reading aloud is a task that students will rarely,
if ever, need to do outside of the classroom. As a method of
assessment, therefore, it is not authentic: It does not test a student's
ability to use reading to accomplish a purpose or goal.
However, reading aloud can help a teacher assess whether a
student is "seeing" word endings and other grammatical features when
reading. To use reading aloud for this purpose, adopt the "read and look
up" approach: Ask the student to read a sentence silently one or more
times, until comfortable with the content, then look up and tell you
what it says. This procedure allows the student to process the text, and
lets you see the results of that processing and know what elements, if
any, the student is missing.
Comprehension Questions
Instructors often use comprehension questions to test whether
students have understood what they have read. In order to test
comprehension appropriately, these questions need to be coordinated with
the purpose for reading. If the purpose is to find specific
information, comprehension questions should focus on that information.
If the purpose is to understand an opinion and the arguments that
support it, comprehension questions should ask about those points.
In everyday reading situations, readers have a purpose for
reading before they start. That is, they know what comprehension
questions they are going to need to answer before they begin reading. To
make reading assessment in the language classroom more like reading
outside of the classroom, therefore, allow students to review the
comprehension questions before they begin to read the test passage.
Finally, when the purpose for reading is enjoyment,
comprehension questions are beside the point. As a more authentic form
of assessment, have students talk or write about why they found the text
enjoyable and interesting (or not).
Authentic Assessment
In order to provide authentic assessment of students' reading
proficiency, a post-listening activity must reflect the real-life uses
to which students might put information they have gained through
reading.
- It must have a purpose other than assessment
- It must require students to demonstrate their level of reading comprehension by completing some task
To develop authentic assessment activities, consider
the type of response that reading a particular selection would elicit
in a non-classroom situation. For example, after reading a weather
report, one might decide what to wear the next day; after reading a set
of instructions, one might repeat them to someone else; after reading a
short story, one might discuss the story line with friends.
Use this response type as a base for selecting appropriate
post-reading tasks. You can then develop a checklist or rubric that will
allow you to evaluate each student's comprehension of specific parts of
the text.
References
http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/assessread.htm
http://sitiroliyahwigati.blogspot.co.id/2010/05/assessing-listening.html
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