ASSESSING LISTENING

CHAPTER 5

Definition: It is an active process whereby students receive, conctruct meaning from and respond to spoken messages.

Models of listening:

1.    Bottom up: Decoding of messages from the smallest meaningful units to complete texts.

2.    Top down: Use of background knowledge of the context and situation to make sense of whet is heard.

Approaches to Listening Assessment:

1.    Discrete-point: It broke listening into component elements and assessed them separately. For example, phoneme discrimination.

2.    Integrative: It attempts to assess a learner’s capacity to use many bits of language at the same time.

3.    Communicative: In this, the listener must be able to comprehend the message and then use it in context.

Considerations in designing Listening Tasks:

1. background knowledge

2. test content

3. texts

4.Vocabulary

5. test structure

6. formats

7. item writing

8. timing

9. skill contamination

Techniques for Assessing Listening Comprehension

•Paraphrase recognition

•short answer

•cloze

•dictation

•information transfer and notetaking 

•listening test delivery: recording voiceovers

•scoring: use questions that are right or wrong