Chapter # 5: Assessing Listening

Synopsis

By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly

Chapter 5
"Assessing Listening"

The assessment of listening abilities is one of the least understood and least developed, yet one of the most important areas of language testing and assessment ( Anderson and Bachman, 2001, p.x.) says Coombe( 2007).  

Everyone knows how important it is to assess the listening skills of our students, nevertheless, sometimes it is difficult to do so because the listening process is internal and not subject to direct study and observation. Now adays,  listening is considered as an active process and a great emphasii is placed on it.

Models of Listening

It is very essential to undertstand the nature of listening and for that reason there are two models in literature that have been identified:

1.  Bottom- Up Processing: Here comprehension occurs when the listener successfully decodes the spoken text. In other words, students take in a word, decode it, and link it with other words to form sentences.

1.  Top-down Listening: Here the listener is directly involved with the constructing meaning from imput. The student uses background knowledge of the context and situation to make sense of what is heard. The recommendation is to assess and teach both.

Approaches to Listening Assessment

Researchers in the educational field had discover that there are three major approachers to  the assessment of listening abilities and they are:

•  Discrete-Point Approach: this approach broke listening into component elements and assessed them separately.
• Integrative Approach: this approach  attempt to assess a learner's  capacity to use many bits( of knowledge of language) at the same time.
• Communicative Approach :the listener here must be able to comprehend the message and then use it in context and there "question formats should be authentic in nature".

Other generalities about assessing listening have to do with:

1. General versus Academic Listening
2. Considerations in Designing Listening Tasks: Here you could analize the background knowledge, Test Content, Texts, Vocabulary, Test Structure, Formats, Item Writing, Timing, Skill Contamination.

Techniques for Assessing Listening Comprehension 

There are different techiniques that are essential to develop good listening comprehension, some are:

• Phonemic Discrimination
• Paraphrase Recognition
• Objective Formats It includes short answer questions, close,dictation.
• Information transfer tasks
• Note - Taking
• Listening Test Delivery
• Recording Voiceovers
• Scoring