Chapter 5: Assessing listening

Language Assessment:

Assessing Listening

              Listening is one of the receptive skills as we can observe neither the process of performing nor the product, but we are observing the result of listening itself. The process of listening performance is the invisible and inaudible process of internalizing meaning from the auditory signals being transmitted to the ear and brain. Invisible and inaudible process means that we cannot see or hear the process of listening; thus, it is impossible to observe the product. We observe only the result of the meaningful input in the form of spoken or written output, and it is usually made by inference. We have developed reasonably good assessment task to make the necessary jump through the process of inference, from unobservable reception to a conclusion about comprehension competence.
            In standardized testing industry, it is rare to find just a listening test. One reason for this emphasis is that listening is often implied as a component of speaking. Every teacher of language knows that one’s oral production ability is only as good as someone’s listening comprehension ability. Aural comprehension far outstrips oral production in quantifiable terms of time, number of words, effort, and attention. Hence, we need to pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroom.

Test Items
            In designing appropriate assessment test in listening, we begin with the specification of objectives or criteria. The objectives of assessing listening can be distinguished into:
1. Comprehending of surface structure elements
2. Understanding of pragmatic context
3. Determining the meaning of auditory input
4. Developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding.
           Those objectives may be classified in terms of several types of listening performance. There are four commonly types of listening performance:
1. Extensive listening
2. Intensive listening
3. Responsive listening
4. Selective listening

Implementation
            The commonly used test items in assessing listening are dialogue and multiple-choice comprehension items and dialogue and authentic questions on details. Those test items are commonly used because they can create authentic stimuli and in some rare cases the response mode actually approaches complete authenticity. Moreover, these test items require the process of inference in which all assessment of receptive skills must be made by.
The strengths of these test items are:
· can create authentic stimuli.
· the scoring process is not time consuming, so teacher as the assessor will be easy to check the students’ answers.
· use the comprehension questions that aim at assessing certain objectives that are built into the stimulus.

The weaknesses of these test items are:
· Any task following a one-way listening to a conversation is sometimes artificial.
· The test-takers might miss some of the questions if they hear the conversation only once and had no visual access to the items.

· Feedback for the students may be harmful.