Assessing Listening

What is listening?

There are two kinds or types of skills, the productive and the receptive. Well listening is one of the receptive skills and is one of the four abilities.


Types of listening.

Intensive: Listening for perception of the components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc.) of a larger stretch of language.

Responsive: Listening to a relatively short stretch of language ( a greeting, question, command, comprehension check, etc.) in order to make an equally short response.

Selective: Processing stretches of discourse such as short monologues for several minutes in order to scan for certain information. The purpose of such performance is not necessarily to look for global or general meanings, but to be able to comprehend designated information in a context of longer stretches of spoken language.

Extensive: listening to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language. Extensive performance ranges from listening to lengthy lectures to listening to a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose. Listening for the gist, for the main idea, and making inferences are all part of extensive listening.



Microskills of listening: Attends to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of
A bottom-up process.

Macroskills: Focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach to a listening task.


Microskills of listening.

Discriminate among the sounds of English.

Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.

Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonation counters, and their role in signalling information.

Recognize reduced form of words.

Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.

Process speech at different rates of delivery.

Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.

Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.) , systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.

Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.

Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.

Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.

Macroskills of listening.

Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals.

Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge.

From events, ideas, and so on, described, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.

Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.

Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.

Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for help, and signalling comprehension or lack thereof.

What makes listening difficult.

Clustering: attending to appropriate chunks of language phrases, clauses, constituents.

Redundancy: recognizing the kinds of repetitions, rephrasing, elaborations, and insertions that unrehearsed spoken language often contains, and benefiting from that recognition.

reduced forms: understanding the reduced forms that may not have been a part of an English learner’s past learning experiences in classes where only formal “textbook” language has been presented.

Performance variables: being able to weed out hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections in natural speech.

Colloquial language: comprehending idioms, slangs, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge.

Rate of delivery: Keeping up with the speed of delivery, processing automatically as the speaker continues.

Stress, rhythm, and intonation: correctly understanding prosody elements of spoken language, which is almost always much more difficult than understanding the smaller phonological bits and pieces.

Interaction: managing the interactive flow of language from listening to speaking to listening, etc.

Intensive listening: such as mimical phonemic pair recognition, to extensive comprehension of language in communicative contexts. The focus in this section is on the microskills of intensive listening.

Paraphrase recognition: the listening comprehension microskills consists in words, phrases, and sentences, which are frequently assesses by providing a stimulus sentence and asking the test taker to choose the correct paraphrase from number of choices.

Responsive listening: is a question and answer-format that provide some interactivity in the lower-end listening tasks. The test-taker’s response is the appropriate answer to a question.

Selective listening: Is 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: tasks require the test-taker to listen to a story, monologue, or conversation and simultaneously read the written text I which selected words or phrases have been deleted.

Information transfer: is a technique in which aurally processed information must be transferred to a visual representation, such as labelling a diagram, identifying an element in a picture, completing a form, or showing routes on a map.

Sentence repetition: Is a task of simply repeating a sentence or a partial sentence, or sentence repetition, is also used as an assessment of listening comprehension.

Extensive listening: gradually move along the continuum from smaller to larger stretches of language, and from micro- to macro-skills of listening, the probability of using more extensive listening tasks increases.

Dictation: is a widely researched genre of assessing listening comprehension. In a dictation,
test-takers hear a passage, typically of 50 to 100 words, recited three times.
Communicative Stimulus-response tasks: is in which the test taker is presented with a stimulus monologue or conversation and then is asked to respond to a set of comprehension questions.

Note taking: uses a 15-minute lecture as a stimulus. One among several response formats includes note-taking by the test-takers. These notes are evaluated by the teacher on a 30-point system.

Editing: 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.

Interpretive tasks: an interpretive task extends the stimulus material to a longer stretch of discourse and forces the test-taker to infer a response.

Retelling: In a related task, test-takers listen to a story or news event and simply retell it, or summarize it, either orally (on a audiotape) or in writing.