Lecture 8

Assessing Listening

Chapter Six

Pages: 116-139

Brown, 2004

Lecture’s objectives:

- The coming four chapters will provide guidelines and hands- on practice in testing within a curriculum of English as a second or foreign language.(Although we are going to present the four skills in separate chapters, assessment is more authentic and provides more washback when skills are integrated).

- This specific chapter will discuss: - The importance of listening. - Principles and types of listening. - Tasks that can be used to assess listening.

Observing The performance of the four skills:

• All language users perform the acts of listening, speaking, reading and writing. They rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish these performances.

• Competence: Someone ‘s ability in one or a combination of the four skills.

• Performance: the observable behaviors.

****Discuss why sometimes the performance does not indicate true competence. (p, 117)

Principles for assessing a learner’s competence:

1. Teachers should triangulate their measurements.(Consider at least two or more performances before drawing a conclusion). (p, 117)

***Multiple measures will always give you a more reliable and valid assessment than a single measures.

2. Teachers must rely as much as possible on observable performance in their assessment of students.

****What does observable mean? (p, 117)

****Discuss the observable performance of the four skills in table 6.1By comparing between receptive and productive skills. (p, 118)

The importance of listening:

• Listening is often implied as a component of speaking.(How could you speak the language without listening)?

** You should know that one’s oral production ability is as good as listening comprehension ability.

**You should pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroom.

Basic types of listening:

Think about what you do when you listen. Read the processes that flash through your brain while listening. (p,119)

Potential Assessment objectives:- Comprehending of surface structure elements. - Understanding of pragmatic context.- Determining meaning of auditory input.- Developing the gist.

Types of listening performance:- Intensive- Responsive- Selective- Extensive ****What is the purpose of each one of the mentioned types? Provide examples.(p,120)

Test takers may at the extensive level need to invoke interactive skills (note- taking, questioning, discussion) listening that includes all the four types. Their listening performance must be integrated with speaking in the authentic give and take of communicative interchange.

Micro and Macro skills of listening:

Micro skills( attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of a bottom-up process).

Macro skills( focusing on the larger elements involved in a top- down approach to a listening task).

**Read the micro and macro skills page 121 which provides 17 objectives to assess listening.

What makes listening difficult? (p,122)

1. Clustering2. Redundancy3. Reduced forms4. Performance variables5. Colloquial language6. Rate of delivery7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation8. Interaction

Designing assessment tasks

Once you have determined objectives, your next step is to design the tasks.

*Intensive listening: (p, 123-124)- Recognizing phonological and morphological elements.- Paraphrase recognition.

*Responsive listening: (p, 125)- Appropriate response to a question.- Open- ended response to a question.

* Selective listening: (p, 125-130)- Listening cloze- Information transfer - Sentence repetition

* Extensive listening: (p, 130-138)- Dictation- Communicative stimulus-response tasks- Authentic listening tasks (note-taking, editing, interpretive

tasks, and retelling)

Lecture 9

Assessing Speaking

Chapter 7Brown, 2004

Lecture’s Objectives:

By the end of this chapter students will be able to:

- Review types of speaking- Discuss micro and macro skills of speaking- Outline numerous tasks for assessing speaking

***Listening and speaking are almost always closely interrelated. While speaking is a productive skill that can be directly and empirically observed,

those observations are invariably colored by the accuracy and effectiveness of a test-taker’s

listening skill.

Basic types of speaking (p, 141-142)

1. Imitative2. Intensive3. Responsive 4. Interactive5. Extensive

*Define and provide one example on each one of the above mentioned types.

Micro and Macro skills of speaking

** What is the purpose of determining the macro and micro skills of speaking? (p, 142)

Micro skills: refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units.

Macro skills: imply the speakers focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options.

**Read the 16 different objectives to assess in speaking pages:142-143

Three important issues to consider as you set out to design speaking tasks: (p, 143-144)

1. No speaking task s capable of isolating the single skill of oral production.

2. Eliciting the specific criterion you have designated for a task can be tricky because the beyond the word level , spoken language offers a number of productive options to test-takers.

3. Because of the above two characteristics of oral production assessment, it is important to carefully specify scoring procedures for a response so that you achieve as high reliability as possible.

Designing assessment tasks:

**Imitative Speaking: (p,144-146)- Word repetition tasks- Phone pass tests

**Intensive speaking: (p, 147-159)- Direct response tasks- Read aloud tasks- Sentence/dialogue completion tasks and oral questionnaires- Picture-cued tasks- Translation(of limited stretches of discourse)

***Responsive speaking:(p, 159-166)- Question and answer- Giving instruction and directions- Paraphrasing- Test of spoken English

***Interactive speaking: (p, 167-178)- Interview- Role play- Discussion and conversation- Games- Oral proficiency interview

***Extensive speaking: (p, 179-182)- Oral presentation- Picture-cued story-telling- Retelling a story, news event- Translation( of extended prose)