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I. CHAPTER ONE
1.1. THEORETICAL BASIS OF ASSESSING LISTENING SKILLS
In many ways, the consideration of testing and assessing listening ability
parallels that of assessing reading. Both are receptive skills and both can be broken
down in similar ways. For that reason, you should
read this guide after or in
conjunction with the guide to assessing reading ability.
The essential difference between the skills is that the listener cannot move
backwards and forwards through the text at will but must listen for the data in the
order in and speed at which the speaker chooses to deliver them.
In common with the assessment of reading skills, that of listening skills is,
perforce, indirect.
When someone speaks or writes, there is a discernible and
assessable product. Merely watching people listen often tells us little or nothing
about the level of comprehension they are achieving or the skills they are deploying.
This accounts for the fact that both listening and speaking skills are often assessed
simultaneously. In real life, listening is rarely practised in isolation and the listener's
response to what is heard is a reliable way
to assess how much has been
comprehended.
Rarely, however, does not mean never and there are a number of times when
listening is an isolated process. For example, listening to the radio or TV, a lecture
or a station announcement are all tasks which allow no interruption or feedback from
the listener to gain clarification or ask questions. One can, of course, allow the
listener access to a recording which he or she can replay as frequently as is needed
to understand a
text but, as this cannot be said to represent a common real-life task,
we'll exclude it from what follows.
We can test some underlying skills discretely. For example:
• we can test learners' abilities to understand lexical items through, e.g., matching or
multiple choice exercises
• we can assess the ability to recognise individual phonemes by, for example,
getting learners to match minimal pairs of words to written forms and so on.
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However, before we do any of that, we need to define what listening skills we
want to test and why. For more on the subskills of listening, see the guide to
understanding listening skills. The following is premised on the fact that you are
familiar with the content of that.
All assessment starts (or should start) from a consideration of the aims of
instruction. With listening skills, as with reading skills, however, it is notoriously
difficult to identify specific skills which are linked to specific purposes. An
argument can almost always be made that the following are key macro listening
skills whatever the setting, whatever the purpose and
whatever the topic and text
type:
1. Listening to locate specific data is required:
• by general listeners to locate items of interest in, e.g., announcements and news
programmes
• for academic purposes to locate the part of a lecture or address or programme which
focuses on what needs to be learned
• in the workplace to make the identification and absorption of heard data efficient
and focused
2. Listening to obtain the gist is needed:
• by general listeners who simple want to get the gist of a text and don't need detailed
understanding
• by students to judge whether a comment or section of a lecture is relevant to their
studies and current concerns
• by busy people in their occupations so they can judge whether something they are
hearing is relevant or ignorable in part or whole
3. Following directions and instructions:
• by general listeners needing to know what to do or where to go in response to an
enquiry which may be as simple as Where's the toilet? or much more complicated
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•
by students to find what to do, what to read and when to submit work
• by people in the workplace to allow them to follow an instruction and organise
their working time
Underlying these three macro skills are a number of micro listening skills
without which few texts can be properly understood. These will include, for
example:
a) Recognising the sounds of English, especially those which are allophones in
English but full phonemes in the learners' first language(s) and vice versa
b) Identifying lexemes and word boundaries
c) Using context and co-text to infer meaning (including visual information)
d) Understanding intonation a recognising attitude
e) Recognising the communicative functions of utterances: questions,
instructions, responses, initiations etc.
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