Other listening-skill assessment task types It may be that your circumstances allow for very simple listening tasks such as those requiring the learners to respond spontaneously to a set of prepared initiations. This kind of test can be done in the classroom or a language laboratory or even on the telephone or video link. Those are all legitimate tasks providing the task type and content suits the purposes of assessment. There are other ways. No list can be complete, but here are some other ideas for other ways to set listening tasks for assessment purposes. The content of any task will of course, depend on all the factors discussed so far.
1. Monitoring tasks
The station-announcement task above is an example of this kind of procedure. Longer texts can be used as well, asking the learners, for example, to identify the linguistic signal a speaker uses to signpost a summary of key points. Such tasks can be graded even if the text is ostensibly beyond the learners' level. Just locating a gate number or a name in an otherwise complex and indistinct recording is a good test of the ability to monitor and ignore the unnecessary.
2. Compare and contrast tasks
See above for an example of this task type. Two similar but distinct events can be described in speech for listeners to identify key words (e.g., roadside vs. harbour).
3. Matching tasks
Getting people to match a short audio description to a picture (or series of similar pictures where only one represents the content of the text) is a good test of detailed understanding.
4. Multiple-choice tests
These tests can be carefully targeted on particular items in the text to test the ability to listen for detail, infer likely meaning of lexemes and understand tense relationships and so on. They can also be targeted at the ability to listen for gist and identify key words and phrases.
The great disadvantage in terms of listening skills assessment is that the learners need to hold all the alternatives in their heads while they are also being required to focus on the text itself. Alternatives need to be kept short if cognitive overload is to be avoided.
5. Directions and instructions
In these tests, learners may be required to listen and follow instructions. Such tasks, because of their artificiality, have limited uses but they do test intensive listening skills. Popular topics are origami and following directions to locate something. They can be motivating and intriguing tests.
6. Labelling tasks
In these tasks, the learners are given a diagram of something fairly complicated and asked to match the descriptions of various labels (A, B, C ...) to the parts of the diagram that the listening text refers to. This is an important academic skill for some learners but of limited utility in other settings.
7. Note-taking tasks
In these tasks, the usual procedure is to require learners to take notes as they listen and then, when the address or lecture is over, they are presented with questions to answer on what they have heard and use the notes to respond. Providing there is a level playing field, i.e., that some of the learners are not able to answer the questions without any reference to notes because they are familiar with the topic, this can be a valid and reliable test of the skill.
8. Dictation
Dictation wanders in and out of fashion but is still seen as a reliable if not too authentic way of testing listening ability. The text has to be carefully chosen to be relevant. The problem with this sort of test is that it isn't always clear what's being tested because a good deal depends on the learners' ability to deploy grammatical knowledge and logic to infer what the text should be.
It is a fairly flexible procedure because we can force learners to start with a blank piece of paper or have them fill gaps in a text. The latter can be quite finely targeted.
