ASSESSING LISTENING

In language learning, firstly people must know that actually there are four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Teachers certainly rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish these performances. When teachers propose to assess someone’s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, teachers assess that person’s competence, but teachers observe the person’s performance. Sometimes the performance does not indicate true competence. A bad night’s rest, illness an emotional distraction, test anxiety, a memory block, or other student-related reliability factors could affect performance, thereby providing unreliable measure of actual competence. So, the first important principle for assessing a learner’s competence is to consider fallibility of the results of a single performance. The second is teachers must rely as much as possible on observable performance in our assessments of students. Observable here means being able to see or hear the performance of the learner (the sense of touch, taste, and smell don’t apply very often to language testing).
Isn’t it interesting that in the case of receptive skills, teachers can observe neither the process of performing nor a product? Teachers are not observing the listening performance; they’re observing the result of the listening. They can no more observe listening than they can see the wind blowing. The process of the listening performance itself is the invisible, inaudible process of internalizing meaning from the auditory signals being transmitted to the ear and brain. Probably people will argue that the product of listening is a spoken or written response from the student that indicates correct or incorrect auditory processing. The receptive skills are clearly the more enigmatic of the two modes of performance. People cannot observe the actual act of listening or reading, nor can they see or hear an actual product. They can observe learners only while they are listening or reading. So, all assessment of receptive performance must be made by inference.
In reality, listening really has an important role in language skills. However, it has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking. It is rare to find just a listening test because listening is often implied as a component of speaking. Moreover, the overtly observable nature of speaking renders it more empirically measurable then listening. A good speaker is often (unwisely) valued more highly than a good listener. A teacher of language know that one’s oral production ability-other than monologues, speeches, reading aloud, and the like-is only as good as one’s listening comprehension ability. Even further impact is the likelihood that input in the aural-oral mode accounts for a large proportion of successful language acquisition. Whether I n the workplace, educational, or home contents, aural comprehension far outstrips oral production in quantifiable terms of time, number of words, effort, and attention.
To design appropriate assessment tasks in listening begins with the specification of objectives, or criteria. Those objectives may be classified in terms of several types of listening performance. When people listen, they can (1) recognize speech sounds and hold a temporary “imprint” of them in short-term memory, (2) determine the type of speech event (monologue, interpersonal dialogue, transactional dialogue) that is being processed and attend to its context and the content of the message, (3) use (bottom-up) linguistic decoding skills and/or (top-down) background schemata to bring a plausible interpretation to the message, and assign a literal and intended meaning to the utterance, (4) delete the exact linguistic form in which the message was originally received in favor of conceptually retaining important or relevant information in long-term memory. In another word, each of these stages represents a potential assessment objective like: comprehending of surface structure elements, understanding of pragmatic context, determining meaning of auditory input, and developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding. From the main activities above, people can derive four common types of listening performance, namely: intensive, responsive, selective and extensive. Intensive is listening for perception of the components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc.) of a larger stretch of language, while responsive is listening to a relatively short stretch of language in order to make an equally short response. The third, selective is processing stretches of discourse such as short monologues for several minutes in order to “scan“ for certain information. Its purpose 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. The fourth, extensive then is listening for developing a top-down, global understanding of spoken language. Listening that includes all four the above types as test-takers actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, role plays, and pair of group work. Their listening performance must be intricately integrated with speaking in the authentic give-and-take of communicative interchange.
In line with the performance of listening comprehension, Richards (1983) divided it into two parts; they are microskills (attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of a bottom-up process). and macroskills (focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach to a listening task). More detail the microskills include: discriminate among the distinctive 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 contours, and their role in signaling information; recognize reduced forms 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, systems, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms; detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents; recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed indifferent grammatical forms; recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse. Then, macroskills include: 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, kinestic, 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 signaling comprehension or lack thereof.
Implied in the taxonomy above is a notion of what makes many aspects of listening difficult, or why listening is not simply a linear process of recording strings of language as they are transmitted into our brain. Some factors that make listening difficult are like: 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, slang, 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 prosodic elements of spoken language), and interaction (managing the interactive flow of language from listening to speaking to listening, etc.).
Language assessment field ideally has a stockpile of listening test types which are cognitively demanding, communicative, and authentic, not to mention interactive by means of an integration with speaking. Buck (2001: 92) stated that every test requires some components of communicative language ability, and no test covers them all. Similarly, with the notion of authenticity, every task shares some characteristics with target language tasks, and no test is completely authentic. There are some possibilities for getting authentic listening tasks. First, note-taking of classroom lectures by professor in which they are common features of a non-native English-user’s experience. Scoring system of note-taking covers visual representation, accuracy, symbol and abbreviation. Second, editing that provides both a written and spoken stimulus and requires the test-taker to listen for discrepancies. The scoring will be test-takers read (the written stimulus material), test-takers hear (a spoken version of the stimulus that deviates, in a finite number of facts or opinions from the original written form), and test-takers mark (the written stimulus by circling any words, phrases, facts, or opinions that show a discrepancy between the two versions). Third, interpretive tasks extending the stimulus material to a longer stretch of discourse and forces the test-taker to infer a response. Potential stimuli used in interpretive tasks include song lyrics, recited poetry, radio/television news reports, and an oral account of an experience. Fourth, retelling a story or news listened before by the test-takers.

(Source: H. Douglas Brown, 2004)