Third week assignment: Assessing listening

                     The challenge of assessing listening

Brown (2003) states, “the integration of skills is of paramount importance in language learning”. However, assessing listening and reading is a tough issue since they are processes that cannot be easily measured by observing students’ real performance. Brown says: “When you propose to assess someone’s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess that person’s competence, but you observe the person’s performance”. As a personal conclusion for this statement, I can say that both competence as well as performance are very important concepts to keep in mind when assessing listening.

It is also stated that performance can be affected by external factors inside a student such as an illnesses or lack of sleep, which could interfere in the student performance so one as a teacher could not evaluate the learners’ real competence in the language. That is why we should take into account at least two or more performances before reaching a conclusion on the real student’s competence and performance in the language, and more specifically, in a skill (listening in this case).

To keep in mind, it is also mentioned the fact that listening is a receptive skill and for that reason, its assessment must be made by observing productive skills (speaking and writing) and not by listening itself. That needs to be made by inference; it looks disappointing but that is why, a series of possibilities to establish the aims of assessing listening are detailed for us to have a clearer idea of what evaluating listening means.

It is important to understand that listening is a powerful component of speaking, so it has different functions. By bearing in mind that principle, we can establish the objectives of a listening test or assessment as follows: “Comprehending of surface structure of language”, “Understanding the pragmatic context”, “Determining meaning of auditory input”, or “Developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding”.

Once an objective has been stated in a listening assessment, different types of listening tasks can be applied to evaluate learners’ competence and performance: “Intensive”, for perception of language components, “Responsive”, a short stretch of language to make an equal short response, “Selective”, to comprehend specific information in context or longer stretches of spoken language, and “Extensive” to understand the main idea and make inferences. By applying them, a variety of tools can be designed to assess students, looking for authentic language as much as possible. Retelling is an example of listening assessment where the learner has to listen to a track (a story, news…) and communicate what it said by answering specific questions or just by retelling it as the name indicates.

As a personal view, I observed that evaluating a skill requires the integration of all the rest of skills, not a single one because we communicate through all of them not by segmenting it. Furthermore, I would like to highlight the fact that it is almost impossible to assess students’ competence by analyzing one piece of information, so we should try as much as possible to gather a lot of it to reach conclusions for us not to obtain unreliable results.  Finally, one as a teacher should make use of different types of listening tasks to evaluate that skill to get closer to the real world listening performance.

First Week Assignment

Summary: ASSESSMENT, EVALUATION, TESTING AND GRADING

Although many people including teachers and students limit the meaning of assessment to giving tests and assigning grades, Scanland (2012) defines assessment as the process of making a judgment or measurement of worth of an entity. That could be a person, a process, or a program.  According to Brissenden and Slater n.d. as cited by Scanlan (2012), learner assessment is designed to serve several purposes. They are “motivating and directing learning”, “providing feedback to students on their performance”, “providing feedback on instruction and/or the curriculum”, and “ensuring standards of progression are met”. Besides, learner assessment involves communication to teachers who will be able to get feedback on teaching, students on their own learning, curriculum designers on the curriculum, and administrators on the use of resources.

Regarding the importance of assessment, they explain that it drives students learning. It means that depending on the strategies used, different kinds of learning will take place. In that case, assessment strategies that focus on recall of knowledge will likely promote superficial learning. On the other hand, if assessment strategies that demand critical thinking or creative problem-solving are chosen, students will have a higher level of achievement.

According to McAlpine (2002) as cited by Scanlan (2012) there exist dichotomies poles to explain the different types of assessment: “Formative vs. Summative”, “Informal vs. Formal”, “Continuous vs. Final”, “Process vs. Product”, and “Divergent vs. Convergent”. The Formative aims to provide feedback to the learner, which can be used to identify strengths and weakness and hence improve future performance. The summative on the other hand, is used primarily to make decisions for grading or determine readiness for progression and communicate students’ abilities to external entities such as administrators or employees.

In the Informal assessment, the judgments are integrated with other tasks often used to provide formative feedback. It tends to be less threatening for the students and for that reason less stressful to them.  In the case of Formal assessment, students are aware that the task they are doing is for assessment purpose. They are summative in nature and tend to have greater motivation impact as they are associated with increased stress.

Continuous assessment happens throughout a learning experience. Even though it involves increased effort for teacher and student, it provides with the information needed to improve teaching and learning in process. Different from the one previously presented, The Final assessment takes place at the end of a learning activity, so it cannot be used for formative purposes.

Process and Product assessments differ in that the first one focusses on the steps or procedures underlying a particular ability or task; but the second one takes into account the result or outcome of a process. It means it focuses on the answer, not on the steps to get that result.  

The last types of assessments are Divergent and Convergent. Divergent refers to those for which a range of answers or solutions might be considered correct like in essay texts. Contrary to Divergent, the Convergent has only one correct response per question, and it values the assessment of real knowledge.

Last but not least, Scanlan (2012) states the distinction between assessment vs. evaluation, and assessment vs. grading. The most important aspect highlighted is that assessment is for students while evaluation is for instruction. In the same way, assessment is contrasted with grading and it is stated that the last one is considered a component of assessment although many think they are totally different because assessment is to measure student growth and process. Whichever conception is taken anyway, will depend on the teacher’s own philosophy.