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.