English Language

Assessment: Meeting 6
and 7
 Practicality
Reliability
Validity
Overview Authenticity
 washback
 direct and indirect testing
 formative and summative
assessment
 The four language skills should not be tested in
isolation
Even the grammar and vocab test will engage
in other forms of language skills
Essential notes
on Language
Particularly in Listening test and assessment:
testing and
assessment More difficult to assess – No product
Less noticed
Then, what is the reason behind the Listening
test?
  Competence: Learners’ true knowledge and
capability in using the language
 Performance: competence that can be
observed.
Factors influencing the performance: anxiety,
Performance illness, emotional distraction, memory block,
Vs. and other student-related reliability.
Competence
Assessing only performance is
not enough !!
  The use of single result can lead to inaccurateness of
decision taking. Therefore, teachers are obliged to
make triangulation:
• several tests that are combined to form an
assessment
Principles of • a single test with multiple test tasks to account for
assessing learning styles and performance variables
competence • in-class and extra-class graded work
• alternative forms of assessment (e.g., journal,
portfolio, conference, observation, self-assessment,
peer-assessment).
  Second is relying much on observable
performance.

Principles of
assessing
competence
  1. You recognize speech sounds and hold a temporary "imprint"
of them in short-term memory.
 2. You simultaneously determine the type of speech event
(monologue, interpersonal dialogue, transactional dialogue)
that is being processed and attend to its context (who the
speaker is, location, purpose) and the content of the message.
What happen in  3. You use (bottom-up) linguistic decoding skills and/or (top-
our brain during down) background schemata to bring a plausible interpretation
listening process to the message, and assign a literal and intended meaning to the
utterance.
 4. In most cases (except for repetition tasks, which involve
short-term memory only), you 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.
 • comprehending of surface structure
elements such as phonemes, words,
intonation, or a grammatical category
Potential
• understanding of pragmatic context
assessment • determining meaning of auditory
objectives input
• developing the gist, a global or
comprehensive understanding
  Intensive. Listening for perception of the of a larger
stretch of language.
 Responsive. Listening to a relatively short stretch of
language in order to make an equally short response.
Types of  Selective. Processing stretches of discourse such as
short monologues for several minutes in order to
Listening "scan" for certain information. The purpose of such
performance is not necessarily to look for global or
tasks general meanings, but to be able to comprehend
designated information in a context of longer stretches
of spoken language
 Extensive. Listening to· develop a top-down, global
understanding of spoken language.
 Macro: sound discriminations and
words, chunks, word classes,
Macro and Micro
stress, reduced forms, cohesive
skills of Listening devices and meaning
Micro: Language functions, infer
meaning, ID literal/ non literal,
employ strategies.
Intensive
Listening
tasks:
minimal pairs -
Morphological &
phonological element,
paraphrase recognition
Responsive
task: Question
answer, or simple
questions with
multiple choice
answer, or TPR.
Selective task:
listening for
specific
information,
Cloze,
information
transfer (picture
selection or
ordering, map,
chart, sentence
repetition, etc.)
Extensive
task:
listening to longer Communicative Stimulus-Response
block of language Tasks such as in TOEFL part 2
communication Listening or other high stake test.
(lectures, Dictation
discussion, etc.)
  1. Clustering: attending to appropriate "chunks" of
language-phrases, clauses, constituents
 2. Redundancy: recognizing the kinds of repetitions,
rephrasing, elaborations, and insertions that unrehearsed
spoken language often contains, and benefiting from that
What makes recognition
Listening  3. Reduced forms: understanding the reduced forms that
may not have been a part, of an English learner's past
complex learning experiences in classes where only formal
"textbook" language has been presented
 4. Performance variables: being able to "weed out"
hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections in natural
speech
  5. Colloquial language: comprehending idioms, slang,
reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge
 6. Rate of delivery: keeping up with the speed of delivery,
processing automatically as the speaker continues
What makes
Listening  7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation: correctly understanding
prosodic elements of spoken language, which is almost
complex always much more difficult than understanding the smaller
phonological bits and pieces
 8. Interaction: managing the interactive flow of language
from listening to speaking to listening, etc.
  • spelling error only, but the word appears to have been
heard correctly
 • spelling 'and/or obvious misrepresentation of a word,
illegible word
Consideration • grammatical error (For example, test-taker hears I can’t
in scoring do it, writes I can do it.)
 • skipped word or phrase
Listening task
 • permutation of words
 • additional words not in the original
 • replacement of a word with an appropriate synonym
Thanks!!