Bùi Lưu Nhật Nguyên - 01801010

Understanding listening assessment (Presenter: Ardeshir Geranpayeh and

Mark Elliott)
1. INTRODUCTION
Listening is a crucial skill and a basic step for most language learners to practice
and improve their language skills; however, it is still underrated in teaching and
learning as a “passive skill”. Teaching listening is not just playing the audio,
then making students listen and fill in the given handout passively; it is a
difficult process that we need to research more to refine our teaching and
assessing listening skills. There are many misconceptions about listening
comprehension in particular and listening in general, therefore; the webinar
about listening assessment had listed some common questions and broken into
small sessions to address the concerns: What is listening? How it is different
from other skills?; What does a listener need to do?; How to assess listening
skills?
2. SUMMARY OF SEMINAR’S CONTENT
2.1. What is listening?
-Listening is the process of turning soundwaves into meaningful elements.
2.1.1. How it is different from other skills?
● Transitory phase: There is no record of the
information but our brain.
● Happen in real-time: Learners have to remember and
analyze at the same time to understand the situation.
Carry information in the mind to build up
comprehension.
● Uncontrollable speech rate.
● Variability in the speech.
2.1.2. What does a listener need to do?
● Decoding: Translate the sounds of input to the sounds
of language and search for words which (nearly)
match the sounds. => OUTPUT: A string of words
that have the meaning as a whole group.
● Parsing: Recognise a grammar pattern in the string of
words and Fit a word to the words surrounding it. =>
OUTPUT: A BARE proposition (a literal abstract
idea). Only understand the meaning of words and
 sentence structure but NOT fully intended meaning of
what was said.
● Meaning construction: To fully understand a
sentence, listeners have to add personal’s world
knowledge and handle the information in context.
2.2. The complexity of Listening Comprehension to English
language learners.
2.2.1. Cognitive processing model (Geranpayeh & Taylor 2013)
The model has 5 different levels in the hierarchical model and 2 different levels
of process: Lower level process (decoding-lexical search-parsing); High level
of process (Meaning construction and Discourse construction)
❖ Input decoding (phoneme, soundwaves)
❖ Lexical research: Look for words that match the sound of a single
morpheme)
❖ Syntactic parsing: Import syntactic and grammatical structure on a
group of words to produce context utterances (bare proposition
without any context)
❖ Meaning construction: Contextualize the bare proposition and add
the listener’s real-world knowledge/ inferences to understand the
intended meaning.
❖ Discourse construction: New proposition combines with the
representation of whole discourse so as to link to things that have
gone before.
2.2.2. Challenges for L2 learners.
❖ Related to Decoding & Parsing (Low-level process)
➢ Inappropriate phenological value (listener can’t recognize the
sounds correctly)
➢ Limited vocabulary and grammar structure.
➢ Lexical and grammatical pattern processes are not automatically
recognized.
❖ Related to Construct & Building meaning (High-level process)
➢ Cultural misunderstanding.
➢ Lack of pragmatic knowledge (implied meaning)
➢ Focus on decoding utterances that limit the ability to carry forward
information.
➢ Incomplete representation of what has been heard already.
➢ Inability to connect ideas.
 2.3. How to assess?
2.3.1. Listening to the CEFR
The Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR) has
published a detailed descriptor of Listening comprehension self-assessment in 6
levels from A1 (beginner) to C2 (advanced)
❖ A1: The listener can recognize familiar words and basic phrases, with
slow and clear speech rate. (Require Decoding & Parsing)
❖ C2: Listeners can understand well most of the spoken languages even
when it delivered at fast native speed. (Require Construction of meaning
& Discourse)
2.3.2. What makes an item easy or difficult?
There are 3 main factors that can affect a test’s difficulty.
❖ Contextual factors (recording content):
➢ Linguistic complexity
➢ Content knowledge
➢ Nature of the information
❖ Speaker:
➢ Speech rate
➢ Accent
3. APPLICATIONS
3.1. The test design assignment
It is important to consider some aspects of testing and challenges of L2 listeners
in designing an effective listening test task:
● The level of the assessment must be equivalent to the listeners’ level.
(E.g: A1-A2 should be assigned to the lower-level listener)
● Teachers or test designers need to consider which process should be
targeted at particular listeners’ level. (E.g: For High-level listeners,
teachers need to target High-level processes)
● Teachers and institutions need to select suitable content knowledge to the
level of learners. (E.g: An academic lecture recording is not suitable for a
General English test)
● The nature of the information must be considered. (E.g: A2 listeners can’t
process Abstract information in text)
● Speech rate is a crucial feature that can directly affect listening difficulty.
(E.g: Recording of A2 level test need to slow down from natural speed
but not for the test at B2 level).
● Assessment’s reliability and validity can be affected by accent.
 3.2. Our future teaching career
Teachers should change listening lessons from passive learning to active
learning as this skill can be practiced regularly to have true competence in
listening to real-life scenarios. Furthermore, teachers should broaden the
listening material by updating students’ interests and letting them practice with
different native speech rates and accents.
In addition, teachers should teach listening with other sub-skills such as
note-taking, short-term memory, etc to support listening skills. Students need to
recognize which phrase is stressed and jot down, identify speakers, analyze
situations and predict the following lines.
4. CONCLUSION
Listening is an interpretative language skill that requires lots of active
involvement from both teachers and students. For that reason, institutions and
teachers need to concern more about different factors that affect the listening
assessment, then find alternative ways to actively enhance students’ skill in the
classroom.