Chapter 6.

Assessing Listening

I. There are 3 factors that need to be under consideration when assessing listening:
- Skills need to be assessed together, not independently or separately.
- Assessing Grammar and Vocabulary: Every test of grammar or vocabulary invokes
two or more of the separate skills of listening, speaking, reading or writing.
- Focusing on listening itself: performance and observation:
● Performance: assess competence but observe performance.
-> Assess performance: use several tests, multiple test tasks combined in a
test, etc. -> more reliable and valid assessment.
● Observation: see or hear the performance of the learner.
II. Basic types of listening:
1. Intensive: listening for perception of the components (phonemes, words, intonation,
discourse markers, etc.) of a larger stretch of language
2. Responsive: listening to a relatively short stretch of language (a greeting, question,
command, comprehension check, etc.) in order to make an equally short response
3. Selective: processing stretches of discourse such as short monologues for several
minutes to "scan" for certain information. The purpose of such per- formance 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 (such as
classroom directions from a teacher, TV or radio news items, or stories). Assessment
tasks in selective listening could, for example, ask students to listen for names, numbers,
a grammatical category, directions (in a map exercise), or certain facts and events.
4. Extensive: listening to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language.
Extensive performance ranges from listening to lengthy lectures to listening to a
conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose. Listening for the gist-or
the main idea-and making inferences are all part of extensive listening.
=> Test takers must invoke interactive skills (note taking, questioning, discussion)
III. Micro-and macro skills of listening

IV. Designing assessment tasks:

1. Intensive listening:
- Recognizing Phonological and Morphological Elements.
- Paraphrase Recognition.
2. Responsive listening: test-takers’ response is the appropriate answer to a question.
3. Selective listening:
 - Listening cloze: require test-takers to listen to a story, monologue or
conversation.
- Information transfer.
- Sentence Repetition: the test-taker must retain a stretch of language long
enough to reproduce it and then must respond with an oral repetition of that
stimulus.
4. Extensive listening:
- Dictation
- Communicative Stimulus-Response Tasks
- Authentic listening tasks:
+ Note taking
+ Editing
+ Interpretive Tasks
+ Retelling
 Chapter 8: Assessing Reading

I. Genres of Reading
- Academic reading
- Job-related reading
- Personal reading
II. Microskills, macro skills and strategies for reading
 III. Types of Reading
1. Perceptive: bottom-up processing,
words, punctuation
2. Selective: matching, true/false
3. Interactive: bottom-up, identify
relevant features (lexical, symbolic,
grammatical and discourse) within
texts
- Reading aloud
- Written response
- Multiple-choice: T/F, circle the
answers
- Picture-cued items
- Multiple-choice (form-focused
criteria)
- Matching tasks (matching
definition)
- Editing tasks (correction)
- Picture-cued tasks:
+ Visual representations
+ Definitions
- Gap-filling tasks
- Cloze Tasks
- Impromptu Reading Plus
Comprehension Questions
- Short-Answer Tasks
- Editing (longer texts)
- Scanning
- Sequencing
- Information transfer: reading
charts, maps, graphs, diagrams
4. Extensive - Skimming tasks
- Summarizing and responding
- Note Taking and Outlining