Listening Skills Assessment

Whilst writing the specification I had to decide on the item types and tasks. Items can be elicited or responded to in either the oral or written form (Brown 2004:51). As this was a test to assess students’ listening skills, the eliciting clearly needed to be oral. However I had to make a decision about whether the students’ response should be oral or written. As a test needs to be practical, that is not take too long to complete or correct (Harris & McCann 1994:34), I decided that the responses should be written, as due to class size it would take too long to administer a test with oral responses for each individual student.

The next stage was to find appropriate texts; ones which would both match the specifications and yield suitable items (Alderson et al. 1995:43). In this case I decided to write and record my own listening texts as I found it very difficult to find authentic or published texts which matched the requirements of the test specifications and the level of the students, and therefore have content validity (Brown 2004:22-3).

There are four different types of listening performance which can be assessed: intensive, responsive, selective and extensive (Brown 2004:120), and within this test I have attempted to assess selective and intensive listening.

Part 1 is a matching exercise where students listen to five short conversations and match the subject of the text to a picture. This type of task can assess students’ selective listening in the form of an information transfer (Brown 2004:127). Students have to selectively listen to the short extract in order to extract the subject area and match it to the picture.

Part 2 is a multiple choice activity which assesses the students’ intensive listening. They listen to a ...

... middle of paper ...

...n. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.

Bachman, L.F. & Palmer. A.S. (1996). Language Testing in Practice: Developing and Designing Useful Language Tests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, H.D. (2004). Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices. New York: Pearson Education.

Brown, J.D. (1996). Testing in Language Programs. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.

Buck, G. (2001). Assessing Listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flowerdew, J. & Miller, L. (2005). Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fulcher, G. & Davidson, F. (2007). Language Testing and Assessment: An Advanced Resource Book. Oxon: Routledge.

Harris, M. & McCann, P. (1994). Assessment. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Hughes, A. (1989). Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.