Name : Dinar Anggraini

Nim` :20216012016

Course : Assessment week 9

Assessing Listening

A. Observing The Performance Of The Four Skills

Before focusing in listening itself, think about two interaction concept of performance and
observation. All language users perform the act of listening, speaking, reading and writing. They of
course rely on their underlying competence in order to accomplish these performances. When you
purpose to

asses someone ability in one or combination of four skills, you assess the person's competence but you
observe the person performance. Sometime the performance does not indicate the competence; a bad
night illness, and emotional distraction, test anxiety , a memory block, or other student- related
reliability factor could affect performance, thereby providing an reliable measure of actual competence.
So, one importance principle for assessing learner's competence is to consider the fallibility of the result
of single performance such us as that produced in the test as with any attempt at measurement, it is
your obligation as a teacher triangulate your measurement consider t least two or more performance
context of drawing any conclusion. That could take the form of one or two following design :

1) several test that are combine to form an assessment

2) a single test of multiple test task to account for learning style and performance variable

3) in class and extra class graded work

4) Alternative form of assessment eg; journal, portfolio, conference, observation, self-assessment,

peer-assessment.

The productive skill of speaking and writing allow as to hear and see the process as it is
performance. Writing gives a permanent product in the form of written pieces. But unless recorded
speech there is a permanent observable product for speaking because all those words you just heard
have vanished from the perception and have been transformed into meaningful intake to somewhere
in your brain.

B. THE IMPORTANE OF LISTENING

Listening has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking. In the standardized testing
industry, a number of separate, oral production test are available ( Test Of Spoken English, Oral
Proficiency Inventory, and Phone Pass). One of reason just emphasis is that listening is often implied as
a component of speaking. Every teacher of language knows that oral's production ability. But of even
further impact is the like hood that input in the aural-oral mode account for large proportion of
successful language acquisition. We therefore need to play close attention to listening as a mode of
performance for assessment in the classroom.

C. BASIC TYPES OF LISTENING:

As with all effective test , designing appropriate assessment tasks in listening begins with the
specifications of objective or criteria:

1) you recognize speech sound and hold temporary imprint of them in short-term memory.

2) You simultaneous determine the type of speech event , monolog interpersonal dialogue ,
transactional dialogue that is being processed and attend to its context.

3) You use bottom up linguistic decoding and top down background schemata to bring a plausible
interpretation to the message, and assign a literal and intended meaning to the utterance.

4) In most case, you delete the exact linguistic which the message was originally received i the favor
conceptually retaining important or relevant information in long term memory.

D. Micro And Macro Skill Of Listening

Jack Richards(1993), in his seminar article on teaching listening skills, provided a comprehensive
taxonomy of aural skills involved in conversational discourse. Such lists are very useful in helping you to
breakdown just what it is that your learner need to actually perform as they acquire affective listening
strategies. Through a checklist of micro skills, you can get a good idea of what your techniques need to
cover in the domain of listening comprehension. So micros kills are the components in listening
comprehension and macro skills are the application in listening comprehension.

Micro and macro skill of listening comprehension that adapted from Richards (1983)

1) Micro skill

 Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English

 Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short term memory
 Recognize English stress patterns, words, in stress and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure,
intonation contours and their role in signaling information
 Recognize reduced form of words
 Distinguish word boundaries recognize a case of words and interpret word order patterns and
their significance
 Process speech at different rates of delivery
 Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables
 Recognize grammatical words classes (nouns, verbs, etc), system (e.g tense, agreement,
pluralization) , patterns, roles, and elliptical forms.
 Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents
 Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms
  Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse

MACRO SKILLS

 Recognize the communicative functions of utterances according to situations, participant, goal

 Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge
 Form events, ideas and so on, described, predict outcomes infer links and connections
between events, deduce causes and effects and detect such relation as main ideas, supporting
ideas, new information, given information, generalization, and ex amplification
 Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
 Use facial, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings
 Develops and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting keywords, guessing the
meaning of word from context, appealing for help and signaling comprehension or lack there
of

E. Designing Assessment Task: Intensive Listening

Listening for perception of the components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers,
etc.) of a larger stretch of language.

 recognizing phonological and morphological elements of language (giving a spoken stimulus and
ask test-takers to identify the stimulus from two or more choices)
 paraphrase recognition (providing a stimulus sentence and asking the test-taker to choose the
correct paraphrase from a number of choices
 Listening to develop a top down, global understanding of spoken language ranging from
listening to lengthy lectures to listening a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message
or purpose. - listening for the gist - listening for the main idea - making inferences
F. Authentic Listening Task
This is probably due to the quite simple notion that the development of good listening skills,
particularly dealing with unknown vocabulary and inferring meaning, needs to be dealt with within a
controlled environment i.e. the classroom. Teaching and learning are currently in the era of
coursebooks: the zeitgeist is to run courses alongside a respectable course book. However, these
coursebooks often provide very scripted, stilted, second-rate recordings; they have an air of
inauthenticity about them. As a result, more and more teachers are opting for authentic listening texts,
such as YouTube videos, clips from the BBC as well as short films from www.filmenglish.com. While
some of these may come with pre-prepared exercises, and others might lend themselves quite easily to
teacher-made exercises, there always looms the issue of incorporating authentic videos and recordings
effectively into a pedagogic setting. What if a teacher has found a recording which is perfect for one
group, as it will arouse great interest and excitement, but finds it only mere minutes before the lesson:
there isn’t any time to transcribe the listening, pick out the blocking vocabulary and design gist and
detailed listening tasks. What then? A useful and ready-to-go format for authentic listening texts is the
KWL format, namely: Know / Want to know / Learnt. This exercise can be used countless times but
requires clear instruction, clarification and modelling the first time it is used. So how does it work? The
teacher draws on the whiteboard three columns and labels them as above. In the first column the
learners need to come up with what they already know about the topic - great for activating their
schemata and it doubles up as a gist prediction task. If the text is a video on skateboarding in the US,
then in this column would go things such as: - I know skateboarding is a popular sport in the US - Tony
Hawk is a famous skateboarder - It is predominantly popular among young people In the second column,
the learners come up with what they would like to know i.e. what they would like to find out from the
recording. For example: - How popular is skateboarding? - What are the figures on the number of
skateboarders in the US? - Is it considered dangerous by others? - Is it a growing or a declining sport? -
Why is it popular usually only among young people? The first time the class listens to the recording, the
task is to listen out for the general gist and to correctly identify whether what is written in their “know”
column is in fact present in the listening. For the second listening - the detailed listening - the learners
should listen carefully for answers to what is written in their “Want to know” column. Due to the fact
the text is authentic, it might be a good idea to allow them to listen to the recording twice during this
stage. The third and final column - the learnt column - gives the learner and opportunity to verbalise
what they have gotten out of the listening, be it an answer to a query or something additional they did
not know before listening. Each of the stages above lend themselves to individual or group work;
alternatively, they might be completed as a group activity, with groups of learners deciding together
what they already know, what they want to know and what they have learnt.
The most important thing is to keep each stage as interactive and communicative as feasibly
possible. As the text is authentic, there will probably be some issues with understanding some of what is
being said. To my experience, this is most often due to poor bottom-up listening skills - an area which is
often overlooked by ELT teachers in favour of top-down listening tasks. Authentic texts provide the
perfect opportunity to do some bottom-up listening practice. The teacher could play a short section of
the listening several times and the learners could transcribe what they hear. To make this more fun or
interactive, they could compare in groups and ‘submit’ a group transcription - the group which is closet
to the correct transcription wins! This could also lead to some vocabulary work; however, I would only
recommend a teacher tackles unknown vocabulary after the transcription task if they have a number of
years experience in ELT: dealing with unknown vocabulary can often lead to unnecessarily increased
Teacher Talking Time. An alternative approach - one focused more on top-down listening - would be to
play a section of the recording, or possibly the whole thing, as a dictogloss exercise. For further
information on what a dictogloss is and how to set it up, please see the following: Despite the text being
genuine and not pre-prepared for the classroom, the applied linguist Widdowson would argue that the
kind of exercises listed above are not very ‘authentic’: transcription and dictoglossing are particularly
contrived exercises in Widdowson’s eyes. So, how can the recording be exploited so as to provide input
and output which is both genuine and authentic? The obvious answer is to look to our own lives for a
solution. For example, when we watch a YouTube video, we probably would tell our friends about it and
give some sort of recommendation: “I watched this awesome video the other day, you gotta watch it /
Oh my god, someone showed me this awful clip the other day - it was so boring!” We could get our
learners to establish an opinion on the recording and then in pairs build up a conversation, whereby A is
the person who watched the clip and B is pretending to be a friend who has not seen it. This sort
approach also allows for work on spoken English, particularly on establishing and practising back-
channel devices and linking devices. For example, in a genuine situation, the friend would use
paralinguistic as well as linguistic devices to show they are listening, such as e.g. nodding the head,
saying “aha, oh yeah, right” (back-channel devices), as well as asking questions to clarify what is being
said, for example “So skateboarding isn’t as popular as people thought?” Finally, there comes the
question of levels. It seems obvious that all of these activities would work with intermediate + levels.
However, what about lower levels? Have you tried out KWL with elementary students? Was it a success?
 REFERENCES

1. Brown, H. Douglas. 2004. Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom Practices

San Francisco: Longman

2. Brown, H. Douglas and Abeywickrama, P. 2018. Language Assessment: Principles and

Classroom Practices. New York; Pearson Education
3. Simaibang, B. (2017) English Language Teaching in a Foreign Situation. Second
Edition. Palembang: Citra Books Indonesia