Assessing listening, is that difficult?

Assessing listening, is that difficult?

Some days before when I thought about listening and some ways to asses it in a classroom anything came to my mind, of course it was because I had not read about the topic and I had a different view about listening. When I was in first semester I was very bad at listening, I did not understand anything and my listening exams were terrible. Now I understand that everything is a process and that a good listener is the result of a process in which the four skills are engage. We cannot pretend that our students have a good development in listening if we do not enhance the other skills.

We as teachers need to know that assessing listening is not a matter of decoding information and put it into something visible, it is process of understanding, analyzing making inferences and so on. We have to Measure comprehension (not hearing, spelling, prior knowledge of a topic or reading long multiple-choice questions).

Now we have a lot of ideas and meaningful assessment task taking into account each kind of listening.

The lack of information is not a excuse to asses listening in the correct way.

Please, remember that:

   

assesment conception

Reading all this articles about assessment, testing, evaluation, I realize that when we were at secondary school these words did not have any sense; they were just the words to blame for our bad scores, or simply these words made our teacher more detestable.

At that time we only knew about terrible exams which used to be the ones to demonstrate if we were good or not in certain subjects. Teachers never gave as feedback about anything; exams said almost everything about the performance of a student.

I think that feedback is an important aspect in education, students need to know about their performances in order to increase the quality of their processes. 

But nowadays in my position as a teacher I must to say that assessment is amazing, and that the process of a student is more important that their scores, assessment give as the tools to improve processes, give solutions to problems and to make the students aware of their own stiles of learning.

It is a shame to say that there are still teachers who do not appreciate the power of assessment as a one of the most important processes in education. They just apply some exams to fulfill a requirement but where are their journals?  Where are their reflections? Where are their proposals to try to solve problems?

These are some of the advantages of assessment for both teachers and students.

Teachers can:

• Identify skills and conceptual understandings that need reinforcement;
• Identify and respond to misconceptions about, and misapplications of, content knowledge and processes; and
• Monitor student progress.

Students can:

• Revisit and revise work based on known criteria;
• Use models of successful work (exemplars) as a “target” for their own learning; and
• Self-monitor their progress.