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:
I just want to add something that i consider we should know it. Listening can be difficult for certain aspects of the spoken language that can influence the listening process and comprehension. H.D. Brown (1991) presents a comprehensive list of these factors:
ResponderEliminar*Clustering: break down speech into clusters or groups such as clauses or phrases, as teacher we may help our students to identify these clusters and demonstrate that these are required for comprehension.
* Redundancy: native speakers rephrase, repeat and add insertions such as "i like", "you know", and "like" to the spoken language; for us these additions make the comprehension more difficult as they increased the amount information we need to decipher.
*Reduce forms: reductions can be phonological "how dy a do it?" morphological contractions "I'll for I will", syntactic when will you eat? Later, maybe and pragmatic Dad! Dinner!
*Performance variables: hesitations, false starts, pauses and correction are common in everyday spoken language as are ungrammatical forms.
*Colloquial language: idioms, slang, expressions that are complex for non-native speakers exposed to standard
*Rate of delivery: native speakers speak to fast; remember that pauses can be challenging to non-native listeners especially in understanding crucial comprehension than speed.
*Stress, rhythm and intonation: putting stress on the syllables and intonation can be challenging to non-native speakers listeners especially for understanding sarcasm, insults.
* Interaction: for non-native listeners; tasks where students learn not only to listen but to respond and also to continue this chain of listening and responding would decrease difficulty.
To conclude, i want to say that listening is really difficult for assessing because we are assess that person's competence but we observe the person's competence. We should use multiple measure means more reliable and valid assessment that a single one.
Listening is important because you can learn new information through listening.
ResponderEliminarListening also includes paying attention to the person speaking, so you can also pick up on body language, gestures, expressions, and other non-verbal clues to help you understand what they are saying.
Listening is also polite, and it helps you to get along with other people.
Listening is a virtue, something that not everyone has. It gives you an insight of other persons thoughts and their behaviour, and which in turn makes dealing easy with them. Some times just by listening you can help people reason with themselves and deal better with their emotions.And the most important of all it gives you other persons perspective of the problem or the situation.
Something that I have been wondering about is that somehow students who manage good listening skills,are more accurate on the other three skills. Acording to your thoughts, I clearly differ from you. Although it is also clear for me that the four sills are engaged as you say, I believe that being skillful on listening is an advantage to develop other skills, in a backward way than you pointed out.
ResponderEliminarYenny, I agree with you when you mention that ''a good listener is the result of a process in which the four skills are engaged''. We as teachers have to play the role of mediators and encourage students to use the other skills to reach a good level of listening. We have to give them the tools to go through a process in which they are conscious of the importance of practicing all the skills to have a better listening comprehension.
ResponderEliminar