Listening, the most widely used language
skill, is often used in conjunction with the other skills of speaking, reading
and writing. Listening is not only a skill area in language performance, but is
also a critical means of acquiring a second language.
Assessing listening is not an easy job since it cannot be simply measured by observing student's performance. Brown stated “When you propose to assess someone’s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess that person’s competence, but you observe the person’s performance” Active listening is vital tool for improving communications with others both professionally and personally.
Listening involves "bottom-up" processing that is when listeners attend to data in the incoming speech signals and "top-down" processing in which listeners utilise prior knowledge and expectations to create meaning. Both bottom-up and top-down processing are assumed to take place at various levels of cognitive organisation: phonological, grammatical, lexical and propositional.
Your entry is very direct and summarises some key issues of listening assessment. I agree with you, assessing listening is very hard. As teachers we need to be aware of what listening really means so that we can create successful tools for its assessment.
ResponderEliminarHey Carolina. Nice summary! By the way, there seems to be something wrong with your images. Check it up!
ResponderEliminarThank you guys for your comments and suggestions . I think the images are available now!
ResponderEliminarFirst of all I would like to tell you: You have a pretty blog! So far, I can say that listening skill is not just to discriminate words and not to understand the meaning of what students are listening, it is like when we assess "speaking" or I could say pronunciation because there are cases in which students are just repeating like a parrot a reading text without any idea what is the main idea, so that's why I think listening can involve more than one skill, that is the reason that make it more difficult to assess and develop.
ResponderEliminarThanks for commenting Cesar. I work really hard on the blog, so it looks great and catchy ;) I agree with you when you say that when assessing listening there must be other skills integrated in the process. Listening is a really important skill for the improvement and development of students and their learning processes. Teachers need to take into account that repetition is not the best way of assessing students, there must be interesting content and different and innovative exercises in order to engage students, so they have fun and feel comfortable with the activity.
Eliminar