Summary "Assessing Listening,Assessing Speaking"

Name : Umi Kalsum Ilham

Npm   : 03061811022

Summarize

Assessing Listening

OBSERVING THE PERFORMANCE OF THE FOUR SKILIS

         Before focusing on listening itself, think about the two interacting concepts of peri formance and observation. All language users perform the acts of listening speaking. reading, and writing. They of course rely on their underlying competeno in order to accomplish these performances. When you propose to assess someone' ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess that person's compe fence, but you observe the person's performance. 

          So, one important principle for assessing a learner's competence is to conside the fallibility of the results of a single performance, such as that produced in a test As with any attempt at measurement, it is your obligation as a teacher to triangu i late your measurements: consider at least two (or more) performances and/or con texts before drawing a conclusion. That could take the form of one or more of the following designs: i several tests that are combined to form an assessment • a single test with multiple test tasks to account for learning styles and per formance variables in-class and extra-class graded work •alternative forms of assessment (eg. journal, portfolio, conference, observai tion, self-assessment, peer•assessment).

the listening performance itself is the invistble, tnaudible process of interna izing meaning from the auditory signals being transmitted to the ear and brain Or you may argue that the product of listening is a spoken or written responsei from the student that indicates correct (or incorrect) auditory processing.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING

        One reason for this emphasis is that listening is often implied as a component of speaking. How could you speak a language without also listening? In addition, the overtly observable nature of speaking renders it more empirically measurable theni listening. But perhaps a deeper cause lies in universal biases toward speaking. A good speaker is often (unwisely) valued more highly than a good listener. To deter mine if someone is a proticient user of a language, people customarily ask, Do you i speak Spanish?" People rarely ask," Do you understand and speak Spanish?"

        Every teacher of language knows that one's oral production ability—other than monologues,speeches, reading aloud, and the like—is only as good as one's listening i comprehension ability. But of even further impact is the likelihood that tnput in thei auraloral mode accounts for a large proportion of successful language acquisition. i In a typical day, we do measurably more listening than speaking (with the exception of one or two of your friends who may be nonstop chatterboxest). 

BASIC TYPES OF LISTENING 

         As with all effective tests, designing appropriate assessment tasks in listening begins with the specification of objectives, or criteria. Those objectives may be classified in terms of several types of listening performance. Think about what you do when you l listen. Literally in nanoseconds, the following processes flash through your brain: 

1. You recognize speech sounds and hold a temporary "imprint" of them in short-term memory. You simultaneously determine the type of speech event (monologue, interper

 2. sonal dialogue, transactional dialogue) that is being processed and attend to its context (who the speaker is, location, purpose) and the content of thei message. You use (bottom-up) linguistic decoding skills and/or (top-down) background 

3. schemata to bring a plausible interpretation to the message, and assign a lis enal and intended meaning to the utterance.

4 In most cases (except for repetition tasks, which involve short-term memory only), you delete the cxact linguistic form in which the message was org-i nally received in favor of conceptually retaining important or relevant infor mation in long-term memory. 

Each of thesc stages represents a potential assessment objective:

 •comprehending of surface structure elements such as phonemes, words,int nation, or a grammatical category 

•understanding of pragmatic context

• determining meaning of auditory input 

•developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding.

MICRO- AND MACROSKIIIS OF LISTENING 

     A useful way of synthesizing the above two lists is to consider a finite number of micro- and macroskills implied in the performance of listening comprehension. i Richards' (1983) list of microskills has proven useful in the domain of specifying i objectives for learning and may be even more useful in forcing test makers to care. i fully identify specific assessment objectives In the following box, the skills are sub divided into what I prefer to think of as microskills (attending to the smaller bits and i chunks of language, in more of a bottom-up process) and macroskills focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach to a listening task).The micro and macroskills provide 17 different objectives to assess in listening.

Summarize

 > ASSESSING SPEAKING

       While speaking is a productive skill hat can be directly and empirically observed,those observations are invariably colored by the accuracy and effective ness of a test-takers listening skill, which necessarily compromises the reliability and validity of an oral production test. How do you know for certain that a speaking score is exclusively a measure of oral productionwithout the potentially frequent clarifications of an interlocutor? This interaction of speaking and listening cha enges the designer of an oral production test to tease apart, as much as possible, the factors accounted for by aural intake.

BASIC TYPES OF SPEAKING

1. Imitatice. At one end of a continuum of types of speaking performance isi the ability to simply parrot back (imitate) a word or phrase or possibly a sentence While this is a purely phonetic levcl of oral production, a number of prosodic, lex ical, and grammatical properties of language may be included in the criterion per formance. We are interested only in what is traditionally labeled "pronunciation ,no inferences are made about the test-takers ability to understand or convey mcaning or to participate in an interactive conversation. The only role of listening here is ini the shorterm storage of a prompt, just long enough to allow the speaker to retain the short stretch of language that must be imitated.

2. Intensire. A second type of speaking frequently employed in assessment contexts is the production of short stretches of oral language designed to demon strate competence in a narrow band of grammatical, phrasal, lexical, or phonolog ical relationships (such as prosodic elements-intonation, stress, rhythm juncture). The speaker must be aware of semantic properties in order to be able to respond, but interaction with an interlocutor or test administrator is minimal at best. Examples of Intensive assessment tasks include directed response tasks reading aloud, sentence and dialogue completion; limited picture-cued tasks including simple sequences; and translation up to the simple sentence level.

3. Responsive. Responsive assessment tasks include interaction and test comi prchension but at the somewhat limited level of very short conversations, standard greetings and small talk, simple requests and comments, and the like. The stimulus: is almost always a spoken prompt (in order to preserve authenticity), with perhaps: only one or two follow-up questions or retorts:

• A. Mary :  Excuse me, do you have the time? 

• Doug    : Yeah. Nine fifteen.

• В. T : What is the most urgent environmental problem today?

• S : I would say massive deforestation.

• C. Jeff : Hey,stef,how's it going? 

• Stef : Not bad,and yourself?

• Jeff : I'm good.

• Stef : Cool. Okay,gotta go.

4. Interactiwe. The difference between responsive and interactive speaking is in the length and complexity of the interaction, which sometimes includes multiple exchanges and/or multiple participants. Interaction can take the two forms of transactional language, which has the purpose of exchanging specific information or interpersonal exchanges, which have the purpose of maintaining social rela tionships. (In the three dialogues cited above, A and B were transactional, and C was: interpersonal.) In interpersonal exchanges, oral production can become pragmati cally complex with the need to speak in a casual register and use colloquial language, ellipsis, slang, humor, and other sociolinguistic conventions.

5. Extensire (monologue). Extensive oral production tasks include speeches, oral presentations, and story-telling, during which the opportunity for oral interaction from listeners is either highly limited (perhaps to nonverbal responses) or ruled out altogether. Language style is frequently more deliberative: planning is involved) and formal for extensive tasks, but we cannot rule out certain informal monologues such as casually delivered speech (for example, my vacation in the mountains, a recipe for outstanding pasta primavera, recounting the plot of a novel or movie).

MICRO- AND MACROSKILLS OF SPEAKING

 In Chapter 6, a list of listening micro and macroskills enumerated the various cor ponents of listening that make up criteria for assessment. A similar list of speakine skills can be drawn up for the same purpose: to serve as a taxonomy of skills from which you will select one or several that will become the objective(s) of an assess ment task. The microskills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language suc: as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, and phrasal units. The macrosklls imply the speaker's focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function, style cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options. The micro an macroskills total roughly 16 different objectives to assess in speaking. 

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: IMITATIVE SPEAKING

      An occasional phonologically focused repetition task is warranted as long as repetition tasks are not allowed to occupy a dominant role in an overall oral pro duction assessment, and as long as you artfully avoid a negative washback etfect Such tasks range from word level to sentence level, usually with each item focusing on a specitic phonological criterion. In a simple repetition task, test-akers repeat: the stimulus, whether it is a pair of words, a sentence, or perhaps a question (to test for intonation production).

PHONEPASS TEST 

        An example of a popular test that uses imitative (as well as intensive) production i tasks is PhonePass, a widely used, commercially available speaking test in many coun tries. Among a number of speaking tasks on the test, repetition of sentences (of 8 toi 12 words) occupies a prominent role. It is remarkable that research on the PhonePass: test has supported the construct validity of its repetition tasks not just for a test taker's phonological ability but also for discourse and overall oral production ability Townshend et al, 1998; Bernstein et al., 2000; Cascallar & Bernstein, 2000). The PhonePass test elicits computersassisted oral production over a telephone. Test-takers read aloud, repeat sentences, say words, and answer questions. With ai downloadable test sheet as a reference, test-takers are directed to telephone a des ignated number and listen for directions. The test has five sections.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: INTENSIVE SPEAKING 

       At the intensive level, test-takers are prompted to produce short stretches of dis course (no more than a sentence) through which they demonstrate linguistic ability at a specified level of language. Many tasks are cued" tasks in that they lead the test taker into a narrow band of possibilities. Parts C and D of the PhonePass test fulfill the criteria of intensive tasks as they elicit certain expected forms of language. Antonyms like bigb and lou, bappy and sad are prompted so that the automated scoring mechanism anticipates only one word. The either/or task of Part D fulfills the same criterion. Intensive tasks may also be described as limited response tasks (Madsen, 1983), or mechanical tasksi (Underhill, 1987),or what classroom pedagogy would label as controlled responses.

Directed Response Tasks

       In this type of task, the test administrator elicits a particular grammatical form or a transformation of a sentence. Such tasks are clearly mechanical and not communicative, but they do require minimal processing of meaning in order to produce the correct grammatical output.

Read-Aloud Tasks

        Intensive reading-aloud tasks include reading beyond the sentence level up to a paragraph or two. This technique is easily administered by selecting a passage that incorporates test specs and by recording the test-taker's output; the scoring is rela tively easy because all of the test-caker's oral production is controlled.

Sentence/Dialogue Completion Tasks and Oral Questionnaires 

       Another technique for targeting intensive aspects of language requires test-takers to read dialogue in which one speaker's lines have been omitted. Test takers are first given time to read through the dialogue to get its gist and to think about appropriate lines to fill in. Then as the tape, teacher, or test administrator produces one part orally, the test-taker responds. Here's an examplc.

             H.Douglas Brown [Language Assessment]  principles and Classroom practices Assessting Listening (Halaman 116-121)Assessing speaking  (140-184)