Importance of Listening Skills:

Before assessing listening skills, it is crucial to focus on the speaker’s competence and performance regarding all four language skills. Evaluating both the product and process is essential. Listening is vital, especially for students taking foreign language tests where they must communicate with native speakers. Therefore, teachers emphasize listening skills to improve speaking abilities.

Types of Listening:

There are various types of listening activities designed to assess different aspects of listening skills:

a) Speech Recognition:

The student recognizes speech sounds, retains them in short-term memory, and answers questions.

b) Focused Listening:

The student listens for specific information such as numbers, ages, or locations and writes the answers.

c) Bottom-Up Approach:

The listener decodes the message using their background knowledge (schemata).

d) Key Information Deletion:

Key words or the main idea are deleted, and students write what they heard from the recording.

The purpose of these activities is to evaluate students’ understanding, pragmatics, semantics, and linguistic competence.

Types of Listening Activities:

a) Intensive Listening: Focuses on picking up individual words, phonemes, and sounds.

b) Responsive Listening: Involves answering questions based on greetings, introductions, etc.

c) Selective Listening: Involves listening to news items, radio talks, or talk shows to gather basic information.

d) Extensive Listening: Involves understanding the main idea using a top-down approach.

e) Interactive Listening: Involves face-to-face conversations, assessing if the listener understands the speaker and can respond appropriately. This type combines elements of the previous four types.

Micro and Macro Skills of Listening:

• Micro Skills: Involves picking up short words, sentences, intonation, etc.
• Macro Skills: Involves understanding the main idea, engaging in big discussions, and recognizing communicative competence.

Listeners may struggle with intonation, stress, reduced forms, or clusters of words. Repeated listening helps in recognizing the actual words.

Designing Assessment Tasks:

Assessment Tasks for Intensive Skills:

• Task: The student listens to a short recording, e.g., [m a doctor], and writes what they hear. The assessor checks if the student recognizes ‘m’ as “I’m”.

Assessment Tasks for Responsive Skills:

• Task: The student answers questions such as “What do you do in your free time?” or “What did you do last weekend?” The assessor evaluates their linguistic competence and assigns a grade.

Assessment Tasks for Selective Skills:

• Task: This includes dictation, repetition of sentences, or listening to a talk show and summarizing the information.

Assessment Tasks for Extensive Skills:

• Task: The student listens to a dialogue, e.g.:
  • Ali: I met her last night at 8 o’clock.
  • Maria: Oh, great! How long did you talk to her?
  • Ali: We had a discussion for about two hours.
  The student is then asked questions like “How long did they talk?” or “When did Ali meet her?”

Subheadings:

1. Importance of Listening Skills
2. Types of Listening
3. Micro and Macro Skills of Listening
4. Designing Assessment Tasks
5. Assessment Tasks for Intensive Skills
6. Assessment Tasks for Responsive Skills
7. Assessment Tasks for Selective Skills
8. Assessment Tasks for Extensive Skills