ASSESSING LISTENING

Basic Type of Listening

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.

a. Comprehending of surface structure element such as phonemes, words,

intonation, and grammatical category. We design this objective by using

intensive listening. Intensive means listening for perception of the components

of a larger stretch of language. In intensive listening we can design

recognizing phonological (such as phonemic pair consonants, vowels,

morphological pair –ed ending, stress pattern in cant, one word stimulus) and

morphological elements and paraphrase recognition (such as sentence

paraphrase and dialogue paraphrase)

b. Understanding of pragmatic context. We can design this objective by using

responsive listening to a relatively short stretch of language in order to make

an equally short response. Example of responsive listening are appropriate

response to a question and open-ended response to a question.

c. Determining meaning of auditory input. The type of this part is selective

listening. We can designing assessment task by using selective listening. It

means processing stretches of discourse such a short monologues for several

minute in order to scan for certain information. The design task for selective

listening are listening cloze, information transfer divided into multiple picture

cued selection, single picture cued verbal multiple choice, and chart filling.

d. Developing the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding. The type of

this part is extensive listening where listening is used to develop global

understanding of spoken language. The design assessment task for extensive

listening are dictation and communicative stimulus response tasks that divided

into dialogue and multiple choice comprehension items and dialogue and

authentic questions on details.