Understanding Listening Assessment
What is listening?
How does a listener turn a sound wave into a complex unit of meaning?
How does a listenenr build comprehension?
an interpretative language skill, which involves all other language skills such as reading speaking and writing.
What makes listening different from reading?
Firstly, listening is transitory. That means there is no record of wht you hear apart from your memory.
Secondly, listening happens in real time.
need to store while analysing
need to carry forward information in the mind
Thirdly, the listener has no control over the rate at which the speech is delivered.
Another difference is that there's a lot of variability in the speech.
Finally, there are no gaps between words when you listen.
What is decoding?
Translating input the sounds of the language
Searching for words which match or nearly match these sounds
What does a listener need to do?
Recognise a grammar pattern in the string of words.
Fit a word to the words surrounding it.
Cognitive processing
Syntactic parsing
Meaning construction
Lexical decoding
Discourse construction
Input decoding
Speakers: variety of accents
Advantages of including a variety of accents
Disadvantages of including a variety of accents
Familiarity with different 'not-standard' accents can be a random factor.
Listening is about more than input decoding.
Can result in positive washback effect in the variety of accents used in preparation material such as coursebooks.
May be important for some tests.