Assessing Listening?

Good conversations start with good listening.

             This chapter really made me think about the listening tests I took in the English courses. I used to ask myself why they graded what we wrote in the answer sheet and the spelling mistakes, if it was our listening competences what were being assessed instead of our writing ones. They used to grade our note taking style, and this very often made crazy because, I mean, not everybody takes notes in the same way, and not everybody needs to take notes to answer questions. Now I see that this complaint was not completely out of place. I agree with the idea that the skills might be integrated to assess one, this is obvious, you cannot even write a paragraph without first, having instructions read or listened. Also it seems to me that it is possible to assess the listening skill using the comprehension competence through the speaking skill and the information transfer with visual representations.

             From my personal experience it is easier to listen and answer a question orally despite the fact that I can look for synonyms and paraphrase what I am supposed to answer rather than writing exactly what I have heard under pressure knowing that the person who is talking, talks faster than what I can write. This is frustrating when you see that your note taking influences your performance in the process of taking a listening test. Moreover, I think that these two skills, listening and speaking are naturally correlated. By this I mean that listening and speaking occurs on the spot, it does not matter if you listened or spoke incorrectly or not, the fact is that you always do it instantly and the time to think is reduced. A person is never going to repeat more than three times what they have said, and you are not going to correct yourself more than three times while speaking. But, if you are writing or reading you have to read until you understand what is needed and write until your text reaches some kind of perfection.

            In conclusion, it can be said that, the way we use every skill to assess another one, go hand in hand with the strengths or difficulties our students face. Also, it is difficult to notice what those strengths and weaknesses are because of the external factors that are always present in students’ life. But what really matters, is that we are trying to be accurate at the time of making decisions about how and with which other skill the assessment should be combined. It was clearly stated by Brown (2004) “When you propose to assess someone’s ability in one or a combination of the four skills, you assess that person’s competences, but you observe that person’s performance”.