In class, we talked a lot about teaching speaking and listening, and especially about incorporating these skills meaningfully into different lessons. Later in the course, we'll talk about assessment, but this blog assignment deals specifically with assessing speaking and listening. Take a look at pages 318-319 and pages 350-353 in the Brown book, which discuss assessment of speaking and listening. Choose one listening assessment and discuss it more in depth, especially in terms of how you might manage the assessment in a large (10+ students) class, when an appropriate time for assessment would be, and why you might choose that particular assessment type. Then do the same for speaking.
Note that you should have 2-3 paragraphs about the listening assessment, and another 2-3 paragraphs about the speaking assessment.
Also, note that this should be completed by Wednesday, April 20.
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Speaking of teaching listening, I believe the goal should always be based on communication. ESL students don’t need to understand every single word, although it would be really nice, as long as they can catch the main idea or overall meaning out of the context. This is why I thought macroskills are more importance than microskills at first. However, I realized that macroskills alone cannot lead to a good communication because sometimes misunderstanding of one word, especially if that is the key word, triggers a complete different meaning of the whole utterance.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I want to discuss intensive listening tasks, which belong to microskills. In textbook, there are examples such as distinguishing phonemic pairs, morphological pairs, stress patterns, and so on for this task. I think to promote the ability to distinguish these will be very helpful to students because they can apply this knowledge to speaking, too. For example, one of the common mistakes that Korean students make is to get confused with ‘l’ sound and ‘r’ sound. If they learn to distinguish ‘grass’ and ‘glass,' they would not only distinguish them when listening, but also pronounce it correctly when they speak.
There could be several ways to assess intensive listening tasks. One basic way is to listen how they speak; if they don’t pronounce it right, they would probably not listen correctly either. However, in case of larger class, it might be challenging for the teacher to pay attention to every student’s pronunciation. Then, I would have a quiz to assess students. I’ve seen a website which provided quizzes of confusing word pairs. (I wanted to link the site, but cannot find it now..) After listening to recording, we could pick one of the two choices and the site immediately showed whether the answer is correct of not. In class, teachers can have a quiz, or activity like this. If students are advanced, I would let them listen to a longer sentence which contains one of the phonemic pairs or morphological pairs. (The sentence should make sense with both words.) Then, I will make students discuss the answer in groups, or have a whole class discussion to see if they get it or not.
To assess speaking skills, I prefer interactive speaking tasks because this type of tasks most resembles the actual communication that students are going to have. The core part of speaking is to make ourselves understood, not to pronounce like native speakers. Thus, I think to see whether students can properly express themselves and respond to others in a conversation is the best way to assess speaking skills.
I also have experienced this sort of tests when I learned English in Korea. In high school, we used to have English oral test with our teacher who was a native speaker. He gave us 3 or 4 questions beforehand so that we could practice. Then, on the test, we met him one by one and were asked one of those questions. We were not supposed to memorize what to say, but try to respond as natural as possible. As we seldom had a chance to meet the teacher individually other than for the test, it made most of us quite nervous. However, I think it was a good way to assess students’ speaking, as well as to make students practice. It could have been very time consuming for the teacher though because it was a large class of 20 students! If I have to assess speaking in that kind of large class, I would rather group them up and let them have a conversation or a discussion about a given topic. It will allow me to save time, and see how they speak with each other without getting involved.
For the timing of the assessment, I think it is the best if I can assess twice: once at the beginning, and the other by the end of the course. The first test will give me information of each student’s initial level, helping me set the goal and objective of that class and modify materials if they are too difficult or too easy. The test at the end can tell how much progress students have made and how much I, as a teacher, achieved my goal.
In my opinion TOFEL IBT test is a good example for assessing English learners’ listening and speaking skills. Each of the four sections in the test, which is composed of reading, listening, speaking, and writing section, has scores of thirty respectively.
ReplyDeleteThe score range for listening comprehension section in TOFEL IBT is from zero to thirty. The evaluation level is described as high (22-30), intermediate (15-21), and low (0-14). The Listening section has 34 – 51 tasks based on listening to lectures, classroom discussions and conversations, then answering questions. The format is consistent in every test. Students have opportunities to practice the test beforehand with the practice test from ETS or with other prep materials.
Every quarter Korean high school students take mock SAT exam. One out of four-section is for English test. In the English section seventeen out of fifty questions are devoted to listening comprehension check. All of these are multiple-choice questions. The same format is applied in Korean SAT. Therefore students know the format fairly well and students prepare for the listening comprehension part for three years in high school as well as in middle school. The questions cover various kinds of situations. I think the exam is very similar to TOFEL listening test and the exam assesses students’ listening comprehension skills quite well. After listening to a situation students are supposed answer for the question. The only problem I have with this exam type is that it does not cover the speaking skill that is closely related to listening. The multiple-choice questions can be very effective to evaluate the English skills however it is not a perfect tool to assess the students’ level of proficiency. If I have two different types of assessment tools for listening and speaking comprehension, then I will apply multiple-choice question for assessing listening comprehension.
The score range for speaking section in TOFEL IBT is from zero to thirty. The evaluation level is described as good (26-30), fair (18-25), limited (10-17), and weak (0-9). According to ETS each of six tasks is rated from 0 to 4. Then the sum is converted to a scaled score of 0 to 30. ETS also provides speaking rubric for test takers. It has four part for evaluation of speaking skill; general description, delivery, language use, and topic development. I think I can use the rubric in my class with some adjustment for my class.
Assessing speaking skill objectively is very difficult for me. In my high school classes I tried to apply the similar rubric from TOFEL speaking section. However, objectivity was hard to keep throughout the speaking assessment. If I ask the students prepare before the class they give me similar answers. If I ask the students different questions some students cannot speak a word at all. In order to make it work, I would give out some practice questions before the test then give them plenty of time to practice it. I would choose a situation for a role play for the specific situation for the speaking test. Also carefully planned rubric should be distributed to the students before the speaking test.
ASSESSING LISTENING
ReplyDeleteHow effectively are my students listening? This is a very difficult question to answer. While it’s difficult to measure what’s coming out of their brains via their mouths (their speech), measuring what’s going in via their ears is even more problematic.
In the class I teach at a community center, I have used tasks in all four of the categories listed in the text. I have especially used phonemic pairs and morphological pairs -- mostly thinking of them as pronunciation tools and not realizing that they were listening tasks as well. Also, our class uses extensive listening tasks, including dictation and dialogue tasks. I’ve even had some of the more proficient students retell stories, again thinking of them as speaking tasks. I’m delighted to have the realization that these are all reinforcing listening effectiveness as well.
In the text, selective listening tasks (#3) were the ones I felt led to a simple type of listening assessment. Not to be unimaginative, but I like the listening cloze. It works for all levels. The material, of course, must be adjusted. However, the exercise requires attention and emphasis on detail. Sentences using minimal phonemic and morphological pairs are especially tricky and useful for more advanced levels. Introducing new words, such as jargon or phrasal verbs is also helpful to focus listening attention. The exercise also has the added benefit of increasing vocabulary and reinforcing grammar. I like its efficiency and practicality.
ASSESSLING SPEAKING
I’m switching gears here and moving from my real-world life teaching at a local community center and focusing on the curriculum I’m building in Business English. It is my hope to teach Business English to advanced, executive-level students.
All of the techniques listed in the text are appropriate provided the content is relevant and at the proper register. While games are great, one could get into great difficulty with an inappropriately leveled role play. In addition to on-going classroom assessments and homework reviews, I’m building two main assessment points in my curriculum. One is a “field trip” during which the class attends a Board of Directors meeting for a large, local not-for-profit organization. There will be a formal meeting with Board members giving presentations, as well as a social hour. Assessment will be in the form of:
1) write a brief presentation for the next class, using PowerPoint, on the issues discussed by the Board (listening assessment and writing assessment), and
2) an assessment of the interaction of the class members and the Board members (speaking and cultural competence assessment).
Since this will be a Board I sit on or have friends on, I will ask for feedback in writing from the Board members on all of the students with whom they spoke. I will give guidelines for their comments. I haven’t written these out yet, but they will be along the lines of:
• Rate the student’s linguistic competence. Was their pronunciation understandable? Was their grammar acceptable? (I haven’t worked out the rating scheme either Maybe I’ll just ask for comments.)
• Rate the student’s sociolinguistic competence. Was their language appropriate for the situation?
• Rate the student’s discourse competence. Was their conversation in a logical order?
• Rate the student’s strategic competence. Did the student get into any difficulty in the conversation that they could not talk their way out of with a question or statement?
• Rate the student’s non-verbal competence. Was their body language appropriate? Were their proxemics appropriate?
Of course, I’ll be mingling and rating them on my own as well. After all of this feedback is in, I’ll give each student a 1:1 debriefing, with recommendations for future work.
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ReplyDeleteOne of the listening assessment tools that I find helpful is a responsive listening task: after listening to a story or a dialogue, the students are asked questions orally or on paper, depending on the formality of the assessment required at that particular time.
ReplyDeleteAs practice assessment, the oral questions could be very helpful, and also can be used well in a bigger class. This is a non-intimidating informal assessment that can be strategically done after a certain listening task to assess how well the students understood the material, or it can be done throughout the lesson, to get the feeling whether or not the students are on task listening and understanding. However, when it's done informally as a class, some students may not participate and it would be hard to assess their level of listening skills.
To solve that issue, the written responsive tasks with multiple-choice questions, open-ended or fill-in-the-blank questions could be used for more formal assessment. In such case, the teacher can get a better idea about individual listening skills of each student. However, such type of assessment requires more work on the teacher's side, as the teacher will have to create the quizzes and then grade them. Open-ended questions will be more time-consuming to grade, but may provide more accurate information as in multiple choice types of questions the students may be able to guess the answer or figure it out by different clues.
For assessing speaking, I like to use the responsive speaking tasks as well, open-ended questions and answers in particular. In some situations, depending on the students' level, the questions or the topics may have to be given to the students in advance to let them take 5 to 10 minutes to put their thoughts together and come up with a good response. However, it's also important to evaluate the students' ability to respond to the questions right away, as in real-life situations they are not likely to get any preparation time.
To evaluate the speaking skills, I would use the categories that the book suggests, grading the students on pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, grammar and so on. More accurate assessment and grading will be possible when the students give the responses individually, and not as a class.
Whenever there is a group of students, more informal assessment of speaking can be done, as the teacher may not be able to write down the mistakes made by different students and grade them all at the same time.
Moreover, as for the time of the formal assessment, I would have a pre-assessment in the beginning of the course; I would have short quiz-type assessments throughout the course and longer ones in the middle and towards the end of the course for both listening and speaking.
The listening assessment type I try to incorporate into my intermediate class/tutor session is extensive listening tasks. I try to find online listening activities that focus on comprehension of what is heard. The main focus trying to be achieved is the student can understand what was heard and express back to me in a communicative way. It is largely a macroskill, but microskills are given in a semi-implicit way; especially if an audio is repeated several times for a student, because by the third time or so listening to it they may already have the main idea of the utterance down and begin to hear irregularities in the phonology or grammar/morphology of the utterance.
ReplyDeleteI think ELT is great because it allows the student to be an active learner and it really test their language competency. This is more about fluency over accuracy, however that doesn’t mean we can’t incorporate a secrete grammar lesson into a listening task. We can easily find or create a dialogue that is heavy on relative clauses or uses phoneme minimal pairs and when the students is doing their comprehension exercises: taking notes, writing paragraphs, quizzes, and etc; the questions can be given so that they have to focus on these forms in the dialogue while still focusing on overall meaning.
For assessment a variety of things could be done. Comprehension quizzes over the activity that assess the meaning beyond the actual utterance, so the student has to interpret what was heard. For larger classes open ended discussions or debates (interactive-listening) would be a good way to see if the students understood what was heard.
For speaking assessment I would chose interactive speaking tasks because it is focused on getting a message across, fluency. This is important because it focuses on the student being understood by other listeners in a semi “real life” way. IST is a good balance between macro and micro skills because it nearly touches all the skills aspects on page 328, and overtime both sets of skills should improve with IST.
Again I would like to use discussion as a means to assess the students’ ability to interpret readings/listening activities. Debates would be a good way to assess the student’s ability to express meaning in different forms because they will have to defend their statements they make. Yet if I wanted to test a certain phonological or grammatical aspect of their speech, oral interviews could be constructed to test such features. Role plays could also be used to do that, for example: a police interrogation role play asking what they were doing a certain night could measure their ability in using past tense markers.
Listening and speaking Assessment
ReplyDeleteFor the purposes of my adult ESL class, I usually use different assessment techniques that include the responsive listening tasks, selective, as well as extensive listening tasks for assessment. I usually go with the unplanned intuitive based teacher assessment because the nature of the program I am teaching in is geared towards teaching English for everyday purposes. Therefore, what I am interested in as a teacher is for my students to be able to understand/process questions and spoken discourse and to be able to respond effectively and accurately to questions, greetings, etc.
It is a fact that listening assessment is a very challenging task for teachers, because unlike assessing speaking there is no an evident and tangible product that students can be judge upon. However, teachers can always check for comprehension by asking students to do something or perform a task that can measure their listening skills and comprehension abilities. Having a class of 10 students or more, would only complicate things and add to the challenging assessment task for the teacher. I consider myself to carry listening assessment throughout my lesson because I am consciously and contentiously checking comprehension by asking questions that involve students listening and processing the question in order for them to answer. However, I do only have 6 students (and in some classes even a smaller number of students) which makes it easier to assess their listening and speaking abilities rather easily.
As often is the case, listening and speaking go hand in hand and are often inseparable. Therefore, it is also the case that assessment of these two skills would go hand in hand. Whenever I am seeking to develop students’ fluency I tend not to interrupt them while they are producing longer stretches of speech in order to give them room to focus on meaning and getting their message across. When I am focusing on form, I tend to make sure that I correct their mistakes after they are done with their spoken production because I like to help their fluency as well and not interrupt their thought line by pointing out form deficiencies in their spoken production.
Selective lisening task
ReplyDeleteI will read a small senario for the lisenig task and to make shore that they are listening I will make tree questions, the first question will consist of the bigining of the store, the second question will consist of a question of the midlle of the anwer and the las question will consist of a question that comes form the endign of the story. With this tree question I will be able to know if the class was paing attention or I might have to change my strategy. The second task will be asquin verbal question like what they tought about the reading and one thing that stand out from the reading.In the teard task I will ask the students to draw an image of the seting of the story and with there images we can meke the stoey come alife. The final task will consist of reashoring the story by repeting any sentes that was not understood.
This assaiment will be aporpiate to use when you what your students to hear new word or you what to know how far there lisening skill have develop and in what levale they are ether intermidiate, advance or beginging.
Interactive speaking task
First we will discuss what dialog means and what tipe of convedations there are. Eather speaking with friends, in an interview or with an adult. I will chose a dialoge were the studens will have an oral interview and each student will have a spesific role play were the students will have to intearact with each other. This is a game in which I think that the students will enjoy and they will be abole to become more familiar with there class mates.
In a large class what I will do is split the class into grups and have a difrent dialog for each student. Also, the appropriate time for this assessment would be afteer speaking about dirent conversation they might have like I asplde in the biginign.
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ReplyDeleteListening Assessment
ReplyDeleteI'd like to use the Extensive Listening: Stories and Narratives type of assessment in an ESL or EFL course. (I really think this is as much a speaking assessment as a listening one, however, because listening and speaking are often inseparable.) Such an assessment would require students to retell a story that I have told or given them on paper. Personally, I would use this type of task for intermediate-level college or adult speakers, but I see how it could work in an intermediate junior high or high school course as well.
This task would allow me to assess students' ability to exercise overall listening comprehension and the strategies (pg. 312) of listening for key words and listening for the general gist of the story. (If I read the story out loud to students, I would be sure to read it two or three times.) I could easily integrate writing and speaking into this assessment by having students first answer comprehension questions about the story on paper (these questions would be graded) before they had to retell the story to me out loud. I would have to find a way to organize a 10+ student classroom so that I could get each student to tell me the story individually and privately, perhaps by having an assistant watching the room and sending students to talk to me outside one at a time.
A stories and narratives assessment could easily include themes of transcultural competence based on the texts chosen. The stories I would choose would either be popular cultural ones such as fairy tales or movie plots, or real-world texts that have to do with current events and issues. That way, students would learn more about American culture while practicing their listening comprehension.
Speaking Assessment
I really like the idea of role plays for a speaking assessment for beginning to intermediate-level L2 English learners. For this proficiency level, I would give a class of 10+ students role play dialogues to practice and memorize in groups outside of class, and then I would assess them based on their presentation of these dialogues in class. I would evaluate each student individually based on pronunciation and fluency during his or her group's presentation.
For a class of 10+ advanced learners, I would integrate speaking and writing by just assigning a role play situation and characters to student groups, who would write their own dramatic interpretation of the scenario to present in front of the class for a grade. First, students would be assessed as a group based on discourse features (pg. 352), their interpretation of the role play situation, and my overall impression of the presentation. The second part of a their grade would be an individual assessment based each student's pronunciation and fluency during the presentation.
In either case, I would ensure that the role play situations I chose were real-world situations (going to the post office, asking for directions, checking out at a grocery store, etc.) that would help students develop more communicative competence. Also, I would perform this assessment at a point in the semester in which I knew my students well enough to decide whether I should create the groups or let students form their own groups.
LISTENING
ReplyDeleteAs the text points out, assessing listening is a tough task. The list of tasks in the text is good, but which one to use? I think it depends on the focus of the course and the population that you are teaching. Therefore, I will specify that for adults with an intermediate level of knowledge, I would choose these two, if I could only use a couple:
* the listening cloze (Ss fill in the blanks)
* the dialogue where Ss hear the dialogue and answer multiple-choice [MC] comprehension questions
For management of the assessment, I think these two types of tasks are quite manageable, even in a large class: both involve written output, and the students can either correct their own papers or hand them in for me to correct. I have used "correct your own and ask questions as we go through the exercise again" to good effect. (In my answer, I am not envisioning a class that is taken for a grade.) It would be important for me to see student papers afterward so that I can look for patterns in student errors.
During the course, the listening cloze could come near the beginning of the course and occur with some regularity. For the dialogue-comprehension task, I might save that for the second half of the course. Then again, if my materials include this sort of assessment tool, it would be good to use it regularly throughout a course, too.
I would choose these two types because I think the students would find them fun and would quickly understand their purpose. For me, hopefully, creating the listening cloze would not be too laborious (so that we could do this frequently). For the dialogue with MC questions, these are quite common and I would use something that follows along in our book.
SPEAKING
Although assessing speaking may be more straightforward than assessing listening, there are many ways to do so and the proficiency level of the student again influences your choice. I find that the difficulty in speaking is getting the students to perform it willingly and frequently. Once they do, assessment is not that challenging.
From the list provided in the text, I have favored reading aloud in my sessions with adult intermediate learners. I find that this type of task is quite manageable because the material to read is a given: the book we are using usually provides the right level of material to read. From student performance, I can gauge the pronunciation and fluency of a student that I do not know at all. Thus, I would tend to use reading aloud at or near the beginning of a course. As the course progresses, hopefully, reading aloud would not be as necessary.
Later on in a course, however, I would rely more on trying to get the students to speak through role plays and discussions. These can be more work for me as a teacher, especially to assess, if the students split into groups that are having conversations simultaneously and I am trying to assess accuracy and fluency in their speech. Therefore, I am intrigued by an idea that the book mentioned as being time-consuming for the teacher of a large class, but which strikes me as possibly quite productive for the shy or hesitant student: the audio journal. I am not sure how available the technology is to all students, but if it is, this would yield excellent material for individual consultations with the students to help them with their speaking. To manage, beyond the time to listen to all of the journal entries, which I would limit to 3 minutes of speech per entry, I think I would provide written comments with timings to the recording that the student made. Something like "2:14 - pronunciation - "busy"; 2:45 - grammar - "doesn't understand" and so on.