Listening Assessment

Testing ESL listening fluency is difficult because you are not only testing the ability of the student to listen, but you are also testing ability in the other basic skills as well. He may hear what you ask him to do, but may respond incorrectly because he does not understand what to do. Still there are a variety of ways one can assess listening ability within the context of a small or larger class. For example, one could test through commands, starting out as a group exercise then moving in on asking individuals to perform a task. Reading a passage aloud and asking a series of questions about what they heard would be another. The difficulty of the task could be increased by varying the length of the passage from 2 or 3 sentences to a long paragraph. One-on-one conversational interactions to test listening would also be useful, but would be a bit more problematic in large classes. One thing I do at the outset of my classes is establish signals for when to listen, when to speak, and when to keep quiet. The finger on the ear is a good way to put them on point for listening to what is about to be said. I gravitated to the selective listening tasks because I see them as basic activities that can enhance a student's listening skills and can be easily woven into any classroom situation. As to when they are appropriate? Always and forever. Testing a learner's ability to listen and respond correctly is an ongoing teaching task, but it is especially critical in the ESL environment where understanding what the learner hears is essential for appropriate language production.