Teaching English Toolbox - OPEN ACCESS SANDBOX

Assessing and Testing Listening

DallE: cute cat listening to a teacher in a school classroom full of children surreal

Assessing listening skills is difficult because listening is often combined with other skills, such as:

  • When you listen to a conversation, you respond, so you speak.
  • When you have a listening "test", you are often asked to read or write something.

So therefore, assessing listening (as with the others skills) needs to be ongoing and is often informal such as by:

  • See the pages on assessing reading here, the tips are similar!
  • Have classroom greeting routines (saying hi, asking about lunch, etc....);
  • Seeing performance on various classroom activities, not just tasks; 
  • Making sure you use many genres of text (e.g. through stories AND instructions AND conversations).

Using the Same Activity in a Different Way

This example comes from a fifth grade. In the first picture, you see that the learners had done the original exercise in the textbook a few days before. 

Tomkinson, A. and Lee, E. (2014). Think Global. Italy, ELI. p. 34

And now you see the text from a few days later, at the end of the unit. The learners had to listen for minimal pairs (so the sound level) and details of the content as well as for some grammar concepts. Ask yourself:

  • How would you score this? There is listening for different constructs and also writing (content and spelling), so how do you separate these?
  • If you then wanted to add on a few items to test reading skills, what item type would you use and what questions would you ask? What would the construct / subskill behind each of those questions be?
©PHZH (L. Buechel)
  • What are the subskills / constructs of listening that you should assess? How do you make these clear to yourself and to your learners?
  • If you were to analyze a listening test from a coursebook, would you be able to justify what is being tested and why? Give an example.
  • What might you observe in a learner's listening from general classroom activities that you can use for report card grades and how can you systematically take note of this in a standards-based way?
  • What are some common item types for assessing listening skills? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
  • How can you tell if a learner cannot understand you or simply does not want to listen to you in general classroom instructions and activities?