There are many different ways in which a teacher can assess the listening skills of their students. Recognition, paraphrasing, cloze tasks, transfer, etc. are all ways to determine a student’s listening proficiency.

One criticism of the task above is that they are primarily inauthentic. This means that they do not strongly reflect something that happens in the real world.

In response to this, several authentic listening assessments have been developed over the years. These authentic listening assessments include the following.

• Editing
• Note-taking
• Retelling
• Interpretation

This post will each of the authentic listening assessments listed above.

Editing

An editing task that involves listening involves the student receiving reading material. The student reviews the reading material and then listens to a recording of someone reading aloud the same material. The student then marks the hard copy they have when there are differences between the reading and what the recording is saying.

Such an assessment requires the student to carefully for discrepancies between the reading material and the recording. This requires strong reading abilities and phonological knowledge.

Note-Taking

For those who are developing language skills for academic reasons. Note-taking is a highly authentic form of assessment. In this approach, the students listen to some type of lecture and attempt to write down what they believe is important from the lecture.

The students are then assessed by on some sort of rubric/criteria developed by the teacher. As such, marking note-taking can be highly subjective. However, the authenticity of note-taking can make it a valuable learning experience even if providing a grade is difficult.

Retelling

How retelling works should be somewhat obvious. The student listens to some form of talk. After listening, the student needs to retell or summarize what they heard.

Assessing the accuracy of the retelling has the same challenges as the note-taking assessment. However, it may be better to use retelling to encourage learning rather than provide evidence of the mastery of a skill.

Interpretation

Interpretation involves the students listening to some sort of input. After listening, the student then needs to infer the meaning of what they heard. The input can be a song, poem, news report, etc.

For example, if the student listens to a song they may be asked to explain why the singer was happy or sad depending on the context of the song. Naturally, they cannot hope to answer such a question unless they understood what they were listening too.

Conclusion

Listening does not need to be artificial. There are several ways to make learning task authentic. The examples in this post are just some of the potential ways