TESTING SPEAKING AND LISTENING

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TESTING SPEAKING AND LISTENING

TEST

Definition

          A test is a method of measuring of person ability,knowledge or performance in a given domain.

Test-Taking Strategies

Before Test

1)    Give students all information you can about the test.

2)    Encourage students to do a systematic review of material,

3)    Give them practice tests or excercises,if available

4)    Facilitate formation of a study group,if possible

5)    Caution students to get a good night’s rest before the test

6)    Remind students to get to the classroom early.

During the test

1)    After the test is distributed,tell students to look over the whole test quickly in order to get a good grasp of it diferent parts

2)    Remind them to mentally figure out how much time they will need for each part

3)    Advise them to concentrate as carefully as possible

4)    Warm students a few minutes before the end of the class period so that they can finish on time,proofread their answers,and catch careless errors.

After the test

1)    When you return the test,include feedback on specific things the student did well,what he or she didn’t do well,nd,if possible,the reason for your comments

2)    Advise students to pay careful attention in class to whatever you say about the test result

3)    Encourage questions from students

4)    Advise students to pay special attention in the future to points on which they are weak

          The principle of languange assesment :

·        Practicality

·        Validity

·        Authenticity

·        Wash back

·        Direc and indirect testing

·        Formative

TESTING SPEAKING AND LISTENING

            From a pragmatic view of languange performance,listening and speaking ar almost always closely interrelated.

SPEAKING

Definition

          Speaking is an act of making vocal sounds.We can say that speaking means to converse,or expressing ones thoughts and feelings in spoken languange.To speak often implies conveying information.It may be form an informal remark to a scholarly presentation to a formal adess.Speaking is the production skills in the oral mode.It,like the other skills,is more complicated than it seems as first involves more than just pronouncing words.

Speaking Skills :

Ø  Speaking skills are the skills that give us the ability to communicate effectively

Ø  These skills allow the speaker,to convey his message in a passionate,thoughtful,and convicing manner.

Ø  Speaking skills also help to assure that one won’t be misunderstood by those who are listening

Basic Types of Speaking

1)    Imitative,the ability to simply parrot back a word or phrase or possibly a sentence

2)    Intensive,the production of short stretchs of oral languange designed to demonstrated competence in a narrow band of grammatical,phrasal,lexical,or phonological realtuonship

3)    Responsive,Include interaction and test comprehension but at the somewhat limited level of very short conversation,standart greetings and small talk.

4)    Interactive,the length and complexy of the interaction,which is sometimes includes multiple exchanges.

5)    Extensive,Include speeches,oral presentation,and story telling,during which the opportunity for oral interaction from listener is limited.

Testing Speaking

          Testing speaking is the method used to test one’s speaking ability.How well they able to master vocabulary,determine intonation,etc.

            Testing Speaking is probably the most difficult skill to test. It involves a combination of skills that may have no correlation with each other, and which do not lend themselves well to objective testing. There are not yet good answers to questions about the criteria for testing these skills and the weighting of these factors.Success in speaking depends to a great extent on the listener. Comprehension of spoken material depends, among other factors, on the degree to which the listener is familiar with the speaker's accent and the degree to which they share background knowledge, and so what is a problem for one listener may not be a problem for another listener. Another difficulty is separating the listening skill from the speaking skill.

            The following content specification for the TSE represent the discourse and pragmatic content specifications for the TSE represent the discourse and pragmatic context assesed in each adminitration :

1)      Decribe something physical

2)      Narrate from presented material

3)      Summarize information of the speakers’ own choice

4)      Give intructions

5)      Give an opinion

6)      Compare/Contrast

7)      Hypothesize

8)      Function

9)      Define

           

THE WAY TO DO SPEAKING TEST

1.Reading Aloud

            One of the best effective ways is testing students by having them read something aloud. It offers several advantages and some significant disadvantages. This technique provides good control. All your students respond in the same way, and so we can make comparisons quite simply. Tests of this kind are generally easy to prepare and to administer, and they avoid our having to find a suitable topic for students to discuss. Besides checking pronunciation, we can see how well our students have mastered the sound – symbol relationships in the English

language.

2. Conversational Exchanges

            Type 1

            Students are asked to construct a sentence following a certain pattern using the information that they are given. They are usually given two or three examples first.

For example:

Tom has been working at the same job for ten years. He is tired of his job and would like to do some thing more interesting.(He wishes he could find a more interesting job.)

            Type 2

             In another type of conversational exchange test, a situation is given but no guidance is given as to how to answer, and the student can respond freely.

 For instance: A friend of yours has been tired a lot recently. What do you say to her? You have been served coffee in a restaurant but you haven't been given any cream or sugar, and you would like some. What do you say to the server? (Could I have some cream and sugar.)

            Type 3

            In another type of text, the student is given a stimulus sentence and can respond in any appropriate way. This type of test usually depends on conventional responses, such as responses to requests, invitations and etc. Could I borrow your book ?(Sure, go ahead./ Sorry, I'm using it.) Hey, how are you doing?(Just fine, how are you?)

             This may also be done as part of a longer dialogue, where there are pauses for the tester’s responses to questions on a tape. The problem with this sort of test is that the dialogue on the tape keeps going along, no matter what the tester says, whether the next line on the tape is appropriate or not. In addition, it is testing listening at least as much as it is testing speaking. However, this type of test does make it possible to test large numbers of people at the same time in away that is at least somewhat communicative.

3.Oral Interviews

            Oral interviews are testing situations in which the tester and the testers carry on a conversation. The tester generally has a list of questions to ask the tester, and someone--either the interviewer or another person but preferably another person--assesses the language proficiency of the tester. The advantage of an interview is that it attempts to approximate a conversation situation, but the knowledge that it is a test and the constraints of the roles in the interview make it difficult to have a real natural conversation.

4.Role Play Test

             Another type of test is a role play. In a role play the testee and a confederate are given information on which to base a role play, and the testees are evaluated on their ability to carry out the task in the role play. For example, the role play might be getting information about course requirements. Role plays require the testee to use various functions tha the/she might need in real communication.

5.Group or Pair Activities

             To avoid the types of problems associated with oral interviews, sometimes students are put together in pairs or groups that are given some task, such as the ones mentioned above in the section on using visual materials. They might also be given a quiz to work on together, a puzzle to work out, or a task. The point of these is not to find the "right" answer but to stimulate speech for the tester to evaluate. This is intended to be a less inhibiting situation than an interview test, but it also has the problem of lack of control. How the activity goes depends to a great extent on the mix of testees that are put together. If their level of English proficiency is widely different, or if one testee is particularly dominant, this will influence the interaction. A well-trained interviewer can provide similar environments from one interview to another, but this is not possible in testing a group of testees in a group activity. In addition, successful group discussions depend on factors other than speaking, including active listening and eliciting the opinions of all of the group members.

LISTENING

Definition

            Listening is the first of the four languange skils,which are : Listening,Speaking,Reading,Writing.In our own languange,listening is usually the first languange skill that we learn.

            To become a fluent speaker in English,you need to develop strong listening skills.Listening skills not only help you to understand what people are saying to you.It also helps you to speak clearly to other people.It helps you learn how to pronounce words properly,how to use intonation,and where to place stress in words and sentences.This makes your speech easier for other people listening to you to understand.

The Basic Types

1)      Intensive,listening for perception of the components (phonemes,words,intonation,discourse markers,etc)

2)      Responsive,Listening to a relatively short strech of languange (a greeting,question,command,comprehension check,etc.)

3)      Selective,processing streches of discourse such as short monologues for several minutes in order to “scan” for certain information.

4)      Extensive,Listening to develop a top down,global understanding of spoken languange.

The basic Structure

          Good listening lessons go beyond the listening task itself with related activities before and after the listening. Here is the basic structure:

Before Listening

          Prepare your learners by introducing the topic and finding out what they already know about it. A good way to do this is to have a brainstorming session and some discussion questions related to the topic. Then provide any necessary background information and new vocabulary they will need for the listening activity.

During Listening

          Be specific about what students need to listen for. They can listen for selective details or general content, or for an emotional tone such as happy, surprised, or angry. If they are not marking answers or otherwise responding while listening, tell them ahead of time what will be required afterward.

After Listening

          Finish with an activity to extend the topic and help students remember new vocabulary. This could be a discussion group, craft project, writing task, game, etc.

The following ideas will help make your listening activities successful.

1.Noise

          Reduce distractions and noise during the listening segment. You may need to close doors or windows or ask children in the room to be quiet for a few minutes.

2.Equipment

          If you are using a cassette player, make sure it produces acceptable sound quality. A counter on the machine will aid tremendously in cueing up tapes. Bring extra batteries or an extension cord with you.

3.Repetition

          Read or play the text a total of 2-3 times. Tell students in advance you will repeat it. This will reduce their anxiety about not catching it all the first time. You can also ask them to listen for different information each time through.

4.Content

          Unless your text is merely a list of items, talk about the content as well as specific language used. The material should be interesting and appropriate for your class level in topic, speed, and vocabulary. You may need to explain reductions (like 'gonna' for 'going to') and fillers (like 'um' or 'uh-huh').

5.Recording Your Own Tape

          Write appropriate text (or use something from your textbook) and have another English speaker read it onto tape. Copy the recording three times so you don't need to rewind. The reader should not simply read three times, because students want to hear exact repetition of the pronunciation, intonation, and pace, not just the words.

6.Video

          You can play a video clip with the sound off and ask students to make predictions about what dialog is taking place. Then play it again with sound and discuss why they were right or wrong in their predictions. You can also play the sound without the video first, and show the video after students have guessed what is going on.

7.Homework

          Give students a listening task to do between classes. Encourage them to listen to public announcements in airports, bus stations, supermarkets, etc. and try to write down what they heard. Tell them the telephone number of a cinema and ask them to write down the playing times of a specific movie. Give them a tape recording of yourself with questions, dictation, or a worksheet to complete.

General Listening Types:

The two main types of listening - the foundations of all listening sub-types are:

1.      Discriminative Listening

2.      Comprehensive Listening

A.Discriminative Listening

            Discriminative listening is first developed at a very early age – perhaps even before birth, in the womb.  This is the most basic form of listening and does not involve the understanding of the meaning of words or phrases but merely the different sounds that are produced.  In early childhood, for example, a distinction is made between the sounds of the voices of the parents – the voice of the father sounds different to that of the mother.

B.Comprehensive Listening

            Comprehensive listening involves understanding the message or messages that are being communicated.  Like discriminative listening, comprehensive listening is fundamental to all listening sub-types.

In order to be able use comprehensive listening and therefore gain understanding the listener first needs appropriate vocabulary and language skills. Using overly complicated language or technical jargon, therefore, can be a barrier to comprehensive listening.

C.Testing Listening Comprehension

            Given the complexity of the listening construct—as described in the first of this series of articles, in which I described the listening construct—it is crucial to use listening comprehension texts that allow valid assessment of that construct. At the very least, this means that texts have the characteristics of real spoken language and are structured in such a way that they allow item writers to write items that target important comprehension skills.

TESTING LISTENING

The practical implications of this for test development are as follows:

Good Texts for Testing Listening:

1.      are well recorded, clear with limited noise;

2.      have the linguistic characteristics of equivalent real-world texts; and

3.      are structured so they support good items.

The most common test items are designed to test the listeners’ comprehension.

They are the process approach and the product approach of testing listening :

1. The Process Approach

            The first of these, the process approach, attempts to identify the various sub-skills or processes used in listening and then tries to assess whether the testee has mastered these or not. This is not so easy, as we have already seen that the process of listening is complex and can vary according to the world knowledge and interests of the listener. However, we do know that both listeners and readers use their linguistic and world knowledge to generate hypotheses about the language they are comprehending. They do not need to get all the information (either graphic or acoustic) contained in a message in order to comprehend, because the language contains more information than is necessary. It is, in other words, highly redundant, and we can use that fact to test language comprehension. We can give the students a passage in which some of the information is missing (words or parts of words) and reasonably expect them to understand it. And if they understand it, we can also reasonably expect them to be able to replace the missing information.

a.       Listening Cloze Tests

Some test makers have used listening cloze tests, in which the students usually get a written passage from which certain words have been replaced by blanks, as in the standard written cloze test, and then they listen to a recording of the passage and try to fill in the blanks from what they have heard. There are a number of problems with this technique. One is that students can often treat the passage as a normal cloze test, and fill in the blanks even if they didn't hear the passage very well, in which case it is no longer a listening test at all. One way around this is to put the blanks on high-information content words, which tend to be more difficult to guess from linguistic knowledge (Henning, Gary, & Gary , 1983). But even then it doesn't make a very satisfactory listening test, as students usually find themselves simply listening for individual words rather than trying to understand and interpret a passage. In many cases such a test would be little different from a word recognition test. In terms of washback on the classroom the objections to the noise test seem to be equally applicable to the listening cloze.

b.      Dictation

One test type which is in many ways related to the reduced redundancy tests and which has been very widely used is the dictation. This was criticized by Lado (1961, p. 34) as being little more than a test of spelling, but work in the 1970s has indicated that dictation can be a good measure of general language proficiency (Oller, 1979; Oakeshott-Taylor, 1977). Basically, the general idea is that although a passage may be redundant for first language users, it will be much less so for second language users. Thus, the extent to which second language users can utilize the redundancy in the language is a good measure of their language ability. For those who don't know the technique, dictation usually involves hearing a passage twice. The first time the passage is played straight through, and students just listen and try to understand. The second time they hear it, the passage is broken into a n~mber of short sections with a pause between each section. During that pause students have to write down what they have just heard.

2. The Product Approach

            As we can now see, the main problem with testing the process of listening comprehension is that we don't really know enough about it. An obvious alternative approach is to test the product of listening. We can give students a passage to listen to and then see if they understood it. The drawback with this approach is that the product of the listening comprehension process is not easily available for inspection. It lies inside the student and we cannot record it, or take it home for grading. Assessing listening ability is an indirect process. We have to give students some task which we think is dependent on comprehending a piece of language, and then try to infer from that whether we think they understood the language or not. The task most commonly given to students is answering questions, but it could also be filling in a grid, or marking a place on a map or chart. Picture identification tasks are also sometimes used. Naturally, it is important that completing the task is dependent on understanding the text. Care should be taken that task completion really does require comprehension of the text. It is surprising how often a good guess can be made at the right answer without even hearing the actual text.

a.       A Purpose for Listening

In "real life, " when we listen to anything, we virtually always listen with some purpose, even if the purpose is something as vague as general interest. If we want to replicate real-life listening, it is very important to give students a purpose for listening. This also relieves them from the necessity of trying to remember all the information in the passage, which is a very unnatural thing to do (and generally impossible), although it is quite common for students to try to do so in important testing situations. There are a number of ways the listening purpose can be set up, but perhaps the simplest is just to give students the questions before they hear the passage. A somewhat more interesting alternative is to give specific instructions about the listening situation and the purpose of their listening, a sort of listening role-play, and then allow students to select the relevant information for themselves.

b.      Authenticity

Another important consideration is the nature of the texts used. There is currently a very strong trend in language teaching to provide

students with "authentic" language. While it is often difficult to be specific about exactly what we mean by authentic (Besse, 1981), the trend is an admirable one. Obviously, if we want our students to learn a language, we must give them realistic language to learn, and have them engage in realistic language activities with it. Of course, in one sense, the language learning classroom itself is not really an authentic situation, and the testing situation is even less an authentic communicative situation than the classroom. Whatever we try to get our students to do, however much we try to set up authentic situations, our students' prime concern will be to get high marks on the test. Nevertheless, given the tremendous washback effect of the test on the classroom, test makers owe it to teachers and students to use texts which are as authentic as possible, in order to encourage students to study authentic texts in the classroom.

c.       Making Multiple Choice Tests

In most standardized tests, such as the TOEFL or TOEIC, it is normal to use mUltiple choice questions to test comprehension. These are very convenient to score with modern high-speed marking machines, but making them, however, is not so easy. Not only do we have to write a sensible question and provide the correct answer, but we must think of three distractors, or alternative answers, which must look like attractive possibilities to those who did not understand the text, but which are clearly wrong to those who did. This is extremely difficult to do. Multiple choice items are very complex, and it is often difficult to tell how they are going to work by just looking at them. Therefore it is necessary to pre-test them on students similar to those who are to take the test, and then subject the results to statistical analysis in order to find out which items are good and which are not. Bad questions, or distractors which are not distracting any of the students, can then be rewritten; and it may often be necessary to reject or rewrite large numbers of the items. Using such a method, it is quite possible to produce tests which have very satisfactory statistical properties. However, pre-testing important entrance examination questions in Japan is generally considered impossible, which suggests that test makers should avoid using multiple choice questions.