Assessing Listening Skills

Hello colleagues, Several ESL teachers in my program are planning to focus on formative assessment this year. The teachers will be working on ways to assess all aspects of language including listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary and grammar. Listening skills may be one of the more challenging aspects to assess.  What are some ways you assess the listening skills of the learners in your class?

Many of us rely on Total Physical Response (TPR) when teaching, and this method can be a good one to assess listening. Check out this brief video, "Spotlight On: Total Physical Response,  by our friends at REEP in Arlington, Virginia, which features an actual ESL class engaged in TPR.

What are some other strategies for effectively assessing listening skills? Thanks for sharing your practices with all of here in the community.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP

Comments

Hello colleagues, I'm currently teaching a class of learners at the low and high beginning levels. One routine I use toward the start of every class is conversation grid. I create a grid for students to ask two or three partners a set of authentic questions that feature both the grammar and vocabulary we are working on in class. The students ask partners the questions and use the grid to record their partners' answers.

For the last couple of weeks, we have been focused on learning irregular past tense. Students worked with the following questions on a conversation grid one day recently. Notice, I also give them sentence starters to support their answers. You can find the actual document here.

  • What is your name? How do you spell it?
  • How are you today? I am ...
  • Did you sleep well last night? Yes, I did. No, I didn't.
  • What time did you get up this morning? I got up at ...
  • How many hours did you sleep last night? I slept ...
  • Did you eat breakfast? Yes, I did. No, I didn't.  (What did you eat? I ate ...)

While students are interviewing each other, I have the chance to circulate and check on students' speaking and listening skills and to address specific questions, including questions about writing.

At the end of class, I often circle back to these questions to intentionally assess each individual's listening skills. I ask the students to number their paper 1 to 5. I ask them questions related to the content we have covered in class, including some of the questions on the conversation grid, e.g., What time did you get up this morning? How many hours did you sleep last night?. The students are expected to write answers to the questions. They don't need to write the questions. Because I state the questions only once [I will repeat the question one time if asked], this becomes an excellent strategy for me to assess who understands spoken English. I collect the papers and check them for accuracy. I also provide feedback on the writing.

This activity has proven to be a really excellent means to assess listening skills. I can see who is getting it and who isn't, and I can offer extra support to those who need with listening and/or writing. Of course, these students are already writing a bit in English.

Let us know if you have used something similar in your teaching. What are some other techniques you could tell us about for assessing listening skills?

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition