Page 187 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

13

Assessing Language Skills

Chapter Objectives
• Analysing and designing various task types for assessing different
language skills
• Discussing assessment tasks appropriate for YLLs
• Understanding the importance of context in assessment

Listening and speaking are at the very centre of the YLs’ curriculum. Children
start learning a foreign language by first listening to samples of the language
and then using the learnt or acquired language to communicate messages.
However, oral language is often avoided in tests with a greater focus on read-
ing and writing. This is because assessing oral language is seen as more com-
plex and difficult to carry out. Also, YLs often lack the cognitive and social
skills needed for participating in oral activities (McKay, 2006). When we plan
the assessment of language skills, it is worth keeping in mind that receptive
skills (listening and reading) are invisible and unobservable; there is no lan-
guage product for us to analyse. We can assess listening and reading only by
inference and by using special types of tasks.

Assessing Listening
In order to become successful listeners, we need to develop a number of lis-
tening skills. They can be divided into different subskills, such as predicting
content, listening for gist or the main idea(s), detecting signposts, listening
for details, listening for specific information and inference, or inferring mean-
ing from the input text. Table 13.1 (p. 188) presents some reasons why these
are important for YLs and provides examples of their actual use in the class-
room.
There are many types of texts which YLs may listen to in the real world:
TV and radio programmes, cartoons, videos, movies, music, TV shows, digi-
tal stories, advertisements, documentaries, talk shows, plays, etc. Therefore,
communicative listening tests should also include a range of different input
textswhich arerelevant forYLsandwhich theyareableto understand.Learn-
ers should be first exposed to and assessed on a clear and slow standard
speech, but gradually, teachers should expose them to more authentic and
real-life texts. It is also important to slowly increase the speaking rate of the
speakers that YLs are exposed to so that when reaching their teenage years,
they can understand any speaker using a normal speech rate.

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