Testing Listening

       I.            INTRODUCTION

It is necessary to evaluate the English language skills of students whose first language is not English. Related to some skills of English, here is the summary of English test in listening skill. There will be more discussion about how and what should we do in conducting the English listening test.

    II.            SUMMARY OF CONTENT

An effective way of developing the listening skill is through the provision or carefully selected practice material. Such material is in many ways similar to that used for testing listening comprehension.

For purposes of convenience, auditory tests are divided here into two broad categories:

1.      Tests of phoneme discrimination and of sensitivity to stress and intonation

The test items described in this section are all of limited use for diagnostic testing purposes, enabling the teacher to concentrate latter on specific pronunciation difficulties. The items are perhaps more useful when testees have the same first language background and when a contrastive analysis of the mother tongue and the target language can be used. Most of the item types described are short, enabling the tester to cover a wide range of sounds.

Although features of stress, intonation, rhythm and juncture are generally considered more important in oral communication skills than the ability to discriminate between phonemes, tests of stress and intonation are on the whole less satisfactory than the phoneme discrimination tests treated in the previous section.

This type of test item is sometimes difficult to construct. Since the context must be neutral, it is often hard to avoid ambiguity. There is also a meanings: e.g. sarcasm, irony, incredulity. Moreover, it can be argued that the item tests vocabulary and reading comprehension in addition to sensitivity to stress and intonation.

2.      Tests of listening comprehension.

These items are designed to measure how well students can understand short samples of speech and deal with a variety of signals on the lexical and grammatical levels of phonology. They are very suitable for use in tests administered in the language laboratory but they do not resemble natural discourse. The spontaneity, redundancy, hesitations, false starts and ungrammatical forms, all of which constitute such an important part of real-life speech, are generally absent from these types of items simply because they have been prepared primarily as written language to be read aloud.

 III.            CONCLUSION

Those are the conclusion of the summary related to the topic. There are some possible situations that will happen to the audience; it has been mentioned completely as above what kind of criteria that can evaluate the tester. In each criteria or type of listening test, there are some points that we need to consider before conducting the listening test.

REFERENCES

Hughes, Arthur. (1983). Testing for Language Teachers. UK: Cambridge University Press.