The True Assessment of Listening and Speaking

Assessment is a dreaded word in many English classes.  Many students fear they will not do well, and it will reflect badly on them.  But as teachers we must recognize that assessment is a necessary process to help students recognize what they have learned and the progress they are making, but also for us to learn what the needs of our students are.  Listening and speaking assessments are as important as reading and writing assessments. 

Listening (Berry 2016) and speaking (O’Sullivan 2017) skills should reflect real life situations, so students become competent in those not-so-perfect situations.  Listening the real world often has background noise, different accents and may be fairly fast. Speaking requires the learner to quickly adapt to the context and content.  We must have a balance between a fair assessment and ensuring students are prepared for real world listening and speaking.

There are a wide variety of settings and tasks that we can use for speaking assessments such as giving personal information, telling a story, comparing things, and all of these can be adapted for different levels of learning (Berry 2016).  Similarly, there are a wide variety of listening tasks that can be evaluated such as identifying main ideas, summarizing, inferring and deducing, and these can be applied in various ways such as audio recordings, live, or video (Sullivan 2017). 

As teachers we must always keep in the back of our minds that we are preparing our students for the real English world, and sometimes this can be overwhelming.  The true ‘assessment’ is whether or not the learner can apply their listening and speaking outside the classroom. How often do we just ‘tune out’ our listening every day?  Do you think it would be much easier if it was a different language?  Of course!  We must encourage our learners to practice their listening and speaking skills all the time!  In the grocery store, listening to the car radio, watching videos and commercials, and speaking to people they meet every day.  Exposure to English outside the classroom and how well the students can listen and speak in everyday life is really the best assessment. Whether they can carry on a conversation with their neighbor, or as for directions to an address will tell them how much they have learned and how much they still have to go.  Learners must understand that when they exit the classroom door, their learning doesn’t stop, but really begins!

Berry, V. (2016) Assessing Listening. British Council.  Retrieved from https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/transcript_assessing_listening.pdf

O’Sullivan, B. (2017).  Assessing speaking. British Council. Retrieved from https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/transcript_assessing_speaking.pdf