Assessing Listening and Speaking Skills

English teachers can assess progress in second language learning and its usage. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the 4 skills that are going to be addressed in the process of learning. The order in which these are list coincides with the class of skill acquisition and the instruction. One cannot learn how to read before learning how to speak. It is crucial when developing lesson plans always keep this sequence in mind, to allow the most natural progression in language attainment.  Let´s focus on each skill one by one:

     1)     Listening is an active process in which the listeners select and interpret information and relate this information to what they already know. During the process of listening,  we are subject to the following steps: receive an aural stimulus, convert it into words, attach meaning into words, relate the message to past experiences and choose a proper response.  As well, Listening has used significantly more than any other language skill in daily life.

2)      speaking is closely related to the listening skills. Listening and speaking can be taught as communication skills. Meaningful communication is a very challenging skill for the students as they often feel that they understand their teacher and peers but have trouble communicating outside of the classroom. Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to present to students patterns of real interactions.  As stated earlier, effective communication (listening and speaking) is the number one reason that most of your students take English lessons. Even though your students, especially the adult ones, understand how useful and valuable this communication is, motivation may still be a challenge for the teacher. 

Micro skills

Refers to producing the small chunks of language (phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations, phrasal units)

Attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of bottom-up process

Macro skills

Imply the speaker’s focus on the larger elements; fluency, discourse, style, cohesion

Focusing on the larger elements involved in a top-down approach. In spite of the two models of listening and speaking are identified: the bottom-up and the top-down processing models. For example, bottom-up strategies are based on the language found in the discourse and include listening for details, recognition of related ideas, and word order patterns. The top-down strategies are based on the listener's background knowledge of the topic and include listening for the main idea, forecasting the outcomes, and summarize the discourse.

____________________________________________________________________________

EFL/ESL students,  both approaches are needed when teaching listening skills. (Nunan, 1997).