Authentic Listening Tasks

There are many different ways in which a teacher can assess the listening skills of their students. Recognition, paraphrasing, cloze tasks, transfer, etc. are all ways to determine a student’s listening proficiency.

One criticism of the task above is that they are primarily inauthentic. This means that they do not strongly reflect something that happens in the real world.

In response to this, several authentic listening assessments have been developed over the years. These authentic listening assessments include the following.

• Editing
• Note-taking
• Retelling
• Interpretation

This post will each of the authentic listening assessments listed above.

Editing

An editing task that involves listening involves the student receiving reading material. The student reviews the reading material and then listens to a recording of someone reading aloud the same material. The student then marks the hard copy they have when there are differences between the reading and what the recording is saying.

Such an assessment requires…