How Do I Test Listening Skills?

Listening skills have always been in second place after speaking because speaking is more measurable; but for communication to be effective, it requires listening. Understanding the message is essential for appropriate language production.

Intensive

·         Intensive listening can be tested through discrimination among smaller components like phonemes, words, discourse markers, among others. Testing intensive listening generally involves a spoken stimulus and the test-taker is required to identify the stimulus from two or more choices.

Responsive

·         Responsive listening testing has a question-and-answer format. The test-taker is required to find the appropriate response. The test has a multiple-choice format (with answers that seemingly have similar meanings) or requires a more open-ended framework.

Selective

·         Selective listening implies listening to a text with the purpose of scanning for certain details or information. Tests can use the information transfer technique, in which case the test-taker needs to decide which picture in a series matches the text to which they are listening.

Extensive

·         Extensive listening involves the comprehension and reproduction in writing of a moderately large spoken passage (dictation), generally of about 50 to 100 words. A variant of this test is answering comprehension questions after listening to the passage several times.