What is involved in assessing listening?

Assessing a test taker’s listening performance is a complex procedure (Field 2013: 84) and it is essential that test developers spend quality time thinking about what the complete listening process involves before they embark on any task development work. Where this does not happen, it is more than likely that the listening tasks will not be at the appropriate difficulty level, and involve items which measure more than just the test takers’ listening ability. Test developers should have a good understanding of the following issues: What the listening process involves. How listening differs from context to context, listener to listener. How listening input varies. How the spoken and written forms of the language differ. What makes listening difficult. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.