PRE-SESSIONAL LISTENING ASSESSMENT: CONSTRUCT, CONTENT AND GRADUATENESS
INTRODUCTION
Many pre-sessional course leaders are implementing an English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) focus to their curriculum to increase the value of the provision to disciplinary sub-groups within their cohort of students. However, writing reliable and valid assessments for these sub-groups is a challenge as pre-sessional students have a range of target courses across many disciplines. Perhaps the most difficult language skill to write assessments for is listening (Field, 2011). Developing a range of discipline-specific listenings is beyond the resources of most language centres; it is more efficient to assess a whole cohort with one version of a listening test. This problem is offered as a reason to remain with English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP). Rethinking the scope of an ESAP pre-
sessional’s learning objectives may help. A catalyst to this rethinking comes from
graduateness research. Research into graduateness has articulated the skills and attributes that all students gain in higher education (Coetzee, 2014). Graduateness frameworks offer a principled way of identifying pre-sessional assessment constructs and specifications that are broader than a specific discipline, but still include them. Doing so allows a pre- sessional course to include ‘general’ aspects of graduateness in ESAP learning objectives and to assess ESAP differently across language skills. In this paper, the development of a pre- sessional listening test at a post-92 university in the UK is used to exemplify some of the challenges and compromises made during test development which followed such a rethinking. It suggests how notions of ‘graduateness’ can widen the scope of the needs analysis, refine ESAP learning objectives and inform manageable, but robust, listening assessments.
