Pre-sessional listening assessment
Rost (2002) surveys the wide-ranging second language acquisition literature on listening and the ways that listening is measured (i.e., operationalizing the construct). Vandergrift (2004) reviews a range of listening pedagogy research and offers a model which integrates strategic metacognitive awareness, bottom- up decoding and strategies for teaching the process of how best to listen. Field (2019) builds on current understanding of what listening is and applies it to language testing theory and the need to test at different levels of proficiency. Within EAP, Bruce (2011, pp. 154–176) focuses on the processes for developing listening skills (particularly top-down and bottom-up processing) and the knowledge that learners draw on when listening (contextual, semantic, syntactic, lexical and phonological); he applies these to the ‘key extended monologic listening event’ of the university lecture. Alexander, Argent and Spencer (2008, pp. 217–226) discuss issues around the purposes and authenticity of lecture materials, pointing out that identifiable features of authenticity can be controlled to meet the learning objectives of particular groups. Other studies have looked at metadiscoursal clues in lectures extending to multimodal features (Bernad-Mechó, 2018). Deroey (2017) compared the use of one type of discourse signpost – importance markers – in 160 authentic (un-adapted) lecture transcripts from four disciplinary groupings in a range of EAP coursebooks. She recommends that EAP practitioners use research-informed judgements about authentic language use to maximise the pedagogical value of listening material. However, the demands of measuring the performance of the ‘listening phenomena’ and its construct (the complex academic context in which the performance is enacted) in addition to appeals for the need for
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authenticity can have a deadening effect on an assessment writing team.
GRADUATENESS: A TALL ORDER FOR A SHORT COURSE?
ESAP needs analysis is focused on the language and skills of a specific discipline. The purpose of research into graduateness is to articulate and measure the skills and attributes that students with a higher education in all disciplines can do better than the general population. Pre-sessional students are progressing to courses which develop graduateness skills as part of their disciplinary studies. These skills and attributes are often expressed in the grammar of learning objectives, but there is a debate about their precise nature, a debate given vitality by the need to align them across international systems as part of the Bologna process. Based on a review of the literature, Coetzee (2014) has developed a 64-item questionnaire with 8 core skills and attributes divided into 3 holistic domains of personal and intellectual development (see Figure 1). Similarly, Steur, Jansen and Hofman (2016) have proposed three domains: Scholarship, Reflective Thinking and Moral Citizenship; however, they wanted to describe a process of development such that a students’ intellectual growth could be measured throughout their undergraduate and postgraduate education. Based on a reading of the literature, they suggest that reflection is the essential capability and that, as students are studying disciplines which draw on the component skills differently, progress in the other two may differ, but still represent a range and level of skills that demonstrate having had a higher education.
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