3.4 Approaches to Assessment of Lecture Comprehension..........
Academic listening assessment carried out in a target academic domain is either
achievement assessment that is used to“determine the extent to which learners have
learned what has been taught during a course of instruction” or proficiency
assessment that aims to“establish the extent to which learners can use the language
for their intended purposes”(Brindley 2001: 149). Since proficiency assessment has
more impact on school syllabus design and development, we only discuss
large-scale proficiency tests with academic listening as one of its indispensable
parts in this section. For both achievement and proficiency EAP tests, a major
concern for test development organizations and EAP instructors is whether the
abilities tested are those actually required in colleges and universities (Brindley
2001). That is to say, further empirical research into required abilities of academic
listening in the tertiary education is needed and abilities targeted in the current
high-stakes academic listening tests also need to be revisited and reconstructed,
albeit difficult.
In terms of test use, TOEFL (ETS 1998) and IELTS (UCLES/British
Council/IDP Education Australia 2011) tests are considered the most widely rec-
ognized and influential international tests employed as the threshold of admission to
universities in English-speaking countries, such as the US, the UK, Canada,
Australia, just to name a few. Apparently, TOEFL and IELTS aim to target
test-takers’ ability of using English for academic purposes because the target
domain for successful ones is the academic environment at the tertiary level in an
English-speaking country. Therefore, the listening subtests in those tests pertain to
listening for academic purposes. TOEFL is claimed to have domain-specific
validity for EAP listening (Brindley 2001: 149), for lectures are used to elicit
test-takers’academic listening performance.
Davies defined academic proficiency (2008: 113) as“skilled literacy”and the
ability to move easily across skills. It is the literacy of the educated, based on the
construct of there being a general language factor relevant to all those entering
higher education regardless of specialist subjects they will study. What Davies
alludes to is that academic proficiency is based upon a general construct tailored for
academic study in higher education. This definition also supports the claim that
IELTS“assesses a candidate’s ability to study in an English medium environment:
it is pre-study rather than in-study”(2008: 112). In another word, IELTS needs to
have predictive validity measuring in advance the possibility of test-takers’aca-
demic success in college. And furthermore, IELTS, as is claimed by itself, tests
“interactions”, which has incorporated features of academic use in its tests.
Therefore, Davies (2008) suggested IELTS was a valid test of academic proficiency
because it had been dedicated to presenting general features of academic language
use, with its texts taken from lectures and journals for Listening and Reading
sections.
But in terms of interaction stimulated by test format, IELTS is also challenged
by critics. In IELTS test, MCQ as a predominant testing format lasted quite a long
3.4 Approaches to Assessment of Lecture Comprehension 31