Abstract:

The Web Computer Adaptive Placement Exam (WebCAPE) was developed in the 1990’s to identify each student’s ability level using traditional notions such as grammar rules, vocabulary, translation, and reading. However, there is a pressing need for aligning what students learn in class and how they learn it with the targets for assessing students’ ability levels. This alignment can be done by developing a test with tenets common to classroom-based language teaching. Building on video-recorded Spanish lectures for teaching beginning, intermediate and advanced courses, a research team composed of practitioners from a large university in the U.S. developed sixteen listening tasks for a pilot Spanish placement test. The tasks for the new Spanish placement test were creating using the software Camtasia Studio within the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS). This video-delivered listening test uses classroom-based tasks designed especially for college learners. This is a pilot test that aims to show what Spanish teachers from a Spanish program do in the formal classrooms when teaching a Spanish course. The listening comprehension construct includes non-verbal and facial cues that video provides in order to align to the Target Language Use domain, the classroom experience. Following Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) test usefulness framework, instructors and students evaluated these listening tasks in order to determine the test’s usefulness in connection with Second Language Acquisition literature related to second language listening comprehension and assessment. The study employs the convergent design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011) that entails the collection of qualitative and quantitative data sets to provide a better understanding of the best practices for assessing listening. 666 students participated in this study. The qualitative data set includes participants’ verbal data via focus groups, reflective practice, and open-ended questions in online surveys for students and teachers. The quantitative data set consists of participants’ responses to Likert scale questions in the online surveys, and the participants’ scores. The study integrated teachers and students’ perspectives to reinforce the validity of the study results. Finally, some of the challenges inherent in testing listening skills within a classroom-based context will be highlighted.

Keywords:

Listening, placement test, reflections.