Listening and Speaking for Real-World Communication: What Teachers Do and What Students Learn From Classroom Assessments

Even though standardized international communication tests have been frequently studied, very little research has explored how teachers planned listening and speaking classroom assessments or which classroom-based tests were more beneficial for teaching real-world English communication. A qualitative inquiry was undertaken to investigate these assessment issues among five English as foreign language teachers and 24 of their students through the collection and analysis of classroom observation and post assessment interview data. While teachers tended to draw on textbook listening and speaking activities to assess those skills, how they graded students focused heavily on the students’ communicative competence as listeners and speakers of English rather than on their ability to answer comprehension questions correctly in the classroom assessments. Students identified a mismatch between classroom instruction and assessments and also a mismatch between the English used in assessments and the English used in real-world communication.