In today’s interconnected world, effective communication in English is more crucial than ever. As educators and language learners seek to measure and improve English proficiency, a resource like the Global Scale of English (GSE) offers a valuable framework for assessment. This blog post will explore how the GSE can be used to assess listening skills, providing insights into how it also helps tailor instruction and support language development.
For listening skills, the GSE focuses on how well learners can understand spoken English in different contexts. It assesses comprehension at varying levels of complexity:
Understanding simple information: At lower levels, learners are expected to understand basic information, such as simple instructions or everyday topics. The GSE provides learning objectives for how well learners can grasp essential details.
Understanding main ideas: As proficiency grows, learners should be able to identify main ideas and key points in more complex spoken texts, such as conversations and broadcasts. The GSE outlines how well learners can extract important information from various sources.
Understanding detailed information: At advanced levels, learners are expected to comprehend detailed and nuanced information, including implicit meaning and speaker intent. The GSE describes the level of detail and depth of understanding required at these stages.
The GSE also shows how students engage in different operations of listening, from global comprehension, recognizing information and identifying specific information to extracting information. By taking this into account, teachers can monitor students’ progress and assess their listening skills. An example will show this in action.
Let’s consider a level, say GSE 30-35 (equivalent to low A2 on the CEFR) and focus on how students process information. When checking a listening activity, rather than simply focusing on whether the answers are correct or incorrect, we can analyze our learners using the GSE and see what progress they are making and what we need to do as teachers to help them move on. Heres how:
