by Dr Carolyn Westbrook, SFHEA (Test Development Researcher, British Council)
FRIDAY, 24th September 2021, 12pm-1pm (BST) While many teachers use both audio and audiovisual materials when teaching listening skills, many tests still use audio only for reasons of practicality and cost. However, this may be to the detriment of the authenticity of the task. In an EAP environment, for example, much real-life listening involves visual input, e.g. lectures, which may be live or recorded. Moreover, academic tasks often require lecture listening to be integrated with writing or speaking skills, and possibly reading, as students listen and take notes on the lecture content or discuss the content in a seminar (Westbrook, 2011). Thus, creating authentic tests requires integrated tasks which replicate the TLU domain. This presentation will discuss the results of a PhD study which investigated the impact of input medium on performance on an EAP listening-into-writing test. In the study 116 Russian and Ukrainian university students watched a lecture which was divided into two halves: one half being audio only and the other half being a video showing the speaker and PowerPoint visuals. Test takers took notes on the lecture and then wrote a summary of the content of the lecture. The summaries were split according to the two input formats and performances were rated by trained raters and then analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. A Hotelling’s T2 analysis revealed that there was a significant difference between the two groups on the combined group means. Post-hoc independent samples t-tests revealed no statistically significant difference for mean video scores for the two groups yet there was a statistically significant difference for the mean audio scores for the two groups. The presentation will also present some key findings from the qualitative linguistic analysis and discuss the implications of the study for EAP assessment design. Dr Carolyn Westbrook is a Test Development Researcher at the British Council. She has been involved in Language Testing and Assessment for 15 years and has been involved in a number of test development and language assessment literacy projects. Her main research interests are in EAP and ESP assessment. Formerly an Associate Professor in EFL, she is a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (Advance HE) and has also worked as a teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer for over 25 years. She has a wide range of experience teaching and assessing General English, Business English, ESP and EAP in Spain, Austria, Germany and the UK. Carolyn has written books and other materials including promotional presentations and online teacher training materials for Cambridge University Press. She has also co-authored a chapter on ESP testing (Lanteigne, Coombe & Brown (Eds.), 2001) and has published in several journals. |
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