THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PICTURE LISTENING COMPREHENSION TEST FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (ESL)

The study involved the development of a norm-referenced test of listening comprehension proficiency for beginning to low-intermediate level students. Since some of the students who are learning English in various small programs in the United States and elsewhere do not have reading and writing skills, it was necessary to construct a test with a picture-selection response format. Students taking the test listen to prerecorded stimulus sentences and respond by circling the correct answer or writing the letter of the correct response directly on the test booklet.;In the next phase of development the 30-item test, then called the Basic Aural Comprehension Test or BAC, was administered to 235 students. At the same time a written test of grammar called the English Placement Test (EPT) (Ilyin, 1971) was administered in order to determine the correlation between raw scores.;The BAC is a norm-referenced test designed to measure the ability of adult ESL students to listen to single sentences rather than paragraphs or extended discourse. The assumption is that students at lower levels, like young children, are struggling more with individual statements than with discourse length comprehension. The BAC is not a test of specific structural-linguistic objectives or a test of the student's ability to listen in "authentic" situations. The test is oriented toward simplified language delivered at reduced rates of speed and toward the real language heard in many classrooms at lower listening levels. Much of the research is pointing to comprehensible input, i.e. involving structural simplifications and reduced rates of speed, as the key to learning a language. It is hoped that the BAC will play some role in encouraging students to listen at their individual functioning levels. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).;The test was developed in two stages. During the item analysis stage, a preliminary 48-item picture-listening test was administered to 451 English as a Second Language (ESL) students at Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia. Based on traditional statistical procedures, a set of specific criteria for the test and items, and the results of a teacher evaluation survey, thirty of the "best" items were selected.