25 October 2011
What is the difference between an easy and difficult listening item on PTE Academic?
According to Glyn Jones, Senior Researcher in Pearson’s Language Testing Division, the main source of difficulty may be the content of what is being listened to, rather than the speed of delivery, quantity of syllables used or the quality of the speech.
“We’re looking into the various aspects of listening tasks that might determine how easy or difficult they are for test takers,” Glyn said. “Initial results suggest that aspects of discourse structure, such as lexical cohesion, are better predictors of a test taker’s performance than acoustic aspects. It may be that by the time they take PTE Academic the majority of test takers have little difficulty decoding even quite rapid speech on a surface level, but processing the academic content still poses a challenge.”
Glyn presented the progress of his research at the European Association for language Testing and Assessment (EALTA) held at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey. The theme of the event in which EALTA launched their new special interest group for academic testing was “Good Practice in the Testing and Assessment of Academic Skills”. The conference was attended by language testing professionals from all over Europe with the aim of sharing “good practice’” in assessment practices.