Assessing Listening

According to the reading, it can be said that listening and speaking are closely interrelated; as it is said by Brown, “It is rare to find just a listening test because listening is often implied as a component of speaking”. Then, in the text there’s a question that calls my attention which is “How could you speak a language without listening?” I think that listening is a good way to widen a foreign language due to the fact that through listening you can learn many things such as vocabulary, intonation, and even by listening to songs and watching movies without subtitles you can develop your own listening skill and your speaking fluency.

Another Brown’s statement that called my attention is the part that says “To determine if someone is a proficient user of the language, people customarily ask, Do you speak Spanish? But rarely Do you understand and speak Spanish? I think that this statement is true because in some situations people have said that if a person is able to speak well another language, it is not necessary to have a good listening skill or it doesn’t matter if you are not able to listen or not.  Maybe this occurs because they don’t are aware of  the relationship between listening and speaking, maybe they don’t realize that in many cases if there’s not enough understanding of the language, then the speaking performance will be poor or limited.

As a conclusion it is important to say that it is necessary to pay more attention to the practice and development of the listening skill because it can be a great help for our students to have a good second language learning process.