Introduction

In Chapter 1 I reviewed work from a number of academic disciplines, mainly linguistics and psychology, to arrive at a broad overview of the listening comprehension process. I concluded that listening comprehension is an active process of constructing meaning, and that this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound. I further concluded that comprehension is affected by a wide range of variables, and that potentially any characteristic of the speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message.

Many of the important characteristics of listening comprehension are actually characteristics of all forms of language comprehension, and while listening ability is unique in some respects, it also shares many characteristics with reading. This should be clear from the discussion in Chapter 1, but there is also research evidence for this conclusion. For example, Buck (1992a) and Bae and Bachman (1998) have established by statistical means that there is considerable overlap between listening and reading ability, while both also have unique aspects. Freedle and Kostin have examined the sub-skills involved in processing a variety of multiple-choice test items, and comparison of the listening sub-skills (Freedle and Kostin, 1999) with the reading sub-skills (Freedle and Kostin, 1994) supports a similar conclusion.

This has practical implications for test development. It will become clear in later chapters that testing listening is technically more complicated, more time consuming and far less convenient than testing reading: providing good quality recorded sound, for example, is just not as easy as handing out pieces of writing.