In this final chapter, I shall summarise the main points I have made about the nature of listening, and the main ideas I have advocated for testing listening comprehension, and then I will discuss a number of issues I think should be addressed in order to make better assessments of listening.

An overview of listening comprehension

Before considering how to make listening tests, we need to understand the nature of the listening construct. Listening is a complex process in which the listener takes the incoming data, an acoustic signal, and interprets it based on a wide variety of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. The linguistic knowledge includes knowledge of phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The non-linguistic knowledge includes knowledge of the topic, the context and general knowledge about the world and how it works. Comprehension is an on-going process of constructing an interpretation of what the text is about, and then continually modifying that as new information becomes available.

Thus meaning is not something that is contained within a text, but it is actively constructed by the listener. The interpretation of the speaker's meaning is greatly influenced by the context in which the communication takes place. There are different types of context: cotext is the text that accompanies or precedes the text currently being listened to; the context of situation is the communicative situation in which the speech event is taking place; and the cognitive environment is everything that is in the listener's mind.