Listening is an important part of effective communication.
Listening skills have always been in second place after speaking because speaking is more measurable; but for communication to be effective, it requires listening. Understanding the message is essential for appropriate language production.
Intensive
Intensive listening can be tested through discrimination among smaller components like phonemes, words, discourse markers, among others. Testing intensive listening generally involves a spoken stimulus and the test-taker is required to identify the stimulus from two or more choices.
Responsive
Responsive listening testing has a question-and-answer format. The test-taker is required to find the appropriate response. The test has a multiple-choice format (with answers that seemingly have similar meanings) or requires a more open-ended framework.
Selective
Selective listening implies listening to a text with the purpose of scanning for certain details or information. Tests can use the information transfer technique, in which case the test-taker needs to decide which picture in a series matches the text to which they are listening.
Extensive
Extensive listening involves the comprehension and reproduction in writing of a moderately large spoken passage (dictation), generally of about 50 to 100 words. A variant of this test is answering comprehension questions after listening to the passage several times.
