The Influence of Listening Conditions on Foreign Language Testing

This article focuses on listening conditions and their influence on the fairness of the foreign language oral comprehension tests that will begin to be administered for undergraduate admission in the 2011-12 academic year. A review of the literature on speech perception shows that foreign language intelligibility is affected by listening conditions, especially a) room acoustics due to reverberation and b) the presence of ambient noise, particularly voices inside and outside the classroom. These parameters affect hearing-impaired persons even more severely. The authors recommend using closed circumaural headphones for listening tests. Circumaural headphones are very common in universities, are commercially affordable and make it possible to test under standardised conditions by cancelling surrounding noise and reverberation. It is highly important to use a headphone reproduction system to conform to the laws on accessibility for the hearing impaired, which are frequently violated through ignorance of the factors that may affect many students, some of whom have very mild hearing impairment. If sound files can be played by the students, using computers or other systems that allow interactive playback, the organisation and administration of the test is facilitated and students can concentrate better and adapt the task to their memory capabilities, focussing on oral language understanding instead of auditory memory and retention capabilities. Audio-only material should be used, without video. In the creation of all material, language level, speech rate, recording quality and recording conditions should be controlled in order to avoid intelligibility differences.