Assessing multimodal listening comprehension through online informative videos: the operationalisation of a new listening framework for ESP in higher education

Abstract

The updated Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe 2001–2018) has recently incorporated media and text types as part of the description of listening comprehension skills. Specific scales to indicate different degrees of achievement in processing, understanding and reacting to TV, videos and films are now presented. Indicators of proficiency level, such as identifying implied meaning or delivery (for instance, clarity and speed) are now part of the listening construct. In this sense, the ability to exploit co-text and visual modes features to deduce meaning becomes a key idea to define proficiency level descriptors. Other relevant aspects of oral communication included in the CEFR are interaction (including online interaction) and mediation, both aspects of relevance in everyday life experiences. This essential description of multimodal and multimedia features in the comprehension of audiovisual texts comes to fill in a gap in the foreign language classroom, where many teachers have changed the use of audio listening practice to audiovisual material design and use. The majority of language teachers, however, are not trained to adapt their course materials to a full description of what their students are expected to do with a video listening comprehension task. They know that these features aid comprehension, but translating that knowledge into assessment criteria or analysing an audiovisual text to ascertain the various difficulty levels can be a real challenge. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose a multimodal difficulty threshold description that is based on the combination of the multimodal elements activated in specific audiovisual examples.