Designing a system for rating listening materials
Abstract: The importance of level-appropriate listening materials should not be overlooked. Unfortunately, assessing the relative difficulty of a listening passage can be challenging. Although a similar approach to that taken with written texts can be taken, listening texts have additional elements that need to be accounted for such as redundancy, speech rate, and information density. In an ongoing research project, a Moodle-based website is being used to collect data about the perceived difficulty (PD) of listening materials from a variety of text types (e.g. problem-solution, discussion, interview, telephone message, news report etc.) of varying levels of difficulty. The system also tracks each student’s performance on the listening comprehension questions. By using these two sources of information to rate these listening materials in terms of difficulty, appropriate listening materials can then be recommended for that specific group of students.