However, up to the present time, the Singapore Examination and Assessment Board (SEAB) has yet to inform schools of how the listening and viewing skills will be tested. Often, teachers without assessment literacy or understanding of the
new Syllabus are left to design their own tests for school-based assessments. Researchers have found that school-based assessments in general are of low authentic intellectual quality, focusing heavily on assessing students’ memorisation
of factual and procedural knowledge (Koh & Luke, 2009). In a research project undertaken in 59 Singapore schools (30 primary schools and 29 secondary schools) to examine the quality of teacher assignments and associated student
work in 2004-2005, it was found that assessment practices by and large do not orientate towards students’ understanding, let alone enhance learners’
understanding (Tan, 2011). Critical metalinguistic skills of inference, evaluation
and language appreciation are seldom modelled for students or tested. The
consequent student work demonstrated a high level of reproduction of factual and
procedural knowledge. This certainly does not sit well with the Learning Outcomes
of the Syllabus 2010 which seek to develop students’ higher order thinking an