what they hear now”. The logic here makes sense except that theflow of though is
restricted due to the lack of relevant notes. Though the third and fourth participant
got the correct answer, no evidence could prove that the second participant was
inferior to the latter two in terms of depth of cognitive process. The third participant
believed“differ”in her notes should be a key verb and this word could be the
possible answer while she was contextualizing her own notes. However, later she
admitted“I cannotfigure out what the previous notes mean”, revealing the fact that
her meaning construction was incomplete. In the fourth protocol, topical knowledge
or the participant’s content schema plays the crucial role, for she confirmed“we
learned educational psychology. It says if there’s some connection between old
knowledge and new knowledge, then comes accommodation and assimilation, so I
come up with the word accommodatefirst”.
Meanwhile, participant Zhou and participant Gao are of the same major, English
Education, so we assume that both of them should have acquired the content
schema embedded in Gao’s protocol regarding“new information and what is
known”. Obviously, Zhou failed to link the audio input with what she had learned
while Gao managed to build this link. Another crux lies in participants’selection of
words in notes. Encountering the same audio input“differ in the conclusions”, Zhou
wrote“conclusion”, Tan picked“differ”and the rest two didn’t write down the
relevant information. It is challenging for listeners to select words to write down the
same time they are listening to the mini-lecture, for the controlled processing of the
piece of information takes place within several seconds, transient enough to be
processed automatically. If they fail to pick the relevant words, a compensatory
means is to resort to the schema, as participant Gao did while she was tackling the
task.
On the whole, the analysis above has highlighted the importance to identify key
words, select and write them down in notes for later retrieval, to build links between
detailed propositional units and links between the input and the schema
(Table6.18).
6.6 Results of the Test-Taking TAPs 99