Participant Tan summarized the key issues in tackling the task, among which
capacity of working memory determines the parsing quality of longer sentences.
All the afore-listed themes that participants drew upon will be discussed together
with Phase 1 and Phase 2 protocols.
7.6 Conclusion
The overall cognitive operations extracted from retelling protocols show that
test-takers are inclined to use paraphrase to build discourse representation of the
lecture. Consistency between Phase 1 and Phase 2 provides the validity of using
online retelling to explore test-takers’mental discourse representation. The com-
parison between a high achiever’s and a low achiever’s retelling protocols indicates
participants’mental discourse representation influences their comprehension per-
formance. Based on the interview data, key themes concerning the task are gen-
erated as a compensation to the TAP and retelling data. In another word, the
interview data, though weaker than Phase 1 and Phase 2 data, also reveal the
uniqueness of the task type and significance of task-related cognitive processes such
as note-taking, selecting key words, summarizing, making inferences, etc. The
interview data have further endorsed the need for the current empirical study.
In the following chapter, discussion of the investigation results will mainly focus
on revisiting the research questions, triangulating quantitative and qualitative data
and linking task demands, cognitive processes and language competence in one
mechanism so that the localized model of Lecture Comprehension Construct can be
established and the arguments in light with test-takers’cognitive behavior (in Phase
1 and Phase 2) across their different competence levels can also be made.
130 7 Using Retelling Protocols to Explore Listeners’...