more and more Chinese universities have embarked on delivering professional
academic lectures in English with imported teaching materials. Correspondingly, a
considerably growing number of college students generate the need to fully grasp
and comprehend English-mediated academic lectures. Lack of note-taking skills
and inability to follow English-speaking professors’lecturing speed now pose as
college students’major barriers to effective lecture comprehension. With the pur-
pose to improve college students’academic English competence, traditional college
English teaching is then gradually giving way to EAP instruction and inevitably,
academic listening also becomes an indispensable module of EAP curriculum and
academic listening test, with its main purpose to test test-takers’academic lecture
comprehension and note-taking ability, is also becoming an important part of EAP
competence test.
In spite of the growing requirement of college students’academic listening
competence, there still remains a gap between their unsatisfactory performance in
English listening comprehension and a lack of attention paid to listening instruction
(Cheng 2009). Moreover, traditional teaching methods of listening comprehension
might not suit the new development of EAP that focuses on students’real ability to
use English for academic purposes. Therefore, the research that explores the nature
and construct of academic lecture comprehension in a local context to a certain
depth can also help us understand students’cognitive processes involved in lecture
comprehension and then help them develop more effective strategies to better
comprehend English-mediated academic lectures.
1.5 Aims and Scope of the Empirical Research Reported
in This Volume
The volume reports a series of empirical studies with the main purpose to explore
the lecture comprehension construct represented by its generic components with the
evidence from both quantitative questionnaire survey and qualitative TAP data. The
focus of the study is to probe into the cognitive processes that test-takers employed
while completing a listen-to-summarize task after listening to a mini-lecture;
meanwhile, the research also aims at specifying differences between successful and
less successful academic listeners in terms of their cognitive processing involved in
their completion of the listen-to-summarize cloze task and their mental represen-
tation of the mini-lecture discourse during retelling. Hence, two research questions
were examined to validate the contextualized framework of Lecture Comprehension
Construct (see Fig.4.1).
On the whole, lecture comprehension construct is dynamic instead of static and it
is defined by interaction of its main components, i.e.,“task domain”and“com-
petence domain”. In the current study, the“task domain”practically covers“item
types” (key points, details, inferences or summaries of a structured
listen-to-summarize task) and“task demands”(knowledge resources and skills
1.4 Gaps Between Requirement and Reality 5