R: But do you think active learners should be the key point if lecturers are delivering that
kind of speech, right?
Zhou: Yes, I don’t know why (I only remembered what passive learners do).
The participant also substantiated her retelling of passive learners in class by
visualizing the scenario, of course assisted by the existing schema:
Maybe I imagine.’cause this kind of situation is quite common, yes, um, I have seen
students chat during assignments of another class, maybe not reading newspapers, but not
sleeping with the pillow, just sleeping on their arms, so, it’s kind of easy to imagine the real
scene, so maybe I think I can visualize the whole situation. So the visualization can help me
yes, remember it. Or maybe it’s quite interesting.
To summarize, the function of schema in academic listening is worth further
investigation. Qualitative data in this research prove that schema has influenced
test-takers’selection of information for processing, and their meaning and discourse
construction. Even in monitoring process, test-takers frequently resort to their
existing schema to check the grammatical acceptability of the words to befilled in
the blank or the contextual coherence between their answers and the task.
8.7.4 Working Memory
Grabe (2000: 232) argued in reading research, working memory encompasses many
simultaneous processing operations, including word recognition, syntactic parsing,
word and structure storage, propositional integration, text model building, etc.;
furthermore, working memory is the major source of variation because discrepancy
in efficiency of working memory interferes with readers’reading processes and
hence determines their reading speed.
In academic listening, efficiency of working memory defines L2 listeners’
information processing speed and their comprehension quality. Participants have
reported that there exists a conflict between comprehension and note-taking, for
meaning and discourse construction also occurs during the process of note-taking.
Note-taking without the help of meaning and discourse construction would turn out
to be a disorganized mess of words that cannot be applied to the gap-filling task
later. For example, one participant reported:
Zhou: I wrote down“note-taking”, and then heard the irrelevant newspaper and chatting.
I think it should be a contrast between active and passive learners. One is taking notes and
the other is chatting or doing something else.
This extract shows that the participant was very aware of the discourse structure
while taking down notes. She attempted to predict how the speech was to be
organized and this is the reason why afterward when she referred to her notes while
doing the gap-filling task, she could report the connections of idea units concerning
this part. The following extract reflects the test-takers’struggling with discourse
construction while taking notes:
8.7 Other Aspects 151