heard without making sense of it while listening to an academic lecture cannot
manage to construct the discourse successfully. Finally, just as is put by the par-
ticipants in the study, the notes become“a scribbled lot of meaningless words”.It
doesn’t mean that the words they have written down are meaningless. Rather, it
means they cannot make sense of their notes afterward, not to mention a complete
discourse structure of the lecture.
An advisable approach in academic listening instruction is to form hierarchies in
guided note-taking (Carrier and Titus 1982; Robin et al. 1977; Rost 1994): students
can be asked to list ideas in lectures in a hierarchical order and are encouraged to
search for logical relationships between idea units rather than accumulating details.
Rost (1994: 113) suggested self-report protocols to teach listening strategies: stu-
dents can compare different summaries of the input and evaluate them by counting
the number of idea units, highlighting the main points and supporting details and
comparing the summaries in terms of effectiveness.
Finally, Field (2011) argues that the building of conceptual structures is critical
to what a listener obtains from an academic lecture and he suggests a kind of simple
task that asks learners to divide a listening test into‘paragraphs’by writing down
thefirst words of each paragraph. Another approach is to provide learners with a
hierarchical outline of the lecture with slots for headings and sub-headings with
some information to assist their comprehension (Field 2011). This exercise format
resembles TEM 8 Mini-lecture and Gap-filling task. Students are required to
complete the structured outline as they listen to the lecture or after the lecture. It is
an effective way to train students’selection of notes as well as their listening
comprehension (Field 2011).
Young (1994) emphasized that an accurate macro-structure of academic lectures
should be presented to students and an acquaintance with the correct schematic
patterning of lectures will assist students. Up till now, readers’narrative schema in
mind can facilitate their understanding of narrations because understanding only
involves enriching the schema with appropriate information from the text (van Dijk
and Kintsch 1978). Young (1994) believed the schema theory can be extended to
expository genre as well. But more research is needed to address the issue of spoken
expository schema and hopefully, thosefindings will help students build a sche-
matic pattern of the academic lecture genre. For example, lecturers usually start
with the theme and major points of a lecture and then end it with a brief summary.
Exercises that promote listeners’immediate discourse representation are needed,
including online summarization. Progressive instruction is more meaningful than
simply checking answers to comprehension questions of listening tests.
9.6.4 Paraphrase
We have already discussed in Argument 6 that paraphrase can enrich mental rep-
resentation of new information and help listeners construct meaning and discourse.
Sinclare (2004) has proposed a new set of language skills and paraphrase is one of
166 9 Conclusion and Recommendations