Studies on listening skills and strategies form a big bulk of literature concerning
listening comprehension. Arguably, the result-oriented approach clarifies and
operationalizes the construct for testers, but there are inevitably some limitations
concerning this approach. First, the fuzziness of categorization. Alderson (2000)
once pointed out the crudeness of much of the research into, and teaching of,
reading strategies and the difficulty to distinguish between reading strategies and
skills. Listening research is confronted with the same challenge. Second, lack of
empirical support. There is an overlap amongst all the present categories of lis-
tening skills with a lack of supporting empirical evidence based on listening in a
natural context (Field 2009). In another word, taxonomies of listening skills are
almost all intuitive without sufficient evidence generated from real cognitive pro-
cesses in the real world, or simply without cognitive validity. Even studies with
empirical evidence, such as Power’s survey result (1986), also have inherent lim-
itations in terms of the representativeness of the sample and the participants’
competence to analyze listening competence.
After Bormuth (1970) made thefirst request drawing attention to the processes
of respondents’answering a language test, more studies appeared that focused upon
observation and description of learners to accomplish language test tasks (Cohen
1998). Cohen (1998: 91) further argued that the“presumptions”test designers and
administrators hold fast and the“actual processes”that test takers go through to
produce answers to test questions are not necessarily the same. Tests indicating
test-takers’level of comprehension sometimes may produce misleading results
because of test-wiseness techniques test-takers have adopted for completing a test
task without fully understanding the texts. Therefore, without exploring the cog-
nitive behavior test-takers carry out in completing a test, the assumed construct, i.e.,
what should be tested, can not be substantially validated.
On the whole, either the sub-skill approach or strategy approach is rather
result-oriented than process-oriented. Listening is a cognitive process badly in need
of the adoption of mixed methods with the aim to shed some light upon the
investigation of its real nature. Vandergrift (2007) proposes in order to overcome
limitation of one single method, researchers investigating a construct as implicit as
L2 listening should“use multi-method assessment to collect convergent data”
(Vandergrift 2007: 192). If data from more than one source can present a more
complete picture of the construct under investigation through triangulation, relia-
bility of the research findings can be enhanced, though, sometimes, the
process-oriented methods are more labor-intensive.
3.2.3 The Cognitive Approach...........................
As a crucial part of academic listening that even defines listeners’academic lis-
tening competence, lecture comprehension is a highly complicated cognitive pro-
cess involving multiple cognitive demands. Therefore, how to define the cognitive
construct of academic lecture comprehension is the gist in clarifying the nature of it.
22 3 Approaches to Assessment of Lecture Comprehension