Weir (2005) also stresses the importance of an understanding of the processes
underlying the L2 skill to be tested and of applying criteria that are based upon such
understanding. Establishing the cognitive construct of academic lecture compre-
hension, so to speak, collecting enough cognitive evidence during participants’
listening and comprehension process of an academic lecture is crucially important
to pinning down such criteria and validating the relevant test.
3.2.3.1 Bottom-up and Top-Down Processes
Listening comprehension is viewed as a cognitive process rather than a product
(Field 2008). Looking back into the history of research on listening process, the
most frequently quoted listening process is metaphorically termed as“bottom-up”
and“top-down”processes. Based on the information processing paradigm, listening
is viewed as mainly a“bottom-up”process (Rost 1994b: 94). Within this paradigm,
listening is believed to be composed of two stages: in thefirst stage, the basic
linguistic information is extracted, and then in the second stage information is
utilized for the relevant communicative purpose (Carroll 1972). Clark and Clark
(1977) also proposed a two-stage view: a distinction is made between“construction
process”where listeners construct an interpretation of a sentence and the“utiliza-
tion process”where listeners use their interpretations. But do people really com-
prehend audio input in afixed manner, i.e.,first the“bottom-up”process and then
the“top-down”process? Buck further argued that“listening comprehension is a
top-down process (also) in the sense that the various types of knowledge involved
in understanding language are not applied in anyfixed order—they can be used in
any order, or even simultaneously, and they are all capable of interacting and
influencing each other”(2001: 3). Simply put, listening comprehension is a com-
plicated cognitive process which requires a full set of knowledge available for
retrieval at any time and the minor processes that interact with each other.
Alternatively, we can say listening comprehension is notaprocess, but the com-
bination of a series of processes (Hansen and Jensen 1994).
Other divisions of listening process include Anderson’s (1995) model that
divides the cognitive process of listening into 3 stages, i.e., perceptual processing,
parsing and utilization respectively. Coincidentally, as a comprehension model,
Levelt’s (1995) speaking model with three components, i.e., acoustic-phonetic
processor, parser and conceptualizer, appears to match the three listening stages
proposed by Anderson.
3.2.3.2 Field’s Listening Model
Therefore, according to psycholinguists, listening comprehension involves com-
plexity of cognitive processes, and a more recent model of meaning building
3.2 The Competence-Based Construct 23