“a sentence can be represented as propositions consisting of two or more concepts
and some form of relation between them”(Carroll 1999: 159). The advantage of
propositional models lies in the fact that the models can be extended to the dis-
course level. In recalling a discourse, people normally assign the meaning of
sentences to the overall discourse meaning. Propositional representations of a
discourse direct and guide discourse comprehension. For example, Reder and
Anderson (1980) eliminated many of the details from the passage, leaving the main
points of the text intact and found that retention was better when the text was
condensed. The experiment shows people comprehend a discourse better when the
extraneous material is omitted. Identification of main points facilitates memory of a
discourse.
Background knowledge orschema also plays an important role in lecture
comprehension. We generally store the gist of what another person has said instead
of the exact form of the original sentences. Furthermore, the inferences drawn
during a conversation are not based purely on linguistic knowledge but rather on the
general world knowledge (Carroll 1999). That is to say, meaning is integrated with
our world knowledge or a schema while it is constructed in our mind during a
conversation. Hence, understanding the subject to a certain depth is advantageous to
successful academic lecture comprehension, for the background knowledge enables
listeners to make sense of the discourse not just at thecohesionlevel but also at the
coherencelevel (Widdowson 1978), or simply put, facilitated by their content
schemata (Carrell 1987), listeners are able to understand the organization of ideas as
well as parse the discourse structure underlying those ideas. Grabe (2000: 236)
summarized discourse structuring principles as: 1. presenting given information
before new information; 2. foregrounding main information and backgrounding
supportive information; 3. placing important information infirst-mention position;
- marking thematic information by repetition, pronoun forms or unusual structures;
- signaling relations between local propositions as well as their relations to the
macroproposition. Researchers investigating discourse processing argue that dis-
course structuring principles contribute to textual coherence (e.g., van Dijk and
Kintsch 1983; Singer 1990). Therefore, enriching schema on discourse structures
can also help listeners grasp coherence, the logical organization of the text.
Both semantic and syntactic factors influence comprehension of idea units (Buck
2001: 16). Semantically, listeners need to build associations of idea units so that the
input is understood as a coherent discourse, while syntactically, listeners are also
required to grasp cohesions quickly in order to parse a sentence. On the other hand,
the listener must learn to actively integrate background knowledge to meaning
construction of the speaker’s words, for straight intake of facts is not sufficient for
effective listening in an academic setting (Benson 1989).
However, integration of background knowledge in the comprehension process
must be activated bymemory. Suppose one has a poor memory, it’s not possible
for him/her to retrieve relevant background or topical knowledge at any given time.
By investigating the relationship between participants’self-reported metacognitive
and cognitive strategies and different areas of language proficiency via a compre-
hensive questionnaire, Purpura (1996: 218–228) indicates that memory is more
3.2 The Competence-Based Construct 25