closely associated with learning rather than language use or test-taking and believes
that the ability to “retrieve” information successfully from long-term memory
during a test is considered a“good”test-taking strategy. Nevertheless, considering
the cognitive load that academic lecture comprehension fetches, we cannot help
thinking about the role of memory in comprehension of longer discourses and
construction of discourse representations. According to Baddeley (1986), the time
span of the working memory where information processing takes place, is typically
15 to 16 s in duration. In propositional terms, only two or four propositions can be
the optimal unit for contextualizing the new information in the working memory
(Rickheit, Schnotz and Strohner 1985: 16). While listeners are listening to an
academic lecture, if they are confronted with too much new information, there’s
simply no cognitive space for retrieving old information stored in the long-term
memory.
On the whole, the high cognitive demand of academic lecture comprehension
poses a challenge for nonnative speakers. According to categorization of learning
proposed by Freedle (1972), academic lecture comprehension definitely falls into
the type of learning as“complex systems of ideas”which is in need of high
cognitive demand and cannot simply be handled by long- or short-term memory but
calls for“parts of old knowledge system which need alteration (substitution,
addition, or subtraction of semantic relations)”(Freedle 1972: 205).
3.2.3.4 Higher Levels of Cognitive Processes
More specifically, higher levels of cognitive processes illustrated by Field (2013:
100 – 103) include meaning construction and discourse construction. He argued in
order to enrich the literal meaning of the audio input, listeners need to apply
pragmatic, contextual, semantic and inferential information to assist their under-
standing of what is intended by the speaker. In order to construct a holistic com-
prehension of a spoken discourse, four processes should be applied in discourse
construction (Field 2013):
Selection. The listener needs to decide upon the relevance of a new piece of information to
the discourse as a whole.
Integration. The listener needs to add the new item of meaning to the developing discourse
representation.
Self-monitoring. Part of integration entails comparing a new piece of information with what
has gone before to ensure that it is consistent.
Structure building. As more and more information is acquired, the listener has to take
account of the relative importance of each item and construct a hierarchical pattern of what
has been said. (p. 102–103)
Field’s model emphasizes the cognitive processes a listener needs to engage
typical of comprehension of large stretches of discourse and therefore these pro-
cesses can also be applied to academic lecture comprehension. Selection is a crucial
26 3 Approaches to Assessment of Lecture Comprehension