step. With limited cognitive capacity, listeners cannot process all the information
simultaneously; they need to select information for processing. Selective listening
happens every day. For example, we might fail to pay consistent attention to a
speaker who is taking a long turn of speech, like a lecture or a conferment talk
(Brown 2008: 11). Few people can concentrate on an academic lecture without
“drifting away”occasionally. Brown’s (2008: 11) argument that“much available
processing capacity is taken up by basic requirements like chunking the discourse
into comprehensible phrases and trying to identify the most significant words”
resonates amongst L2 listeners whose information processing is rather conscious
than automatic. Integration emphasizes the need to integrate the new information
into the developing discourse representation. In Field’s argument, discourse rep-
resentation is dynamic and developing while new input is being integrated. During
the process of integration, monitoring becomes essential, for listeners need to
constantly judge the relevance of new information to the existent discourse repre-
sentation. On the whole, thefirst three steps prepare for the last step—structure
building and the importance of structure building is already discussed in Sect.2.6.
3.2.3.5 Bridging Result-Oriented and Process-Oriented Approaches
Inherent difficulties remain in listening research, for up till now there is no technical
device invented to catch dynamic cognitive processing in listeners’mind. In recent
researches concerning reading test validation, an eye-tracking system has been
employed to trace the participants’eye movement during the reading comprehen-
sion process (Bax 2013). But there’s no such system yet to probe into listening. The
data elicited from test scores, verbal reports of strategies, concurrent think-aloud
protocols are all snapshots of participants’cognitive processing in a certain context
at a certain moment. What researchers can do is to piece together those snapshots
and attempt to map out a construct framework closer to the nature of academic
listening comprehension. Meanwhile, studies on cognitive processing support
cognitive validity investigation, which focuses on“cognitive validity of a measure
relying upon the processes that respondents employ in response to language
assessment items and tasks”(O’Sullivan and Weir 2011). In second-language
acquisition research, the focus has shifted from a product to a process, featured by
the increasing number of studies on strategies since the 1980s (Swain et al. 2009).
Influenced by the newly generated interest into learners’ process of learning,
process-oriented studies in thefield of language testing have also taken its initial
shape: for example, Swain et al. (2009) investigated test-takers’reported strategic
behavior in the speaking section of the TOELF iBT test; Yu et al. (2011) examined
the cognitive processes of testers’taking IELTS academic writing task on graphs;
Richard and Yan (2012) analized the think-aloud protocols of native speakers of
Chinese while they were taking an IELTS listening test; Bax (2013) studied the
3.2 The Competence-Based Construct 27