According to the test purpose and the target listening domains and tasks, TEM 8
academic listening subtest needs to cover the following skills:
- ability to identify key words and phrases in a give discourse
- ability to understand the main idea of a given discourse
- ability to distinguish between the main idea and the supporting details
- ability to identify and understand important details
- ability to make inferences and deductions from given information
- ability to understand the communicative language functions of utterances
- ability to relate utterances to the social and situational context in which they are
produced
- ability to deduce the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items from the context
- ability to take notes and use appropriate abbreviations
- ability to adapt notes to the gap-filling task
(Adapted from Dang 2004)
Restricted to abilities required in a formal academic lecture listening context, the
abilities targeted by TEM 8 Mini-lecture and Gap-filling task echo Richards’(1983)
and Powers’(1986) specification of‘academic listening’skills. However, since the
TEM 8 mini-lecture part is conducted in two phases, namely, the note-taking phase
and the gap-filling phase, real operationalization of the relevant construct still
somewhat differs from Richards’taxonomy. Furthermore, Field (2008) also notes
the difficulty to match one test item to testing of a particular skill or sub-skill. One
item might test multiple skills. Therefore, the latent construct of TEM 8
mini-lecture comprehension cannot be simply defined as a list of‘academic lis-
tening’skills, but rather a multi-layer complexity of cognitive processes.
In accordance with Carroll’s proposed stages of listening process, the TEM 8
mini-lecture task also involves two stages: the information extraction stage and the
information summary stage. In thefirst stage, usually, the bottom-up process is
applicable which involves decoding phonemes, syllables, words and chunks. In the
second stage, the up-down process is integrated with active and complex handling
of information, namely, comprehension, inferencing and summarization of
information.
All in all, if we adopt Douglas’framework of abilities for academic listening, we
may argue that TEM 8 academic listening consists of language knowledge to meet
the linguistic criteria for senior English majors in higher education, strategic
competence to retrieve linguistic knowledge and relevant schemata tofill in the
gaps during the process of listening to authentic lectures and conversations in
academic contexts. Relevant schemata concern background knowledge in target
discourse domains on topics such as politics, economy, culture, education, and
science and technology, based on the competence criteria stated in the teaching
syllabus for English majors.
4.2 Task Characteristics of TEM 8 Mini-Lecture Comprehension 35
