Testing Lecture Comprehension Through Listening-to-summarize Cloze Tasks

3. Representative nature of participants. All the participants in the main study are
   either English Majors or studying English as the second degree and their TEM 4
   scores demonstrate that they represent the intermediate and advanced English
   proficiency level of English Majors in the university setting.


4. Validity. As was already mentioned, in order to guarantee the validity of
   qualitative data, we must make sure that all the participants in the current project
   had no access to the research version of TEM 8 test before. So, we wouldfirst
   ask participants whether they have done the research version of TEM 8 test and
   afterward retain those who didn’t do the research version for data collection;
   otherwise, it could be a waste of time and energy for both participants and the
   researcher.


5. Oral expression. TAP data collection is contingent upon participants’“thinking
   aloud”in the colloquial form; therefore, participants’oral expression is signif-
   icant in determining the quality of data. The threshold criterion in screening
   participants is that they can express their thinking clearly and articulately.

6.2.2 Rationale of Grouping.............................

In the real situation, we divided participants into two groups in terms of the year
task they tackled as the research version. According to the Independent Samples T
Test results, there’s no significant difference across the two groups’task perfor-
mances in terms of their means, because the t-value is−0.343 with the significance
level of 0.7360.05. In another word, participants in two different year task
groups have approximately the same lecture comprehension ability level on average
(see Table6.1and6.2).

Table 6.1 Descriptive statistics for 2010 and 2013 task groups (research version)

Task year 2010 (N = 8) 2013 (N = 8)

Mean Standard deviation (SD) Mean SD

3.688 1.6677 3.938 1.2082

Table 6.2 Independent Samples T Test for 2010 and 2013 task groups (research version)

Levene’s test for

Equality of variances t-test for equality of means

F Sig. t df Sig.

(2-tailed)

Mean

difference

Std error

difference

0.738 0.405 −0.343 14 0.736 −0.2500 0.7281

70 6 Employing the Think-Alound Method...