Testing Lecture Comprehension Through Listening-to-summarize Cloze Tasks

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to infer the answer through interacting closely with the given information from the
exam paper. The third participant spent more time monitoring her own compre-
hension to ensure the grammatical acceptability of the wordsfilled in the blank.
Apparently, she was very cautious about the structure of the given outline, parsing
the phrases in it prudently and hence she could make sure of the part of speech of
the word to befilled in the blank.
For other participants, more frequently, the decoding process took longer time, if
theyfixated their attention on either the structure of the given outline or their own
notes for relevant information or fragments of information lingering in their
memory. The meaning-building process was emphasized especially on occasions
that the participants needed to build coherence by contextualizing the relevant notes
or infer answers from their notes, the given outline or even their own background
knowledge. The monitoring process can be viewed separately from the
meaning-building process because it is necessary to make sure the word or words
test-takersfill in should be both grammatically and semantically acceptable if they
tend to achieve a good score. The Cognitive Operation Model of the Test-taking
Phase (see Fig.6.3) could help us clarify the test-takers’cognitive processing while
they are completing the academic listening test. A normal cognitive processing
starts from decoding information from the given outline, notes or from the working
memory, then enters the meaning-building process where test-takers need to vig-
orously employ an individual-specific set of tactics with the aim tofigure out the
missing words, and then goes through the monitoring process where test-takers
might work back and forth for the most suitable words, and eventually arrives at a
decision. There were occasional exceptions since a few participants reported in their
TAP that they relied upon test-wiseness strategies, such as randomly guess a word
merely to“fill”a blank, but those rare cases do not influence the validity of the
model. On the other hand, the test-wiseness strategies cannot be eliminated as they
differentiate a testing condition from a non-testing condition.
Assisted with participants’schema including their world and topical background
knowledge, the meaning-building process and monitoring process present indi-
vidual test-takers’different preferences on cognitive operations to make sense of the
task as well as the academic lecture they just heard. This is worth further investi-
gation and will be discussed in the following section.


6.6.3 Interaction Between the Task and Cognitive Processes....

Interactiveness is referred as the interaction between the test-taker and that task, the
extent and type of involvement of the test taker’s individual characteristics in
completing a test task (Bachman and Palmer 1996). In the process of interaction,
the task characteristics play a critical role, for the more test-takers are asked to get
involved in the task, the higher the interactiveness of the task could be (Zou 2004:
33). In the following section, we are going to observe two dimensions with ref-
erence to the interaction between Task and Performance:


6.6 Results of the Test-Taking TAPs 93

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