Levels of processing: In all of the protocols, participants reached the level of
meaning construction, which is evidenced by extracts from protocols such as:“It’sa
characteristic. Let me think. It should be...”,“I feel it’s sort of attitude or manner”,
“I think it concerns mistakes, but failure is better. It means...”etc. The protocols
show they have already confirmed that the missing part should be a noun or
nominal phrase and also tried to assign some attribute to the missing word/words. In
another word, they are interpreting the meaning of the missing information.
Differences: Thefirst protocol from Zhou is, comparatively speaking, the
longest, which shows she has spent longer time on this particular gap. Apart from
lower levels like decoding and parsing, she obviously attempted tofigure out the
meaning of the missing information by inferring from her background knowledge,
for example, she mentioned“It should be others said something, the behavior is
good or bad, and then learners decide whether to change or not. Then, active
learners will change, if good, they keep it. Passive learners will not take notice of
others’comment”. So she has assigned the meaning to some external reason. But
she failed to construct meaning on the relevant content from the lecture and this is
the reason why she arrived at the conclusion that“it should be attitude toward
changes, or alteration”, a wrong answer. Her summary“It’s a characteristic”is also
somewhat misleading. Later, when the participant wanted to refocus on the specific
gap again, she just repeated“attitude toward”and“evaluate and change behaviour”
three times, and the decoding contour goes from“attitude”to the active learners’
behaviour“evaluate and change”in a cyclic pattern. Finally, the participant arrived
at a conclusion that“I know the general meaning, but just cannotfigure out the
exact word.”The claim does not really count because the essential meaning of this
part is not articulated in words and hence the meaning is not constructed suc-
cessfully even if it is in fact latent somewhere in the mind.
In one word, thefirst participant did adopt all the cognitive processes, especially
the higher ones including inferencing with the help of background knowledge, but
the problem here is she failed to grasp the relevant piece of information and build
connection between the propositional units.
Table 6.19 (continued)
something toward difficulty or failure, it’s more
suitable
Protocol 3 (Gap No. 9; Correct
answer; TEM 4: 79; TEM 8 Mini: 4)Fan: Attitude toward...Um...I’d put failure for the
ninth gap
R: Why?
Fan: I think it concerns mistakes, but failure is better.
It means active learners evaluate and change, but
passive learner remain the same
R: How do you get the answer is“failure”?
Fan: Um. It says active learners will evaluate what
they did before and change accordingly, if the
method is suitable, he needn’t change it while
passive learners don’t change, they remain the same
even if they make mistakes6.6 Results of the Test-Taking TAPs 101