Chapter 7
Using Retelling Protocols to Explore
Listeners’Mental Representation
of the Two Mini-Lectures
7.1 Introduction
This chapter presents analysis of Phase 2 retelling protocols that substantially
compensate Phase 1 TAP data in the aspect of probing into listeners’mental rep-
resentation of mini-lectures. The purpose of aligning phase 1 and phase 2 data is to
establish a solid understanding of test-takers’cognitive processes in both stages, i.e.
the stage of listening to the mini-lectures and the stage of completing the
listen-to-summarize tasks. Another focus of this chapter is to explore the differences
between high achievers and low achievers in terms of their mental representation of
the mini-lecture discourse evidenced by retelling protocols.
7.2 Participants’Overall Retelling Protocols in Phase 2
The table of nodes list for Phase 2 (see Table7.1) shows that all the 16 participants
employed paraphrase cognitive process in retelling the mini-lecture. While sum-
marizing the episodes of mini-lectures (see Appendix 6 and 7 for length of each
episode in 2010 TEM 8 Mini-lecture script and 2013 TEM 8 Mini-lecture script),
15 of them used deletion, deleting some of the propositional units while retelling
the discourse. Since the time span of the working memory is rather limited, with the
duration of typically 15–16 s for information processing (Baddeley 1986), average
textual length of episodes for test-takers’retelling is controlled within 60 words.
The textual length of 60 words is cognitively demanding for retelling, but helpful
for the researcher to scrutinize test-takers’summarizing skills. According to all the
retelling protocols, only one student did not report cognitive processes related to
summarization, for she either retold the part of discourse verbatim or paraphrased
the rest of the discourse without deleting any meaningful clusters of propositions.
Later she reported she had systematically trained her working memory to improve
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018
H. Wang,Testing Lecture Comprehension Through Listening-to-summarize
Cloze Tasks, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-6202-5_7
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