Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1 Background..........................................
Students’academic listening competence has been increasingly considered as an
important pre-requisite for their academic success (Flowerdew 1994; Lynch 2006;
Cai 2012). However, research on what constitutes academic listening construct and
how to operationalize the construct of academic listening in assessment seems to be
only emerging (Buck 2001; Flowerdew and Miller 2005; Field 2008; Vandergrift
2006, 2007; Lynch 2011; Weir 2013). Findings from research on academic lis-
tening assessment can not only provide evidence that helps us understand the
construct of academic listening per se but also offer insights into the development of
appropriate academic listening instruction.
Currently, we are in the middle of“educational globalization”where English has
become the major means of instruction in universities worldwide. Meanwhile, in
order to internationalize the tertiary education, more and more Chinese universities
have started to import English course books and deliver academic lectures in
English. This new trend poses new challenges not only in classrooms, but also in
assessments. First, the cognitive processes in the listeners’mind when they hear an
academic lecture remain a“black box”. Second, some traditional test types fail to
target higher levels of listening comprehension (Field 2013: 133). So, we cannot
help asking ourselves the following questions: what really happens when students
are hearing an academic lecture? How do test types interact with test-takers’cog-
nitive processes? To what extent do test-takers differ across these cognitive pro-
cesses involved in listening to an academic lecture and completing a test assessing
their lecture comprehension? On the whole, all these questions press for a better
understanding of academic lecture comprehension.
However, up till now, we still have learned little about the cognitive nature of
listening and second language listening remains the least researched compared with
other language skills. Moreover, students’listening proficiency has already proved
to be one of the biggest impediments on the way to their final academic
©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_
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