Testing Lecture Comprehension Through Listening-to-summarize Cloze Tasks

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her interpretation skills, so her case can be seen as extraordinary. In terms of
frequency, paraphrase tops others and summarizing goes in the middle, while
verbatim retelling covers the least. On the whole, the retelling protocols present to
us a straightforward distribution of the cognitive processes involved in the mental
representation of the mini-lectures.
The individual frequency distribution of cognitive processes in Phase 2 (see
Table7.1) shows how participants form their online mental representation of the
heard discourse. The low use of verbatim retelling can be partially attributed to the
limit of working memory. Meanwhile, because we code the retelling protocols
based on the unit of a complete clause, the verbatim retelling of phrases containing
terminology such as“paralinguistic features”, etc. is ruled out. Generalization and
construction in summarizing category are also not frequently used. Since the task is
online retelling of the discourse instead of summarizing the whole lecture after
hearing it, summarization is not as frequently used as paraphrase. The dividing line
between paraphrasing and summarizing lies in the quantity of propositional units in
participants’retelling. If the participant retells most of the propositional units in the
designated part of the discourse, it is considered a paraphrase. Obviously, if the
participant only retells part of the propositional units in the designated part by
deleting sequences of propositional units or if the participant retells the designated
part of discourse by generating some propositional units or reconstructing the
syntactic structure, it is considered a summary. On the other hand, since the par-
ticipants are required to do the online retelling almost immediately after they have
heard the episode of the lecture at one interval and it’s also the second time to hear
it, participants might try their best to recall as much information as possible unless it
is indeed gone from mind. Therefore, participants have resorted to either paraphrase
or deletion according to the frequencies listed in the table (see Table7.2).
Participants as Fu (No. 11) and He (No. 16) used deletion most frequently, which
means they have retained the least amount of information compared with other
participants. Participants as Zhang (No. 10), Gao (No. 8) and Tan (No. 2) retold the
lecture by paraphrasing it, which means they actively constructed the meaning of
the lecture in their own way and managed to retain most of the information from the
lecture.
The mental representation of the lecture discourse varies from individual to
individual, but we can still observe some trends. Within Phase 2 cognitive pro-
cesses, the correlation between deletion and summarizing is highly significant


Table 7.1 Nodes list for
phase 2-retelling


Nodes Sources References
Verbatim 8 24
Paraphrase 16 148
Summarizing 15 123
Deletion 15 91
Generalization 7 9
Construction 12 23

Representation of the Two Mini-Lectures...................... 7 Using Retelling Protocols to Explore Listeners’Mental

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