Testing Lecture Comprehension Through Listening-to-summarize Cloze Tasks

(National Geographic (Little) Kids) #1

Gao: Stick to the exact meaning of one word, not the general idea.
R: Is it passive learner or active learner?
Gao: Passive learner, because at last of the sentence, the lecturer said you are
actually a passive learner.


Low Achiever


R: Ok, do you know the meaning of“quote and unquote”?
Wang: No. I listened it, but I don’t understand it.
R: And“what in the world was that about?”Did you catch that sentence? What
does it mean?
Wang: Yes, I catch it, but I don’t know what the meaning is, so I didn’t catch the
idea.
R: So you didn’t catch the idea of that sentence. Ok. Let’s go on.


Observation
Here, the two participants, Gao and Wang responded to the vague part of the
discourse in a vastly different manner. First, Gao responded to the vague part with
quite affirmed paraphrase, though her interpretation of“quote and quote”and“what
in the world was that about”is not correct, while Wang responded to both questions
with a negative statement like“I don’t know”or“I don’t understand”, an explicit
indicator of being at a loss. Second, Wang reported that she had heard the words
“quote and unquote”and“what in the world was that about”but didn’t understand
their meaning. It shows that Wang retained that part of information without pro-
cessing it to the meaning-building level, or at least she didn’t make any sense of the
vague part in an active way, such as using contextual clues or background
knowledge. In fact, the comprehension of this vague part is not part of the
gap-filling task and hence does not influence their test performance, but the way of
approaching vague details might influence their listening process, for obviously, an
active listener’s listening process will be comparatively smoother while theyfill in
those information slots with their own interpretation while a passive listener’s
listening process will be interrupted from time to time while they encounter com-
prehension difficulties.


7.5 Interview Data


We could generalize the following key themes in students’interview transcriptions
about the task in question: task type, note-taking, key words, summarizing and
inferring and working memory (Table7.11).


7.4 Comparison Between a High-Achiever... 127

Free download pdf