use these lower processes, but successful listeners will smoothly progress to a more
profound cognitive process while less successful listeners might get stuck midway
without successfully constructing meaning of the decoded part.
8.6.3 Argument 3
Test-takers’decoding quality varies. Successful listeners rarely found difficulty in
decoding input, even the pronunciation of new words. For example, the word
“huskiness”in the 2010 TEM 8 Mini-lecture, to test-takers in the current project, is
a new word. Successful decoders spelled the word correctly, even without knowing
the exact meaning of the word, while unsuccessful decoders wrote a variety, like
“hostility”, “husthy”, “hospeness”, etc. Other examples such as“reflect, think
critically”decoded as“reflect, think quickly”all prove decoding phonemes cor-
rectly is thefirst step toward meaning construction. Novice decoders make con-
siderable effort to match the acoustic input to the standard form of the language and
hence quicker recognition of words and chunks presses for more decoding practice
(Field 2008). Goh (2000) also reported that low-level learners were found to have
noticeably more difficulties in the decoding process than more advanced ones.
Novice decoders need to prioritize familiarizing themselves with the English sound
system in a gradual process toward being an experienced decoder. In terms of
academic listening, the acoustic input listeners need to decode is no longer confined
to phoneme and word level, but extended to a formulaic chunk level, word clusters
containing terminology that appear in the co-text. For example, participants
reported the difficulty in decoding“paralinguistic features”,“proximity, posture,
echoing”in the 2010 TEM 8 Mini-lecture.
Angela Oakeshott-Taylor (1977) drew the conclusion that proficient subjects had
the ability to process the sound quickly and derive meaning from what they heard
while less proficient subjects spent more time on basic linguistic analysis so they
had no time for meaning interpretation, based on evidence from a study examining
dictation errors.
Academic lectures normally cover a wider scope of vocabulary for elaboration
on subject matters, so all those chunks containing terminology and unfamiliar
words pose thefirst challenge to L2 decoders whose decoding quality largely
influences their comprehension of the lecture.
8.6.4 Argument 4
Test-takers’selective attention is different. Literally, fulfilling a gap-filling task on
the summary of a mini-lecture after it is delivered is contingent a lot upon the
information retained either in mind or in notes. A distinction is made between
controlled processes and automatic processes in terms of listening: controlled
142 8 Linking Task Demands, Cognitive Processes...