processes involve a sequence of cognitive activities under active control while
automatic processes refer to a sequence of cognitive activities that occur auto-
matically (Schneider and Shriffrin 1977; Anderson 1983; Bialystok 1990; Buck
2001). In another word, controlled processes are realized with due attention paid to
the audio input while automatic processes simply happen without listeners’con-
scious attention. To L2 learners, listening can be tough since they need to engage
more controlled processes than native speakers (Wu 1998; Buck 2001). Therefore,
the gap lying between L1 and L2 listeners is the proportion of automatic processes.
But even for L1 listeners, they adopt different strategies in different situations, e.g.,
nouns, argument nouns are highly preferred and selected for attention when sub-
jects are listening under stressful conditions (Brown 2008). So, listening is selective
no matter it’s L1 or L2. Listening to a L2 could be more“selective”, for much of the
available processing capacity is already taken up by basic requirements like
breaking down the discourse into comprehensible phrases, identifying the most
significant words (Brown 2008: 11) or struggling with language difficulties (Wu
1998: 23). Field (2008: 243) made very explicit argument that listeners are not
simply“recorders of information”. They evaluate and make judgments about the
information in the input: they select some, delete some, and retain some in reduced
form (Field 2008: 243). Self-evidently, individuals’selection of information of the
same piece of input would largely vary and hence their meaning construction upon
the integration of selected propositions would also be different.
Given that academic listening involves unfamiliar chunks as well as complicated
syntactic structures, the highly controlled process will be halted from time to time
either for decoding or for meaning building, during which processed information
might be forgotten. It then draws a division line between successful listeners and
less successful listeners concerning whether there is still sufficient cognitive
capacity for meaning construction. While tackling the TEM 8 Mini-lecture task,
participants frequently reported:“Because I cannot remember the detailed infor-
mation...But I didn’t manage to write down the information that is tested...
Actually I heard a lot here...”,“I didn’t hear that...”“I vaguely heard...”, which
clearly reflects their selection of attention is geared toward something else instead
of the targeted content. On the contrary, protocols such as“I think comprehensive is
the most important word...”,“I think it’s a key word here”confirm that the par-
ticipants’selection of attention coincides with the key content in the gap-filling
task.
Selective attention is equally important in Phase 1 and Phase 2. In Brown’s
research (2008), she examined how nouns, verbs, and adjectives/adverbs (treated
together as‘adjuncts’) were distributed in the retellings compared with the original
texts and found that nouns are privileged in memory after participants were asked to
retell a story. Likewise, since L2 learners are usually listening under stress, espe-
cially while listening to academic lectures, they would automatically focus on
nouns (and verbs) as the key words based on which they could probably reconstruct
the crucial parts of the information (Brown, 2008). The retelling protocols also
demonstrate that successful academic listeners retain more propositional units than
8.6 Test-Takers’Cognitive Behavior... 143