less successful listeners and successful listeners select more propositional units for
processing than less successful listeners.
8.6.5 Argument 5
Test-takers’ways and results of meaning construction vary. Comprehension and
decoding go hand in hand and it is hard to tell which should be prioritized (Field
2008). Field (2008: 116) argued that listeners have two main goals in meaning
construction:meaning enrichmentandinformation handling. Meaning enrich-
ment needs listeners’world and topical knowledge while information handling
involves listeners’decision about the importance of the new information and the
relation between the new information and the background knowledge or the
speaker’s intention. Here, we can see that meaning-building relies heavily upon
listeners’world/topical knowledge and their ability to build relations in handling a
piece of new information. Since the knowledge schema and the way to handle new
information vary from one individual to another, it is hard to generalize the
meaning-building process and this is also the reason why the Phase 1 protocols
related to meaning-building look very muddy.
However, we have still found some traces. Though less successful participants
also tried to build links between their notes and the gap-filling task or connections
between the new information and their background knowledge, their protocols still
revealed that they lacked the ability to efficiently handle a piece of new information,
evidenced by the failure in identifying the importance of the relevant information or
building links between the idea units. Hence, I would like to argue that online
meaning construction is practically a process of building connections between idea
units.
In literature review, we already discussed spoken language is usually produced
in streams as“idea units”and how the idea units are glued together varies with
listeners’own interpretation. Taylor and Taylor (1990) once argued that with
limited syntactic ability, L2 listener would construct the meaning of the idea units
based on“plausibility”of associations between content words. This“plausibility”,
in our researchfindings, is dependent upon participants schemata and therefore,
inferences and interpretations of those associations vary with participants, but
making those inferences based on relationships between content words is a
“common comprehension strategy”(Buck 2001: 16).
The followingfigures (Figs.8.3and8.4) depict the difference between suc-
cessful listeners and less successful listeners:
In thefigure of successful listeners (see Fig.8.3), many arrows between idea
units or propositional units demonstrate that successful listeners actively build links
between these units to attain contextual coherence. In thefigure of less successful
listeners (see Fig.8.4), sporadic arrows show that less successful listeners can
hardly build association between idea units or propositional units and hence their
information handling and coherence building often break down. Simultaneously,
144 8 Linking Task Demands, Cognitive Processes...