successful strategy for answering global questions”(Hansen 1994: 265). Verbatim
retelling might only happen when the propositional units are not lengthy and the
syntactic structure is relatively simple. Therefore, the strategy used to stick the
propositional units together is still paraphrase.
Paraphrase opens the door to the opportunity for enriched mental representation
of new information. Especially in an academic lecture, more abstract notions and
formal dictions are used, simple repetitions of the original wording cannot help
internalize the new information and hence comprehension might break down on
occasions where mental representations of certain obscure chunks are not suc-
cessfully formed. Confronted with longer streams of information, online processing
should really be efficient. Verbatim retelling may help test-takers retrieve infor-
mation later, but word-for-word copy is demanding in terms of working memory
and cannot facilitate integration of information and hence structure building of the
discourse. In my argument, a very effective cognitive strategy to strengthen mental
presentation of a discourse is more practice on paraphrase, which serves as the exact
scaffolding to assist discourse construction as we have already discussed that
information units are stored in listeners’familiar expressions. Actually, receptive
skills and productive skills are interactive rather than isolated from each other.
Paraphrase can help test-takers internalize the new information. Sachs (1967)
argued a listener constructs a meaning of an idea unit and then would forget the
original words and the syntax. So, the retained information is a summary of the
meaning, the gist of a discourse. In another word, the retained information of a
discourse is mentally represented in meaning units.
While analyzing Phase 1 TAPs, we have run the text search query and located
the words that participants claimed as they“hear”or“heard”. After comparing the
what the participants claim as they“hear”or“heard”with the two scripts of the
original mini-lectures, we have found that altogether 12 from 25 extracts (48%) are
not the exact wording from the mini-lectures. That means nearly half of the
information fragments participants claim as the original words from the lectures are
actually not the“original”. For example, some claimed: I heard“reflection and
critical in thinking”(“think critically”in the mini-lecture); I heard the original
words“whether they understand it or not”(no such wording in the mini-lecture),
etc. This fact shows the information retained in listeners’mind might not take the
form of the original wording, which echoes the frequent use of paraphrase to
represent the same meaning as in the mini-lecture or even different meaning on
some occasions. Meaning is stored and represented in mind in a way that must
facilitate the information retention and the later retrieval. However, meaning can
never stand by itself. They are certainly stored in the form of our familiar propo-
sitional units or chunks. The more familiar propositional units/chunks there are to
host meaning units, the more successful meaning representation is. So meaning
representation is realized by paraphrase which assists participants in integrating
new information to the existent discourse structure. Meanwhile, paraphrase is a
comprehensive linguistic skill that is determined by one’s repertoire of linguistic
resources including vocabulary, formulaic chunks, syntactic structures, etc.
Successful listeners retain more information than less successful listeners by either
146 8 Linking Task Demands, Cognitive Processes...