retelling sentences verbatim or paraphrasing them in their own words and hence
more skilled L2 listeners’listening process will be comparatively smoother while
theyfill in information slots with their own interpretation of the vague parts;
however, less skilled listeners’listening process will be interrupted regularly if they
fail tofill in those slots in their own way.
8.6.7 Argument 7
Retelling protocols demonstrate the cognitive process of discourse construction.
The last difference lies in the discourse construction process. The holistic discourse
structure of the mini-lecture is by all means hierarchical, manifested by the outline
format of the given gap-filling task, but how online discourse construction process
is realized still needs analysis on retelling protocols.
In literature review, we talked about macrostructure of lectures and cognitive
representation of discourse structure, with emphasis on the hierarchical organization
of information in the discourse. However, this assumption largely derives from
discourse analysis of lectures from a speaker’s point view. How listeners process a
discourse in their mind is barely available. Rost (1994: 94) argued that analyses on
organization of lecturers did not tell us how listeners constructed an“internal
organization”of the lecture content and hence the assumption of the“hierarchical
discourse structure”is not valid enough. Do listeners perceive a discourse as we
have assumed? Is the hierarchy of discourse constructed automatically in listeners’
mind? Is the hierarchical discourse constructed with some sort of scaffolding? If so,
what does this scaffolding entail?
Based on retelling protocol analysis, we can observe the following discourse
construction processes:
Selective attention: deletion, verbatim (salient parts in the memory)
- building associations at different layers
- integrating the new information into the structure
- building a hierarchical discourse structure
Therefore, building a hierarchical discourse structure is not a one-step cognitive
process. Field’s (2013) argument on the three steps that prepare for discourse
structure building makes lots of sense, which includes selection, integration and
self-monitoring. We can now answer the question about the scaffolding of discourse
structure building. There should be four steps before building a discourse structure:
- Selection. Select the relevant propositional units for information processing.
- Association. Build connections between propositional units and assign those
units to their corresponding structures. - Integration. Add new information to the existent discourse representation.
- Coherence-building. Compare a new piece of information with the existent
structure to ensure that contextual coherence is attained.
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