Successful listeners outperform less successful listeners in terms of the four
steps. First, successful listeners select more propositional units for processing than
less successful listeners; second, successful listeners build more associations
between selected propositional units than less successful listeners; third, successful
listeners are more inclined to actively integrate new information to the developing
structure and make sure of the contextual coherence while less successful listeners
usually fail to assign new information to the corresponding structure and hence
cannot build consistency between the new information and the existent structure.
As for Field’s (2008)figure (see Fig.2.1) describing successful and less suc-
cessful listeners’structure building, the linear pattern is leaning toward the extreme
of poor listeners. The analysis of qualitative data in the present project proves
hierarchical structure representation to some extent, but it does not necessarily
indicate that low achievers do not construct hierarchy of the discourse. The major
difference of discourse construction lies in the preparatory steps for structure
building: i.e., the selection of key information, association between propositional
units across different layers and even within the same layer, integration of new
information and contextual coherence building. In another word, successful lis-
teners canfinally construct comprehensive and complicated hierarchical structure
representation while less successful listeners may only construct incomplete and
inconsistent hierarchical structure representation.
8.7 Other Aspects
There are some other aspects of themes emerging from the current research project,
such as retelling as a measure to assess academic listening construct; parsing
complicated sentences, schema and working memory. These themes are further
discussed as follows.
8.7.1 Retelling as a Measure to Assess Academic Lecture
Comprehension
Retelling is used as one of the popular assessment tools of reading comprehension
(Nilsson 2008; Pearman 2008; Reed and Vaughn 2011). If retelling can be used to
assess reading comprehension, can it be part of listening comprehension construct?
At least retelling presents information retained in the memory. Participants may
remember far more than what appears in the retelling, but the retelling must rep-
resent part of what they remember, presumably the most salient in memory (Brown
2008). Rost (1994) argued it was effective to use online-summary as a way to assess
listeners’mental representation of lectures.
148 8 Linking Task Demands, Cognitive Processes...