Wei: I shall follow the order of lecture. First, positive, oh, no active learners’character-
istics, and then later passive learners’characteristics. But when it goes to another point, I
would like to go back and write down information, but only tofind the space for writing is
rather limited, because I didn’t leave any space for a next point. And I just wrote words one
by one for thefirst point, then, they are all mixed together. My note-taking turns out
unclear.
This extract shows the participant was eager to write notes in a systematic
hierarchy so that she could retrieve information later easily. But during the
note-taking process, apparently, she failed to take notes in the predestined way.
Then, in the test-taking process, she found the notes were not in a clear order and it
took her more time to locate useful notes for the gap-filling task. Nevertheless, she
had strong motivation to work out the discourse structure of the lecture while
writing notes.
Conflict between note-taking and meaning construction is unavoidable espe-
cially in academic listening tests and it poses a challenge to most test-takers. As
test-designers, we need to balance the challenge and test-takers’existing working
memory capacity. As academic listening instructors, we need to work out effective
teaching methods to expand the size of students’working memory and improve its
efficiency.
8.8 Conclusion
The main factors that represent task demands extracted from both teacher ques-
tionnaire data and student questionnaire data are decoding, discourse construction
(macro and micro) and note-taking, which can be triangulated with cognitive
processes including decoding, selective attention, meaning and discourse con-
struction evidenced by qualitative analysis of TAPs. Supported by the test-takers’
TAP data, the localized LCC model highlights close interaction between task tar-
gets and cognitive processes; the model is composed of cognitive processes that
test-takers have been through while completing the academic listening task and the
specific cognitive operations test-takers have employed in a frequency order per-
taining to each cognitive process;finally, since the model is contextualized in a
testing situation, test-wiseness strategies are also a necessary part of it, albeit
insignificant.
Major differences between test-takers across test-taking and retelling cognitive
processes were inferred, which lie in decoding of sound patterns, selection of key
words and meaning and discourse construction. In terms of meaning and discourse
construction, crucial cognitive operations such as associating propositional units
and assigning those units to their corresponding structures, integrating new infor-
mation to the existent discourse representation and simultaneously building con-
textual coherence make significant impact on successful meaning and discourse
construction. For the sake of mnemonic convenience, these key factors influencing
152 8 Linking Task Demands, Cognitive Processes...