can easily identify what goes wrong, i.e., which word is hard to be decoded, what
syllables are hard to identify, where the assimilation occurs, etc. But in terms of
meaning building, individuals handle meaning of input in their own preferred way
without a standard model to follow. Field (2008: 90–92) has also proposed featured
tasks that emphasize students’meaning building while listening:
- Sum up what they have heard so far and say what they expect to hear next;
- Have to use world knowledge to establish a context or to expand upon what is said;
- Use the speaker’s opening sentences to identify the situation;
- Listen out for certain pronouns and say what they relate to;
- Paraphrase an ambiguous piece of text or a set of vague ideas;
- Simply identify the main point or the speaker’s attitude or role and so on.
Take TEM 8 Mini-lecture and Gap-filling test for example, students need to
match a piece of notes to the gap embedded in a structured summary of an academic
mini-lecture. If students’meaning building process is not activated efficiently, they
couldfind it hard to tackle this type of academic listening task. Therefore, teachers
can give students individual sentences taken from the lecture recording and ask
them to retell the sentences one by one in an oral form or teachers prepare a list of
paraphrases of a certain complicated sentence and let students choose from those
paraphrases the one that could match the meaning of the sentence they have just
heard. In one word, teachers need to design a variety of exercises to quicken
students’sentence-parsing and meaning-building processes.
Furthermore, students should be encouraged to actively build connections
between idea units and propositional units they have heard. Meanwhile, students
should also be trained to integrate what they hear into their existent discourse
structure and activate their background knowledge for the construction of meaning.
Teachers can also group students in the listening classroom so that students can
participate in an active meaning building process on the basis of collaboration
amongst themselves.
9.6.3 Discourse Structure Construction
According to Gernsbacher’s (1990) structure building model, when a new piece of
information comes in, a listener or reader must decide whether it belongs to the
current meaning structure or should be shifted to a new one. Finally, successful
listeners can set up a complex network of interrelated ideas while less successful
listeners might just string propositions together without building a discourse
structure (Field 2008: 254) (see Sect.2.6). In the current project, after comparing
test-takers’test-taking TAPs and retelling protocols, wefind that less successful
listeners retain far less information that successful listeners.
It is also important to note that verbal protocols reflect the fact that test-takers are
building the discourse structure during note-taking. Writing without
meaning-building is not recommended. Students who only dictate what they have
9.6 Recommendations for Pedagogy 165