covers two stages, the stage of listening to the mini-lecture and taking notes
simultaneously and the stage of doing the corresponding gap-filling task.
The purpose of both teacher questionnaire and student questionnaire remains the
same, i.e. to identify major factors as latent academic listening skills tested by TEM
8 Mini-lecture and Gap-filling task. The only difference between two questionnaires
is that detailed description of the task under research is provided in teacher ques-
tionnaire while general impression of the task is inquired in student questionnaire.
The description of the task in teacher questionnaire helps teachers understand the
purpose of the test while general impression of the task in student questionnaire
serves as a prompt to elicit students’memory of their experience with TEM 8 tests.
5.4 Questionnaire Collection.................................
On the whole, there are three steps toward thefinalization of the skill part (the main
part) of the questionnaire in order to guarantee its validity.
a. 37 senior students majoring in English at one of the colleges of Shanghai
International Studies University participated in the trial test of the initial version
of the questionnaire which contains 28 items. Students were only required to
tick the items given in the questionnaire or add to the inventory what they
believed were tested by TEM 8 after they completed a simulation test of TEM 8
in the classroom setting.
b. The items of the initial version chosen by below one third of the 37 students
were deleted and a few new items written by students were considered and
added to the new inventory. The deleted ones are mainly the skills not directly
connected to academic listening and the added ones demonstrate different
aspects linked to note-taking. This revised version of skill part contains 35 items
that are assumed to cover major aspects of skills representative of academic
lecture comprehension construct.
c. Finally, the revised version of questionnaire was given to 12 teachers who
participated in the trial test. Thereafter, three of them gave detailed comments on
each item and some suggestions on the wording of some items. Based on the
comments derived from the trial test, ambiguous and vague wording in items of
the questionnaire was modified and hence thefinalized version came into being.
According to the comments from the teacher participants with expertise of
listening instruction and assessment, the items are considered highly related to
academic listening construct. Table5.2shows how both versions of question-
naire survey were conducted.
5.3 Design of Questionnaire 45