Improving Academic Listening and Note-Taking Skills: A Study in Foreign Learners’ Strategy Training 3631816448, 9783631816448

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Improving Academic Listening and Note-taking Skills

SOUNDS – MEANING – COMMUNICATION LANDMARKS IN PHONETICS, PHONOLOGY AND COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS Edited by Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska

Editorial Board: Eugeniusz Cyran (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin) Halina Chodkiewicz (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin) Adam Głaz (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin) Haike Jacobs (Radboud University (Nijmegen), The Netherlands) Henryk Kardela (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin) Przemysław Łozowski (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin) Bert Peeters (Australian National University (Canberra) and Griffith University (Brisbane), Australia)

VOLUME 13

Notes on the quality assurance and peer review of this publication Prior to publication, the quality of the work published in this series is reviewed by an external referee appointed by the editorship.

Karolina Kotorowicz-Jasińska

Improving Academic Listening and Note-taking Skills A Study in Foreign Learners’ Strategy Training

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress

This publication was financially supported by Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin, Poland. Cover illustration printed with kind permission of Jerzy Durczak. Reviewed by Jarosław Krajka. Printed by CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 2365-8150 ISBN 978-3-631-81644-8 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-82355-2 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-82356-9 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-82357-6 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b17026 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2020 All rights reserved. Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of contents Introduction ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 9 Chapter One Insights into the process of listening comprehension ���������������������������������������������������������������������  13

1.1 Defining the nature of listening comprehension ������������  13 1.1.1 Understanding auditory input ����������������������������������  15 1.1.2 Differences in the transactional and interactional function of language ����������������������������  19



1.2 A process approach to listening comprehension ������������  21 1.2.1 Listening comprehension processes �������������������������  22 1.2.2 Bottom-up and top-down processing ����������������������  25



1.3 A psycholinguistic view of listening comprehension �����  29 1.3.1 Psycholinguistic models of listening comprehension ������������������������������������������������������������  29 1.3.2 The role of memory and background knowledge ���  37 Memory ������������������������������������������������������������������������  37 Background knowledge ����������������������������������������������  38



Chapter Two Listening comprehension in foreign language instruction ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  43



2.1 Differences in listening comprehension in L1 and L2 ���  43 2.1.1 Approaches to L2 listening instruction �����������������  44 2.1.2 Factors influencing L2 listening comprehension ���������������������������������������������������������  49 Internal factors ���������������������������������������������������������  50 External Factors �������������������������������������������������������  52 2.1.3 EFL students’ difficulties in understanding oral input �������������������������������������������������������������������  54 2.2 Learning strategies in listening comprehension �������������  57

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2.2.1 Listening strategies in transactional settings �������  61 2.2.2 A strategy-based approach to teaching L2 listening comprehension ����������������������������������������������  63



2.3 Issues in evaluating L2 listening comprehension ��������  64

Chapter Three The specificity of listening to lectures and notetaking strategy ��������������������������������������������������������������������  69

3.1 Distinctive features of academic listening ��������������������  69 3.1.1 Taxonomies of academic listening micro-skills ���  72 3.1.2 Background knowledge and visuals as variables in lecture comprehension �����������������������  74



3.2 Characteristics of input in academic listening �������������  76 3.2.1 Lecturing styles ��������������������������������������������������������  76 3.2.2 Selected features of lecture discourse ��������������������  78 3.2.3 Lecture discourse structure ������������������������������������  81



3.3 Students’ problems in understanding lecture content   83



3.4 The role of note-taking in academic lectures ���������������  85 3.4.1 Types and functions of note-taking �����������������������  85 3.4.2 Quality and quantity of notes ���������������������������������  89 3.4.3 Students’ perceptions and problems concerning note-taking �������������������������������������������  89 3.4.4 The effect of note-taking on academic listening success �������������������������������������������������������  93



3.5 Measuring lecture comprehension ��������������������������������  95

Chapter Four Academic listening, note-taking and strategy training from a research perspective �����������������������  99



4.1 Research on lecture discourse features and speech modifications ��������������������������������������������������������������������  99 4.2  Note-taking studies in L1 and L2 settings ������������������  103 4.2.1 Note-taking in L1 ���������������������������������������������������  104 4.2.2 Note-taking in L2 ���������������������������������������������������  106

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4.3 Basic issues in investigating strategy training ���������������  113



4.4 Issues in evaluating academic listening comprehension ������������������������������������������������������������������  117



4.5 A summary of research findings relevant to the present study ����������������������������������������������������������������������  123

Chapter Five Academic listening skills and note-taking strategy training for EFL advanced learners: The design of the study ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������  147

5.1 Aim and research questions ��������������������������������������������  147



5.2 Method �������������������������������������������������������������������������������  149



5.2.1 Participants ����������������������������������������������������������������  150



5.2.2 Strategy training procedures and materials �����������  151



5.3 Data collection instruments and administration procedures ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  154



5.3.1 General Listening Test ����������������������������������������������  155



5.3.2 Academic Listening Test ������������������������������������������  156 Characteristics of the rubric and response criteria ������������������������������������������������������������������������  158 Characteristics of the input �������������������������������������  159 Validating academic listening test ��������������������������  160



5.3.3 Notes analysis ������������������������������������������������������������  162



5.3.4 Post-course questionnaire ���������������������������������������  162

Chapter Six The study: Results and discussion ������������������������������  165

6.1 General listening scores ���������������������������������������������������  165



6.2 Academic listening test #1 �����������������������������������������������  168 6.3  Investigating the quality of the notes �����������������������������  171

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6.3.1 Academic listening test #2 �����������������������������������������  172



6.3.2 Efficiency of the notes �������������������������������������������������  172



6.3 Correlations between the measures ����������������������������������  176



6.4 Analysing the questionnaire data ��������������������������������������  179



6.5 Summary of findings ����������������������������������������������������������  182 6.5.1 Pedagogical implications and directions for further research �����������������������������������������������������������  185 6.5.2 Limitations of the study ���������������������������������������������  188



Conclusion ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  191 Appendix A Academic listening course syllabus ��������������������������������  193 Appendix B Improving note-taking skills: Lesson plan �������������������  197 Appendix C Pre- and post-course general listening tests ����������������  199 Appendix D Pre and post-course academic listening tests �������������  207 Appendix E Scoring criteria for academic listening tests ���������������  213 Appendix F Transcript of lectures ������������������������������������������������������������  219 Appendix G Post-course questionnaire  ��������������������������������������������������  231 List of figures and tables ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  239 Bibliography ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  241 Index ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  261

Introduction The issues that lie at the core of this work pertain to two areas. Firstly, the most fundamental theoretical underpinnings of listening comprehension and academic listening are addressed. Secondly, the book focuses on investigating strategy training in academic listening and note-taking skills with advanced learners of English as a foreign language and evaluates the outcomes of the instructional practices used. Listening to lectures and taking notes has been a staple activity of academic life and learning cultures for decades, and the subject of interest for many a scholar. They seem to have agreed upon the fact that academic listening, despite sharing a number of features with general listening comprehension, shows crucial idiosyncrasies and sets different processing demands, and therefore deserves to be treated as a separate construct in research. From a theoretical perspective, studies into academic lecture comprehension have investigated the specific skills that are necessary for effective lecture listening. It has been substantiated that students are supposed to process different levels of information presented in a lecture and, as a result, the construct of academic listening has often been defined in terms of different comprehension subskills or levels of understanding, such as understanding major ideas, understanding specific information or making inferences (e.g. Alderson, 2000; Buck, 2001; Song, 2012). Apart from attempting to outline the myriad of subskills comprising academic listening, the studies investigating listening to lectures and the learner strategies used for making the act of listening more effective follow three major strands: (1) students’ perceptions and problems regarding listening to academic lectures, (2) features of lecture discourse and speech modifications made by the lecturer as methods of aiding students’ comprehension, (3) note-taking strategies applied by students in academic settings (DeZure, Kaplan and Deerman, 2001). Out of these three areas, note-taking appears to have been investigated most extensively, both in L1 and L2. The production of notes while listening to lectures has often been researched from the point of view of cognitive psychology, which focused on both the final outcome of the note-taking activities and the interplay between comprehension and note-taking as well as the activity itself, measuring the mental operations involved (Boch and Piolat, 2005), underlining the encoding and storing functions of notes. The functional complexity of notes might account for the lack of special training programmes at universities (Piolat, Olive and Kellogg, 2005) and the

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Introduction

fact that few students are taught note-taking skills. Even if undergraduates undergo training sessions, they often come in the form of awareness-raising questionnaires (Carrell et al., 2007; Gabryś-Barker, 2011). Yet learning to take notes well undoubtedly takes an amount of time comparable to learning to write in a relatively experienced way. Taking into account the different functional aspects of note taking as well as the complexity of the process itself, learning to take notes involves the development of a range of skills that might take several months, or even years, to master. A number of researchers believe that all students would benefit if provided with a long-term strategy training in note-taking techniques and the opportunity to practise and receive feedback (Haghverdi, Biria and Karimi, 2010). The purpose of the present work is to provide an account of the current state of knowledge on the processes underlying academic listening and notetaking skills. More importantly, however, it aims to present and discuss a study conducted to investigate whether Polish advanced EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ academic listening and note-taking skills improve after one year of strategy training. It is hoped that the present analysis will shed light on various aspects of listening to lectures as well as offer helpful implications for academic listening and note-taking strategy training instruction at advanced levels. The initial chapters provide the theoretical context in which the present study evolved. Chapter One outlines various theory- and research-inspired perspectives of the nature of listening comprehension, attempting to define the skill and fathom the processes lying at the core of listening. A considerable part of this section of the book is devoted to psycholinguistic theories and models of listening comprehension. Chapter Two pertains specifically to listening comprehension in a second language and looks at this skill from a pedagogical perspective, focusing on the second language learner. This part of the project draws a comparison between listening in L1 and L2, points to L2 students’ problems in listening to oral input and suggests strategies to overcome such difficulties. Finally, the chapter concentrates on second language assessment, discussing some of the most important issues concerning the evaluation of listening comprehension. The main focus of Chapter Three is the nature of academic listening. It aims to pinpoint the factors typical of lecture comprehension, outlines the features of academic listening situations, as well as the input the recipients are exposed to, that is, lecture discourse. The second part of the chapter deals with the role of note-taking in listening to lectures, underlining its main functions and the interplay between taking notes and successful lecture comprehension.

Introduction

11

The most significant developments and major findings from the research in the field are reviewed in depth in Chapter Four. The first part of the chapter is devoted to the presentation of studies focusing on the influence of lecture discourse features and speech modifications on comprehension. The second part focuses on the studies whose aim was to grasp the role of note-taking in lectures, both in L1 and L2. The next section of Chapter Four reviews the strand of research dealing with implementing listening strategy training and measuring its potential benefits. The following section of this chapter presents the most important results yielded in the field of academic listening assessment. The chapter finishes with a summary of the findings particularly important from the point of view of the present study. Chapters Five and Six are concerned with the research study undertaken for the purpose of this book. Chapter Five provides a thorough description of the design of the study, focusing on such issues as the aim, research questions, methodological issues pertaining to the participants, data collection instruments and the procedures used. Chapter Six presents and discusses the results obtained through the present study, which sought to explore the effect of a note-taking strategy training on the students’ academic listening performance, measured by a battery of tests and an analysis of the quality of the students’ notes. Moreover, Chapter Six brings together and discusses the findings of the study and its implications for academic listening instruction at advanced levels. Finally, suggestions for further research into note-taking strategy training that emerged from the present investigation are presented.

Chapter One Insights into the process of listening comprehension Abstract: This chapter aims to pinpoint what listening comprehension entails and focuses on the major theoretical underpinnings of understanding spoken language. The chapter starts with an attempt to elucidate the nature of listening comprehension by discussing the features of oral input and delineating the processes which accompany extracting meaning from spoken messages. It is followed by an overview of various process which attending to auditory input comprises. A number of listening comprehension models are then described, shedding light on how listening is viewed from the psycholinguistic perspective. Finally, the last section sets out to define the role of memory and background knowledge in the process of arriving at the meaning of spoken discourse.

1.1 Defining the nature of listening comprehension Despite the widely acknowledged role of listening in language development, there has been no universally accepted view of the conceptualisation and definition of listening comprehension. It has been popularly referred to as decoding speech, making sense of aurally received input or uncovering the speaker’s message. Some of the more scientific definitions label listening as ‘the process of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli’ (Wolvin and Coakley, in Feyten, 1991, p.  174), ‘the formation of meaningful mental representation from the perception of a physical linguistic stimulus’ (Townsend, Carrithers and Bever, 1987, p. 218) or ‘(…) an active process in which individuals focus on selected aspects of aural input, construct meaning from passages and relate what they hear to existing knowledge’ (O’Malley, Chamot and Küpper, 1989, p. 420). Other definitions seem to look at listening comprehension from the perspective of the EFL classroom and describe it as ‘the ability to understand the spoken language of native speakers’ (Mendelson, 1994, p. 19), being able to answer comprehension questions following a text, understanding key vocabulary and interpreting the intentions of the speaker. The lack of uniformity in framing the fundamental concepts of listening has also been noted by second language acquisition (SLA) researchers. In her review of the state of the art of studies on listening, Witkin (1990) paid attention to the existence of many definitions of listening, none of which was widely agreed upon. She pointed out:

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension A basic issue that has rarely been addressed by researchers is how well the concept of ‘listening’ plays the role of the hypothetical construct in theory building and research. Just as there is no generally agreed upon definition of listening, and theories and models exist that are not only contradictory but mutually exclusive, so there has been a lack of continuity in more than half a century of research to connect the efforts into a unified field of study. (p. 19)

One of the most comprehensive overviews of listening comprehension definitions was presented by Glenn (1989), who carried out an in-depth analysis of 50 different attempts to pinpoint the term. Her enquiry helped to identify several aspects of listening comprehension which scholars seem to acknowledge. Most of these aspects are particular steps in listening which enable us to conceptualise the process. They include: perception, attention, interpretation, response and memory. Once again, however, there seems to be little agreement among scholars as to which steps listening really entails. The lack of consensus on this issue is of a double nature. First of all, there is no consistent terminology and the listening steps are referred to as sensing, interpreting, evaluating and responding or as signal, literal and reflecting processing (Edwards and McDonald, 1993). Secondly, there exists disagreement among researchers regarding the inclusion of two elements involved in the listening process, namely memory and response (Ridge, 1993). Listening is the active process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages. It involves the ability to retain information as well as to react empathically and/or appreciatively to spoken and/or nonverbal messages. (p. 3)

Attempts to formulate a working definition of listening were also undertaken by International Listening Association (Witkin and Trochim, 1997). At a conference in 1994, a definition containing all of the aspects of listening outlined in Glenn’s detailed scrutiny was put forward. The definition was hoped to be generally accepted by scholars and practitioners alike. However, it found no recognition in second language acquisition literature. A fairly radical, yet very convincing view on defining listening comprehension is the one held by Rost (2002), who claims that since the perception and conceptualisation of listening is strongly influenced by current theoretical interests, one uniform definition is neither needed nor possible to arrive at. Instead, Rost (2002) looks at various patterns in the already existing array of definitions and identifies four different perspectives that listening definitions tend to draw on: receptive orientation – defining listening as receiving what the speaker actually says; constructive orientation  – referring to constructing and representing meaning;

Defining the nature of listening comprehension

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collaborative orientation – negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding to it and transformative orientation – creating meaning through imagination, as well as involvement and empathy with the speaker. Such an orientation-based approach toward listening seems to underline the complexity of the process. Clearly, it seems difficult to unequivocally say what listening really means. Perhaps the best approach to fathom the nature of listening would be by describing the neurological and psycholinguistic processes that listening entails, by specifying the sub-skills applied by listeners constructing the meaning from verbal input or identifying the factors influencing this process. In other words, instead of defining listening, it might prove effective to analyse its characteristics and the features endemic to listening comprehension. One such factor determining listening comprehension is the nature of stimulus.

1.1.1 Understanding auditory input As listening comprehension is often referred to as ‘understanding spoken language’, ‘speech recognition’ or ‘speech perception’ (Driven and OakeshottTaylor, 1984a), its nature seems to be inextricably bound up with the characteristics of spoken discourse which the listener has to process. Some of the most common qualities of speech as a rapid and transitory medium include no, or little, planning time, ephemerality, here-and-now orientation or a low degree of formality (Horowitz and Samuels, 1987). However, as it has been substantiated that the properties of speech exert a strong influence on the process of listening, the need arises to look at the characteristics of spoken language in greater detail. Furthermore, analysing the properties of spoken versus written language is important form the perspective of the present work, which focuses on academic lectures, sharing the features of both (see Chapter Three). Although there is no clear-cut definition of what constitutes the nature of spoken and written texts and there seems to be no simple dichotomy between the two, the features of auditory input are still best examined in juxtaposition to written language. Rather than being separate, unitary constructs, speech and writing constitute two modal points of one continuum, from spontaneous to self-monitored production, from active to reflective language (Halliday, 1987). It is possible, however, drawing on the spokenness – writtenness distinction, to enumerate the qualities intrinsic to auditory input (Tab. 1.1). All major, and most general, differences between oral and written communication can be categorised under five main headings: (1) the relationship between the writer/speaker and the recipient, (2) the meaning and function of context, (3)  the structural and lexical characteristics of the discourse, (4)  conveying

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension

Tab. 1.1: The oral-written dichotomy (Horowitz and Samuels, 1987, p. 9) Oral language (Talk) Face-to-face conversation with reciprocity between the speaker and listener Narrative-like Action oriented Event oriented Story oriented Here and now In given space and time Informal Primary discourse Natural communication Interpersonal Spontaneous Sharing of context (situational) Ellipsis Structureless Cohesion through paralinguistic cues Single prediction Repetition Simple linear structures Paratactic patterns Right branching with limited subordination Fleeting Unconscious

Written language (Text) Face-to-text with limited reciprocity between the author and the reader Expository-like Idea oriented Argument oriented Explanatory prose Future and past Not space- or time-bound Formal Secondary discourse Artificial communication Objective and distanced Planned No common context Explicitness in text Highly structured Cohesion through lexical cues Multiple prediction Succinctness Complex hierarchical structures Hypotactic patterns Left branching with multiple levels of subordination Permanent Conscious and restructures consciousness

meaning through visual and aural modalities, (5)  the nature of interaction (Horowitz and Samuels, 1987). With respect to the above-mentioned criteria, the characteristics of spoken language can be summarised as follows: – it is typically produced for the sake of conversation, processed in face-to-face communication where the interlocutors interact; – it always takes place in context and addresses a specific audience; – it uses narrative-like and episodic language, involves the use of informal register (adapted to social context) and deictic expressions; – the message is conveyed not only through language but also by means of prosody and paralinguistic devices; – the speaker and listener(s) are usually in contact, which allows for immediate feedback.

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These characteristics are indeed fairly broad and rather imprecise. In order to further explore the nature of auditory input, several investigations into the matter will be now summarised. Many of the inquiries into the characteristics of spoken and written language look at the linguistic features of the two. It has been substantiated that the syntax of spoken discourse is somewhat different from that of writing. In speech, the discourse abounds in hesitations, false starts, performance errors, first person and interactive expressions, non-specific words and vagueness and simpler noun phrases (Halliday, 1987; Brown and Yule, 1993; Mendelson, 1994). The syntax of spoken language has been proved to be limited and loosely organised, with less embedding or subordination and containing incomplete sentences and as such may give the impression of speech being simpler, which many researchers seem to maintain. This common view, however, has been challenged by Halliday (1987), who has distinguished two kinds of complexity: lexical density (the ratio of content words to the total discourse) and grammatical intricacy (the patterns of clause organisation). Halliday (1987) states that although written language is undoubtedly of higher lexical density and, for that matter, is more complex than speech, it is the spoken discourse that is more complex in terms of grammatical intricacy – a feature inherent in unconscious and spontaneous language production. In other words, while written language is lexically dense and grammatically simple, speech is lexically sparse but grammatically more intricate. To further investigate the linguistic features of spoken discourse, it is worth looking at the categorization put forward by Stanley (1980), who summarised the characteristics differentiating spoken and written register under seven headings: 1. fewer sentence connectors  – connective functions maintaining cohesion between sentences are indicated by a smaller and informal set of items; 2. syntactic parallelism – reiterative forms and frequent co-ordination used to avoid complex embedding and facilitate both production and comprehension; 3. high degree of redundancy, digression, comment, direction changing and disorderly flow of ideas; Enumerated as one of the key features of spoken language by many authors (Horowitz and Samuels, 1987; Brown and Yule, 1989; Mendelson, 1994; Flowerdew and Miller, 2005), redundancy and the presence of repetition, restatement, redefinition, paraphrase etc. seem to be crucial for understanding spoken discourse. Redundancy provides the recipient of the message with opportunities to comprehend the parts they have missed. Moreover, redundancy influences the amount of what Mendelson (1994) calls cognitive content, i.e. ‘the amount of information being transmitted in any measured unit of language’ (Mendelson,

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension

1994, p. 16), which is lower in spoken language. In other words, in a spoken text information is packed less densely and, as a result, is easier to process by the listener (Brown and Yule, 1989). 4 . reference and ellipsis with greater degree of imprecision acceptable; 5. distinctive selection of vocabulary and idioms – repetitiveness of lexical items (due to the rapidity of speech and inability to fully explore mental lexicon) and idiomaticity of language used (meeting the need for more economy with the number of words); 6. the presence of continuitives (e.g. now, of course, anyway, well) – maintain the flow of ideas and acknowledge the presence of the interlocutor; 7. the presence of proposition evaluators – used by the speaker to evaluate his/ her own remarks (e.g. of course, as usual). The features of spoken language outlined above are closely interwoven and they all have two major qualities in common:  they either simplify the message or recognise the presence of the interlocutor (Stanley, 1980). A  similar grouping of speech properties into two categories has been proposed by Chafe and Danielewicz (1987). One set of the features of speech and writing can be attributed to the relationship between the producer and the audience and are described as ‘involvement’ as opposed to ‘detachment’. In other words, speech contains linguistic indications of the speaker’s involvement with the recipient of the message and with the concrete reality and, as such, is tied to specific places, people and events, from which writing seems to be detached. Written language lacks such involvement and revolves around ideas that are abstract and timeless. Another set of differences between the spoken and written register, according to Chafe and Danielewicz (1987), can be assigned to the spontaneous and evanescent nature of speaking, which affects the speaker’s choice of words. As there is no time for deliberate planning in the process of speaking, the range of lexical choices is always narrower than in writing and the linguistic variety rather limited. In other words, while the deliberateness and editability inherent in writing leads to a richer, less hedged and more explicit use of words, ‘(…) [s]‌peakers are so strongly constrained by their need to produce language rapidly and by their inability to edit, that they are unable to imitate the lexical richness and explicitness of writing (…)’. (Chafe and Danielewicz, 1987, p. 94). However, it is not only the choice of vocabulary that is influenced by the rapidity of speech, but also how words are put together. In this respect, one of the properties of spoken discourse is the relative brevity of intonation units (clauselike units of spoken language expressing what is in the speaker’s shortterm memory), which has been attributed to the fact that speakers can focus

Defining the nature of listening comprehension

19

their attention and consciously process a limited amount of material at a time. Naturally, as writing is free from the constraints of short-term memory, moving along the spoken–written continuum the intonation unit size will increase. Yet another set of properties representative of oral language has been suggested by Rost (2002), whose compilation, presented in Tab. 1.2 below, was based on a thorough scrutiny of the data obtained from authentic spoken language corpora. The fact that auditory input constitutes a separate construct with a number of distinctive features will undoubtedly have implications for listening comprehension. For example, since typical spoken language entails general items and less specific language, it will be hardly possible for the listener to fully comprehend spoken discourse without relying on context and background knowledge (Brown and Yule, 1989). Clearly, there seem to be other types of input to the listening comprehension process which the learner needs to attend to in different ways in order to arrive at comprehension. In order to explore what other sources listeners draw upon while trying to comprehend spoken discourse and building mental representation of an oral text, it is worth looking at the psycholinguistic processes that listening entails, will be described later in this chapter.

1.1.2 Differences in the transactional and interactional function of language Determining the nature of auditory input is not only to be based on the formal properties of spoken language, but also requires an investigation into what language is used for and what its primary function in communication is. The function of interaction falls under two major categories:  transactional and interactional (Brown and Yule, 1989), also referred to as referential and social functions (Buck, 1995). In transactional settings, language serves mainly the expression of content. Its primary purpose is the transmission of factual or propositional information and communication is considered successful when the message is understood (Buck, 2001). Unlike the message-oriented transactional function, interactional language use involves expressing social relations and personal attitudes and its main aim is to establish and maintain relationships (Brown and Yule, 1989). Moreover, the information transferred is less significant, giving way to the very act of saying something (Buck, 2001). In other words, it is not the content that matters, rather the mere fact that something is said. An important point which needs to be raised here is that the two functions of language are not mutually exclusive. It is inconceivable for any utterance produced in a natural setting to perform one function to the complete exclusion of the other (Brown and Yule, 1989). Rather, the two roles of language represent

20

Insights into the process of listening comprehension

Tab. 1.2: Features of oral English (Rost, 2002, p. 31) Feature Example Speakers speak in short bursts of speech, that The next time I saw him/ is, in ‘pause units’. He wasn’t as friendly/ I don’t know why Spoken language contains more topicThe people in this town – they’re not as comment structures, and more topic friendly as they used to be restatement. Speakers frequently use additive (‘paratactic’) He came home/ ordering with and, then, so, but. and then he just turned on the TV/ but he didn’t say anything/ so I didn’t think much about it/ Speech is marked by a high ratio of function written version: The court declared that the (or structure) words (particles, preposition, deadline must be honoured. proforms, articles, ‘be’ verbs, auxiliary verbs, (content words 4: function words 5) conjunctions) to content words (nouns, verbs, spoken version: The court said that the adjectives, adverbs, question words). deadline was going to have to be kept. (content words 4: function words 9) Speech is marked by incomplete grammatical It’s not that… I just wanted to… units, false starts, ‘abandoned’ structures. But, only… Speakers frequently use ellipsis – omitting (Are you) Coming (to dinner)? (I’ll be there) known grammatical elements and unstated In a minute. topics. Speakers use the most frequent words of the the way it’s put together vs its structure language, leading to more ‘loosely packed’ language. Topics may not be stated explicitly. I’m not sure it’s a good idea for us to do that. (the topic = ‘that’ action referred to earlier, or never explicitly mentioned in the discourse) Speakers use a lot of filler and interactive And, well, um, you know, there was, like a markers. bunch of people… Speakers employ frequent ‘exophoric The guy over there, this thing, why are you reference’, and rely on gesture and non-verbal doing that? clues. Speakers use variable speeds, accents, paralinguistic features and gestures.

a continuum, from social to informative, from listener-oriented to messageoriented (Rhodes, 1993; Anderson and Lynch, 1988). It has been agreed that the primary function of oral communication is interactional, the transactional ending of the continuum being principally the domain of written language

A process approach to listening comprehension

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(Brown and Yule, 1989). However, the distinction is not clear-cut, as there are many examples of transactional speaking – produced more carefully, with the intention of the conveying the message to the learner rather than exchanging opinions or personal attitudes. Evidently, speaking can be both transactional and interactional in style and the function of language will have a strong bearing on the listening situation. To start with, the function of language determines the degree of interaction, i.e. how much the listener is expected to collaborate with the speaker (Buck, 2001). It is the purpose of language use that makes it possible to indicate the desired degree of involvement on the part of the listener (Rost, 1994a). In transactional communication the participants are more independent, hence its nature is described as non-collaborative or nonreciprocal (Rhodes, 1993; Celce-Murcia and Olshtain, 2000). The interactive view perceives communication as a series of actions and reactions and so the listener’s response becomes more significant (Rost, 2002). In such a collaborative or reciprocal listening, the recipient takes active part in shaping the meaning by continuously cooperating with the speaker. Furthermore, the goal of listening also relates to the type of language function fulfilled. In interactional settings the listener is expected to process the message only partially, grasp the gist of the message to understand the overall meaning (Brown and Yule, 1989). At the same time, the success of interactional listening experience is dependent on the ability of the recipient to employ effective cooperation tools, such as back channelling or turntaking (Buck, 1995). In transactional communication, on the other hand, it is imperative that the listener capture the propositional information in the message and understand the meaning as fully as possible. Transactional settings, therefore, foreground effective language processing as the key to successful listening.

1.2 A process approach to listening comprehension A traditional way of looking at listening is from the angle of its final outcome, namely comprehension (Field, 1998, 2008a). Many practitioners tend to focus excessive attention on the product of listening in the form of answers to comprehension questions and fail to consider aspects of the listener’s behaviour and the routines for handling the incoming speech. In second language acquisition literature, however, it is common to divide listening into a number of component processes, which constitute a framework for investigating listening comprehension.

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension

The following section provides an insight into the processes by which the listener comprehends a text. It also examines the varieties of input that the listener attends to, together with the types of processing involved.

1.2.1 Listening comprehension processes A number of second language listening researchers point to the dual nature of listening comprehension, underlining two major aspects of the process, namely decoding and meaning building (Driven and Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984a; Lund, 1991; Buck, 2001; Field, 2008a). The first one, unanimously referred to as decoding, involves transferring the acoustic input that the listener receives into meaningful forms of language (Field, 2008b). In order to make sense of the speech signals, the receiver employs a number of operations, ranging from translating acoustic cues into sounds, through identifying words and phrases, to tracing grammatical patterns in the auditory input they are exposed to. In other words, the decoding component of listening comprehension takes place at a number of levels, each of which requires the listener to engage in several different processes (Tab. 1.3). Based on the multidimensionality of the decoding stage of listening comprehension, it can be further divided into several steps, each dealing with a different aspect of the input and, as a result, calling for different types of processing (Driven and Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984a; Rost, 2002). The continuum of listening processes begins with the reception and conversion of sound waves by the auditory system in the brain, i.e. the neurological processing of the acoustic input. Once this is completed, listeners need to assign meaning to the sounds they hear by means of linguistic processing, which, again, involves a number of operations. First, the receiver discriminates between and categorises the sounds through, what Rost (1994a) calls, ‘categorical perception,’ consisting of a number of phonological procedures of speech perception. Later, the listener employs word recognition processes, which are believed to constitute the basis of spoken language comprehension and have emerged as a significant predictor of listening comprehension success (Mecarrty, 2000; Field, 2003; Rost, 2006, 2002). While semantic considerations tend to dominate understanding and it has been proven that for any higher-level comprehension processes to take place, a sufficient amount of lexical recognition must occur (Bonk, 2000; Flowerdew and Miller, 2005), it is not the final step in linguistic decoding. In order to understand the language in the input, the incoming speech needs to be mapped onto the grammatical model of the language (Rost, 2002). The application of grammatical rules and using the knowledge of the linguistic system to divide words

A process approach to listening comprehension

23

Phoneme level Idenfying consonants and vowels Adjusng to speakers’ voices Syllable level Recognising syllable structure Matching weak syllables and funcon words Word level Working out where words begin and end in connected speech Matching sequences of sounds to words Idenfying words which are not in their standard forms Dealing with unknown words Syntax level Recognising where clauses and phrases end Ancipang syntacc paerns Checking hypothesis Intona on group level Making use of sentence stress Recognising chunks of language Using intonaon to support syntax Reviewing decoding at intonaon group level

Tab. 1.3:  Examples of important L1 decoding processes (Field, 2008a, p. 115)

into meaningful constituents is defined as ‘parsing’ (Rost, 1994a; Flowerdew and Miller, 2005). By combining words into phrases and attaching phrases to clauses, grammatical parsing significantly contributes to comprehension and allows the listener to create a proposition model of the incoming speech (Rost, 2002), which undergoes further processing during the second of the two major operations which the listening comprehension entails, namely meaning building. The latter phase of listening, referred to as ‘encoding’ (Driven and Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984a), ‘comprehension’ (Lund, 1991) or ‘meaningbuilding’ (Field, 2008a), is described as the construction of meaning with the use of both the decoded language and the listener’s prior knowledge. It has been substantiated that decoding at the level of sounds, words and grammar helps the listener deal with the input to a limited extent and arrive merely at a literal meaning of an uttered sentence, which falls short of the true comprehension of what the speaker means. For the listener to fully understand the message sent, i.e. to expand the meaning of the message conveyed by the

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension

‘Context’: using knowledge sources Drawing upon: world knowledge – topic knowledge – cultural knowledge Analogy with other similar listening encounters Deriving meaning Storing the literal meaning of an uerance Accepng an appropriate meaning Checking understanding Adding to the meaning Making inferences Dealing with pronouns Dealing with ambiguity Selecng informaon Selecng relevant informaon Recognising redundant informaon Integrang informaon Carrying forward what has been said so far Connecng ideas Self-monitoring for consistency Recognising the overall argument structure Nocing connecng words used by the speaker (On the other hand…)

Tab. 1.4:  Examples of important L1 meaning-building processes (Field, 2008a, p. 117)

words uttered, add the incoming pieces of information to the overall picture of the talk and decipher the speaker’s intentions, he or she needs to draw upon their knowledge of the world as well as the contextual clues in the discourse. The complexity of the meaning-building stage of listening comprehension is shown in Tab. 1.4, whereby different kinds of processes involved in the stage are displayed. A parallel can be drawn between Field’s (2008a) meaning-building stage and what Rost (2002) calls pragmatic and psycholinguistic processing, which seem to be the component parts of the encoding phase. As stated above, linguistic decoding is only the first step of listening comprehension, which requires the receiver to address the context in which the speech act occurs, and infer the speaker’s intentions, i.e. to process the input from the pragmatic perspective. Furthermore, the meaning-building phase involves psycholinguistic processing,

A process approach to listening comprehension

25

which refers directly to comprehension and embraces such steps as relating language to concepts in the listener’s memory and to references in the real world, updating mental models or building mental representations of the discourse (see Section 1.3.1). Evidently, in order to fully understand spoken language, there are several types of knowledge to be drawn upon: phonological, semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and factual knowledge about the world, which seems to confirm the complexity and multidimensionality of the listening process (Flowerdew and Miller, 2005). At the same time, however, the dual nature of listening emerges, as all the processes involved fall into the two major groups of decoding and encoding. The key difference between the two stages lies in the material that is processed during each of them (Field, 2008b). While decoding is strictly connected with input (i.e. the language of the message), meaning building appears to be highly reliant on context (evidence or information in a discourse which goes beyond its literal meaning). Based on the kind of material dealt with, the listener applies various knowledge sources in two distinctive manners: bottom-up and top-down, which will now be discussed in greater detail.

1.2.2 Bottom-up and top-down processing As stated above, comprehension processes rely on several types of information. Understanding takes place when the message and different kinds of knowledge are matched against each other (Faerch and Kasper, 1986). The matching process begins either with extracting information from the input and integrating it with the elaborate knowledge system or with predicting the possible meaning on the basis of prior knowledge and interpreting the input in the light of the created expectations. In the first case, the listener attends to individual units of meaning and combines them in a hierarchical order, from phoneme to discourse level (Flowerdew and Miller, 2005; Vandergrift, 2007). In other words, the recipient responds to perceptual information and engages in data-driven, bottom-up processing (Field, 1999; Vandergrift, 2003a). In the second scenario, the listener uses context and prior knowledge to make inferences and build a conceptual framework of the discourse, employing knowledge-driven, top-down processing. Clearly, listeners apply different knowledge sources using top-down and bottom-up processes, which, metaphorically, reflect a hierarchical view of the stages through which listening proceeds (Field, 1999) and can be graphically captured in the Speech Recognition Framework as shown in Fig. 1.1.

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension Top-down processing

Expectations based on prior knowledge (content schemata)

Expectations based on the assessment of context/ speaker’s intentions

Expectations based on discourse and sociocultural knowledge (formal schemata)

Pragmatics

Metacognition

Interpretation of Spoken Discourse (Input)

Language knowledge: phonology, vocabulary, grammar

Listening strategies

Bottom-up processing

Fig. 1.1:  Speech recognition framework (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain, 2000, p. 104)

A process approach to listening comprehension

27

One matter of particular interest to second language acquisition scholars is how exactly the recipient of the message attends to the meaning conveyed. It has been proven that language processing is ‘massively parallel (…) [and] interactive’ (McClelland and Elman, 1986, p.  119). Instead of building understanding starting with either basic linguistic units or with the use of previous knowledge, listeners process the input in both directions simultaneously, so that top-down and bottom-up processes closely interact and influence each other (Field, 1999; Celce-Murcia and Olshtain, 2000; Rost, 2002; Vandergrift, 2003a; Flowerdew and Miller, 2005). It has been substantiated that in proficient listeners top-down and bottom-up processes interact in such a way that deficiencies in information at one level are compensated for with the information provided at the other level (Peterson, 2001). Such a premise finds its confirmation in the Interactive Compensatory Hypothesis developed by Stanovich (1980, cited in Tsui and Fullilove, 1998), providing an explanation for how readers1 understand texts despite certain difficulties. If the recipient decodes the linguistic message successfully, or when the confidence in input is high, the compensatory value of top-down processing is reduced and the application of prior knowledge will serve the purpose of enriching the fully decoded message. However, when the reader or listener cannot rely on the input due to deficiencies in their linguistic knowledge, the top-down approach will provide crucial assistance in arriving at the meaning of the text. The corollary of such a view is that the interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing depends to a large extent on second language proficiency. According to Stanovich’s perspective, poor listeners make considerable use of top-down processes, employing them in a compensatory manner to build the meaning of a text. On the other hand, some researchers have demonstrated that beginner-level L2 listeners devote so much attention to perceptual operations at the word level that little capacity remains for activating top-down knowledge (Peterson, 2001) and that below a certain threshold of language proficiency listeners are unable to activate higher-level operations (Anderson and Lynch, 1988). Furthermore, studies have shown that bottom-up processing is more important for listeners of poor language proficiency, as they cannot use

1 Research into listening comprehension draws heavily upon the findings of second language reading studies. As it is often assumed that comprehension is a general construct involving different modalities, many researchers and theoreticians use research results on reading to hypothesise about listening comprehension (Vandergrift, 2006).

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension

HIGH CONFIDENCE IN INPUT

LOW CONFIDENCE IN INPUT

Fig. 1.2:  Interactive compensatory hypothesis (Stanovich, 1980)

background knowledge effectively (Tsui and Fullilove, 1998). A  similar view seems to be held by Wilson (2003), who postulates the primacy of bottom-up processes, which have been considerably undervalued. He suggests that the ultimate goal of listening comprehension is to hear and understand what is actually uttered, without the need to compensate for the gaps in bottom-up skills. Other researchers have underscored the need for interactive listening abilities, that is, the necessity to apply both skills simultaneously and interchangeably in order to progress (Yeldham and Gruba, 2014). Summing up, there may be little agreement as to the degree to which listeners rely on top-down and bottom-up processes, yet all models of listening processes seem to acknowledge the two aspects of comprehension. A variety of labels have been given to the two types of processing, ranging from ‘perceptual’ or ‘higherlevel’ operations (Peterson, 2001), through ‘lower- and higher-level processing’ (Faerch and Kasper, 1986), to ‘apprehending linguistic information’ and ‘relating that information to a wider context’ (Carrell and Freedle, 1972). However, despite the multiplicity of terms ‘(…) scholars seem to have arrived at similar conceptualisations of listening comprehension, and the fact that they use different terminology suggests that they have arrived at this understanding more or less independently. This adds considerable credibility to the two-stage view of listening’ (Buck, 2001, p. 52) and endorses the dual nature of oral discourse comprehension.

A psycholinguistic view of listening comprehension

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1.3 A psycholinguistic view of listening comprehension It would be difficult to look at listening without recognising its psychological and neurobiological factors, and refusing to acknowledge the role cognitive science played in elucidating the process of comprehension seems virtually impossible. The following section will look at the enquiries into discourse processing made in the 1980s which shaped the way listening comprehension is viewed today (Buck, 1994; Yi’an, 1998; Richards, 2005; Field, 2008a). It aims to explain how the multidimensionality of the comprehension process was brought to light and how aural comprehension, regarded as passing through a number of consecutive steps in a predetermined order, has been replaced with frameworks where processing takes place on a number of different levels (Buck, 1994).

1.3.1 Psycholinguistic models of listening comprehension One way to look at listening comprehension was to analyse what is involved in changing the input (in the form of all acoustic signals) into understanding. A number of speech communication models focused on enumerating the phases or components of the listening process (Witkin, 1990). Such a perspective on listening concentrated on the information flow, i.e. how the listener processes acoustic events as they take place over time (Witkin, 1993) and attempted to identify the stages of such information processing. A central tenet of such models is that listening is the sequential process initiated by the incoming data (Rost, 1994a). Some of the process-oriented models based on the approach to listening include Steil, Barker and Watson’s SIER model (Steil et al., 1983), Rumelhart’s five-stage continuum of information flow (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1987) or Goss’s sequence of signal processing, literal processing and reflective processing (Goss, 1982). The first model includes sensing, interpreting, evaluating and responding to the message received as the basic building blocks of the process of listening (Ridge, 1993). Rumelhart’s model, which, by drawing upon memory and attention, approximates to the cognitive models, which have exerted a major influence on current approaches to listening, comprises: (1) sensing disturbances in the environment that affect the sense organs; (2) recognising patterns through attention and perception, coding complex sensory inputs and matching them with stored memory patterns; (3) understanding language by discovering the meaning of the linguistic input; (4) remembering, including information decay and loss with time, as well as the organisation of long-term memory structures; (5) reasoning, that is operating on structured memories that allow us to make inferences (Witkin, 1993, p. 28).

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension

Such models, however accurate, are not based on experimental research, which strongly undermines their plausibility. It is through extensive studies in cognitive psychology, complemented with an in-depth analysis of attention and memory that a number of influential comprehension models were developed. They have a substantial bearing on how listening is viewed today, although few of them are listening models as such. One such model of adult second language listening comprehension, based on research on memory and verbal input processing, was put forward by Nagle and Sanders (1986). They rely heavily on psycholinguistic foundations of comprehension, bringing to light three types of human memory described in SLA literature: (1) short-term memory of limited capacity and time span, with echoic memory, also referred to as sensory register as its integral part; (2)  working memory, where most of the processing takes place; and (3) long-term memory of greater capacity, where information is stored for a longer duration. As shown in Fig. 1.3, acoustic input is first captured by short-term and echoic memories, and affected by two factors: trace decay and interference form the incoming input. When the information is passed on to working, or executive memory, initial processing activities, such as scanning, searching or comparing take place. They are influenced by attention, i.e. ‘the application of mental energy to processing tasks […] rang[ing] from focusing on specific features of input to controlled retrieval’ (Nagle and Sanders, 1986, p.  17), and activated by arousal, ‘which entails an increase of activity in the nervous system’ (Nagle and Sanders, 1986, p. 17). In the working memory, two principle processing modes come into play: controlled processing and automatic processing, the result of which is transferred to the long-term store, where the input is integrated with the listener’s existing knowledge, both linguistic and contextual. The last component of the model is the feedback loop, whereby the information about success or errors in processing is related back to the executive processor, where it is recycled, if necessary. The model designed by Nagle and Sanders (1986) has three major advantages. First of all, it demonstrates the immediate relevance of the listener’s current state of knowledge to arrive at an interpretation of a spoken text. Moreover, due to the distinction into controlled and automatic processing, the model is viable in second language processing (Buck, 2001). While automatic processing, activated without deliberate control or attention by the listener, occurs incidentally in most communicative activities and seems to be the part and parcel of efficient language use, controlled processing is involved in performing new language skills. As Nagle and Sanders (1986) stress, critical to successful comprehension is automatic processing, which does not lead to overload or breakdown, but which needs to be developed through extensive training provided by controlled

Trace decay and interference weaken retention in initial memories.

STS

EXEC.

Controlled processes

Automatic processes

LTS

Feedback loop

Explicit Linguistic Knowledge

Implicit Linguistic Knowledge

Other Knowledge

Inference

Retrieval

Synthesis

Arousal, triggered by affective factors, task demands, context, or complexity of input, may activate attention.

Fig. 1.3:  A model of listening comprehension processing in adult language learners (Nagle and Sanders, 1986, p. 14)

Input

Sensory register

Attention may stimulate rehearsal and retention in STS, narrowing of focus or monitoring and initiation of controlled processing

A psycholinguistic view of listening comprehension

31

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension

processing. Finally, Nagle and Sanders’s model incorporates the notions of attention and memory, which in cognitive psychology play a significant role in discourse comprehension. One major fallacy of the model lies in its failure to account for the conversion of whatever is perceived into an underlying representation of its meaning (Buck, 2001). In other words, what is missing in the Nagle and Sanders pattern is how the meaning of a text is built in memory. Perhaps the most influential model of discourse comprehension, which takes the representation of meaning as its starting point, was developed by van Dijk and Kintsch (1983). According to this model, the distinctive features of comprehension can be summarised as follows: 1. Understanding discourse of either modality involves organising propositions (i.e. units of meaning) into a text-base (i.e. a semantic representation of the input). The process takes place in the short-term memory and, due to its limited capacity, is cyclical in nature (one input clause at a time). By deleting redundancies, making generalisations and bridging inferences at a global level (through the application of various kinds of presupposed knowledge), macro-operators convert propositions of the input into macro-propositions, which establish the gist of the passage. 2. All processes which discourse comprehension entails are overseen by a control system, which includes relevant topics, the actual goals of the listener or reader, the information from knowledge scripts etc. 3. The process of comprehension is strategic in nature, which puts emphasis on what language users actually do when they try to grasp the meaning of a text. Comprehension is a gradual, on-line process; it draws upon information from various levels of discourse as well as the communicative context, individual beliefs and goals of the recipients, which sets the whole process apart from formal, structural text analysis. Such a model accounts for a number of phenomena accompanying the processing of the text. First of all, as the information is transferred to the text-base in the form of macro-propositions, we are unable to recall the exact words of a passage, but only its gist. Furthermore, due to the influence of background knowledge which affects the process of comprehension at all levels, the information which is not explicitly stated in the text is often included in the memory of the text. Clearly, the model provides an explanation as to why people tend to falsely recall information that was not expressed in the original text (Gernsbacher and Foertsch, 1999). In the course of time, together with the impact of different trends in cognitive psychology, van Dijk and Kintsch’s model was subjected to a number of

A psycholinguistic view of listening comprehension

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modifications (Gernsbacher and Foertsch, 1999). To begin with, the way text processing is viewed today was strongly influenced by the concept of mental models which appeared in cognitive science. They are defined as ‘cognitive representations in episodic memory of the situations discourses are about […] (and) embody the accumulated memory of previous occasions with the same or similar meaning, persons or events’ (van Dijk, 1987, p. 191). It has been substantiated that apart from a text-base, which represents the actual meaning of the discourse, particular knowledge in the form of situational models is indispensable. In other words, while listening or reading, language users not only construct the meaning of the discourse in the form of a text-base, but they also build or retrieve from memory a model which represents what they think of the situation described in a given text. A number of types of models have been enumerated, each of which plays a different role in discourse interpretation. Particular models, which are ‘unique representation(s) of unique situation(s) we are involved in or read or hear about’ (van Dijk, 1987, p. 178), are helpful in the interpretation of only one specific text. General models refer to the same situations, participants, events or locations and constitute a link between particular models and scripts, which are built of socially accepted information. General models, still very much individual, are influenced by both particular models and by social scripts. Equally crucial in establishing a coherent text-base are pragmatic context models, which are connected to a particular communicative situation, define the genre and represent the aims of the participants. The retrieval and activation of models is affected by the communicative context in which the discourse is to be interpreted on the one hand, and the goals and interests of the listener/reader on the other. The inclusion of different types of episodic models in the discourse comprehension resulted in an elaborate framework, the representation of which is shown in Fig.  1.4. It can be seen that text interpretation has two major components: the construction of a coherent text-base and the construction of a particular model. These two steps are complemented by the evaluation of the incoming information in terms of norms, values, truths and opinions, so that personal meaning is assigned to whatever is perceived. Therefore, what we tend to remember of a text is not really its meaning, but our subjective model of the situation the text denotes (van Dijk, 1987). Moreover, what the model presented above brings to our attention is that, if language users are involved in a much more complex process than merely constructing a semantic representation of the text in their episodic memory, successful discourse comprehension will depend to a large extent on the situational models we have in our minds. In other words, if the reader or listener does not have appropriate models to refer to, comprehension will be impaired; if the

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension Text and context input 1. Context goals 1. 2. 3. 4.

STM

Strategic surface structure analysis (decoding) Proposition formation Local coherence establishment Macroproposition formation

2. Local coherence monitoring 3. Macro-propositions (topic) 4. Retrieval of concepts from LTM 5. Retrieval of models from EM

Application of model information Cyclical processing Reinstatements from EM

6. Combination of model fragments 7. Partial instantiation of scripts 8. Partial instantiation of attitudes Overall monitoring of comprehension strategies, retrieval processes and representation evaluation

EM

Textbase Context model

updating

LTM

Particular Situational Models

General Models

Frames Scripts

Attitudes

Fig. 1.4:  A schematic representation of+ the role of models in discourse comprehension (van Dijk, 1987, p. 170)

A psycholinguistic view of listening comprehension

35

discourse is different from what is represented by the models already existing in our memory, a lot of updating is needed and it will take us more time to understand a text. It was not only the concept of mental models which required adjustments to van Dijk and Kintsch’s original model. Further modifications were introduced based on connectionist models of how memories are stored and retrieved form the neural networks of the mind (Gernsbacher and Foertsch, 1999). The prevailing connectionist approach to text processing is known as Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP), studied extensively by Rumelhart and McClelland (1987). Their model draws heavily on neuroscience, which assumes that the brain consists of a network of interrelated neurons sending messages to one another. PDP assumes that information processing occurs through the interactions of numerous units (i.e. simple processing elements representing particular conceptual objects), operating simultaneously on a number of levels. Hence, understanding is not perceived as a sequential process, but rather one where a number of simple processors operate in parallel. Furthrmore, a distinctive feature of PDP lies in the way knowledge is stored in memory. Unlike in other models, where knowledge is preserved in the form of a static copy of a pattern and its retrieval equals finding the pattern in the long-term memory and transferring it into the working memory, in PDP it is stored in the form of connection strengths between units, which enables the recreation of patterns in due time. At the same time, the knowledge about patterns is distributed over the connections among a large number of units, so each individual connection participates in the storage of many different items of information. Following these premises, it has been emphasised that learning occurs with gradual changes in connection strengths as a result of experience and allows for the activation of the right connections under the right circumstances. In PDP understanding is seen as an interplay of multiple sources of knowledge. At the same time, Rumelhart and McClelland (1987) undermine the plausibility of scripts, frames or schema theories, which may be useful structures of encoding knowledge, but, bearing in mind that most everyday situations cannot be assigned to one script only, they fail to account for the interaction between various scripts and therefore do not capture the generative capacity of human understanding in new situations. On the basis of PDP theory and its main assumptions, Kintsch developed the Construction-Integration model of comprehension (Gernsbacher and Foertsch, 1999). According to Kintsch (1988), comprehension takes place when the elements that enter into the process (construction) achieve a stable state (integration) in which the elements are either meaningfully related to each other or, if they

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Insights into the process of listening comprehension

do not fit the pattern, suppressed. Connectionist elements in the model can be traced in several of its characteristics. To begin with, comprehension is not driven by schemata in a top-down manner, but the bottom-up, data-driven comprehension processes are emphasised (Kintsch, 1988). Moreover, the text-base created during the construction phase comes in the form of a network of associations, in which the concepts are elaborated on by activating the nearest nodes in the network and learning occurs by making explicit changes in the connecting values between processing units (Gernsbacher and Foertsch, 1999). A vast body of research into the mental representation of texts in memory in the form of propositions, together with the extensively studied role of memory and background knowledge in the process of comprehension, laid the foundations for the framework suggested by Anderson (1980), who proposed a three-phase model of listening comprehension. Unlike Nagle and Sanders’s framework, Anderson’s model was developed with reference to first language comprehension, but it is no less relevant in understanding second language listening and has been heavily relied on by L2 listening researchers and theoreticians (e.g. O’Malley et al., 1989; Goh, 2000). The model put forward by Anderson (1980) consists of three major steps. Comprehension begins with perceptual processing, which entails encoding the acoustic signals and chunking phonemes from the streams of speech. Once the sounds are transferred to echoic memory, initial analysis of the input may take place and some of its elements may be transformed into meaningful representations. Moreover, some factors in the perceptual processing attend selectively to the input, making use of various clues, such as contextual elements, the listener’s goals, expectations about the speaker’s purpose or the nature of the interaction. In the parsing stage of the comprehension process, speech is broken down into component parts, which requires drawing upon the grammatical knowledge of the language and involves the mapping of the incoming speech onto a grammatical category, and assigning relationships between them. The outcome of the parsing stage is the propositional model of the text stored in the short-term memory, which constitutes the basis for recreating a meaningful representation of the original input. In the last phase of the process – utilization – this mental representation of the auditory input is related to the knowledge in the long-term memory, so that the listener can draw inferences to complete the interpretation, make the input personally meaningful or respond to the speaker. It is only when the input and the existing knowledge are matched that real comprehension takes place. Anderson’s model provided a solid basis for research into listening comprehension (O’Malley et al., 1989; Goh, 2000) and the framework

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proved particularly useful in identifying second language learners’ problems and strategies for understanding aural input (see Sections 2.1.3 and 2.2). The models described in this section introduced the concept of background knowledge and inferencing into text comprehension. Listening involves not only the bottom-up activation of linguistic knowledge, but also the application of non-linguistic knowledge in a top-down manner. It is the listener’s existing knowledge and his/her mental models that help to interpret and understand a text despite any ambiguities. Moreover, the models above showed that comprehension is subject to the shortcomings of human memory, whose limited capacity makes it easily overwhelmed by performing simultaneous functions of storage, retrieval and processing. Clearly, cognitive science has brought to light the concepts of background knowledge and memory, which will be discussed in the section to follow.

1.3.2 The role of memory and background knowledge Memory Most of the models of listening described in the previous section include reference to memory and aim to explore the relationship between listening comprehension and memory processes. Since comprehension is viewed as the act of relating language to concepts in one’s mind (Rost, 2002), memory seems to be indispensable for successful listening. Even from a layman’s viewpoint, it is imperative for effective comprehension that the listener remember what has been heard (Witkin, 1990). The role of memory in listening is twofold. On the one hand, there is the process of activating relevant memories in order to aid comprehension; on the other hand, memories are continually updated and modified during comprehension (Rost, 2002). If the traditional temporal classification of memory into short- and long-term is called upon, the data in the input are passed to longer-term processing mechanism and are finally committed to long-term memory while at the same time they are being sorted out by the knowledge contained in long-term storage (Randall, 2007). It would be impossible to talk about memory without understanding its organisation and the various processes it is involved in. The field of psycholinguistics has witnessed the appearance of different models of memory, adopting either the structure or process approach to explicating its nature (Bentley, 1993). The most influential model, looking at both the structure of memory and the processes of encoding and retrieval, is the model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968; quoted in Bentley, 1993; Robinson, 2006; Randall, 2007). The

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model distinguishes between a short-lived perceptual or sensory register, where essential data are selected from the input; short-term (in the temporal sense) or working memory (referring to its function), where information is analysed and the meaning is extracted; and long-term memory comprising semantic and episodic components (the former incorporating the knowledge of the language, the latter referring to past life experiences). Although this original model underwent several modifications and gave rise to the appearance of other models, such as Baddeley and Hitch’s framework (1974; quoted in Ellis, 2003) with the further division of working memory, or Bostrom and Waldhart’s (1988) classification into short-term memory and short-term memory with rehearsal, there is a widespread consensus as to the general memory mechanism (Bentley, 1993). One such model, which attempts to illustrate data processing in listening based on Atkinson and Shiffrin’s original model has been designed by Randall (2007), whose information processing diagram resembles the models presented in the previous section, yet puts different types of memory to the foreground (Fig. 1.5). The way input processing operates by means of a series of memory stores has a strong bearing on listening comprehension and brings to light a number of constraints. To start with, due to the temporal difference between the types of memory, time appears as a critical factor in preserving what has been listened to (Bentley, 1993). Equally important is the concept of the limited capacity of short-term memory, which makes the amount of information in the input quite significant (Witkin, 1990; Randall, 2007). Moreover, particular types of storage will be involved in listening in different ways, as different tasks require different memory types to be activated (Bostrom and Waldhart, 1988). For instance, it is necessary for a good listener in an interactional listening situation to process information in the short-term memory long enough to respond to the interlocutor, whilst in public speaking long-term retention will be of utmost importance. Finally, the role of long-term memory as the storage of background knowledge seems to be paramount in listening, since much of what we are able to recall from an oral message depends on what we already know.

Background knowledge The most recent theories of comprehension are based on the learner’s ability to draw on their existing background knowledge (Vandergrift, 2007). Owing to the research in cognitive psychology, the major role played by background knowledge in the process of comprehension could be established (Long, 1989; Eckhardt, Wood and Jacobovitz, 1991). It was substantiated that listening involves a lot more than extracting information from the incoming speech. Rather, it is

Segments speech into units

Makes/Compares predictions based on schema and personal knowledge.

Makes predictions about words/meaning based on language knowledge

Holds incoming sounds. Assembles speech into meaningful units according to info from the knowledge of language

Fig. 1.5:  A diagram of the information processing involved in listening (Randall, 2007, p. 92)

Sounds

Echoic (iconic) memory

Working memory

Personal Knowledge: Episodic Memory

Knowledge about the Word: Schematic memory

Sounds, Syllables, Intonation Syntax/grammar Mental lexicon

Knowledge about language: Semantic Memory Phonology

Long term memory (LTM)

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a process of matching the auditory input with what the listener already knows about the topic. In other words, meaning results from the interaction between the speech and the listener’s prior knowledge and differences in the background knowledge of the interlocutors are likely to cause communication breakdown (Chiang and Dunkel, 1992). The recognition of such pre-established patterns of knowledge and discourse structure stored in memory gave rise to the schematheoretic perspective of listening comprehension (Flowerdew and Miller, 2005). Scholars believe that prior knowledge and past experiences are organised in the form of mental structures called schemata (Anderson and Lynch, 1988), also referred to as frames (Minsky, 1975; quoted in Flowerdew and Miller, 2005) or scripts (Shank and Abelson, 1977; quoted in Driven and Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984b). The basic tenet of schema theory is that meaning is the result of the interaction between the incoming speech and the listener’s prior knowledge (Chiang and Dunkel, 1992). Schemata, recognised as the fundamental building blocks of cognition, are the basis for all elements of information processing, from interpreting sensory input through determining the goals of listening to retrieving information from memory (Rumelhart, 1980; quoted in Long, 1990). Clearly, schemata aid comprehension by filling in missing information and by providing a context, and can influence understanding in two major ways (Buck, 2001). On the one hand, the knowledge of context restricts the interpretation of a listening text; on the other, the knowledge of specific facts can help extract details not explicitly stated in the text and is therefore useful for meaning enrichment in the meaning-building phase of comprehension (Field, 2008a). Such a dual role of prior knowledge, either compensatory or expansive in nature, finds confirmation in the top-down and bottom-up models of listening, described in Section 1.2.2. Researchers have pinpointed that it is not only the listener’s background knowledge of content and structure that matters, but also the knowledge of the text itself (Carrell, 1983). While the text alone does not carry meaning, but merely provides guidance as to how the intended meaning should be constructed from the previously acquired knowledge, the value of formal (Carrell, 1987) or textual schemata (Anderson, 1978; quoted in Long, 1989) cannot be underestimated. It is the skilled application of text specific organisational strategies and the recognition of rhetorical structures of different text types that allows for a complete interpretation of a message. Although there is no disagreement among scholars as to the significance of schemata in the process of language comprehension, studies attempting to elucidate the exact influence of background knowledge on message interpretation have arrived at various conclusions. While most researchers underline the

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facilitative nature of background knowledge, several enquiries have shown that schemata can hinder second language comprehension. Long (1990) proved that the listeners may ‘read into’ the message information which is not there. Similar misuse of prior knowledge was observed by Macaro, Vanderplank and Graham (2005; quoted in Vandergrift, 2007), in whose research the subjects arrived at an inaccurate interpretation by relying too heavily on background knowledge, instead of on the evidence in the text. Vandergrift (2003b) points to an underlying strategy of ‘questioning elaboration’, when listeners use a combination of comprehension questions and world knowledge to arrive at an interpretation without sufficient reliance on the message itself. The fact that background knowledge can distort the actual message was also corroborated by Rost (2002), who showed that the differences in prior knowledge of listeners accounted for differences in the interpretation of the same text. To sum up, however theoretical the above-mentioned points concerning listening comprehension may sound, they have a strong bearing on how the skill of listening is viewed in second language classrooms. Among the issues of concern for practitioners are the activation of background knowledge in comprehension tasks, the limited capacity of short-term memory as a source of comprehension breakdown, ineffective speech perception, potential problems with the decoding phase of listening and many others. Evidently, this insight into the processes central to listening comprehension has shed light on what constitutes valuable listening instruction.

Chapter Two Listening comprehension in foreign language instruction Abstract: The following section will focus on the major standpoints concerning second/foreign language listening comprehension development in formal instruction. While the issues reported on in the previous chapter refer to listening in both the native as well as a second/ foreign language, it seems appropriate in this work to explore the issues of the skill of listening from the purely pedagogical perspective of an L2/FL classroom.The chapter begins with a comparison between L1 and L2 listening comprehension and outlines the factors influencing listening in a second/foreign language together with potential problems students may encounter. The use of listening strategies by EFL learners is then discussed. The chapter finishes with an overview of the problems addressed by second/foreign language listening assessment specialists.

2.1 Differences in listening comprehension in L1 and L2 Although it has been substantiated that, unlike natives, L2 listeners process aural input less automatically and focus consciously on what they are listening to, the processes underlying listening comprehension in a native and a second/foreign language are essentially the same (Anderson and Lynch, 1988; Vandergrift, 2007). It has been asserted that while the learner needs to master a new form/ meaning system, the types of knowledge brought to the task are inherently similar in both L1 and L2 contexts and many researchers tend to point to the similarities rather than the differences in L1 and L2 speech perception skills (e.g. Byrnes, 1984; Rost, 1994a; Field, 2008a). Such a view resulted in the goals of second language listening teaching and testing being based on what contributes to successful listening in the native language and in associating L2 listening with the processes underpinning a native speaker’s comprehension. One powerful approach to teaching receptive skills assumes that every learner already displays a fully developed competence in their L1, which, being the same for both native and second language, does not need to be built from scratch, but adapted to new contexts (Field, 2008a; Walter and Swan, 2008). In other words, the listening ability is already there in the learner’s mind and no new components need to be added. This refers in particular to the meaning-building phase of listening comprehension – while in decoding it is imperative that the learner be familiarised with the spoken forms of the target language, in meaning building they can rely on the processes well-established in L1. At the same time,

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practitioners are warned against wrongly assuming that the transfer of comprehension is automatic. On the contrary, a fair amount of practice is required to help learners adjust to L2 listening events. A significant part of this trend in L2 listening is the body of research investigating the relationship between L1 and L2 listening comprehension, that is, the degree to which L2 listeners’ native language listening ability may contribute to their L2 listening potential. Feyten (1991) investigated some parallels between general L1 listening test and L2 final examination scores and found a positive correlation between L1 listening ability and foreign language listening comprehension. Vandergrift (2006) pointed to the L1 listening ability as one of the key predictors of L2 listening comprehension skills, which, together with L2 proficiency, explained 39 % of the variance in the L2 listening ability. Naturally, despite the widely acknowledged homogeneity of listening in L1 and L2, the disparities between the two did not escape the experts’ attention. The differences at the level of decoding were examined by Field (2008a). He found that in word recognition native language listeners were more willing to abandon wrong segmentational hypotheses than L2 listeners, who tended to persist with their first impressions. Such a bad practice may be due to nonnative listeners’ incomplete vocabulary, their limited experience in listening to the target language or possible gaps in co-text knowledge. Furthermore, several differences in meaning-building, or higher-level processing, could also be pointed out. Hayashi (1991) noted an increased use of top-down strategies among L2 learners. He showed that, if L2 listeners are not hindered by limited linguistic competence, they use higher-level information more often than L1 listeners. Similar findings were reported by Field (2008a), who indicated a frequent application of compensation strategies as a major difference between L1 and L2 listening comprehension.

2.1.1 Approaches to L2 listening instruction Listening comprehension instruction is now a major component in second/foreign language curricula (Dunkel, 1986; Rubin, 1995; Richards, 2005; Rost, 2005). Due to the investigations into first language acquisition, the role of listening in L2 classrooms has changed from being a mechanical manipulation of prefabricated patterns and pronunciation drills in an environmentalist approach to a primary vehicle of language learning (Usó-Juan and Martĭnez-Flor, 2006). In modern methodologies, listening is perceived as an interactive process of meaning creation, with a meaningful purpose, contextualised perspective and social aspects and, as such, plays a key role in second/foreign language learning. For example,

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COMMUNICATIVE Linguistic Competence

Discourse Strategic Competence

LISTENING

Pragmatic Competence

Competence

Intercultural Competence COMPETENCE

Fig. 2.1:  Integrating listening within the communicative competence framework (UsóJuan and Martĭnez-Flor, 2006, p. 36)

Vandergrift and Goh outline three main orientations in teaching the skill of listening:  text-oriented listening instruction, communication-oriented listening instruction and learner-oriented listening instruction (Vandergrift and Goh, 2012). Recognising the critical importance of listening comprehension development has given rise to a number of approaches to pedagogy. Nation and Newton (2009) emphasised the value of listening in their four-strand instructional design under the labels of meaning-focused input and fluency practice. Usó-Juan and Martĭnez-Flor (2006), following the attempts to operationalise communicative competence into different models (Canale and Swain, 1980; Bachman, 1990), incorporated listening into the framework of communicative competence (Fig. 2.1). The skill of listening lies at the core of discourse competence, which makes it a necessary requirement for the listener to understand language at a level higher than sentence level. Discourse competence and listening skills are influenced by linguistic competence, i.e. the knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, phonology and prosody, pragmatic competence, referring to understanding the illocutionary force of the spoken message, intercultural competence

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encompassing the listener’s background knowledge of cultural aspects and its contribution to meaning building, and strategic competence orchestrating the process of comprehension by applying particular cognitive, metacognitive and socio-affective tactics. Morley (1995, 2001) acknowledged different perspectives on teaching the skill of listening and conceptualised four models of instructional design: – pattern matching:  listening, imitating, memorising  – to drill language structures, memorise prefabricated patterns, imitate pronunciation; – processing discrete-point information: listening and answering comprehension questions – to enable learners to manipulate information and ‘develop listening as a skill in its own right’ (Morley, 1995, p. 188); – processing text:  functional listening  – language use and language analysis tasks – to provide practice in using the information from the listening passage to complete a task, solve a problem, follow instruction or take lecture notes; – interactive communication:  critical thinking, critical listening, effective speaking – to develop communication skills, manage bidirectional interaction. Based on all of the main theories in listening comprehension, Flowerdew and Miller (2005) have put forward a Pedagogical Model for Second Language Listening (Fig.  2.2). The model encompasses a number of dimensions of the listening process, including a cognitive, as well as a process approach to listening. This individual variation, together with the affective dimension, allows for an individual approach to linguistic processing (depending on the listener’s language proficiency or text and task type) and take into account the learner’s goals. The cross-cultural dimension refers to schemata and background knowledge together with the listener’s attitudes, values and beliefs. The contextualised dimension sets the listening process in a particular communicative situation, while the strategic dimension emphasises the actions accompanying the process and points to the need to educate learners in this area. Yet another approach towards L2 listening instruction focuses on an analysis of the component skills applied by expert listeners. Instead of positioning listening skills in an L2 pedagogy framework or focusing on an instructional design aimed at L2 listening skills development, this approach sets out to identify listening sub-skills, which could become the basis for both the teaching and testing of listening comprehension. One such very good list of listening abilities was compiled by Rost (2002). It involves: – hearing prominent words; – hearing pause unit boundaries;

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Dimensions Individualised Critical

Cross-cultural

PROCESSES Intertextual

Bottom-up Top-down Integrated

Strategic

Social

Affective Contextualised

Fig. 2.2:  A model of second language listening comprehension (Flowerdew and Miller, 2005, p. 86)

– – – – – – – – – – – – – –

hearing assimilations, elisions, reductions; hearing differences in intonation; guessing the meaning of ‘weakened words’ in an utterance; guessing the meaning of unknown words; discriminating between similar words; parsing an utterance into relationships (agent, object, location etc.); deciding the meaning of ambiguous utterances; finding correct references for ellipted forms and pro-forms; understanding the function of an utterance when the speaker is indirect; using gestures to guide our understanding; activation images and memories when we listen to a story or description; making predictions as we listen; filling in missing information (or information that was not heard clearly); using reasoning as we listen, such as filling in the ‘supporting grounds’ of an argument and making ‘bridging inferences’; – understanding the speaker’s intended function for an utterance; – understanding differences in conversational style and discourse patterns; – understanding organisational patterns of the speaker;

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– holding information in short-term memory, building up long-term memory of relevant information; – responding to what the speaker says. Like many other compilations of listening sub-skills, this comprehensive list takes into account numerous theories connected with listening comprehension that have already been mentioned in the previous chapter, such as the characteristics of speech perception or the role of memory in the process. However, the way listening sub-skills are taxonomised differs among writers. One of the earliest accounts of what listening entails was provided by Aitken (1978; quoted in Buck, 2001). His taxonomy goes beyond pure linguistic processing and encompasses the skills of relating linguistic information to a broad communicative context, including identifying the speaker’s purpose, drawing conclusions and inferences about the social situation or recognising rhetorical devices used by the speaker to convey the message. Other theoreticians attempted to create more complex taxonomies. Munby (1978; quoted in Buck and Tatsuoka, 1998), for example, presented a detailed compendium of 250  ‘enabling skills’, which, however influential, was also severely criticised, mainly due to the randomness of the inclusion or exclusion of different skills and the lack of consistency as far as the level of detail was concerned (Skehan, 1984). Another comprehensive taxonomy of listening sub-skills (presented in Table 4.3) was devised by Richards (1983), who distinguished between 33 conversational listening skills and 18 subskills for academic listening. Equally important are research-based taxonomies. One of them, proposed by Buck and Tatsuoka (1998), was compiled to include 15 abilities underlying listening test performance: – identifying the task by determining what type of information to search for in order to complete the task; – scanning relatively fast spoken text, automatically and in real time; – processing a relatively large information load; – processing a relatively medium information load; – processing relatively dense information; – using previous items to help information location; – identifying relevant information without any explicit marker to indicate it; – understanding and utilising a relatively heavy stress; – processing relatively fast text automatically; – making text-based inferences; – incorporating background knowledge into text processing; – processing L2 concepts with no literal equivalent in the L1; – recognising and using redundant information;

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– processing information scattered throughout a text; – constructing a response relatively quickly and efficiently. What the above-mentioned taxonomies have in common is the operationalisation of listening as a multi-faceted process, in which the ability to extract purely linguistic information needs to be complemented with its interpretations in a broader context. Undoubtedly, taking such a perspective on listening is congruent with the tenets of the psycholinguistic models described in Section 1.3.1. All of the theoretical considerations presented in this and previous sections seem to have led to a discussion on how to design an effective listening course. A  number of scholars focused on the practical applications of the prevailing theories, enumerating the targets of listening practice (e.g. Morley, 1995; Buck, 1995; Lynch and Mendelson, 2002; Rost, 2002). They were best summarised by Nunan (1997), who characterised effective listening instruction as being guided by the main principles briefly outlined below. 1. The materials should be based on a wide range of authentic texts, including both monologues and dialogues. 2. Schema-building tasks should precede the listening. 3. Strategies for effective listening should be incorporated into the materials. 4. Learners should be given opportunities to progressively structure their listening by listening to a text several times, and by working through increasingly challenging listening tasks. 5. Learners should know what they are listening to and why. 6. The task should include opportunities for learners to play an active role in their own learning. 7. Content should be personalised. The guidelines enumerated by Nunan (1997) bring to light a very important notion, one which has not yet received any attention in this book, namely the application of strategies to aid listening comprehension and develop the learner’s listening skills. A strategy-based approach to teaching listening will be subjected to closer scrutiny in Section 2.2. First, however, in order to discover how to overcome the difficulties in listening comprehension with the efficient use of listening strategies, factors influencing L2 listening comprehension together with any potential problems it may entail, will be examined in greater detail.

2.1.2 Factors influencing L2 listening comprehension One significant body of research in L2 listening comprehension has focused on what factors are involved in the listening process and aimed to identify how

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variation in these factors is likely to affect comprehension. Studies in this field have been gaining pedagogical value, as knowing the range of factors enables practitioners to envisage some potential problems L2 listeners may encounter in the classroom context. The most important factors tend to be categorised under various labels. For example, Rubin (1994), having analysed a number of major research findings, pointed to five principal aspects that affect listening comprehension:  (1) text characteristics, (2)  interlocutor characteristics, (3)  task characteristics, (4)  listener characteristics and (5)  process characteristics. The classification applied in this work follows Samuels (1987), who distinguished two groups of factors affecting listening, those resulting from what happens in the listener’s head and those influencing the listener from outside. In this book they will be referred to as internal and external factors, and some of them, that is the most important from the perspective of the present work, will now receive a brief examination.

Internal factors Factors falling under this category embrace all of the listener’s characteristics which can, in any way at all, contribute to or hinder successful listening. The first group of such features, which Samuels (1987) classifies as ‘inside-the-head’, includes seven elements.  1. Intelligence Does the listener have the intelligence to comprehend language?

2. Language facility

Is the listener accurate and automatic in the recognition of words and in the ability to segment and parse the speech stream into morpheme and syntactic units? Vocabulary:  Does the listener have extensive vocabulary knowledge? Does the listener know the variety of ways in which a word can be used? Syntax:  Can the listener take embedded sentences and parse them into understandable units? Is the listener able to make inferences necessary to understand the elliptical sentences commonly used in casual conversation? Dialect and idiolect:  If a dialect different from the listener’s is spoken, can the listener understand it? Anaphoric terms: Can the listener identify the referent for the anaphoric terms used?

3. Background knowledge and schema

Does the listener have the necessary background knowledge to understand the topic? Can the listener make appropriate inferences?

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4. Speech registers and awareness of contextual influences

Is the listener aware of the different styles of speech used for different contexts? Can the listener identify the status of the speaker in order to interact appropriately?

5. Metacognitive strategies

Is the listener aware of when there is a break in communication? Is the listener aware of how and when it is appropriate to request additional information or clarification from the speaker? Can the listener summarise the major points made during a conversation or lecture? 6. Kinesics Can the listener understand the non-verbal signals used in spoken communication? 7. Motivation Is the listener sufficiently interested to focus attention and to interact appropriately on what the speaker is saying? (pp. 298–299)

This list might be supplemented with some other variables, such as listening anxiety or listening attitude, both of which have been proven to correlate, either negatively or positively, with comprehension measures (Tayşi, 2019). Some of the above-mentioned factors have already been or will be described in greater detail in the present work (for example, background knowledge, schemata or metacognitive strategies). Not all of them, however, have received the interest of researchers in the field of L2/FL listening comprehension. The most extensively examined item on the list above is definitely language facility and its instantiations. To start with, general language proficiency has been recognised as a significant factor in L2 listening comprehension. Scholars examining the relationship between the two concluded that at least 15  % of the variance in L2 listening comprehension was attributable to L2 proficiency (Feyten, 1991; Vandergrift, 2006). Another aspect of language proficiency which proved to be a significant predictor of L2 listening comprehension was phonological memory (Vandergrift, 2007). Mecarrty (2000) examined the contribution of vocabulary and grammar knowledge to L2 listening comprehension and showed that only lexical knowledge was a significant predictor of L2 listening success. Her findings confirmed earlier studies in the area, which pointed to insufficient lexis as the main hindrance to foreign language comprehension and underlined the fact that effective strategies may be helpful in dealing with lexically complex texts, yet high lexical familiarity is absolutely necessary for comprehension to take place (Kelly, 1991; Bonk, 2000). One of

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the most comprehensive inventory of variables which contribute to the overall L2 listening comprehension success, supported by empirical research, has been outlined by Vandergrift and Baker (2015) and includes:  first language listening ability, first language vocabulary knowledge, second language vocabulary knowledge, auditory discrimination ability, metacognitive awareness of listening and working memory capacity. Finally, an important internal factor in listening success is motivation. Recent research has focused mostly on the relationship between motivation and the application of metacognitive listening strategies by L2 learners (Vandergrift, 2006; see Section 2.2). Other affective dimensions affecting listening comprehension overlooked in the framework presented above include learner beliefs, attributions in L2 listening (Graham, 2006), as well as listening anxiety and its debilitative effect on listening comprehension scores (Elkhafaifi, 2005).

External factors The other group of factors encompasses what Samuels (1987) calls ‘outside-thehead’ influences. They refer to such issues as text features or speaker characteristics and, unlike internal factors, can be manipulated in a teaching/testing situation. The factors are presented below. 1. Discussion  topic Is the topic one which the listener has sufficient background to understand? 2. Speaker awareness of audience need Has the speaker correctly judged the level of background knowledge of the listener? Is there an appropriate match between the information presented by the speaker and the listener’s background knowledge? Does the speaker make appropriate adjustments for the listener’s background in terms of examples given, rate and pacing of information presented? Does the speaker present too much information? Is the speaker aware of the need to modulate the loudness of the voice according to the distance between the speaker, the listener and acoustic properties of the room? Is the vocabulary appropriate? Is the sentence structure too complex for the listener? 3. Clarity and speaker effectiveness Does the speaker use too many anaphoric terms? Is the referent clearly indicated for these terms? Does the speaker shift topic without indicating there has been a shift? Does the message lack cohesive ties and causal links? Does the speaker indicate in formal presentations the goals and objectives of the presentations, the major thesis, the supporting ideas? Is the presentation

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well structured? Are there summaries, reviews, questions from the speaker to the listeners? Does the speaker use pitch, stress and pauses appropriately? 4 . Context Are there contextual cues present which support what the speaker is saying? (pp. 298–299) Many of the above-mentioned factors deal with the characteristics of the spoken text, which was subjected to extensive research, inspired by Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (Rubin, 1994). In other words, scholars looked at which factors in the aural input itself make comprehension easier. One such text variable widely believed to influence comprehension scores is the simplification of a listening text. However, the results of empirical studies seem inconclusive. Chaudron (1983) investigated the effect of syntactic modifications on students, and found that redundancy in the form of repeated nouns was the most beneficial. Chiang and Dunkel (1992) showed that modified input, i.e. containing redundant information and elaborations, was advantageous only in the case of high-proficiency learners. The findings of Cervantes and Gainer’s study (1992) recognised syntactic simplifications as an aid to comprehension, regardless of the listeners’ language proficiency and pointed to repetition as a factor facilitating the comprehension of both simplified and non-simplified texts. Kelch (1985), on the other hand, who examined the effect of different speech modifications (synonymy, hyperonymy, parallel syntactic structures and paraphrase) on listening achievements, found no major influence. Rather, he indicated the rate of delivery as the most powerful parameter in helping learners understand a spoken text. Other studies measuring the temporal acoustic variable of speech rate were rather contradictory in their results. Griffiths (1990, 1992) supported the facilitative nature of reduced speech rate while Rubin (1994) reported studied which found no significant effect of the rate of delivery on listening comprehension. Moreover, Blau (1990) noted that the speed of speech had no influence on listening comprehension and proved the introduction of pauses as additional processing time to be more powerful. Another acoustic parameter within the range of external factors is the accent of the speaker. Some of the findings of preliminary studies acknowledging the advantage of a local accent in listening comprehension were questioned and it is now believed that it is the degree of familiarity with the accent of the interlocutor that is of major help (Gass and Veronis, 1984; Ortmeyer and Boyle, 1985; Tauroza and Luk, 1997). Apart from different modifications introduced into aural input, equally meaningful is the organisation of the text. Shohamy and Inbar (1991) examined

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the ‘listenability’ of three types of texts: a news broadcast, a lecturette based on written notes and a consultative dialogue, of which the first one turned out to be the most difficult to understand and the third one the easiest. The authors contend that this is mainly due to the differences in their position on the oral-literate continuum, which, by definition, makes some texts more difficult than others. A number of studies have shown that visual support can facilitate listening comprehension. Ginther (2002) examined the presence of content visuals (photos, graphs or drawings relating to the subject matter of the mini-talk) and context visuals (showing the speakers and the situation in which they are talking) on listening test performance. The outcomes proved that visual aids with content-based information facilitate text comprehension, possibly by enabling the listeners to confirm the inference they make during listening. Somewhat different results were presented by Ching-Shyang and Read (2007), in whose research the effectiveness of visual support in aiding listening comprehension was secondary to repeated input. As far as text organisation is concerned, it is also important to acknowledge the role of discourse markers in listening comprehension. The research in this field, however, will be analysed in greater detail in Chapter Three.

2.1.3 EFL students’ difficulties in understanding oral input All of the factors discussed in the previous section can account for the high degree of failure in second language listening (Rost, 2002). Judging from the variety of those factors, it would be unjustified to assume that EFL learners find listening comprehension difficult only due to insufficient linguistic knowledge. Both the complexity of the process and the nature of the stimulus contribute to understanding oral input, considered a demanding task in second/foreign language learning. Interestingly, despite the abundance of factors making the problems with listening comprehension rather predictable, it has been noted that some teachers tend to underestimate the difficulties which their students might experience (Yildirim, 2015). Therefore, it seems mandatory to focus on what exactly makes listening comprehension so challenging for students. The problems L2/FL learners face during listening may emerge from a number of ‘uncertainties’ that learners tend to experience (Hedge, 2000). They include: uncertainties of language, uncertainties of content, uncertainties of confidence, uncertainties deriving from the presentation of speech, uncertainties because of gaps in the message, uncertain strategies and visual uncertainties. Rost (1994a) looked at some of the most important reasons why listening in a second/foreign language is so challenging. Firstly, he pointed to the motive in

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L2 listening, which, unlike in L1, is no longer connected with language development and self-expression. Then he identified the psychological problem of transfer as a source of L2 listening difficulty. Another aspect that he enumerated was connected with neurological development, which by the time one starts learning a foreign language is very often completed. Finally, he underlined the importance of input and its limited quantity in L2 contexts. From an analysis of Rost’s (2006) list of potential sources of difficulties one observation seems to arise, namely the areas he distinguished refer to second language teaching and learning in general, rather than listening comprehension itself. For example, the amount of input learners are exposed to is a factor affecting all aspects of language acquisition. Therefore, it is worth concentrating on the features of aural input as the root of L2 listening problems, which many researchers, including Rost (2006), have attempted to do. Brown (1995) aimed to identify various aspects making listening comprehension problematic as a result of the intrinsic cognitive load of the text. She focused on the cognitive load imposed on the listener by transactional texts and enumerated the following parameters: a high number of referents in the text, the poor distinguishability of referents in terms of the similarity of names, role or physical characteristics, complex spatial and temporal relations, the high number of causal and intentional inferences necessary to relate sentences to the preceding text, the vagueness and ambiguity of the information expressed, making it impossible to relate to the listener’s existing knowledge. Clearly, the processing demands which the listener has to meet greatly contribute to the level of difficulty of a given text. It is not only the cognitive effort imposed on the listener by one particular text that can make comprehension difficult, but also general spoken input characteristics. This seems to have been the assumption made by Rost (2006), whose compilation of text variables of listening comprehension difficulty reflects both Brown’s (1995) cognitive load of the listening text as well as the features of aural input, a number of which were examined in the previous section (Tab. 2.1). Another widely cited classification of second language listening comprehension problems was proposed by Goh (2000). She adopted a cognitive perspective towards L2 listening difficulties and her taxonomy, based on the three-phase model of language processing by Anderson (1980), resulted from experimental research on a group of EFL students, who reported their problems with listening comprehension in diaries and interviews. The table below shows the results of the study, i.e. the most commonly enumerated difficulties, with reference to the three stages in text comprehension: perception, parsing and utilisation (Tab. 2.2).

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Tab. 2.1: Variables influencing text difficulty (based on Rost, 2006) Variable

Description

Word count

Total number of words in a text average speed (words per minute) of the speaker Total number of individuals and objects Narrative, descriptive, instructive, argumentative

Text speed Individuals and objects Text type

Pause unit length Object distinction

Inference types

Average number of words per sentence (or pause unit) Clarity and distinctness of individuals and objects in a text Inferences required are very familiar to the listeners Information in a text is consistent with information known by the listener

What makes the text Impact on the easier listener Lower word count Less text to process Slower speed, more pauses

More time for word recognition and parsing Fewer individuals and Fewer cross objects referencing decisions to make Paratactic (time Sequential ordering ordered) organisation takes less time and rather than abstract effort to process (unspecified) or hypotactic (embedded) organisation Shorter average pause Less syntactic unit parsing needed Individuals and objects in a text clearly distinct from each other

Clearer spatial and/or semantic boundaries between items being analysed in short-term memory Less cognitive effort

Lower order (more frequently used) inference calculations Information Direct activation of shorter memory consistency useful schemata in searches and memory less delay in comprehension of problematic text segments Information density Ratio of known to Higher ratio of Less filling or storage unknown information known to unknown of new information information

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Tab. 2.2:  Problems related to different phases of listening comprehension (based on Goh, 2000) Perception Parsing Do not recognise words Quickly forget what is heard they know Unable to form mental Neglect the next part when representation from thinking about meaning words heard Cannot chunk streams Do not understand of speech subsequent parts of input Miss the beginning of the text because of earlier problems Concentrate too hard or unable to concentrate

Utilisation Understand words but not the intended message Confused about the key ideas in the message

As Goh (2000) admits, the purpose in identifying problems in listening comprehension is mainly to help learners become better listeners. As a rule, an investigation into some possible reasons for failure in any aspect of language acquisition should be conducted with the perspective of pursuing an effective remedy and searching for ways of improvement. In addition, in listening comprehension, the examination of learners’ problems should result in devising a set of strategies that can be applied to overcome these problems.

2.2 Learning strategies in listening comprehension As was pointed out in the previous section, engagement in the complex mental processes while trying to understand information in oral texts is very often hindered by the difficulties experienced by the listener. In order to overcome these problems, listeners apply a number of listening strategies, which will now be examined in greater detail. Firstly, however, it is necessary for the concept of general learning strategies to be explained. Since the 1970s, when the notion of learning strategies appeared in second language acquisition literature for the first time, there have been numerous attempts to identify what a strategy is and what basic properties particular strategies have. Researchers have arrived at various definitions of the concept and described learning strategies as behavioural or mental operations (Ellis, 1994; Cohen, 1998), general approaches to learning (Cohen, 1998) or specific actions (Wenden, 1987; Oxford, 1990; Brown, 1993), which can affect learning either directly or indirectly. From this multiplicity of definitions, one seems to be quoted most often, especially in literature on listening comprehension, namely the definition proposed by Chamot (1987). She conceptualises learning strategies

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as ‘techniques, approaches, or deliberate actions that students take in order to facilitate the learning and recall of linguistic and content area information’ (Chamot, 1987, p.  7). An important distinction between strategies and skills, which contributed to the way strategies are conceptualized, has been emphasised by Vandergrift and Goh (2012). They pointed out that: listening strategies are conscious and goal-directed behaviors, cognitive and social in nature, which learners use to assist their comprehension and learning. Unlike skills, which are automatic processes that make little or no demand on processing capacity, strategies are controlled processes that require conscious attention in their deployment, modification, and orchestration. (p. 91)

Not only the definition of the term, but the classification of learning strategies has also been approached in different ways, and a number of miscellaneous taxonomies have been proposed (Rubin, 1987; Oxford, 1990; Brown, 1993; Cohen, 1998). Despite the surface disparities in categorisations and variations in terminology, there is a great deal of overlap between the typologies which all seem to uphold the division of strategies into cognitive, metacognitive and socioaffective strands. The case seems to be no different when it comes to listening comprehension strategies. Scholars examining second language learners’ listening strategies ground their work on cognitive/metacognitive distinction. Cognitive listening strategies are useful in handling the incoming information and are employed to process the message, infer meaning and facilitate comprehension often with the help of students’ existing knowledge (Mendelson, 1995, 2006; Goh, 1998, 2000; Vandergrift, 1997, 2003). Metacognitive listening strategies, on the other hand, go beyond the transformation of incoming data and involve monitoring cognitive processes, thinking how the information is processed and stored. One major inventory of listening strategies, which proved to be influential in researching second language listening, was compiled by Vandergrift (1997). Based on the cognitive/metacognitive division, his typology included the strategies summarised in Tab. 2.3. A somewhat different inventory of listening strategies was compiled by Chien and Wei (1998). In an attempt to identify specific mental processes in comprehending aural stimuli, they created a list of thirty operations employed by learners while listening and divided them into three groups: linguistic (based on textual elements), cognitive and extralinguistic (based on what the listener sees or hears in the listening situation). One interesting result of Chien and Wei’s study was that while strategies from cognitive and extralinguistic groups proved

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Tab. 2.3:  Metacognitive and cognitive listening comprehension strategies (Vandergrift, 2003a, pp. 494–496) METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES Planning Developing an awareness of what needs to be done to accomplish a task, developing an appropriate action plan and/or appropriate contingency plan to combat difficulties that may interfere with successful completion of the task. Advance organisation Clarifying the objectives of an anticipated listening task and/ or proposing strategies for handling it. Directed attention Deciding in advance to attend in general to the listening task and to ignore irrelevant distracters; maintaining attention while listening. Selective attention Deciding to attend to specific aspects of language input or situational details that assist in understanding and/or task completion. Self-management Understanding the conditions that help one successfully accomplish listening tasks and arranging for the presence of these conditions. Monitoring Checking, verifying or correcting one’s comprehension or performance in the course of a listening task. Comprehension Checking, verifying or correcting one’s comprehension at monitoring the local level.’ Double-check monitoring Checking, verifying or correcting one’s understanding across the task or during the second time through the oral text. Evaluation Checking the outcomes of one’s listening comprehension against an internal measure of completeness and accuracy. Problem identification Explicitly identifying the central point needing resolution in a task or identifying an aspect of the task that hinders its successful completion. COGNITIVE STRATEGIES Inferencing Using information within the text or conversational context to guess the meaning of unfamiliar language items associated with a listening task, or to fill in missing information. Linguistic inferencing Using known words in an utterance to guess the meaning of unknown words. Voice inferencing Using tone of voice and/or paralinguistics to guess the meaning of unknown words in an utterance. Extralinguistic inferencing Using background sounds and relationships between the speakers in an oral context, material in the response sheet, or concrete situational referents to guess the meaning of unknown words. (continued on next page)

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Tab. 2.3: Continued METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES Between-parts inferencing Using information beyond the local sentential level to guess at meaning. Elaboration Using prior knowledge from outside the text or conversational context and relating it to knowledge gained form the text or conversation in order to fill in missing information. Personal elaboration Referring to prior experience personally. World elaboration Using knowledge gained form experience in the world. Academic elaboration Using knowledge gained in an academic situation. Questioning elaboration Using a combination of questions and world knowledge to brainstorm logical possibilities. Creative elaboration Making up a storyline or adopting a clever perspective. Imagery Using mental or actual pictures or visuals to represent information. Summarisation Making a mental or written summary of language and information presented in the listening task. Translation Rendering ideas from one language in another in a relatively verbatim manner. Transfer Using knowledge of one language (e.g. cognates) to facilitate listening in another. Repetition Repeating a chunk of language (a word or phrase) in the course of performing a listening task.

helpful in comprehending oral texts, several operations from the linguistic category turned out to inhibit the comprehension process. An interesting approach towards the classification of listening strategies was adopted by Goh (1998), who made a distinction between general strategies and more specific tactics. She first divided strategies into cognitive (e.g. inferencing, prediction, elaboration) and metacognitive (e.g. selective or directed attention, monitoring, evaluation) and then enumerated several tactics, also categorised under two headings. Cognitive tactics included such items as using prior knowledge to elaborate and complete information, relating one part of the text to another or predicting general contents before listening using contexts and prior knowledge. Examples of metacognitive tactics were: establishing a purpose for listening, paying attention to tones and pauses or continuing to listen despite difficulties.

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One cognitive strategy useful in listening comprehension enumerated in several taxonomies is note-taking (Mendelson, 1995; Chien and Wei, 1998; Goh, 2000). As this is particularly significant from the perspective of the present book and, at the same time, inherent in listening to lectures in academic settings, it will be subjected to closer scrutiny in Chapter Three. From the above examples it seems clear that, despite the differences in terminology, there exists an apparent overlap between these taxonomies. Another aspect, which all the classifications have in common is the purpose for which they were designed, namely to determine which factors contribute to becoming a skilled second language listener.

2.2.1 Listening strategies in transactional settings The following section will focus on studies which sought to identify learning strategies used by good language learners, as well as those comparing strategy use by more- and less-effective second language listeners. While several studies’ results proved the significance of socio-affective strategies in interactive contexts (Ross and Rost, 1991; Lynch, 1995; Vandergrift, 1997), the main focus of this part of the chapter will be on cognitive and metacognitive strategies which are used to develop transactional listening skills, which seems more relevant from the point of view of the present discussion. An extensive body of research looking at the relationship between strategy use and proficiency or second language listening ability proved that the application of appropriate strategies is conducive to the successful comprehension of oral texts. The first empirical evidence came from Murphy (1985; quoted in Vandergrift, 2003b), who investigated English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in academic lectures and showed that more skilled listeners used more strategies, of greater variety and applied them more flexibly than less skilled listeners. These findings were later supported by O’Malley et  al. (1989), who used Anderson’s three-phase model of understanding in order to discriminate between effective and ineffective listeners. The scholars concluded that listening comprehension is an active and conscious process in which the recipient constructs meaning by relying on multiple strategic resources. They also pointed to the type and frequency of strategy use as crucial factors distinguishing effective from ineffective listeners. The results of their inquiry were summarised by Flowerdew and Miller (2005) and are presented in Tab. 2.4. Bacon (1992), who followed the same procedure and analysed strategy use according to the three phases of the comprehension process, found similar regularities. Success in listening turned out to depend on the variety of strategies used,

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Tab. 2.4: Effective and ineffective learning strategies (based on Flowerdew and Miller, 2005) Perception

Parsing

Utilisation

Effective listeners Aware of when they stop attending, try to redirect their attention to the text;

Ineffective listeners Stop attending due to the length of the text and the number of unknown words; Do not redirect their attention to the text; Attend to larger chunks, attend to Focus on the text word-by-word; individual words only in the case of message breakdown; Make use of intonation and pauses, listen for phrases or sentences; Use world knowledge, personal Passive; knowledge and self-questioning to Do not activate background attend to verbal messages; knowledge or utilise elaboration Actively involved in the listening techniques; process;

flexibility in changing them, motivation, self-control, maintaining attention and effective use of background knowledge. One interesting conclusion which he drew was that monitoring was used equally often by both more and less skilled listeners, yet better listeners were more realistic in assessing their comprehension. He also made an attempt to verify whether gender differences influenced strategy use, but failed to deliver conclusive results. A similar endeavour was made by Vandergrift (1996). He showed the differences between strategy use by males and females, the former using fewer tactics to tackle comprehension tasks. Moreover, the study demonstrated that the total number of strategies used increased together with the proficiency level, which was confirmed in a later study by Chien and Wei (1998). Novice listeners, due to excessive processing demands, failed to make use of metacognitive strategies, which were applied more readily by more skilled listeners (Vandergrift, 2003b). Further evidence for the relationship between metacognitive awareness and second language listening ability was provided by Vandergrift, Goh and Mareschal (2006), Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010) and Wang (2016). Summing up, there are significant differences in strategy use between groups of different listening abilities. More advanced learners use a greater number of operations, with more flexibility and more appropriately for a particular listening situation (Peterson, 2001). The major difference lies in the number of

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metacognitive strategies, which are reported to be used more often by more skilled listeners (Vandergrift, 2003b). Cognitive strategies seem to be used equally frequently, but more effectively by advanced learners. Clearly, given the facilitative nature of listening strategies, as well as the fact that strategic modes of processing can be developed through training (O’Malley et al., 1989), the power of a strategic approach to listening instruction seems indisputable.

2.2.2 A strategy-based approach to teaching L2 listening comprehension Although we cannot assume that L2 students do not use any strategies whatsoever, it has been postulated that untutored learners are likely to use listening strategies inappropriately (Goh, 1998; Peterson, 2001). Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, such strategies have been certified as teachable (MichońskaStadnik, 1996) and hence arguments were voiced in favour of listening strategy training in L2 classrooms. Finally, such an approach seems advantageous due to the positive correlation between listening strategy use and listening comprehension as substantiated by the relevant research (Kök, 2018). To that end, Mendelson (1994, 2006) proposed a set of pedagogical guidelines which comprised a coherent strategy-based approach to teaching listening. Unlike traditional strategy training based on inserting strategy instruction into the course, Mendelson’s pedagogy was organised around different strategies, which constitute the core of the course. He defines his approach as follows: A strategy-based approach is […] a methodology that is rooted in strategy training […]. It is an approach that sees the objective of the ESL course as being to train students how to listen, by making learners aware of the strategies they use, and training them in the use of additional strategies that will assist them in tackling the listening task. […] Learners have to be weaned away from strategies that are unhelpful, like grabbing for a dictionary or panicking when an incomprehensible word is heard, and these have to be replaced by such helpful strategies as guessing the meaning of a word from context. (p. 37)

An important issue referred to in this definition is the need for raising students’ awareness of the strategies they are already using. The problem was also addressed by Chamot (1995), who pointed to the importance of acknowledging strategies students apply while listening to texts in their mother tongue. As she explained, a number of strategies employed in L1 listening are transferrable to L2 contexts. This refers in particular to cognitive strategies, the conclusion being that more time should be devoted to developing learners’ metacognitive awareness, which has received support in the literature (Buck, 1995; Goh, 1998, 2008; Vandergrift,

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1999, 2003a; Vandergrift et  al., 2006). For example, Buck (1995) stated that it is virtually unfeasible to teach students how to perform cognitive processes and therefore metacognitive practice seems more likely to be productive. Furthermore, metacognitive instruction for second language listening development has been proved to be beneficial for three reasons: (1) it boosts listeners’ confidence and lowers anxiety, and as such improves the affect in listening situations; (2) it improves listening performance; (3) it helps poor listeners improve their aural comprehension skills (Goh, 2008). Although the benefits of strategy training seem to have been widely recognised, some doubts about the actual potential of strategy instruction have also been voiced (Field, 1998). Out of twelve studies reported by Rubin (1994) and Chamot (1995) only two gave conclusive results. The ambiguous findings may be attributed to the limitations of the methods assessing listening performance before and after strategy training, or to the fact that strategy use is idiosyncratic and rooted in the student’s learning style (Field, 1998). In other words, the fact that a learner receives strategic instruction does not guarantee that he or she will readily apply the strategies taught (Goh, 2000). Equally sceptical about the value of explicit strategy training is Ridgway (2000), who also cites the inconclusive research results and suggest extensive listening practice as a viable alternative to strategy-based approach. Moreover, he claims that, as strategies in L1 are transferrable to L2 contexts, there is no need for additional time being devoted to strategic instruction. Ridgway’s line of argumentation is refuted by Field (2000), who points to the compensatory nature of strategies and claims that strategies may enable the process of decoding before the learner reaches the language threshold at which L1 strategies transfer to L2 setting on their own. Clearly, the effects of strategy training on second language listeners need further analysis, which will be carried out in Chapter Three of the present work.

2.3 Issues in evaluating L2 listening comprehension Testing second language listening comprehension is a very broad multi-faceted subject, all of whose aspects, due to the lack of a connection to the topic of this book, need not be described here. However, as one of the steps in the study reported in this paper was to create a measurement instrument for academic listening which required sufficient validation, the issue of test validity is one aspect which seems to demand fuller examination. Test validation is a long and painstaking process, which requires a structured approach (Buck, 1992; Dunkel, Henning and Chaudron, 1993; Thompson, 1995; Bachman and Palmer, 1996; Messick, 1996; Wagner, 2002; Weir, 2005). Probably

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the most exhaustive method of validating tests, and at the same time highly influential in current studies, was suggested by Weir (2005). His socio-cognitive framework for validation procedures is shown in Fig. 2.3, the key elements of which will now be described in greater detail. The following section will not focus, however, on scoring validity, which in receptive skills testing refers mainly to verifying the internal consistency of a test, but will address the issues revolving around test specifications laid down at the outset of test design. According to Weir, while in the past little attention was paid to non-statistical aspects of validity, current validation procedures are very much descriptive in nature. This is true especially for gathering a priori validity evidence, i.e. that which is accumulated before the test is administered. It is a kind of ‘evaluative judgment of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy (…) of [test] interpretations’ (Messick, 1996, p. 245). The aim of such an approach is to make sure that ‘performance on a given language test is related to language use in specific situations rather than the language test itself ’ (Bachman and Palmer, 1996, p. 43). In other words, for test results to be generalisable to non-test situations, it is mandatory for test tasks to be representative of the target language use domain (Messick, 1996). In order to do so efforts need to be made to incorporate into the test situation as many real-life conditions as possible, which will be reflected in the context validity of the measurement instrument. The first step in trying to approximate the testing situation to real life, however, is to understand what processes and behaviours accompany the real-life situation, that is, to establish a construct or theory-based validity. In the case of listening comprehension, given its covert nature and the necessity to evaluate comprehension on the basis of task completion, providing evidence for theorybased validity seems a formidable task and is not devoid of potential pitfalls (Buck, 2001; Vandergrift, 2007). Accumulating thorough evidence for theorybased validity, which entails the definition and operationalisation of the construct, seems indispensable to avoid the risks of construct-underrepresentation or construct-irrelevant variance (Messick, 1996), which may distort the conclusion made on the basis of the test results and may cast doubt on the authenticity of the testing situation. A close-up view on defining the construct of listening comprehension was presented by Buck (2001), who proposed a two-fold approach towards construct definition, based either on the test-takers’ competence or their performance in a test situation. The former takes into account the descriptive models of competence by Canale and Swain (1980) and Bachman and Palmer (1996) assume that test performance is a manifestation of both linguistic and strategic competences

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Listening comprehension in foreign language instruction TEST TAKER CHARACTERISTIC • Physical/physiological • Psychological • Experiential

CONTEXT VALIDITY SETTING: TASK • Purpose • Response format • Known criteria • Weighing • Order of items • Time constraints SETTING: ADMINISTRATION • Physical conditions • Uniformity of administration • Security

THEORY-BASED VALIDITY

INTERNAL PROCESS

DEMANDS: TASK • Linguistic - Discourse mode - Channel - Length - Nature of information - Content knowledge - Lexical - Functional - Structural • Interlocutor - Speech rate - Variety of accent - Acquaintanceship - Number of speakers - Gender

EXECUTIVE PROCESSES • Goal setting • Acoustic/Visual input • Audition • Pattern synthesiser

M EXECUTIVE O RESOURCES N • Language knowledge - Grammatical I (phonology, lexis T syntax) O - Discoursal R - Functional I (pragmatic) N - Sociolinguistic G • Content knowledge - Internal - External

RESPONSE

SCORING VALIDITY SCORING • Item analysis • Internal consistency • Error of measurement • Marker reliability

SCORE/GRADE

CONSEQUENTIAL VALIDITY SCORE INTERPRETATION • Differential validity • Washback in classroom/workplace • Effect on individual within society

CRITERION-RELATED VALIDITY SCORE VALUE • Comparison with different versions of the same test • Comparison with the same test administered on different occasions • Comparison with other tests/ measurements • Comparison with future performance

Fig. 2.3:  A socio-cognitive framework for validating listening tests (Weir, 2005, p. 45)

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underlying listening comprehension. Such competence-based construct definition has a number of fallacies, including the inability to unequivocally state what processes take place in the test-taker’s mind. Hence, an alternative way of defining the listening comprehension construct was suggested. Rooted in the framework by Bachman and Palmer (1996), the outline for defining listening task characteristics drawn up by Buck (Tab. 2.5) addresses the problem of determining which abilities are necessary for performance on both target language use tasks and test tasks and as such, meets the argument for situational authenticity (Messick, 1996). An important comment needs to be made at this point, namely that there is a clear parallel between Weir’s context validity and Buck’s framework for defining listening. The fact that both authors included contextual issues in their approaches to validating tests proves that the conditions under which test tasks are performed are of enormous significance. In other words, a lot of preliminary considerations need to be taken into account and issued, such as an unambiguous and concise rubric, clear evaluation criteria or time constraints which need to be set in advance (Weir, 2005). In addition, research on testing listening comprehension enumerated a number of other variables bearing strong influence on test performance. They include the nature of the input, text and task type, the response format and interlocutor variables such as speech rate, accent and dialect (Buck, 1991; Shohamy and Inbar, 1991; Jensen et al, 1997; Bae and Bachman, 1998; Yi’an, 1998; Freedle and Kostin, 1999; Brindley and Slatyer, 2002; Major et al., 2002; Carrell, Dunkel and Mollaun, 2004; Major et al., 2005; Yanagawa and Green, 2008). Summing up, in order to claim the validity of any test a vast number of considerations must be taken into account and included in elaborate test specifications. In listening comprehension, which to a large extent is based on unobservable mental processes, designing a valid measurement instrument is particularly challenging. That is because ‘performance on each test item by each test taker is a unique cognitive event’ (Buck, 1994, p. 164) and there is never an absolute guarantee that a learner who answers a test question correctly used the skills designated in the test specifications to arrive at the right answer (Brindley and Slatyer, 2002). Nevertheless, we should always try to make the testing situation as authentic as possible and, with appropriate validation, be able to prove the correspondence of the test tasks to the target language use tasks. The first step in doing so is getting to know the nature of the construct tested, which was the aim of this chapter. As, however, the present work focuses on and sets out to evaluate, a specific kind of listening comprehension, namely understanding academic lectures, let us now explore the specificity of listening in academic contexts.

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Characteriscs of the seng: the physical circumstances under which the listening takes place. Physical characteriscs: the actual place, background noise, live or recorded etc. Parcipants: the people around, including test administrators. Time of task: me of day, whether the listeners are fresh or fagued. Characteriscs of the test rubric: the characteriscs that provide the structure for the test, and how the test-takers are to proceed. These have to be made explicit in the test, but are usually implicit in language use. Instrucons: instrucons, details or procedures, as well as purpose of listening, including the language used, and whether they are oral or wrien. Structure: structure of the test, how the parts of the test are put together, including the number of listening passages, whether the passages are repeated, their order, the number of items per passage etc. Time allotment: the me allowed for each task. Scoring method: how the tasks are scored including criteria for correctness, steps used for scoring or rang, and how the item scores are combined into the test score. Characteriscs of the input: the listening passages and other accompanying material. Format: whether passages are spoken or recorded, their length etc. Language of input: including phonology, grammar, lexis, textual, funconal and sociolinguisc knowledge. Topical knowledge: the cultural, schemac or general world knowledge necessary to understand the passages. Characteriscs of the expected response: the response expected from the test-taker to the task. Format: selected or constructed, the length, the form it will take, me available. Language of expected response: for constructed responses whether in the L1 or the L2, criteria for correctness etc. Relaonship between the input and response: Reacvity: whether the listening is reciprocal, non-reciprocal or adapve. Scope: the range of listening material that must be processed. Directness of relaonship: the degree to which the response can be based primarily on the language of the passage, or whether it is necessary to use informaon from the context, or apply background knowledge.

Tab. 2.5:  A framework for defining listening task characteristics (Buck, 2001, p. 107)

Chapter Three The specificity of listening to lectures and note-taking strategy Abstract: This third chapter sets out to understand the nature of academic listening and lecture comprehension. It begins by outlining the features of the listening comprehension process particular to academic contexts. Later, the qualities of the input together with the traits of the discourse which lecture listeners are exposed to are considered and the problems encountered by the students are summarised. The second part of this chapter deals with note-taking, which is a strategy inseparable from academic listening.

3.1 Distinctive features of academic listening Although there is an overall correlation between general and academic listening, it cannot be denied that listening to lectures2 involves a set of skills in its own right. Moreover, a number of researchers have pointed to the fact that the differences between the two may stem from the variance in the input the listener is exposed to. In other words, the general/academic listening distinction should be seen from two major perspectives: (1) what students hear when they listen to lectures, (2) what students do when they listen to lectures (Jensen, 1999). Whatever the source of the differences, there seems to be a general agreement among scholars as to one fact – all distinctive features of academic listening influence comprehension and, as such, should be acknowledged whenever listening to lectures is investigated. One of the first researchers who made a clear distinction between general and academic listening was Flowerdew (1994b), who grouped the key differences between conversational and transactional listening into two major categories, namely differences ‘in degree’ and differences ‘in kind’. The differences ‘in degree’ include: – the type of background knowledge required, which, in the case of academic listening, will involve a higher level of specificity;

2 For the sake of the present work, the terms ‘listening to lectures’ and ‘academic listening’ will be used interchangeably. The working definition of this concept is included in Chapter Four.

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– the ability of the recipient to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information; – the application of turn-taking conventions; – the inclusion of implied meaning and indirect speech acts into the discourse. As far as the differences ‘in kind’ are concerned, all of the features underlined by Flowerdew refer to the skills required from the listener: – the ability to comprehend longer stretches of talk without the opportunity to engage in facilitative interaction, which makes the comprehension process more cognitively demanding; – note-taking, which is as integral part of most academic settings; – the ability to combine the information from the lecture with that from other media (handouts, textbooks, visual materials etc.). A different approach towards outlining the distinctive features of academic listening is adopted by Jensen (1999). She analyses the characteristics of listening in academic contexts and divides them into factors related to the lecture conditions and those to the lecture discourse. As the features of input will be described in greater detail later in this chapter (see Section 3.2), let us now focus on what Jensen calls ‘distinctive features for the conditions of lectures’ (Jensen, 1999, p. 31). Those features can be summarised as follows: 1. the specificity of the lecture situation – one lecturer in front of the audience, often using visual support; 2. the transactional, or non-collaborative, function of interaction, which requires the lecturer to anticipate listeners’ potential problems; 3. the focus on propositional meaning, i.e. orientation towards conveying meaning; 4. the depth of background knowledge necessary for lecture comprehension; 5. the planned nature of lecture discourse; 6. the inequality of the speaker/listener relationship, in which the speaker (i.e. the lecturer) is always in control. While the features enumerated above focus on the context of academic listening, another group of lecture characteristics, which Jensen pinpoints, refer to the unique discourse of academic lectures. It is based mainly on Chafe and Danielewicz’s (1987) research and includes such aspects as lexical complexity, the use of hedges and literary vocabulary, the length of intonation units and the coordination of sentences. These features will be addressed later in this chapter, when the structure of lecture discourse will be subjected to closer scrutiny.

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Tab. 3.1: A matrix for defining the construct of academic listening (Buck, 2001, p. 110) Most important tasks Formal Students’ lectures presentations #1 #2 #3 #1 #2 #3 Language competency required Grammatical knowledge: phonological modification stress/intonation spoken vocabulary/slang oral syntax repetitions and false starts Discourse knowledge: discourse markers rhetorical schemata story grammars asides/jokes separating main points/detail Pragmatic knowledge: basic functions conveying ideas manipulating learning or creative indirect meanings/hints pragmatic implications text-based inferences Sociolinguistic knowledge: appropriacy of linguistic forms informal idiomatic expressions local dialect cultural references figures of speech

x x x x x

x x

x x x x x x x x x x

x x

x x x

x x x x

x x x

x x x

x

x x x x x

x x x x x

Instructions / assignments #1 #2 #3

x

x

x x

x x x x x x

x x x x x x x x x x

x x x x x x x x x x x

x

x x

x x x x x x

x

A somewhat different method of identifying the distinctive features of academic listening comes from the field of language assessment. Buck (2001), attempting to replicate real-life academic listening in a test situation, suggested an innovative approach to defining the construct of academic listening. To make sure that the test task and the target-language use situation call for the same competence on the part of the test taker/language user, Buck created a matrix of features typical of listening to formal lectures (Tab. 3.1). For the sake of the current discussion, Buck’s matrix provides an analysis of the types of knowledge required for successful lecture comprehension.

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Whatever the approach towards elucidating academic listening, there is a great overlap between the features of listening to lectures as described by different scholars and the above-mentioned characteristics comprising the basis for defining the construct of academic listening. A somewhat different way of looking at the process of academic listening is through the set of sub-skills it involves. Lebauer (1984), for example, sees lecture comprehension as an interaction of three main abilities: (1) synthesising discourse and extracting relevant information, (2) anticipating future information, (3) relating prior knowledge to the incoming data. Such a sub-skillbased approach to defining academic listening has become quite popular and a number of studies in the field, including the research reported in the present work, has taken into account the micro-skills involved in academic listening.

3.1.1 Taxonomies of academic listening micro-skills It is common among second/foreign language researchers to describe complex, multidimensional processes in terms of underlying sub-skills (Buck, 2001). Such attempts have also been made in the case of academic listening, which instead of being defined as a separate construct, is often juxtaposed with general, or conversational, listening by means of a whole range of micro-skills specific to lecture listening. One such taxonomy of academic listening sub-skills has been developed by Richards (1983), whose comprehensive list of as many as 18 skills relevant to listening to lectures has become the theoretical basis for many subsequent studies in the field. Richards’s inventory of academic listening micro-skills includes:   1. ability to identify purpose and scope of lecture; 2. ability to identify topic of lecture and follow topic development; 3. ability to identify relationships among units within discourse (e.g. major ideas, generalisations, hypotheses, supporting ideas, examples); 4. ability to identify role of discourse markers in signaling structure of a lecture (e.g. conjunctions, adverbs, gambits, routines); 5. ability to infer relationships (e.g. cause, effect, conclusion); 6. ability to recognise key lexical items related to subject/topic; 7. ability to deduce meanings of words from context; 8. ability to recognise markers of cohesion; 9. ability to recognise function of intonation to signal information structure (e.g. pitch, volume, pace, key); 10. ability to detect attitude of speaker toward subject matter;

73

Distinctive features of academic listening 11. ability to follow different modes of lecturing: spoken, audio, audio-visual; 12. ability to follow lecture despite differences in accent and speed; 13. familiarity with different styles of lecturing:  formal, conversational, read, unplanned; 14. familiarity with different registers: written versus colloquial; 15. ability to recognise relevant matter: jokes, digressions, meanderings; 16. ability to recognise function of non-verbal cues as markers of emphasis and attitude; 17. knowledge of classroom conventions (e.g. turn-taking, clarification requests); 18. ability to recognise instructional/learner tasks (e.g. warnings, suggestions, recommendations, advice, instructions). (p. 228)

However detailed the taxonomy above may be, there is one major flaw as pointed out by Buck (2001) – it lacks empirical support and therefore it cannot be unequivocally stated that Richards’s compilation of sub-skills constitutes an exhaustive description of what academic listening entails. Yet another taxonomy, which is important from the perspective of the present thesis, is that by Powers (1986). Unlike Richards’s compilation grounded entirely on theoretical speculations, Powers’s inventory of academic listening sub-skills was based on research. He used Richards’s work to design a survey, which was later distributed among lecturers, to evaluate the importance of various listening abilities with regard to the academic success of non-native students. The most important sub-skills which emerged in the study included: 1 . identifying major themes or ideas; 2. identifying relationships among major ideas; 3. identifying the topic of a lecture; 4. retaining information through note-taking; 5. retrieving information from notes; 6. inferring relationship between information; 7. comprehending key vocabulary; 8. following the spoken mode of lectures; 9. identifying supporting ideas and examples. (p. 30) As the author of the study points out, his research findings are not free from limitations. Firstly, faculty members who are not teachers of English as a second language may not be competent enough to evaluate the importance of listening skills for non-native students; secondly, lecturers are only one of the possible sources of information about the importance of listening subskills. Nevertheless, despite its flaws, this list of nine core academic listening

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micro-skills was extensively used by scholars researching listening to lectures and developing academic listening measurement instruments (Hansen and Jensen, 1994; Flowerdew, 1994b; Huang, 2005).

3.1.2 Background knowledge and visuals as variables in lecture comprehension The understanding of academic lectures is undoubtedly affected by a number of variables. Factors which play a significant role in the process of academic listening are general language proficiency (Dunkel, Mishra and Barliner, 1989), listening proficiency (Chiang and Dunkel, 1992), lecture length (Carrell, Dunkel and Mollaun, 2002, 2004), accent (Harding, 2008), text structure meta-discourse and intonation (Thompson, 2003), gestures (Sueyoshi and Hardison, 2005) and several others. Rost (2002) emphasised that it is difficult to decide which of many different variables have the greatest influence on listening comprehension. From the perspective of the present work, two aspects of academic listening seem to be of particular importance – the effect of background knowledge and visual aids on lecture comprehension, which will now receive a brief analysis. As far as the prior knowledge of the lecture content is concerned, it is believed that the more familiar with the topic of a lecture the listeners are, the easier it will be for them to comprehend and retain general points from the lecture discourse (Chaudron, 1995). Some interesting results in this respect were obtained by Chiang and Dunkel (1992). They noted higher scores on a post-lecture comprehension test when subjects listened to familiar-topic lectures. However, when test-type was considered a factor in the assessment, it turned out that prior knowledge was relevant only in passage-independent items, while no significant effect was noticed in the case of passage-dependent items. The conclusion to be drawn from these results is that researchers need to be more careful in evaluating the contribution of background knowledge to listeners’ ability to recall lecture content. Another interesting body of research into the effects of prior knowledge on specific purpose test performance was carried out by Clapham (1996; quoted in Douglas, 2000). Although her study focused on reading tests, the implications are important for all cases of specific purpose assessment, in which background knowledge is likely to influence the final results. Clapham’s findings can be summarised as follows: – The effect of background knowledge depends on the degree of specificity of the passage – subjects did better on tests related to their field of studies if the reading passages were sufficiently specific. The specificity of a text depends on whether comprehension requires familiarity of subject specific concepts

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not explained in the text, i.e. the amount of context-embedded information, rather than the source of the material or the vocabulary. – The level of background knowledge may have an effect on performance  – postgraduate students did better than graduates. – The level of structural knowledge influences the effect of background knowledge on test performance – subjects with low scores in grammar (below 60 %) showed no background knowledge effects, while subjects with better language knowledge made use of background knowledge. Moreover, there seemed to be a threshold for background knowledge to have any influence. At the same time, subjects with high language competence were less affected by prior knowledge of the subject, because they were able to compensate for the deficiencies in background knowledge. Extrapolating these findings onto lecture listening, it may be concluded that the role of prior knowledge of the lecture content may seem to be overestimated and in an assessment of comprehension it is fairly easy to control this variable so that it does not distort the results. One more factor in academic listening significant for the present discussion is the use of visual material in lectures. Such visuals include illustrations, slides, videos etc., and are often an integral part of the message, complementing verbal information, illustrating a concept or providing additional details (Flowerdew and Miller, 1997). Some researchers underline the beneficial value of visuals used in lectures, as visual support orientates the listener in the lecture discourse and aid the comprehension of concepts (Olsen and Huckin, 1990). However, some study results suggest visuals are actually a burden for the listeners, as they are required to simultaneously process information from two different sources (Flowerdew and Miller, 1997). Moreover, taking notes on both spoken and visual input may constitute a bigger challenge for students than taking notes on a monologue only. King (1994) points to yet another problem for listeners – the inability to decide whether to write what is heard or what is seen. Again, studies analysing learner behaviour in this respect bring contradictory results – King’s investigation showed that visually presented material is not recorded at all, while Vandergrift (2007) presented some research findings proving that students were so much engaged in copying information from visual material that they failed to focus on listening to the lecturer. In order to prevent such situations, Flowerdew and Miller (1997) suggest that handouts with relevant visual materials should be distributed by the lecturer before the lecture in teaching and testing situations.

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3.2 Characteristics of input in academic listening As stated in the previous section, defining the nature of academic listening should not only involve an investigation of what listeners do when they process lectures, but also what exactly they hear. In other words, in order to grasp the arcana of listening comprehension in academic settings it is mandatory to analyse the features of the discourse and register of the input, especially in light of the research findings postulating a significant link between discourse structure and comprehension (Chaudron and Richards, 1986; Tauroza and Allison, 1994; Chaudron, 1995). The results of the discourse analysis of lectures are important for a number of reasons. They can lead academics in improving the structure of lectures so as to aid students with the comprehension and processing demands. They may also enable material and curriculum designers to prepare adequate training for learners. Finally, they can guide lecturers on how to deliver their lectures in an optimal way. The discourse analysis carried out by most researchers so far comes in three major strands: the mode of delivery, the distinctive features of the register and the structure of discourse.

3.2.1 Lecturing styles The first attempt to identify the modes of lecture delivery was undertaken by Morrison (1974; quoted in Gómez and Fortuño, 2005). He identified two lecturing styles: formal, which resembled ‘spoken prose’, and informal, rich in factual content, but without a high formal register. As the division into two modes was regarded as very basic, further analysis was carried out. Dudley-Evans and Johns (1981; quoted by Chaudron and Richards, 1986) identified three major ways of delivery: – reading style: the lecturer reads from notes or speaks as if s/he were reading; – conversational style: the lecturer speaks informally, with or without notes; – rhetorical style: the lecturer is like a performer, making frequent asides and digressions. The distinction made by Dudley-Evans and Johns is most often employed by researchers investigating academic lectures. Somewhat different terms, yet referring to similar concepts, were used by Goffman (1981b; quoted in Jordan, 2002), who enumerated memorisation, reading aloud and fresh talk. In Mason’s (1994) study, three main styles of lectures emerged, quite different from those quoted above, namely ‘talk-and-chalk’, with the blackboard as the main visual aid, ‘give-and-take’, with discussion, questions and comments

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from the listeners, and ‘report-and-discuss’, with the topics being allocated to students for study, presentation and discussion. An important feature of Mason’s classification is that it stemmed from the lecturers’ and students’ descriptions of actual classroom experience, rather than purely theoretical deliberations. An interesting approach to lecturing styles is adopted by Frederick (1986), who identified as many as eight different variations. He is not so much focused on the delivery mode as on how the lecture event can be organised. The lectures he enumerates are: 



1. The Exquisite Oral Essay – resembling the reading style in Dudley-Evans and Johns’s (1981) classification; 2. The Participatory Lecture – involving brainstorming sessions, which generate ideas organised later on in a coherent pattern by the lecturer; 3. Problem Solving: Demonstrations, Proofs and Stories – at the onset of the lecture a question or a paradox appears, which the lecturer attempts to decipher in the course of the class; 4. Energy shifts: Alternating Mini-lectures and Discussions – eliminating the attention span problems by interweaving 15–20 minute lectures with student-led discussions; 5. Textual Exegesis: Modeling Analytical Skills – using the old, underused, yet useful technique of explication du texte; 6. Cutting Large Classes in Half without Losing Control: Debates – assigning specific tasks to groups of students; 7. Smaller Groups in Large Classes: Simulation and Role Playing 8. ‘Bells and Whistles’:  The Affective, Emotional Media Lecture  – using audio-visual aids to accompany the verbal message. (pp. 43–50)

Frederick does not recommend one particular style of lectures, but rather opts for a combination of all modes. As the author stresses, although it may seem difficult at first glance, a large group of students or big lecture halls should not become barriers to providing an interactive, participatory lecture experience. The main aim is not to reduce students to the role of passive auditors, but keep them interested and encouraged to study the subject in depth and take an active part in the lecture. As far as the actual use of different lecturing styles is concerned, there is no research evidence about the frequency of lecturing modes employed in the classroom, but there is a general agreement among scholars that the informal, or conversational style, based on notes and handouts is the most common (Gómez and Fortuño, 2005). This kind of participatory and interactive lecturing mode brought to attention by Frederick (1986) and Mason (1994) is growing in popularity. However, it is more willingly accepted at American universities than in

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Europe (Gómez and Fortuño, 2005) and depends on several conditions, such as the educational system and background (Flowerdew, 1994b; Morell, 2007).

3.2.2 Selected features of lecture discourse Most of the features of lecture discourse derive from the fact that it cannot be placed on either end of the speech-writing continuum (see Section 1.1.1.). As Tannen (1982) put it, lectures are ‘an example of spoken language that is very written like’ (Tannen, 1982, p. 4). According to Chafe and Danielewicz (1987) lecture discourse can be characterised by: – intonation units, i.e. a single coherent intonation contour followed by a pause and likely to be a clause only slightly longer than in conversations; – low lexical variety (measured with type/token ratio); – the use of hedges (sort of, kind of), a feature typical for spoken discourse; – a ratio of literary vocabulary somewhat higher than in conversations, but far from that in written language (probably due to the discourse being planned in advanced); – the frequent use of coordination, with sentences rather syntactically unelaborate; – some degree of detachment and inexplicit references. Clearly, the characteristics mentioned above are very much influenced by the operative constraints and the necessity of instant production. As Chafe and Danielewicz conclude, lectures use ‘a mixed kind of language, still controlled by the constraints of rapid production, but striving after some of the elegance and detachment of formal writing’ (Chafe and Danielewicz, 1987, p. 111). Another prominent feature of lecture discourse, unaddressed by Chafe and Danielewicz, is the use of lexical phrases and rhetorical markers, which establish the sequence of argumentation or denote the boundaries between major and minor points in the lecture (Chaudron, 1995). One of the first researchers to focus on discourse markers were Chaudron and Richards (1986), who investigated lectures in a reading style. They divided the markers into two types: micromarkers and macro-markers, examples of which are shown in Tab. 3.2. Chaudron and Richards concluded their investigation with the following remark: ‘[…] a lecture read from a written text will usually lack the kinds of macro-markers found in the more conversational style of teaching. A lecture which uses more macro-markers is likely to be easier to follow. On the other hand, an overuse of micro-markers possibly distracts from the overall coherence of the lecture’ (Chaudron and Richards, 1986, p. 124).

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Tab. 3.2:  A list of micro- and macro-markers by Chaudron and Richards (quoted in Jordan, 2002, pp. 184–185) Micro-markers Segmentation Well Ok Now And Right All right

Temporal At the time And After this For the moment Eventually

Causal So Then Because

Contrast Both But Only On the other hand

Emphasis Of course You can see You see Actually Obviously Unbelievably As you know In fact naturally

Macro-markers What I’m going to talk about today is something you probably know something about already What [had] happened [then/after that] was [that] We’ll see that That’s why To begin with Another interesting development was You probably know that The surprising thing is As you may have heard Now where are we This is how it came about The problem [here] was that This/that was how The next thing was This meant that One of the problems was Here was a big problem You can imagine what happened next In this way It’s really very interesting that This is not the end of the story Our story doesn’t finish here And that’s all we’ll talk about today

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Tab. 3.3: Macro-organisers in lecture discourse (DeCarrico and Nattinger, 1988, p. 94) Global macro-organisers

Topic markers Topic shifters Summarisers

Local macro-organisers

Exemplifiers Relators Evaluators Qualifiers Aside markers

The first thing is Let’s start with Today we are going to hear Let’s look at Now Let me talk a bit about To tie this up My point is that What I’m saying is that Take X for example One of the ways this can be seen is This ties in with As we just talked about As X would have us believe X is worth noting The catch/problem here is That’s true, but I guess/think I got off the track here Where was I?

Another study which aimed to display the lexical phrases that most frequently occur in academic lectures was conducted DeCarrico and Nattinger (1988). They isolated, identified and classified the conventionalised structures which performed the function of macro-organisers (Tab. 3.3) and, as they pointed out, constituted useful directional signals indicating how information in lectures was organised. Just as Chaudron and Richards pointed to the facilitative value of discourse markers for understanding a lecture, DeCarrico and Nattinger seem to have arrived at a similar conclusion. According to them, a better understanding of macro-organisers ‘can ease the problems of perception, for it relieves L2 learners of having to attend to each individual word […] and allows them to focus attention on a larger structure of the discourse’ (DeCarrico and Nattinger, 1988, p. 92). This view seems to receive confirmation in the results of yet another study devoted to the use of discourse markers in lectures. Lebauer (1984), who analysed lecture transcripts to examine devices that lecturers employ to highlight major topics and demonstrate the relevance of propositions to those topics, concluded that the awareness of such devices can help students organise the content of

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lectures and facilitate their comprehension. Moreover, Lebauer emphasized the point that if students are trained to recognise and follow such discourse markers, their processing and understanding of lectures will be enhanced. Theoretical speculation as to the facilitative nature of discourse markers were endorsed by a body of research. Although the findings of studies have been mixed, it can be generally concluded that the presence of discourse markers is conducive to better lecture comprehension. The empirical evidence for the effect of signalling cues on L2 listening comprehension was first provided by Chaudron and Richards (1986). Their investigation showed that markers indicating the macro-structure of discourse aid learners in their understanding of lectures, but that the micro-markers were not so beneficial. Contrary to these results, Dunkel and Davis (1994) demonstrated no significant difference in the comprehension of a lecture presented with or without signalling cues. The reasons for these discrepancies might lie in the methodological differences between the studies – different text types, comprehension measures and test conditions used in the studies (Flowerdew, 1994b). As neither of the research results seemed accurate due to the methodological shortcomings (Jung, 2003), further investigation was conducted. Flowerdew and Tauroza (1995) measured the influence of naturally occurring micro-markers on L2 listening comprehension and proved their facilitating effect. Similar results in an academic setting were obtained by Jung (2003). He showed that, compared to the subjects listening to a non-signalled lecture, the signalled group recalled significantly more high-, as well as low-, level information from the lecture in an accurate manner. Clearly, as the usage of organizational cues has been confirmed to promote learning and effective note-taking (Meyer and Hunt, 2017), the features of lecture discourse are important from at least two perspectives: their usefulness in understanding lecture structure as well as the potential aid in training listeners (Chaudron, 1995). Furthermore, the macro-markers enumerated above are of especially great use for curriculum and material developers, and they should become the focus for second-language classroom activities and instructional materials (Chaudron and Richards, 1986).

3.2.3 Lecture discourse structure Apart from the chunks of language characteristic for lectures, another important aspect of discourse playing a role in comprehension is the structure and organisation of lectures. Naturally, the linguistic features described in the previous section and the discoursal patterns are very much connected, but due to

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its relevancy in learner training, the structure of lectures should be discussed separately. The approach to discourse analysis most often quoted in the literature is that adopted by Cook (1975; quoted by Chaudron and Richards, 1986, Chaudron, 1995; Jordan, 2002). Cook identified two structural patterns within a lecture: a macro-structure, consisting of a number of expositions in the form of ‘episodes’, and a micro-structure made of ‘moves’. The episodes enumerated by Cook include: 1 . an episode of expectation (optional) 2. a focal episode (obligatory) 3. a developmental episodes (obligatory) 4. developmental episodes (optional) 5. a closing episode (obligatory) The moves at the micro-structure level are:  focusing, concluding, describing, asserting, relating, summarising, recommending, justifying, qualifying, contrasting and explaining. The key feature of Cook’s work is the division of lecture discourse into a macro- and micro-structure, or the main and subsidiary discourse, which seems to be acknowledged by all researchers dealing with the language of lectures and academic listening comprehension. A more recent investigation into the macro-structure of lectures was conducted by Young (1994). Based on a corpus of seven one-hour lectures from different disciplines, her discourse analysis lead to the identification of six ‘strands’ or ‘phases’: 1. a discourse structuring phase (indicating the direction to be taken in the lecture) 2. a conclusion (summarising points made in the lecture) 3. an evaluation (referring to the points which are about to be made or have already been made) 4. interaction 5. a theory/content phase (showing the lecturer’s purpose) 6. examples. All of the six phases enumerated by Young reoccur in a discontinuous manner and are interspersed. Her findings seem to be of particular importance for one reason, namely they point to the generalisability of lecture structure, i.e. the possibility to apply the patterns described above in a variety of academic disciplines. This contradicts earlier research outcomes, which indicated that the structure of lectures differs across disciplines (Dudley-Evans, 1994), and therefore dispels

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the doubts about the usefulness of a general listening strategy training that could apply to all lectures. Another interesting aspect of lecture discourse to be considered is how the purpose of lectures influences the way ideas in lectures are organised. Olsen and Huckin (1990; quoted in Flowerdew, 1994b) brought to light the distinction between (1) lectures giving information and (2) lectures developing an argument in a problem-solving framework. Each of these types of lectures requires a different listening strategy, either ‘information-driven’, based on absorbing facts, or ‘point-driven’, in which students are expected to differentiate between one overriding main point and a number of subordinate, supporting points. To sum up, whatever the approach to analysing lecture discourse patterns and whatever the terms used, all investigations arrive at similar conclusions – there is one general structure common to all lectures and the ability to recognise it can aid students in comprehension. Not only an awareness of lecture structure, but also of its linguistic features can improve the ability to process and understand lectures. Such findings seem to be confirmed by the schema theory described in Chapter One – formal schemata, i.e. networks of data derived from our knowledge of discourse genres, for example an academic lecture, enable the listener to make sense of the input he/she is exposed to. In addition, although empirical evidence is scarce (Chaudron, 1995), there seems to be overall agreement among researchers that training in recognising macro-structure and discourse markers will make the comprehension of information easier and therefore will be beneficial for students’ academic performance (Young, 1994).

3.3 Students’ problems in understanding lecture content When analysing the distinctive features of academic listening, it is worth mentioning the potential problems students may encounter in lecture comprehension. It has to be admitted that there is a clear overlap between the results of research into academic listening difficulties and the problems learners are likely to face in general listening situations. For example, the three main problems underlined by Flowerdew and Miller (1992) after their investigation of students’ diaries, namely the speed of delivery, new terminology and concepts, and concentration, can be easily generalised to other listening situations. Moreover, different categories of variables leading to difficulties in lecture comprehension identified in the course of interviews and questionnaires by Yousif (2006) seem to overlap with general listening difficulties. Similarly, the insufficient knowledge of lexis pointed out by Rost (1994a) or factors such as limited short-term memory, failure to apply appropriate strategies and poor inferencing abilities

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(Chiang and Dunkel, 1992) will hamper the processing of all types of auditory input, not only lectures. However, some of the problems students may have while listening to lectures in L2 are unique to academic settings, especially since it has been proven that high aural proficiency does not guarantee the comprehension of a lecture (Mason, 1994). Some of the difficulties students face may derive from the fact that they are often expected to combine information from different sources  – not only the lecturers’ monologue, but also all kinds of visual input and background reading (Jordan, 2002). Also, the lecture genre itself creates potential areas of difficulty (Benson, 1994). What seems to be particularly problematic is the necessity to focus on and comprehend longer stretches of language without the possibility to ask for clarification or repetition, or to negotiate meaning. Moreover, a number of researchers point to students’ inability to recognise the macro-structure of a lecture (Lebauer, 1984; Chaudron and Richards, 1986; Tauroza and Allison, 1994; Flowerdew, 1994b). As Olsen and Huckin (1990) put it, although students may understand the exact words in a lecture, they may fail to understand the main points and the line of argumentation. These problems may be attributed to several factors. According to Tauroza and Allison (1994), the failure in the comprehension of lectures may be due to the fact that their structure departs from what students are used to. Paraphrasing Olsen and Huckin’s ‘point-driven’ and ‘information-driven’ approach to lecture comprehension, they postulate that understanding academic lectures is rather ‘expectation-driven’. In another study, Chaudron and Richards (1986) ascribed the inability to grasp the main points in the lecture to the difficulties in the recognising signalling cues. Students fail to notice the sequence of argumentation because they neglect discourse markers and the transitions from one major point to another. As Yuan (1982; quoted in Chaudron and Richards, 1986) pointed out, students pay so much attention to decoding speech one sentence after another that it becomes impossible to actually extract information from lectures. Such behaviour was also commented on by Jensen (1999). She indicated that even if students’ knowledge of L2 is proficient, they use so much cognitive capacity to understand the language that little is left for processing the content of the lecture. It is due to such cognitive overload that students often report having understood everything, but are unable to remember anything. A good summary of students’ problems in academic listening mentioned so far is the list of factors augmenting the difficulty of lecture comprehension compiled by Chiang and Dunkel (1992). They include:

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1 . an inability or lack of opportunity to interact with the lecturer 2. an inability to detect the main points 3. an unfamiliarity with the type of structure 4. an inability to understand discourse markers and see logical connections within lecture discourse. Interestingly, despite the whole array of difficulties encountered during lectures, students still seem to value this form of class (Covill, 2011). They are reported to appreciate a lecture-style class for the fact that lectures ensure a great deal of engagement in the learning process as well as in independent thinking and problem solving. Another area of difficulty, which has been reported to cause major problems for students, is note-taking (Jordan, 2002). There are several processes involved in note-taking which may constitute a challenge: the ability to distinguish between major and minor points, making a decision as to when the points should be recorded (so that important information is not missed while writing), writing concisely and clearly with a use of ‘personal shorthand’ and deciphering the notes to recall the information form the lecture. As the process of note-taking, together with the potential problems it causes, is a central part this book, let us now move to an in-depth investigation of students’ notes and note-taking strategies.

3.4 The role of note-taking in academic lectures Note-taking is an important micro-skill in the process of academic listening. Defined as ‘short condensations of source material that are generated by writing them down while simultaneously listening, studying or observing’ (Piolat et al., 2005, p. 292), notes are generally regarded as useful for increasing students’ attention and the retention of the lecture discourse (Carrell, 2007). The strategy of note-taking has been extensively studied for its contribution to the performance on post-lecture tests, the quality of notes taken by students, various functions and techniques of note-taking, as well as potential problems students may encounter. The results of different investigations into note-taking will be reviewed below.

3.4.1 Types and functions of note-taking It is worth beginning the discussion about note-taking strategies with an attempt to classify various types of notes and their functions, techniques of taking notes and factors influencing the process. Of all these aspects, one is the most often described and researched, namely the functions of taking notes (Barnett, DiVesta and Rogozinski, 1981; Dunkel, 1988; Einstein, Morris and Smith, 1985; Kiewra,

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1987; Kiewra et  al., 1991; Chaudron, Loshky and Cook, 1994; Carrell et  al., 2002; Boch and Piolat, 2005; Kobayashi, 2005; Carrell, 2007; Luo, Kiewra and Samuelson, 2016). The authors who first acknowledged that the facilitative effect of note-taking comes from its different functions were DiVesta and Gray (1972). They considered note-taking a useful strategy due to its encoding and external storage functions. The first one, which refers to the very process of taking notes, aids retention by activating attention and engaging such processes as coding, integrating, synthesising and transforming aural input into meaningful information. The second function concerns the product of note-taking, which enables the revision and review of the lecture information and, as such, stimulates the recall. As Chaudron et al. (1994) put it, note-taking aids encoding processes by increasing meaningful chunking, the general level of attention and effort put into the task and the assimilation of new and old information; by providing external storage, note-taking helps rehearsal as well as yielding mnemonics and enabling memory reconstruction. Over the years, many researchers tried to identify which of the two functions is more important for academic listening success and which contributes to learning to a greater extent (Kiewra, 1989). The encoding function, which suggests that it is the process of note-taking itself that facilitates learning, was measured by comparing the performance of students who took notes during a lecture with those who did not, both groups being deprived of the opportunity to review the notes. The research review quoted by Kiewra et al. (1991) showed that only 35 out of 61 studies proved the facilitative effect of encoding, while 3 pointed to its debilitative impact. The external storage function, implying that learning is enhanced by reviewing the product of note-taking, was investigated by comparing the performance of students who recorded and reviewed notes with those who did take notes but were not allowed to revise them. In 75 % of the studies reported in Kiewra (1989), students who reviewed their notes had a higher achievement on various performance tests. These tests results, however, have been discredited due to their failure to really differentiate between external storage and encoding (Kiewra et  al., 1991). What those studies traditionally assumed to be external storage, was, in fact, the combination of encoding and external storage (subjects both took the notes and reviewed them). Hence, the independent storage function was included in some research by absenting students from the lecture and having them review someone else’s notes. In other words, the performance of three group of subjects were analysed: (1) take notes / no review, (2) take notes / review, (3) borrow notes / review. The results showed that the encoding plus storage group outperformed the encoding group on the final tests. Moreover, the external storage group was better than the encoding group. These findings

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can be attributed to two aspects of note-taking: repetition and generative processing. The encoding and external storage groups accessed the information only once, while the encoding plus storage group encountered the information twice. Moreover, generative activities (relating the information across the material and to the prior knowledge) were more likely to occur during the notes review, when attentional resources were not divided, than during the lecture. The benefit of reviewing notes was also proven by Luo et  al. (2016), who added two more variables to the picture, namely a pause effect (during a lecture) and a partner effect (reviewing notes with another student). Their investigation showed that the best scores on the achievement test were obtained when the participants could review their notes during a pause in the lecture. In a similar way, Wetzels et al. (2011) juxtaposed the retrieval-directed function of notes with the activation of prior knowledge. They found that participants with high prior knowledge benefited from taking notes while activating prior knowledge, whereas note taking had no effect on the performance of learners with limited prior knowledge. While the functions of notes has received a lot of attention in the literature, the classifications of types of notes and techniques are rather scarce, with only a few scholars addressing the issue. Rost (1990) provided a list of types of notetaking, many elements of which constitute the basis for an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course syllabus (Tab. 3.4). Having analysed the structure of notes, Piolat et  al. (2005) enumerated a number of techniques most often used by students. They included: – abbreviating procedures, applied to lexical units, e.g. end truncation, suffix contraction; – syntax transformation, aimed at shortening statements, e.g. substitutive techniques and symbols; – physical formatting. The last item on this list, i.e. the format of note-taking, has been proven to influence recall and learning (Kiewra et  al., 1995). Three main note formats were identified: linear, or conventional, outline and matrix. These formats can be distinguished in two dimensions: a quantitative dimension, i.e. their potential completeness, and a qualitative dimension, i.e. their potential to encourage internal connections in memory (Kiewra et  al., 1995). The vast majority of students take notes in a linear system, involving the vertical listing of items and points (Jordan, 2002). This is mainly due to the fact that students focus on the lecturer’s discourse which they will have to recall during the exam, often attempting to rewrite the lecture transcript in a verbatim way (Kobayashi, 2005; Piolat et al.,

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The specificity of listening to lectures Topic-relaon notes: 1. Topicalising – wring down a word or phrase to represent a secon of the text 2. Translang – wring down L1 equivalent of topic 3. Copying – wring down verbam what the lecturer has wrien on the blackboard (overhead projector, etc.) 4. Transcribing – wring down verbam what the lecturer has said 5. Schemasing – inserng graphics (e.g. diagrams) to organise or represent a topic or relaonship Concept ordering: 1. Sequence cueing – lisng topics in order, numbering 2. Hierarchy cueing – labeling notes as main point (key finding, conclusion, etc.) or example (quote, anecdote, etc.) 3. Relaon ordering – le‡-to-right indenng, using arrows, dashes, semi-circles, or = signs to indicate relaons among topics Focusing notes: 1. Highlighng – underlining, placing a dot or arrow in front of a topic, circling a topic word 2. De-highlighng – wring in smaller leers or placing topic inside parentheses Revising notes: 1. Inserng – drawing arrow back to earlier note, inserng with caret 2. Erasing – crossing out old note

Tab. 3.4:  Types of correspondences between listener notes and lecture texts (Rost, 1990, p. 126)

2005). However, it is the non-linear formats of recording information that are more beneficial and research indicates that outline and matrix notes contain more ideas than conventional ones (Kiewra et  al., 1991). For example, when left to their own devices, students fail to record complete notes, taking down usually about 30 % of the ideas, while outline and matrix frameworks increase the amount of information recorded to about 40 % (Kiewra et al., 1995). It has also been substantiated that recall and test performance is enhanced if the ideas are well connected and organised in the memory. Conventional notes, which lack local and global coherence (the former referring to associations with minor points, the latter to the relationships between major concepts), are not conducive to creating internal connections. Outline and matrix notes, on the other hand, foster such connections more effectively or, in other words, the spatial

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organisation of notes on a page shows the conceptual links between ideas from the lecture and between new information and the students’ previous knowledge. Clearly, one characteristic of notes is its format or physical organisation on a piece of paper. Other features of notes, identified through research investigating the notes students take and the relationship between the notes and post-lecture recall and quite unanimously quoted in the literature, are the quality and quantity of notes.

3.4.2 Quality and quantity of notes To begin with, study results are inconclusive as to the influence of the quality and quantity of notes on test performance (Chaudron et al., 1994). Fisher and Harris (1974) and Norton (1981) found that notes containing more words are related to higher achievement. Dunkel (1988), however, managed to prove the opposite – the total number of words are not related to the long-term recall of information and writing down as much as possible is not an effective note-taking strategy. Rather, it was the terseness of the notes, i.e. compacting large amounts of information into propositional information units, that appeared to be of crucial importance. These findings confirmed earlier research results, which pointed to a positive correlation between a high ratio of ideas to total words with better recall (Fisher and Harris, 1973; Howe, 1974; Aiken, Thomas and Shennun, 1975). Another feature of qualitative notes is the inclusion of potential test questions, or the so-called ‘test-answerability’ (Fisher and Harris, 1974; Dunkel, 1988). Finally, what influences the recall performance, and therefore constitutes an important feature of notes, is the amount of higher and lower level of information recorded (Rickards and Friedman, 1978; quoted in Chaudron et al., 1994). It was found that subjects were able to reconstruct lower level information on the basis of higher level information more effectively than the other way round, which implied that the inclusion of higher level information correlated positively with the amount of information recalled on a post-test. Summing up, various types of notes, together with their different functions, are important to gain an insight into the note-taking strategy for the purposes of training or material design. One thing which needs to emphasised, however, is that there is no direct correlation between the quality and quantity of notes and the level of understanding (Dunkel, 1988; Rost, 1990; Chaudron et al., 1994).

3.4.3 Students’ perceptions and problems concerning note-taking Note-taking is a very complex activity which involves a parallel combination of comprehension and production processes and is influenced by a number

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of factors (Barbier et  al., 2006). During the lecture, students have to listen, select important information, hold, manipulate and interpret it and finally record ideas (Kiewra et al., 1991). From the cognitive perspective, note-taking is not only an abbreviated transcription of information, but it strongly relies on the working memory processes responsible for managing comprehension, selection and production (Piolat et  al., 2005). Clearly, note-takers have to cope with several simultaneous demands, which frequently go beyond their working memory capacity (Faraco, Barbier and Piolat, 2002). Furthermore, the mechanics of concurrent note-taking is demanding – the average speed at which students take notes is 0.3–0.4 words per second while the rate of speech in lectures is usually 2–3 words per second (Boch and Piolat, 2005). Such time urgency forces students to try to reduce the demands put on them. What they often resort to is focusing their attention on either comprehension of the lecture content or transcription, without processing the aural input for meaning (Piolat et  al., 2005). In other words, students may give up trying to grasp the points of a lecture, because they’re busy writing down what the lecturer says (Kobayashi, 2005). Hence in real academic situations, students benefit more from revising their notes after the lecture than from the very act of note-taking. The cognitive overload experienced in lecture situations and note-taking is even bigger in the case of L2 learners, due to the deficits in their linguistic skills and the restricted metacognitive control of note-taking strategies (Faraco et al., 2002; Barbier et al., 2006). The problems of L2 note-takers derive from the fact that they ignore some of the abbreviation rules in L2 or the procedures they use are not automated. In addition, L2 students may experience difficulty with selecting lecture information, as well as determining the elements responsible for the organisation of the lecture. As a result, they make shorter notes, which has an influence on later scores on recall tests. Apart from the inability to select and record crucial information, lecture rate or short-term memory deficits, other factors that may constrain note-taking include inattentiveness, cognitive style and poor structuring of the stimulus (Kiewra, 1987). Quite an extensive list of students’ problem in listening to lectures and taking notes was compiled by Chiang and Dunkel (1992). The areas of difficulty which they enumerated included: 

– the inability to engage in interaction with the lecturer or the lack of such opportunity; – the failure to recognise the main points of the lecture; – unfamiliarity with discourse type and structure;

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– inability to understand discourse markers and follow the relationships between ideas in lectures; – problems with understanding lectures delivered at a fast pace; – limited capacity of short-term memory for foreign language input; – inappropriate or no application of cognitive and learning strategies; – the lack of inferencing skills; – low L2 proficiency; – the lack of prior knowledge of the lecture content; – inability to process unmodified input, devoid of elaboration or redundancies. (p. 348)

Despite the abundance of problems that accompany the process of note-taking, students generally believe it assists in the process of learning and retaining information and they have a positive view of note-taking as an aid to remembering and organising lecture content (Dunkel and Davy, 1989; Hale and Courtney, 1994; Badger et al., 2001). Some interesting facts were brought to light by means of questionnaires investigating students’ conceptualisation of note-taking processes. For example, the amount of notes students took was dependent on the content of a given course, the visual support provided by the lecturer and the relevance of the information to exams. Moreover, the reasons for note-taking were mostly product-oriented (note-taking as external storage) and students professed to recording mainly factual information as well as the information from slides and presentations, which actually refuted the findings of Hartley and Davies (1978), whose study showed that information from transparencies and slides is unlikely to be recorded. In an interesting study conducted by Van Meter, Yokoi and Pressley (1994), college students were asked about their aims in note-taking. While their major goal referred to doing well in academic courses, students enumerated other important aims, such as boosting attention during a lecture, increasing comprehension and the recall of material, providing an opportunity to connect ideas or create a general representation of lecture content, enabling studying for exams or helping with homework. As far as the content of notes is concerned, the respondents reported the following information: ideas stressed by the lecturer, content on the board or overheads, information cited in the syllabus, main points, important ideas, unfamiliar or not well understood ideas. When asked about the structure of notes, students pointed to their own preferred methods, which varied from student to student. To sum up, due to the burden put on students in academic listening and note-taking, they develop certain methods and processes which enable them to record information from lectures. Note-takers tend to acquire some adjustment

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Indicators that trigger note-taking: Wri ng on the board: a very powerful indicator (Teachers are well advised to choose what they write on the board carefully, as it’s extremely likely to be included in the note-taking). ‘Dicta on’: when the teacher acts as if he or she is dicta ng the informa on (slow delivery, low vocal register). A tle of a sec on or a list or the lis ng of informa on (which, moreover are o­en wri€en on the board). Defini ons, catch phrases (even if students do not understand them, they overwhelmingly take notes on them). Macro-textual planning indicators that organise and structure the classes (expressions such as ‘firstly’ / ‘secondly’ or ‘first ques on’ / ‘second ques on’). Indicators that discourage note-taking: Parentheses or asides: sequences that do not contribute to the organisa on of what is said and that we intui vely perceive as o­en being introduced with lower inten onal register. Interac on in the class between the teacher and the students (responses by the teacher to students’ ques ons) or, worse, between students. Prosodic phenomena, which are symmetrically opposed to those that characterise the trigger indicators: faster delivery, higher vocal register. These indicators o­en accompany the asides, parentheses and digressions. Hesita ons in speaking, which are probably signs that what is being said has not been planned by the teacher. Certain paraverbal indictors: when the teacher puts aside his or her notes or walks around the classroom, the student sta s cally takes less trouble to note what is being said at that me.

Tab. 3.5:  Factors influencing note-taking (Boch and Piolat, 2005, p. 103)

strategies to cope with the task, for example transcribing reduced information (Barbier et al., 2006). They also learn to react to a number of factors, which either indicate that note-taking is required or rather redundant at a particular point of a lecture (Boch and Piolat, 2005). The markers to which students are particularly attentive are shown in Tab. 3.5.

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Clearly, learning to take notes involves several skills and takes considerable time to master. As Dunkel (1988) put it, if students were less burdened with the mechanics of taking notes, they could concentrate on the lecture content more and grasp the structure and organisation of the information conveyed by the lecturer. Although she admitted that there was no unitary method of taking notes which could be effective for all students, considering it futile to provide note-takers with one general format, she did not deny the need for training. A  number of researchers concluded their investigations with the comment that in order to counteract certain difficulties which students experience, pretraining or instructional intervention should be described (Dunkel and Davy, 1989, Clerehan, 1995, DeZure et al., 2001, Kobayashi, 2005). Unfortunately, in the literature there is no evidence that training students in note-taking strategies is effective. Researchers have not addressed the topic extensively and those who have, have found no influence of training on students’ post-lecture test performance (Carrier and Titus, 1979; quoted in Chaudron et al., 1994; Peck and Hannafin, 1983; Kobayashi, 2005; Carrell, 2007).

3.4.4 The effect of note-taking on academic listening success One interesting branch of research is that seeking to determine whether notetaking has an effect on listening comprehension and recall of lecture material, and, if it does, whether the effect is facilitative or debilitative (DiVesta and Gray, 1972; Fisher and Harris, 1973; Aiken et al., 1975; Weiland and Kingsbury, 1979; Barnett et al., 1981; Einstein et al., 1985; Kiewra, 1987; Dunkel, 1988; Dunkel et al., 1989; Fahmy and Bilton, 1990; Kiewra et al., 1991; Chaudron et al., 1994; Hale and Courtney, 1994; King, 1994; Carrell et al., 2002; Kobayashi, 2005; Clark et  al., 2012). The findings, however, have been quite inconclusive, producing contradictory results. DiVesta and Gray (1972), for example, showed that the number of ideas recalled after the lecture was favourably influenced by notetaking. Similar results were obtained by Fisher and Harris (1973), who pointed to the beneficial effect of note-taking for lecture content recall, but at the same time stressed that taking notes as a way of creating an external storage of information is more important than the process of taking notes itself. Furthermore, in Weiland and Kingsbury’s (1979) study, note-takers performed significantly better than non-note-takers on both immediate and delayed recall measures. However, the investigation measured only the encoding effect and failed to include the influence of the notes review, as the subjects were not given an opportunity to revise their notes. Aiken et al. (1975) showed that lecture material was twice as likely to be recalled if it was recorded. At the same time, retention was greater

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when note taking was separated from listening and subjects took notes right after the lecture segment. Barnett et al. (1981) did not deny the advantageous effect of note-taking, but made it clear that making any statement on the value of notetaking cannot be separated from such factors as the timing of the testing, the type of information tested or the processes that occur after learning. One of the most recent studies on the effect of note-taking on lecture learning was conducted by Carrell et al. (2002). They correlated note-taking and no-note-taking condition with other factors and found that the beneficial value of recording lecture information depended on the lecture topic and was important only in arts and humanities lectures, not in science topics. Unlike the research results quoted above, a number of studies have undermined the benefits of taking notes. Kiewra (1987), for instance, clearly points to the advantage of reviewing notes and not really the taking of them. Similarly, by comparing the impact of note-taking or no note-taking on the encoding of lecture information, Dunkel and Davy (1989) concluded that note-taking without review does not facilitate the retention of information. This was confirmed by Dunkel et al. (1989), who found no encoding effect of note-taking, probably due to the immediacy of the test administration. Einstein et  al. (1985) juxtaposed the recall test results of subjects who only listened to the lecture with those who listened and took notes and found no differences  – the recall was dependent on the content of the notes rather than the act of note-taking. An analogous conclusion was arrived at by Chaudron et  al. (1994), whose study showed no effects of note-taking retention on lecture scores and pointed to the quality of the notes as an important factor in test performance. Having measured the influence of note-taking on the minitalks in the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), Hale and Courtney (1994) surmised that the short length of discourse the subjects were listening to could have been decisive in whether or not notetaking was beneficial. Finally, according to Kobayashi (2005), it is the revision of notes that bears influence on test results rather than the act of taking itself, while Clark et al. (2012), who compared Allow Notes and Listen Only conditions in terms of test performance, yielded results which failed to show any difference. In conclusion, it might seem that due to the dubious utility of note-taking, there appears to be little or no sense researching it further, let alone teaching. However, the above-mentioned research findings have questioned only the encoding function of taking notes, while the product-oriented external storage has not been undermined. Moreover, a number of researchers admit that the quality of notes does matter and it seems to be a good rationale for introducing training sessions. Finally, the poor encoding of lecture content might be attributed to the fact that students focus so much attention on transcribing everything

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the lecturer says that little, if any, effort is devoted to actually processing the aural input, which may constitute yet another reason to teach note-taking skills and strategies.

3.5 Measuring lecture comprehension To a large extent, listening to lectures is very much like general listening, as it activates similar cognitive processes, and therefore testing academic listening, is not much different from testing listening comprehension in general. The process of designing an academic listening test, which is a part of the study reported in this book, will therefore follow the steps of test validation outlined in Chapter Two, and the measurement instruments are the same as in general listening comprehension and include quizzes, multiple-choice questions, matching questions, open questions requiring short answers etc., usually containing both global and detail questions. There are some issues, however, which are distinctive of academic listening and therefore deserve particular attention, such as the characteristics of the listening stimulus, lecture context, question types and the time of test administration. To begin with, it is mandatory to acknowledge the fact that there are two distinctive traditions in language testing (Hansen and Jensen, 1994). In the first one, i.e. indirect testing, discrete items covering a very restricted area of linguistic knowledge are used to predict language performance. The direct methods of testing, on the other hand, feature materials and tasks that more closely simulate what the test-taker will actually be doing in a language-use situation. In the case of academic listening, as in many other specific purpose tests, there is a clearly identifiable target-language use situation, which can constitute a basis for test design (Douglas, 2000). As Buck (2001) puts it, it is constructive to replicate as many aspects of the target-language use situation as possible, for instance type of speakers, listening texts and most common tasks to be carried out. One such aspect regarded by many researchers investigating lecture comprehension as being particularly important is the authenticity of the listening stimulus. The question whether the comprehension of academic lectures can be measured directly using authentic discourse as a stimulus was addressed by Hansen and Jensen (1994). They observed that a scripted lecture that is read aloud is not the type of material which students will have to attend to in a lecture room, yet it is used in many teaching and testing situations. Lacking such features as repetition, paraphrase, pauses, misspeaks or disfluencies, the lectures used in testing situations were proved to be far from authentic input in academic settings. The way in which the researchers decided to grapple with the problem was to

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videotape lecturers delivering the lectures they had previously taped and turned into scripts. The lecturers, however, did not use the scripts, but were asked to memorise the material. This procedure aimed to ensure that the testing situation resembled the target-use situation as much as possible. However, one major fallacy of such an approach, as indicated by Tauroza (2001), was the short length of the recorded lectures. As he pointed out, in authentic lectures, students are required to process stretches of discourse lasting 15 minutes or longer and their ability to concentrate varies over time. Naturally, the 3–5 minute lectures recorded by Hansen and Jensen could not require the same cognitive processes as a full-length lecture and, as such, did not match what students experience in authentic lecture situations. Similar doubts about the nature of listening stimulus in authentic and controlled conditions were voiced by Flowerdew and Miller (1997) and Thompson (2003). Although the scholars did not deal with academic listening testing, but rather EAP courses and instruction, the conclusions they arrived at are applicable to lecture comprehension assessment. They noted that the strategies often used by the lecturer were rarely found in EAP textbooks, and students who relied on such texts were therefore ill-prepared in knowing how to handle such features of a lecture. Language instructors were advised to take notes from the lecture excerpt they wanted students to listen to, and then present the lecture extract themselves, speaking from these notes. In this way the result was likely to be at least a little more authentic – the text would be divided into tone units rather than complete clauses, with false starts, hesitations, and so on, and it would be supported by the physical presence of the “lecturer”. Naturally, apart from its potential benefit in the process of teaching academic listening skills, such a procedure could also ensure the authenticity of experience in a testing situation. In addition to the nature of the listening stimulus, another important aspect recognised by researchers was the context of the testing situation, which among others, involves the use of visual materials. Tauroza (2001), who attempted to pinpoint the essential features of second-language lecture comprehension in controlled naturalistic conditions, made it clear that researchers of the lecture comprehension processes should ensure that their subjects receive both aural and visual information, as visual aids assist comprehension and have been proven to be an integral part of most authentic lectures. Another element which refers to the context of lecture listening is the activation of schemata. In the study by Hansen and Jensen (1994) subjects were provided with information as to what lecture they were going to attend and what the topic of the lecture was. This was supposed to allow the listeners to set up expectations and make predictions about the content and structure of the information they would hear.

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The supportive character of prompting predictions was confirmed by Tauroza (2001), who studied different techniques of activating schemata. The activation of schema is strongly connected with the effect of prior knowledge on EAP listening test performance. The first attempt to identify the influence of background knowledge on listening to lectures was made by Chiang and Dunkel (1992). Their study results showed that prior knowledge had a significant impact on subjects’ memory for information contained in passage-independent test items on the post-lecture comprehension test, while the performance on passage-dependent items did not differ whether the topic of the lecture was familiar or not. In other words, the more background knowledge the listener has about the topic of the lecture, the easier it is for him or her to comprehend and retain general information. These findings were not confirmed by Hansen and Jensen (1994). Their study did not support the hypothesis that high proficiency listeners who have indicated prior study of a topic would perform better on lecture comprehension than listening skills alone would predict. They did discover, however, that prior knowledge is more likely to affect performance on lectures in technical disciplines. The conclusion which can be drawn for the purpose of the present work is that one of the chief concerns about content-based tests, namely, whether the results will be biased in favour of listeners with prior knowledge, should not be of concern. In addition, a test of academic listening should include only passage-dependent items, as passage-independent questions assess the listeners’ degree of familiarity with the topic. One final issue important to the assessment of academic listening is notetaking, which is usually an integral part of the lecture situation, unlike, for example, answering comprehension questions, which does not seem to be in line with direct testing methodology, as this is not what students usually do in the lecture room (Hansen and Jensen, 1994). However, it needs to be emphasised that urging students to take notes may prove dysfunctional (Hale and Courtney, 1994). Moreover, the inclusion of note-taking in assessment will affect the time of test administration. Two different solutions have emerged from the body of research on the effect of note-taking on lecture comprehension, namely immediate or delayed recall, with or without the possibility of reviewing notes (Weiland and Kingsbury, 1979; Kiewra, 1989). In immediate recall, subjects are given a test right after they listen to the lecture; in delayed recall the test is administered after some time. The first option seems to be more applicable when the encoding effect of note-taking is measured. It is then advised to collect notes before the test is administered to make sure that it is the actual process of note-taking that is assessed, not the product (Dunkel et al., 1989). In the studies investigating notetaking as external storage, subjects were usually allowed to review notes and the

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testing was carried out some time after the listening experience to make sure that the encoding function was separated from the external storage function (Kiewra, 1989; Kiewra et al., 1991). Summing up, if the assessment of L2 lecture comprehension is to be conducted in controlled conditions, but is supposed to bring results generalisable to authentic contexts, the data need to be collected in a relatively naturalistic manner (Tauroza, 2001). In order to do so, test designers should ensure that: 1 . the subjects should see the speaker, as well as any other visual aids; 2. the lecture is delivered in a conversational style, simulating the real-life situation in which the lecturer speaks from memory and notes, rather than reads from a script; 3. the aural discourse is at least 15 minutes long; 4. the subjects are allowed to take notes, but are not forced to do so. Naturally, these are only some of the factors that need to be acknowledged in the preparation of an academic listening test. Other issues influencing the process of creating the measurement instrument used in the present study have already been outlined in Chapter One. More details on how the test was designed will be described in Chapter Five.

Chapter Four Academic listening, note-taking and strategy training from a research perspective Abstract: The following chapter provides an overview of research into the areas that constitute the underpinnings of the present study. The first section discusses lecture discourse and content, trying to determine its salient features together with the factors enabling students to understand lectures better and issues to be taken into account while teaching and testing lecture comprehension. Later, the results of research into note-taking strategies in both L1 and L2 contexts, which appear central to the study undertaken in the present work, are analysed. The third section in this chapter offers a comprehensive outline of studies into second language listening strategy training, which implemented various techniques, some of which were adopted by the author of this book. Finally, in order to determine the conditions critical to academic listening and lecture comprehension assessment, there is the section on research into evaluating lecture comprehension.

4.1 Research on lecture discourse features and speech modifications Due to the growing number of overseas students attending academic courses at American universities, students’ comprehension of academic discourse and lecture learning has become an important focus of study (Flowerdew, 1994b; Jordan, 2002; Flowerdew and Peacock, 2001; Morell, 2007). Many researchers have attempted to determine the major factors influencing non-native students’ comprehension of the content by analysing their difficulties in listening in academic settings. Students’ problems, the recognition of which enabled researchers to identify potential areas of enquiry were enumerated in detail in Section 3.4.2 (see page 111). A number of those problems refer to the processing of lecture discourse. Hence, one of the researchers’ aims was to investigate the significance of lecture discourse variables in improving non-native students’ lecture comprehension. The variables involved: speech modifications, the presence or absence of discourse markers and chunking as well as students’ familiarity with a given discourse structure. Studies concentrating on the effect of lecture modification on its understanding stem from the research on modified input and general listening comprehension (see Section 2.1.2). Based on the findings from general listening, scholars attempted to identify whether, and which modifications in particular, are likely

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to make lectures more comprehensible to L2 students. One of the studies which proved modified lecture input significantly aided comprehension was conducted by Dunkel (1988). Dunkel compared post-lecture test achievements and the quantity of notes taken during conversational style (modified) and broadcast (unmodified) lectures and concluded that the former resulted in higher test scores and an increased amount of notes taken. Another study probing the impact of modifications on L2 listeners’ comprehension of academic discourse brought somewhat similar findings with one difference – only a particular type of modification enabled the students to process lectures more effectively. Parker and Chaudron (1987; quoted in Chiang and Dunkel, 1992) reported that linguistic modifications, i.e. simplifications of syntax and vocabulary, had no major effect on comprehension. It was only after elaborate modifications were introduced and the thematic structure of the lecture was clearly signalled that understanding was improved. The most seminal investigation elucidating the effect of speech modification on understanding academic lectures was conducted by Chiang and Dunkel (1992). The study, whose subjects were almost 400 non-native students, examined the impact of speech modifications in relation to prior knowledge and listening proficiency. Students listened to four versions of a lecture: unfamiliar/unmodified, familiar/unmodified, unfamiliar/modified (i.e. containing redundant information and elaborations) and familiar/modified. Multiple-choice post-lecture comprehension tests, which included both the recognition of the main ideas and details from the text (passage-dependent items), as well as general information on the topic (passage-independent items), revealed that low-intermediate subjects did not benefit from speech modification introduced into the lecture discourse. As the authors of the study imply, such a finding may be attributed to the fact that students with low listening proficiency need more modifications than just elaborations and redundancy, which proved to be effective for more advanced EFL learners. Moreover, the research showed a noteworthy interaction between prior knowledge and scores on passage-dependent and passageindependent test item and therefore confirmed the significance of background knowledge in the process of comprehension (see Section 1.3.2). The corollary of these findings is that a valid lecture comprehension test should minimise the potential influence of background knowledge by avoiding passage-independent items and choosing such topics which the subjects of the study know little or nothing about. Another aspect of lecture discourse which constitutes an important area of enquiry is the application of different types of discourse markers by the lecturer. This issue was investigated in depth by Chaudron and Richards (1986), who

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attempted to find a correlation between the use of micro-markers (i.e. features indicating the overall organisation of a lecture), macro-markers (i.e. features indicating the links between sentences and fillers) and lecture comprehension. The study, in which 150 participants listened to four versions of the same lecture and took 3 recall tests (cloze test, multiple-choice tests and true-false test), gave the following results: macro-markers enhanced the recall of lecture content more than micro-markers by helping students to organise major ideas and build a mental schematic representation of the lecture information; the inclusion of micro-markers, instead of adding valuable information, only increased the cognitive load and made the processing of the lecture content more difficult. The researchers concluded that the findings were relevant from the point of view of both lecturers and educators, as they clearly indicated ways of making lectures easier for students to follow on the one hand, focused on how this problem should be incorporated into second language classroom activities and instructional materials on the other. Somewhat different results were obtained by Dunkel and Davis (1994). They measured the influence of the presence of rhetorical cues on the lecture content recall and quantity of notes (measured by the number of information units) taken by both native and non-native speakers of English. In the experiment the subjects watched the two videotaped lectures following different rhetorical structures, either evident with explicit cues of the structure, or non-evident, with the cues deleted. The results did not lend support to the notion that the amount of notes or the quantity of information recalled is determined by the signalling cues used by the lecturer and the major factor influencing the comprehension tests results and the amount of note-taking is the subjects’ L1 – native speakers took more notes than non-native speakers, whether the lecture contained the signalling cues or not and, surprisingly, students generally recorded more in their notes while listening to the lecture without signals. As the researchers themselves admit, the differences between theirs and other studies may be down to the research methodology and they point to the fact that recall protocols may not be the best instrument for measuring recall and they suggest the application of recall tests as a measurement instrument, as used by Chaudron and Richards (1986). Research into the relation of lecture discourse to the comprehension of main points has concentrated on one more aspect, namely the students’ familiarity with a lecture pattern. Olsen and Huckin (1990) embarked on an exploratory study trying to explain why students often fail to comprehend the main points of the lecture and its logical argumentation despite understanding all the words. They found that what mainly accounted for the failure was the information-driven

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strategy used by the subjects in the lecture situation – they were only focusing on absorbing the facts, instead of trying to see the bigger picture of the discourse (i.e. applying a point-driven strategy). As Olsen and Huckin concluded, the problems which emerged in their study should be given due consideration while designing EAP courses aimed at lecture comprehension. Such an implication for pedagogy was confirmed by Tauroza and Allison (1994), whose study showed that students’ understanding of lectures was affected by the level of the familiarity with a given lecture discourse. In other words, lecture comprehension is rather expectation-driven than information- or point-driven, as suggested by Olsen and Huckin, and students encountered problems when they tried to adjust information presented in an unfamiliar discourse into a more familiar structure. However, the conclusion to be drawn remains the same – students need to be familiarised with different kinds of lecture formats in EAP preparatory courses. Another strand of research dealing with the characteristics of lecture discourse and features of delivery is devoted to investigating the differences between authentic lectures and EAP talks, as well as those given by native and non-native lecturers. Khuwaileh (1999) set out to contrast two lectures delivered by a native speaker of English and a non-native speaker in terms of chunks and phrases in the discourse and the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects (i.e. body language) used to clarify the meaning, as well as students’ comprehension of the lecture content. The study also attempted to draw parallels between the quality of language used by the lecturer and students’ good performance on a post-lecture quiz. The comparison of two modes of delivery brought somewhat unexpected results – the lecture given by a native speaker was more learner-centred (using more questions and encouraging interaction), delivered more slowly and with pauses, introduced linguistic chunks to signal the organisation of the discourse, avoided reading and relied heavily on body language. As a result, students who listened to the native speaker lecturer did considerably better on the test. In order to further investigate the typical features of academic discourse, Thompson (2003) analysed six authentic lectures and contrasted them with five EAP materials. Several considerable differences were brought to light in terms of text-structuring and phonology – EAP talks used more markers and were more clearly signalled at higher levels of organisation. Some phonological differences were also noted. The outcome of Thompson’s study indicates that EAP courses do not really prepare learners for what they will encounter in a real lecture situation. The same issue was addressed by Flowerdew and Miller (1997), who present a set of observations to be used in EAP listening comprehension pedagogy based on the analysis of a representative authentic lecture. A small-scale survey of academic listening textbooks showed that the salient features identified in the

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lecture were found to be missing from EAP textbooks. Among the features mentioned are:  narration, macro-markers, rhetorical questions and visual aids. In conclusion to their survey, Flowerdew and Miller point to the need of exposing students to longer texts, which are more likely to contain the above-mentioned aspects. The researchers also suggest a way of authenticating textbook material: […] It is important that students are exposed to lecture data which is delivered spontaneously, and has not been scripted or dressed up to look like spoken text when in fact it is really written language. To overcome this problem we would suggest that, where EAP texts are accompanied by recorded tapes and transcripts, language instructors would do better to reduce the text to note form and then present the lecture extract themselves (or have a colleague do it), speaking from these notes. In this way the result is likely to be at least a little more authentic; the text will be divided up into tone units rather than complete clauses, with false starts, hesitations, and so on, and it will be supported by the physical presence of the “lecturer”. (p. 44)

In conclusion, the studies presented in this section provide important insights into lecture discourse for both researchers investigating and evaluating lecture comprehension and practitioners developing instructional materials and designing EAP courses. The insights can be summarised as follows: – courses preparing students for academic listening should focus on the recognition and understanding of the discourse markers typical of lectures, especially those signalling the general organisation of the lecture; – students should be given training in following lectures whose structure is not so clearly signalled; – in order to avoid situations in which students understand the individual words but fail to follow the line of argumentation due to the unfamiliarity with a particular lecture format, students need to be exposed to different formats in the preparatory courses; in addition, while evaluating students’ lecture comprehension unfamiliar formats should be avoided as they may distort the results; – EAP textbooks should be supplemented with authentic lectures with all the salient features of lectures delivered in real-life conditions; – while testing and teaching academic listening comprehension it is advisable to authenticate textbook materials by taking notes on the recorded lecture and delivering it spontaneously from these notes.

4.2 Note-taking studies in L1 and L2 settings When in the 1980s a number of coursebooks were published offering the training of ESL/EFL note-takers (Dunkel and Pialorsi, 1982, Mason, 1983, Ruetten, 1986),

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the instructional practice suggested was based on individual experiences and intuition (Chaudron et al., 1994), as until then most of the research in the area had been conducted in native English-speaking contexts. It was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the number of international students at American universities was noticed to be increasing, that L2 note-taking strategies began to be studied in greater detail and were given a rightful place in the literature. As the inquiries into note-taking in L2 drew heavily upon the research findings in L1, it is worth examining the outcomes of research into L1 note-taking.

4.2.1 Note-taking in L1 The empirical studies carried out investigating note-taking in L1 have referred to three major areas: establishing the influence of note-taking on post-lecture test performance, analysing the quality of notes taken by students and measuring the effect of training in note-taking skills on test performance. The least researched of these three areas is note-taking instruction. A study conducted by Carrier and Titus (1979), showed no effect of pre-training and revealed that better notes were taken only when students were informed about the oncoming test, which brought into question the test expectancy factor as an important variable. Another experiment, by Peck and Hannafin (1983), found relationships between note-taking instruction and note-taking, but at the same time proved its limitations, as, when the subjects were prohibited from taking notes, the untrained group did better at the recall. More recently, Kiewra et al. (2018) outlined the benefits of offering teachers with advice on how to improve students’ note-taking in L1, which could act as a substitution for a typical skill training given to learners. The researchers underlined the benefits of such techniques as providing complete or partial notes, providing note-taking cues, giving multiple presentation of the same lesson or making pauses to ensure revision opportunities. An extensive body of research into note-taking in L1 context focuses on the effect of note-taking on the retention and recall of lecture content measured by post-lecture test performance. The earliest experiment carried out by Crawford (1925; cited in Carrell et al., 2002) reported no major influence of either notetaking or no note-taking on subsequent test performance:  ‘taking notes on a point does not guarantee its being recalled at the time of the quiz, but failing to take note of it greatly decreases its chances of being recalled’ (Carrell et al., 2002, p. 2). More precise conclusions were only drawn several decades later, when a number of experiments detected a positive relationship between the act of note-taking and post-lecture test performance (DiVesta and Gray, 1972; Fisher

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and Harris, 1973; Aiken, Thomas and Shennun, 1975; Annis and Davies, 1975; Rickards and Friedman, 1978; Einstein et al., 1985; Kiewra, 1987, 1989). All of those studies confirmed that lecture material was more likely to be recalled when it was taken down. What was brought to light, however, was the importance of reviewing notes. In other words, it was not just the act of note-taking, but the opportunity of rehearsal that influenced the retention of lecture information. For example, in the study by Fisher and Harris (1973) subjects who did not take any notes while listening to lectures but reviewed external notes did better on a post-test than those who took their own notes, the reason for which might be the lack of cognitive effort which made the task of listening without note-taking less demanding. Similar results were obtained by Rickards and Friedman (1978), who found that the subjects who took their own notes recalled less higher-level information than the subjects who only reviewed external notes. While the difference in post-test performance may stem from the quality of notes taken and rehearsed, the authors surmised that it is the reconstruction of information with appropriate prompts that aids post-lecture recall. Moreover, Kiewra (1987), who compared the performance of note-takers who had access to and reviewed, the notes with note-takers who did not review the notes, concluded that the rehearsal of the notes helped the subjects in a post-lecture achievement test. Clearly, most studies seem to support the product, or external storage function of notes as a crucial factor in lecture content recall (Carrell et al., 2002). It has been substantiated, however, that the act of note-taking does fulfil the function of encoding by enhancing organisational processing (Einstein, et al., 1985) and even the traditional view of note-taking as external storage combines both the product and process functions (Kiewra, 1989). In other words, the facilitative effect of note-taking derives from a combination of encoding and storage (Kiewra et al., 1991). Apart from the act of note-taking itself, studies conducted in the area underlined the importance of the content of notes, drawing attention to the quality of the notes as a principal factor in lecture learning (Howe, 1974; Fisher and Harris, 1974; Rickards and Friedman, 1978; Norton, 1981; Kiewra,1987; Einstein et  al., 1985; Kiewra et  al., 1995). One of the earliest research studies attempting to determine the qualities of good notes was carried out by Howe (1974), who found a positive correlation between the efficiency of the notes (i.e. communicating the maximum amount of information or content units with the minimum number of words) and subsequent recall. In other experiments it was the number of ideas from the lecture included in the notes (Fisher and Harris, 1974) or the number of total words taken down (Norton, 1981)  that seemed to influence the long-term recall of lecture content. Moreover, researchers

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investigated what kind of information should be included in notes to stimulate later recall. It has been confirmed that when subjects focused and noted down the main ideas in the lecture or included higher-importance propositions in their notes, they did better on a post-test (Rickards and Friedman, 1978; Kiewra, 1987; Einstein et al., 1985), which might have been due to the fact that students tend to use higher-level information to reconstruct lower-level information (Rickards and Friedman, 1978). Yet another study dealing with the quality of notes focused on how different note-taking formats influenced recall and relational performance (Kiewra et  al., 1995). The subjects were instructed to take notes in either a conventional manner, according to an outline or a matrix framework. The results of the study showed that the students took more notes and recalled better if they followed an outline, which proved that it is not only the amount and kind of information that is taken down that matters, but also the format in which it is done. The research into note-taking in L1, a selection of which was outlined in this section, provided a basis for investigating taking notes in second language settings, which is going to be reviewed in the section to follow.

4.2.2 Note-taking in L2 In order to determine the merits of note-taking in a second/foreign language context, it is useful to look at three major strands of research: studies ascertaining students’ opinions about taking notes, examining the effects of note-taking on recall and post-lecture test performance and, finally, assessing the quality of notes. One body of research on note-taking aims to investigate students’ views on taking notes in lectures (Dunkel and Davy, 1989; Hale and Courtney, 1994; Van Meter et al., 1994; Badger et al., 2001). A comprehensive study targeting students’ conceptualisation of taking notes in lectures was carried out by Badger et  al. (2001). They posed a number of questions during interviews, including such issues as why students take notes, what kinds of information they write down, what techniques they use and what kind of support they expect to help them improve note-taking skills. It turned out that subjects’ reasons for taking notes revolved around the external storage or product function of notes, i.e. notes were taken for the purpose of the recall of lecture content for exams and assignments, and contained both general ideas and factual information, sometimes complemented with the lecturer’s opinions. In addition, students reported making use of different cues for note-taking, for example visual aids, which were usually recorded

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in the notes.3 Moreover, full-time students, who had more experience in notetaking, applied a wider range of techniques (e.g. abbreviations, symbols, spacing etc.). As far as the expected institutional support was concerned, students mentioned greater use of handouts and visual aids and the need for a clear indication of what is important in the lecture. In another questionnaire survey of international students, Dunkel and Davy (1989) found positive attitudes towards note-taking in the classroom. Students pointed to the fact that they often get better exam grades if they take and review notes, which were considered to provide a good memory aid to remember lecture content. Most students taking part in the survey agreed that note-taking is a useful classroom technique, whose primary value comes from memory assistance. Similar results were obtained in the questionnaire conducted by Hale and Courtney (1994). The subjects in this study, apart from regarding notes as a good aid for remembering lecture information, organising content and studying after the lecture, reported that note-taking facilitated listening and understanding. Van Meter et al.’s (1994) interviews with college students showed that the majority of subjects took notes, as it provided an incentive to listen to lectures more attentively, improved students’ understanding and retention of lecture content, as well as helping to link main ideas and identify specific information. Clearly, many subjects in the studies outline above claimed that taking notes helps them understand the lecture and better remember its content. The question arises whether students’ listening comprehension, as measured by performance on post-listening tests, is really affected by the opportunity to take notes. This issue has been explored by a number of researchers (Dunkel et al., 1989; Chaudron et al., 1994; Hale and Courtney, 1994; Liu, 2001; Carrell et al., 2002). Most of these studies have shown that note-taking has little or no effect on test scores or recall of information. For instance, Dunkel et al. (1989), who had subjects listen to 23-minute lectures to examine if concurrent note-taking had an effect on immediate recognition, observed that both note-takers and non-notetakers performed equally well on recognising lecture concepts, and concluded 3 The issue of visual messages (e.g. information written on the board, slide, overhead transparencies etc.) being recorded in lecture notes received a lot of attention form the researchers, but the results are rather inconclusive. As reported by King (1994), a number of studies showed that students have a tendency not to record in their notes visually presented material, the King’s own study, however, investigating postgraduate students taking notes during engineering lectures, showed that students generally note down the visuals, unless it is explicitly indicated by the lecturer that they do not need to do so.

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that it is rather high short-term memory ability and linguistic proficiency that help students recognise lecture concepts more effectively. Similar results were obtained by Chaudron et al. (1994), whose experiment revealed the lack of any overall effect of note retention on post-lecture test scores. In the light of such outcomes, both groups of researchers uniformly conclude that the benefit of note-taking lies in the opportunity to review notes, and taking notes without rehearsal does not facilitate encoding in any way, which confirms the results of research in L1 contexts (Fisher and Harris, 1973; Annis and Davis, 1975; Aiken et  al., 1975). It is also upheld by Liu’s study (2001; reported in Carrell, 2007), which showed that it is not only the act of taking notes, but the possibility of referring to them while answering test questions that facilitated the recognition of specific information form the lecture. Yet another study in the area, conducted by Hale and Courtney (1994), proved the non-significant effect of note-taking on immediate recall. The study differentiated between allowing students to take notes and urging them to do so. While the possibility of note-taking had little impact on the performance on TOEFL minitalks, the requirement to do so actually impaired the scores. The reason for such findings, as is pointed out by the authors, may be the amount of cognitive load placed on students, who, when obliged to take note, tend to concentrate on writing down the details and fail to follow the general organisation of the lecture. In other words, listening without the cognitive effort of note-taking seems to be a superior learning condition, which was also proved by research in nativespeaking contexts (Fisher and Harris, 1973). The first study to show the facilitating effect of note-taking on L2 listening comprehension, although still to a limited extent, was carried out by Carrell at al. (2002). The research, which aimed to measure the impact of note-taking, lecture length and topic on the listening component of TOEFL exams, showed that note-taking was effective only during short lectures (i.e. during short lectures students performed better on the test when they took notes than when no notetaking was allowed). During longer lectures, however, note-taking was not a factor influencing subjects’ performance. A correlation between the topic of the lecture and note-taking was also found – students performed worst on arts and humanities topics when no note-taking was allowed, they performed best on arts and humanities topics when note-taking was allowed and equally well on physical sciences topics, whether with or without note-taking. The authors conclude, however, that the results might be due to the academic background of the participants, rather than the topic itself. Despite a number of limitations, the fact remains that this experiment provides support for the facilitative value of taking notes.

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Quite an extensive body of research in the area of note-taking focused on the quality of notes as an important factor in post-lecture retention of information (Dunkel, 1988; Cushing, 1993; Chaudron et  al., 1994; Clerehan, 1995; Liu, 2001; Faraco et al., 2002; Song, 2012). Some of the conclusions were arrived at by means of a comparison of L1 and L2 note-taking procedures. Clerehan (1995) focused on the differences in the recording of the hierarchical structure of the lecture and brought to light the difficulties of L2 note-takers. The notes taken by L2 students were considerably deficient in top-level information and failed to report on 19 % of Level 1, 34 % of Level 2 and 40 % of Level 3 information, while the L1 group recorded on average 99–100 % of all elements and showed no omission down the hierarchy of levels. The corollary of such findings may be down to the fact that L2 students tend to miss the logical structure of the lecture discourse, which evidently influences the quality of notes. In another study contrasting L1 and L2 students’ notes, Faraco et al. (2002) examined notes in terms of volume and content (the number of words and information units) and procedures (abbreviations, icons and reformulations), and found no major differences between L1, less proficient L2 and more proficient L2 students – for all subjects the use of abbreviations and icons correlated positively with the comprehension scores and negative correlations emerged between comprehension scores and reformulation, which appeared to be a debilitative note-taking strategy, for both L1 and L2 students. Another comprehensive study, which was the first to look at cross-cultural differences in note-taking practice and which later became the basis for most research in the field, was conducted by Dunkel (1988). The main aim of the experiment was to answer the question of what really makes good notes and to establish which of the indexes for content of notes predicted achievement on post-lecture tests. In the research subjects viewed 23-minute videotaped lectures, which was followed by an immediate retention test. The notes the students took were collected before the test and examined in terms of five indexes: – the total-number-of-words score (i.e. the number of any notations – words, symbols, abbreviations, illustrations); – the information-units count (the number of information units, defined after Anderson (1980) as the smallest unit of knowledge that can stand as a separate proposition that can be evaluated ‘true’ or ‘false’); – the test-answerability score (the number of test items answerable from the student’s notes); – the completeness score (the ratio of all information units in the lecture to the number of information units in the notes);

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– the efficiency ratio (the number of information units, divided by the number of words). Out of the five investigated indexes, two proved to be related to test achievement, namely terseness of notations (confirmed by Cushing, 1993, reported in Carrell, 2007) and the inclusion of potential test questions. In other words, effective L1 and L2 note-takers are able to compact large amounts of spoken discourse into propositional information units using abbreviations, symbols and omitting structure word, and detect potentially important pieces of information, which might later appear on a test. At the same time, the authors stressed that a common procedure of ‘writing down as much as possible during a lecture may not result in an effective encoding of the lecture for [either] L1 or L2 note-takers’ (Dunkel, 1988, p. 269). The application of different indexes to examine the quality of notes was also used in the research by Liu (2001; reported in Carrell, 2007), who investigated three features of students’ notes: the number of content words, the number of words fully spelt and the number of notations. The results showed that notes should contain content words which help in the recollection of specific information in the lecture and that note-takers should not attempt to write down words in full spelling. A part of Chaudron et  al. (1994) study also investigated the quality and quantity of notes, according to several measures:  provision of the lecture title, numbering, the use of hierarchical outlining, the inclusion of examples, verbatim notes, diagrams, symbols, abbreviations and the total number of words. The authors attempted a factor analysis, which brought rather imprecise results. Nevertheless, several important points were uncovered. The authors emphasised the accuracy and the unambiguity of notations as critical factors determining the effectiveness of notes as external storage. Moreover, the excessive use of abbreviations and symbols may lead to problems with retrieving information and overly schematic notes do not constitute an effective recall cue. An interesting approach towards evaluating the quality of notes was adopted by Song (2012). He set out to determine the influence of the quality of notes, measured in terms of the different levels of information recorded, on the performance on open-ended listening tasks. The research also took into account two different formats – blank and outline, and attempted to examine the relationship between the notes structure and test performance. The results yielded indicated that the number of topical ideas found in the notes was a good indicator of test takers’ second language academic listening proficiency

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and that the relationship between the open-ended listening measures and note quality measures were stronger in the outline format than in the blank format. This brings to the surface the issue of guided notes as an effective strategy of lecture learning (Cushing, 1993; Austin et  al., 2004; Neef, Brandon and Summer, 2006). Any attempts to show the advantage of guided notes brought convincing results  – Austin et  al. (2004) showed that a lecture with slides, be it with or without an outline given to students, is a superior condition to ‘traditional’ lectures (i.e. without overheads), although the quality of notes measured by the inclusion of information units, improved when guided notes were used. Neef et al. (2006) revealed no consistent difference between guided and completed notes, while Cushing (1993) pointed to L2 proficiency as an important factor in making use of an outline format. Clearly, as the effectiveness of guided notes is not equivocal, it need not be included as an important factor in notes quality. Several of the reports on research described above conclude with a comment on the necessity of introducing training in effective note-taking skills (Dunkel, 1988; Dunkel et al., 1989; Chaudron et al., 1994; Clerehan, 1995). The findings of the research suggested there should be some pre-training in note-taking practice and academic listening, especially for non-native students, who are at a linguistic disadvantage in an English-speaking lecture environment. Several areas of difficulty, which should definitely be implemented in such training sessions, include detecting and noting content words, working with ‘skeleton notes’ to practice following major points, synthesising segments of discourse into key phrases and many others. However, little attention has been paid to the potential outcome of such pedagogical intervention. In fact, only one experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of note-taking strategy training on listening comprehension. Carrell (2007) investigated over 200 international students to find out if instructional intervention, detailing good note-taking practices (used without the support from the instructor) affected the quality of subjects’ notes or improved their listening test scores. The research questions posed by Carrell (2007) included: – Are the strategies students use influenced by instructional intervention? – What strategies do subjects report using while taking notes and how important do they think these strategies are for test performance? – Are the reports affected by instructional intervention? – Are subjects’ note-taking strategies related to test performance? – Are the test scores influenced by instructional intervention?

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Control Group

Experimental Group 1st listening test Quesonnaire Analysis of notes

No instruconal intervenon

Instruconal intervenon nd

2 listening test Quesonnaire

Fig. 4.1:  Note-taking strategy training – study design (Carrell, 2007)

The results were obtained through analysing scores from two listening tests, answers on pre- and post-test questionnaires and the content of notes taken before and after the training took place. The initial examination of the notes showed they were of rather poor quality – small number of abbreviations, symbols and paraphrases, incompleteness (the inclusion of only one fifth of the important ideas from the lecture) and few organisational devices were noticed. Although the number of strategies used increased significantly between the first and the second listening test, there were no statistically significant effects of the intervention on the prevalence of strategies, as the increase was observed in intervention and no-intervention groups alike. As explained by the author, the change might have been due to practice and experience with the test and note-taking or, in other words, increased test wiseness. Furthermore, the intervention had no influence on students’ perception of the frequency and the helpfulness of note-taking strategies, as the perception of frequency increased significantly in both intervention and no-intervention groups and the perception of usefulness did not change in either group. Moreover, while the scores on some of the test tasks were correlated positively with several note-taking strategies (e.g. the number of content words, the use of abbreviations, symbols, arrows etc.), they were again unaffected by instructional interventions, which had no impact on performance on any of the listening tasks. Clearly, a note-taking strategy training in the form of a brief instructional overview has little or no effect on either the strategy used or test performance. Tips and guidelines given to subjects immediately prior to listening experience,

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without the opportunity to discuss or practise particular techniques bring no major results. As the author of the study suggests, while preparing students for note-taking, teachers have to ensure a sufficient amount of practice. The same conclusion was drawn by Gabryś-Barker (2011), who investigated notes as the written output of processing language from an aural input. The researcher assumed that skilled note-takers engage in what Harley (2008) calls attentional (as opposed to automatic) processing and analysed the notes taken by students before and after two study-skills sessions based on explicit instructions on note-taking and effective listening. In the diagnostic measure, a number of difficulties were observed: gaps in the notes as a sign of the inability of the working memory to follow lecture content, an inability to differentiate between main ideas and digressions, recording a lecture verbatim, unstructured notes without any format and unclear page layout or the lack of individually established coding systems to name a few. Having identified typical problems students had, Gabryś-Barker sought to find out whether explicit training would help to eradicate any of them. The post-treatment measures showed that some of the aspects of note-taking improved, yet for the training to be successful it needs to be implemented into a regular course and take a sufficient amount of time. One study that offers a longitudinal perspective on note-taking strategy training was conducted by Tsai and Wu (2010). Their investigation looked at the effect of a 14-week strategy training in note-taking implemented in the experimental group on the participants’ listening comprehension scores on both short conversations and long lectures. The study proved that note-taking instruction can give ESL students an edge to better comprehend their lectures. More importantly, Tsai and Wu considered it mandatory for the teacher to pay adequate attention to the amount of time spent instructing students and called for more studies in the field which would breakdown the construct of listening comprehension into categories. A similar interpretation of research analysis was provided by Hayati and Jalilifar (2009), who stated that students’ note-taking strategies would benefit most if they were practised over the course of several months, and recommended that note-taking instruction be included in the language course the students are participating in.

4.3 Basic issues in investigating strategy training The question whether learning strategies can be taught has been a concern for researchers ever since strategies were proven to be one of the crucial factors differentiating good language learners from the unsuccessful ones. It is believed

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that strategy training has the potential for improving teaching and enhancing the learners’ success. At the same time, strategy intervention studies are rather scarce in comparison with description studies and there exists a relatively small amount of empirical research reporting on the benefits of strategy training in language learning tasks (Chamot, 1995). Nevertheless, some research did give conclusive results as far as strategy training is concerned. The following section will focus on those studies which have attempted to teach strategies for listening comprehension to second language learners. One of the first studies into listening strategy training was conducted by O’Malley and her associates (O’Malley et  al., 1985), who examined different types of strategy training, i.e. metacognitive, cognitive and socioaffective strategies, on different language skills. The subjects of the study, high school ESL learners who received strategy training on vocabulary, listening and speaking, were divided into three groups:  (1) metacognitive/cognitive/socioaffective, (2)  cognitive/socioaffective, (3)  no strategy training (control group). The premise behind such a design was the suggestion from previous research, namely that the transfer of strategies to new settings was enhanced if cognitive strategies were paired with metacognitive ones. In other words, the experiment set out to verify whether the ability to talk about their learning experience gives students an advantage in language learning. In the listening part the students received 50 minutes of training a day during a period of 8 consecutive days. In each training session they listened to 4–5-minute videotaped lectures of growing difficulty on academic subjects (history and geography), which were followed by short comprehension tests. Furthermore, they took a pre- and a post-experiment test. The strategy instruction was very explicit at the beginning but the reminders to use strategies faded over the course of the training so by the end of the course no straightforward instructions were given to students requesting them to use a particular strategy. The results showed that while the experimental groups performed better on the daily tests, they did not outperform control groups in post-tests (the difference in their final scores approached, but failed to reach, significance). A number of explanations were put forward with regard to such outcomes. Firstly, one possible reason for the poor performance of the treatment groups was the short period in which the cues were shown to the students. In other words, the cues faded before the subjects actually managed to automate them. Secondly, the poor scores might have been due to the influence of the task difficulty – strategy training failed to compensate for the complexity of the tasks. Finally, it was suggested that the experimental group showed no advantage over the control

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group due to an insufficient period of instruction. Concluding the study, the researchers stated that in order to improve the results and enhance students’ ability to adopt new strategies and use them independently, a different lesson design should be implemented and a more extended period of instruction should be considered. Clearly, the major cause of strategy training bringing no satisfactory results lies in the course design. There is a body of research which points to other flaws of strategy training lessons to be avoided while organising strategy training (Chamot, Küpper and Impink-Hernandez, 1988; Chamot and Küpper, 1989; Thompson and Rubin, 1996). The conclusion reached by these researchers can be summarised as follows: – strategy training should last long enough for learners to practice the strategies in new tasks and discuss their usefulness, which means that strategy training should be implemented into regular classroom procedures; – students should not be confused by being exposed to too many strategies at a time; – presentation of strategies should be accompanied by information about their usefulness and opportunities to evaluate them in different applications; – teachers should undergo training in the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of strategy instruction; teacher expertise should be developed prior to the training they conduct; the training may come in the form of workshops in order to acquaint the teacher with the model for strategy instruction; – in order to better understand and become proficient in teaching strategies, teachers should be involved in the design of learning strategy lessons. An interesting study of strategy training was conducted by Cross (2009), who endeavoured to examine the effect of strategy training on video news comprehension. In his research, the instruction model by Mendelson (1994) described below was utilised to provide a procedural framework for teaching listening comprehension: 

1) identify and analyse factors that may influence the extent of comprehension; 2) expose learners to the material and ascertain whether or not they already apply any listening strategies; 3) determine suitable metacognitive, cognitive and social-affective strategies for instruction and consider appropriate activities through which to teach them; 4) prepare pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening materials and exercises; 5) conduct integrated and informed strategy instruction, provide substantial practice and feedback, and consistently review; 6) evaluate the learner instruction on a regular basis and revise where necessary;

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Tab. 4.1: Course overview for the experimental and control groups (Cross, 2009, p. 156) Experimental Group (EG) WEEK 1 30-minute pre-listening task 40-minute pre-test 30-minute post-listening task WEEK 2-9 30-minute pre-listening task 90-minute strategy instruction 30-minute post-listening task WEEK 10 30-minute pre-listening task 40-minute post-test 30-minute post-listening task



Comparison Group (CG) 30-minute pre-listening task 40-minute pre-test 30-minute post-listening task 30-minute pre-listening task 60-minute listening task 30-minute post-listening task 30-minute pre-listening task 40-minute post-test 30-minute post-listening task

7) encourage self-evaluation and autonomous use of listening strategies. (p. 158)

In the study, the participants attended 10-week current affair courses. Each lesson in weeks 2–9 was based on material from the BBC website accompanied by a 90-minute strategy instruction in the experimental group and no training in the control group (Tab. 4.1). As far as data collection procedures are concerned, the assessment of the listening comprehension of news was achieved in the same way for both the control and experimental groups in the form of a test. It was also supplemented with a questionnaire to obtain relevant background information. The findings revealed no significant difference in post-test performance between the experimental and control groups. The results might have resulted from several limitations of the study pointed out by its author: the low number of participants, the relative complexity of the tests and the subjective nature of the scoring system. Although the studies discussed above, which are important from the methodological point of view, did not bring the expected results, this does not imply that no research on the influence of strategy training on listening comprehension scores gave significant results. It has been proven, for example, that metacognitive knowledge can be improved through classroom training (Vandergrift, 2003b; Vandergrift, 2007; Rahimirad, 2014). Moreover, a positive correlation has been displayed between metacognitive instruction and

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improvement in listening performance (Vandergrift, 2007; quoted in Goh, 2008). Therefore, strategy instruction in the classroom seems fully justified, as long as the following key principles of strategy training are adopted (Goh, 2008): – connectivity, i.e. integrating strategy training with the course; – providing clear and explicit information about the usefulness of the strategies taught; – prolonged training. All of these tenets were taken into account in the design of the research presented in this work.

4.4 Issues in evaluating academic listening comprehension The final section in the research overview focuses on two prominent studies in the field of testing lecture comprehension, namely those by Tauroza (2001) and Hansen and Jensen (1994). The criterion for the selection of these two particular studies to be described is twofold. Firstly, they attempted to determine the conditions which need to be fulfilled for academic listening in controlled conditions to resemble authentic lecture situation. Secondly, the study by Hansen and Jensen involved the development and validation of a measurement instrument, which also constituted a part of the research conducted for the purpose of the present work. In his paper on investigating lecture comprehension in controlled conditions, Tauroza (2001) sets out by admitting that measuring academic listening in naturalistic setting, that is observing students’ behaviour in lecture situation, analysing only students’ notes and relying on subjects’ reports on their experiences, is quite unlikely to bring reliable results. Pointing to the limitations of the ethnographic approach in investigating lecture comprehension, such as no clear relationship between the notes taken and the level of comprehension or distorted perception of comprehension found in self reports, Tauroza enumerates problems in the research methodology of many studies (Tab. 4.2) and states that controlled conditions are preferable for investigating L2 lecture comprehension as long as they simulate authentic lectures as much as possible. He indicates three salient features of lectures vital to creating naturalistic controlled conditions: (1) students being expected to process both visual and aural information, (2)  the lecture delivered in a conversational style, (3)  the recipients of lectures being required to process stretches of discourse of at least 15 minutes. These conditions are enumerated as absolutely essential to obtain reliable research results, yet little

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Tab. 4.2:  Basic feature of typical lectures versus the lecture experience in L2 research (Tauroza, 2001, p. 151) Chaudron 1983 Chaudron and Richards 1986 Dunkel 1986 Chiang and Dunkel 1992 Chaudron, Loshky, Cook 1994 Dunkel and Davis 1994 English 1986 Hansen and Jensen 1994 Rost 1994b Dunkel 1988 Dunkel, Mishra, Berliner 1989 Olsen and Huckin 1990 Tauroza and Alison 1994 Flowerdew and Tauroza 1995

Visual Input N N N N N

Unscripted N N Y/N* N N

Length