Exploring The Construct Of Academic Listening: The Trio Of Task Demands, Cognitive Processes And Language Competence

By reviewing competence-based and task-based approaches to the investigationof listening construct, this study aims to validate the theoretical framework ofAcademic Listening Construct (ALC) with mixed methods. The ALC frameworkhighlights the interaction between task domain and competence domain and furtherdemonstrates cognitive processes as indicators in competence domain.Altogether187valid teacher questionnaires and204valid student questionnaireswere collected for component analysis and the main factors extracted from the twodata sets were analyzed and compared to understand task demands from bothteachers’ and students’ perspectives. Simultaneously,16from the204students’ thinkaloud verbal protocols (TAPs) while they were completing a structured summarycloze test after an academic mini-lecture and their retelling protocols of the samelecture were transcribed and coded via Nvivo10.0to investigate:(i) cognitiveprocesses in consensus,(ii) how the test targets interact with test-takers’ test-takingcognitive processes and (iii) to what extent test-takers differ in terms of theircognitive processes in test-taking and retelling. Finally, statistics drawn fromquantitative measures like factor analysis of the questionnaire data were triangulatedwith qualitative data, i.e., interpretation and implication of TAPs and retellingprotocols.The results indicate that ALC is a highly interactive model that task targets intask domain have immediate impact on cognitive processes in competence domain.Similar principal factors representative of task demands, i.e., discourse construction(macro and micro), note-taking and decoding, were extracted from both teachers’ andstudents’ questionnaire data, with different sequences, though. Cognitive processesinvolved in test-taking include decoding and selective attention, meaning anddiscourse construction and monitoring. Task demands represented by questionnairedata and cognitive processes represented by TAPs can largely be triangulated. Majordifferences between test-takers across test-taking and retelling cognitive processes were inferred, summarized as discrepancy in decoding of sound patterns, selection ofkey words, association of propositional units, integration of new information to theexistent discourse representation and construction of contextual coherence, provingthat cognitive processes can be intrinsic indicators of academic listening competence.The results of the research provide implications for test designers to better understandthe construct of academic listening per se, for teachers to develop more effectiveacademic listening instruction, for test administrators to reinforce equitability andimpartiality of academic listening test use.