A Free Recall Study Of CET4 Listening Comprehension And Retention

This thesis reports on the use of free recall as the main research method in the investigation of band 4 testees' comprehension and retention of a CET4 listening comprehension discourse(in narrative genre). Based on psycholinguistic theories of human information processing, we used free recall to elicit the prepositional representation of the discourse from the testees' episodic memory. And by using the two important theories of story grammar and text-strategic continuity, we devised a framework for the analysis of the recalls. A two-phase experiment is then carried out. In the first phase, 34 recalls are investigated and the results got proved the feasibility of the research method; moreover, the episodic structure of the recalls are also detected. In the second phase, 42 recalls are examined. The detailed analysis of these recalls reveals that in comprehending CET4 narrative discourse, many of our testees are weak in processing causal relationship and drawing local-coherence-building inference. On the other hand, it is also found that the poor recalls are mainly caused by the testees' weakness in processing the multiple participants.