Testing Lecture Comprehension Through Listening-to-summarize Cloze Tasks: The Trio of Task Demands, Cognitive Processes and Language Competence

This book explores the effectiveness of listen-to-summarize tasks as a tool to assess lecture comprehension ability. It especially focuses on listen-to-summarize tasks that represent listeners’ meaning building and the discourse construction of the lecture for listening assessment purposes.

It discusses in depth the nature of lecture comprehension and introduces the approaches to assessing it. It also presents teachers’ and students’ perceptions of listen-to-summarize task demands and their respective implications. By observing interactions between test-takers’ cognitive processes and the task itself, the book explores the effectiveness of these tasks. It also examines the discrepancy in cognitive processes between different language competence levels in detail, shedding light upon current research on lecture comprehension assessment and offering insights into listening comprehension instruction.

Dr. Haiping Wang is a postdoctoral and postgraduate supervisor at East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai. She holds a PhD in the field of Language Assessment from Shanghai International Studies University and was a visiting scholar at the University of Bristol’s Graduate School of Education. Her recent publications include: Wang, H. (2017). “A Review of Studies on Cognitive Processes in Language Testing”, Foreign Language Testing and Teaching (the only journal of language testing in mainland China); Wang, H., Zheng, Y. & Cai, Y. (2015). Application of Corpus Analysis Methods to the Teaching of Advanced English Reading and Students’ Textual Analysis Skills, Zou, B. Hoey, M. & Smith, S.  (Eds), Chinese Corpus Linguistics, published by Palgrave Macmillan (peer review); Wang, H. & He, Z. (2013). Public Diplomacy and the Co-Evolution of China and Europe, Frauke Austermann (Ed), China and Europe in 21st Century Global Politics: Partnership, Competition, or Co-Evolution, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (peer review); Wang Haiping (2014). Construction of Cognitive Context in Teaching Reading and Corpus Use, Foreign Language Education in China (CSSCI).