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IELTS Research Reports Volume 9 67

www.ielts.org

2The use of tactics and strategies by Chinese

students in the Listening component of IELTS

Authors

Richard Badger

University of Leeds

Xiaobiao Yan

Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS)

Grant awarded Round 12, 2006

This study is a comparative analysis of the strategies used in an IELTS Listening Test by first language users of

English and Chinese learners of English.

ABSTRACT

This study investigates whether there are differences between the strategies used by native speakers/ expert

users of English and those used by learners of English who are native speakers of Chinese when they take an

IELTS Listening Test.

24 native speakers of Chinese (twelve pre-undergraduate and twelve pre-postgraduate), at an IELTS level for the

Listening paper of between 5.5 and 6.5 and 8 native/expert speakers of English (three undergraduates, three

masters level and two doctoral), took a sample listening test (from McCarter and Ash 2003).

Data were collected using a think-aloud protocol and then analyzed using a framework based on Goh (2002)

adapted to include particular features of the data sets based on a grounded approach (Glaser & Strauss 1967;

Glaser 1992; Senior 2006). This produced a three level system of coding, with an initial distinction between

cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies, each of which was divided into sub-strategies and then again into the

tactics used to carry out the strategies.

The result of an independent samples 2-tailed t-test revealed there were no significant differences between the

two groups in terms of strategy use. At the level of sub-strategy there were differences on two out of thirteen

metacognitive strategies. At the level of tactics there were significant differences for seven tactics (two cognitive

and five meta-cognitive) out of fifty eight at p≤0.005. This suggests that the strategies and tactics adopted by

native and non-native speakers of English in the IELTS Listening Module are not significantly different.

We also examined the differences between the twelve pre-undergraduate and twelve pre-postgraduate Chinese

native participants but found no significant differences at strategy, sub-strategy or tactical levels.

The paper then discusses possible reasons for the results.

Richard Badger and Xiaobiao Yan

68 IELTS Research Reports Volume 9

www.ielts.org

AUTHOR BIODATA

RICHARD BADGER

Richard Badger is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. He co-

ordinates the MA TESOL programme and teaches modules in Teaching and Learning in TESOL, Investigating

Language for TESOL and Learning and Teaching Vocabulary. His research interests include the teaching of

academic writing, argument in academic contexts and academic listening. He has published in ELT Journal, the

Journal of Second Language Writing, the Journal of Pragmatics, System and ESP Journal. He is currently working

on a project investigating how undergraduates learn from biology lectures, focussing on the roles that PowerPoint

play in this learning and on how teachers of ESP deal with topics where they lack disciplinary expertise.

XIAOBIAO YAN

Xiaobiao Yan is a lecturer in the College of Continuing Education at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in

Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. He has been engaged in IELTS teaching and research for several years and at

present he is the coordinator for the IELTS Preparation. His research interests are language testing, particularly

for listening and writing, and SLA. He has published in the Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies,

the Journal of Leshan Normal University, and a monograph entitled ʻ A Probe into Continuing Education

Programmeʼ. He is the author of ʻModern Business Writingʼ, published by Zhongshan University Press. He is

currently working on a university-funded project on the exploration and analysis of IELTS washback to IELTS

teaching in speaking course.

IELTS RESEARCH REPORTS

VOLUME 9, 2009

Published by: British Council and IELTS Australia

Project Managers: Jenny Holliday, British Council Jenny Osborne, IELTS Australia

Acknowledgements: Dr Lynda Taylor, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations

Editor: Dr Paul Thompson, University of Reading, UK

review, no part may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic or mechanical,

including recording, taping or information retrieval systems) by any process without the written permission of the

publishers. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. The research and opinions expressed in this volume are

those of individual researchers and do not represent the views of the British Council. The publishers do not

accept responsibility for any of the claims made in the research.

ISBN 978-1-906438-51-7 © British Council 2009 Design Department/X299

The United Kingdomʼs international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.

A registered charity: 209131 (England and Wales) SC037733 (Scotland)

CONTENTS

1Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................... 70

1.1 Situational authenticity

.................................................................................................................................................................. 70

1.2 Inter

actional authenticity .............................................................................................................................................................. 71

2Back

ground to the research ....................................................................................................................................... 72

2.1 Models of listening

.......................................................................................................................................................................... 72

2.1.1 T

op-down, bottom-up and interactive .................................................................................................................... 72

2.1.2 P

erception, parsing, utilization .................................................................................................................................. 72

2.1.3 L

earning to listen ............................................................................................................................................................. 72

2.2 Str

ategies and tactics .................................................................................................................................................................... 73

2.3 A tax

onomy for strategies and tactics ................................................................................................................................... 73

2.4 Think-aloud pr

otocol ...................................................................................................................................................................... 74

2.5 R

esearch questions ........................................................................................................................................................................ 74

3The study

............................................................................................................................................................................ 75

3.1 The par

ticipants ................................................................................................................................................................................ 75

3.2 Ethical issues

...................................................................................................................................................................................... 76

3.3 Data collection

.................................................................................................................................................................................. 76

3.4 Data analysis

...................................................................................................................................................................................... 76

3.4.1 R

evising Goh’s taxonomy ................................................................................................................................................. 77

3.4.2 Applying the ne

w taxonomy ........................................................................................................................................... 78

3.5 Findings

................................................................................................................................................................................................ 78

3.5.1 R

esearch Question 1

.......................................................................................................................................................... 78

3.5.2 R

esearch Question 2 .......................................................................................................................................................... 81

3.5.3 R

esearch Question 3 .......................................................................................................................................................... 81

4Discussion and conclusion

........................................................................................................................................... 84

4.1 Choice of te

xts

.................................................................................................................................................................................. 84

4.2 The use of nativ

e/expert users of English in test validation ....................................................................................... 84

eferences .............................................................................................................................................................................. 85

Appendix 1: Non-nativ

e speaker protocol

..................................................................................................................... 87

Appendix 2: Nativ

e speaker protocol ............................................................................................................................. 89

Appendix 3: Goh’

s 2002 taxonomy ................................................................................................................................. 93

Appendix 4: A

dapted taxonomy of strategies ............................................................................................................. 94

Appendix 5: Consent form for the r

esearch ................................................................................................................. 96

IELTS Research Reports Volume 9 69

The use of tactics and strategies by Chinese students in the Listening component of IELTS

www.ielts.org

1INTRODUCTION

The IELTS Test is a high stakes test and relative success or failure can have a life changing impact on candidates.

The language use which the test attempts to measure is associated very closely with cultural patterns. Many

commentators argue that the Confucian background of native speakers of Chinese (Gieve and Clark 2005;

Scollon 1999; Yao 2000) is significantly different from the cultural background most common in Australia,

Canada and the UK. It is important therefore that we have confidence that the IELTS Test is proving an appropriate

measure of the language ability of Chinese speaking students. A related question concerns the level of education

of candidates for IELTS and whether the intellectual development typically associated with the completion of a

degree may have an impact on the way in which those preparing for undergraduate and graduate study take the

IELTS examination. This study is an attempt to address these issues.

The focus of this research is on listening, a key skill in language use, but much harder to test and research than

speaking and writing because, like reading, most of the processes involved in listening happen within the minds

of language users. Testing these skills requires the creation of a construct to understand what happens when

language users read or listen and the adoption of an indirect means of assessment for these skills. Even compared

with reading, listening presents additional difficulties to the test writer and researcher because it is “transient

and occurs within limited capacity working memory” (Goh 2002, p 182).

IELTS is a test of communicative language use and, within the tradition of communicative language testing, the

aim has generally been to evaluate whether candidates have the ability to communicate in the target-language

use (TLU) domains (Bachman & Palmer 1996, p 18), that is “the real world situation in which the language will be

used” (Buck 2001, p 83). Many commentators use the term ‘task’ to describe the activities that are carried out

by language users outside the test situation. Bachman and Palmer define a target language use domain as “a set

of specific language use tasks that the test taker is likely to encounter outside of the test itself” (Bachman and

Palmer 1996, p 44). This notion means that one of the aims of test writers is to produce test tasks that are as

similar as possible to TLU domain tasks. However, as Buck (2001, p 90) observes, “test tasks can never be

entirely authentic replications of target language use tasks”. For further discussion of the concept of ‘authenticity’,

see Widdowson (2003).

Ellis (2003) addresses the impossibility of designing completely authentic test tasks by distinguishing between

situational authenticity and interactional authenticity which may be taken as very similar to text and task authenticity

(Guariento & Morley 2001; Skehan 1996). Situational authenticity is the extent to which the test task matches a

real life situation. It would provide a rationale, for example, for including a listening text related to the task of

filling in a form where filling in forms was part of the TLU domain. Interactional authenticity reflects the extent to

which the test task elicits language behaviour which “corresponds to the kind of communicative behaviour that

arises from performing real-world tasks” (Ellis 2003, p 6). For the form filling task, this would be the way in which

users would use the listening text in completing the form.

1.1 Situational authenticity

An examination of Listening Test tasks in the IELTS shows that there is a plausible claim that they have some

situational authenticity. For example, the test sample in IELTS Testbuilder (McCarter and Ash 2003), the

commercial IELTS test practice book that we used in this research and which mirrors IELTS papers closely,

included the following listening texts:

! A two person conversation on the phone between a credit card holder and a call centre employee

! A radio show in which a speaker discusses his success in giving up smoking with the radio presenter

! A conversation between a tutor and two undergraduate students about what one of their course mates

is doing and the marks of the two undergraduate students.

! An extract from an academic lecture on bullying in the workplace.

All of these could be seen as coming from the TLU domains that candidates who are going to study in Higher

Education Institutions in English speaking countries might encounter. There are some issues such as the

intonation in the tutorial and the possibly inauthentic North American accent in the final text but it would be

possible for test writers to use such texts as the basis for tasks with situational authenticity.

70 IELTS Research Reports Volume 9

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Richard Badger and Xiaobiao Yan

1.2 Interactional authenticity

Interactional authenticity is more problematic. The students have to complete a range of written multiple choice

questions and gap filling exercises, neither of which are activities which would be carried out in relation to these

kinds of listening texts outside an examination or language classroom and so do not have obvious interactional

authenticity. However, it is possible to identify sufficiently strong links between non-examination and examination

interactions to ground the validity of the examination. For example in the first section, candidates have to note

down the post code (question 2) having heard the following extract.

O: And what’s your post code?

C: SE1 8PB

O: SE1 8PB

C: That’s it. [our underlining]

Similarly, in question 34 of section 4 the candidates have to complete with not more than three words the gap in

the following phrase

Setting 34. ______ tasks.

The cue for this is:

The first item on the list: giving people

tasks that managers themselves cannot do and which are

therefore impossible to achieve. [our underlining]

This would seem to be fairly closely related to the task of taking notes in a pre-PowerPoint lecture and so to

have interactional authenticity.

There are however several questions where the interactional authenticity is harder to justify. For example, in task

two, which replicates an interview on the radio, candidates have to answer the following multiple choice

question:

11 M r G o l d h a d p r o b l e m s b e c a u s e h e

ahated smoking

bsmoked

ccouldn’t touch his toes

dwas very lazy.

The relevant extract from the tape script is:

Well I enrolled on a number of evening courses where I found I wasn’t able to do the warm up sessions.

Bending down to touch my toes made me breathless. Even though I hated to admit it my pr

oblem was

not so much my sitting around all the time but my fifteen to twenty a day smoking habit. If I’d been able

to limit myself to three or four cigarettes a day there would have been no problem but I was seriously

addicted. And I’m talking about waking up at three a.m. and dying for a cigarette or in the days before

twenty four hours shopping driving acr

oss London to buy a packet of cigarettes when I ran out. But

above all my addiction meant making sure I never ran out at the expense of everything else including

necessities. [our underlining]

It is quite difficult to see, first, what the interactionally authentic task would be for a radio interview, and,

secondly, how the multiple choice format would relate to such a task. Similar issues arise with the tutorial

situation, where again it is not immediately obvious what the interactional task should be.

The weakness of arguments based on interactional or task authenticity mean that claims about the ability of the

IELTS Test to whether candidates can handle TLU tasks need support from elsewhere. In this paper, we explore

the possibility that this may be found in the similarity of the behaviour of candidates taking IELTS to that of a group

of people whose ability to handle the TLU can be assumed, that is native and expert users of English, and in

particular we attempt to answer the following research questions:

! What are the similarities and differences in the mental processes of native speakers of English and

native speakers of Chinese when taking the IELTS Listening Test?

! To what extent do the mental processes of Chinese speaking candidates preparing for undergraduate

and postgraduate studies differ?

IELTS Research Reports Volume 9 71

The use of tactics and strategies by Chinese students in the Listening component of IELTS

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2BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

In the background literature section, we look at models of listening, the concept of strategies and talk-aloud protocols.

2.1 Models of listening

Researchers such as Anderson and Lynch (19880, Buck (2001), Rost (2002) and White (1998) have offered a range

of models of listening. Here we discuss firstly top-down, bottom-up and interactive models and then Anderson’s

(2000) perception, parsing and interpretation model. Flowerdew and Miller (2005, p 85 ff) make a strong argument

for saying that a model of listening should include a social element. However for the purposes of this piece of

research and, in particular, the focus on listening within the socially constrained context of an examination, we have

chosen to focus on psychological aspects of the listening process.

2.1.1 Top-down, bottom-up and interactive

A distinction is commonly made between top-down and bottom-up processes in listening. This is based on the

view that there is a continuum of information that is needed for effective listening from phonetic and phonemic

information at the bottom to schematic and world knowledge at the top.

Listening comprehension is the result of an interaction between a number of information sources, which include

the acoustic input, different types of linguistic knowledge, details of the context, and general world knowledge

and so forth (Buck 2001, p 3).

We regard this as an understatement of the degree of interaction required. Both top-down and bottom-up

information require the interaction of listening text and the listener. To decode a series of sounds as being instances

of particular phonemes, listeners need to have the raw data, that is, the listening text, but also need to bring to

that data their knowledge of what counts as a phoneme in the language to which they are listening. The information

that a particular sound represents, for example, /s/ in English, is not necessarily in the acoustic signal but in the

acoustic signal as interpreted by listeners with the knowledge of what phones make up the /s/ phoneme in English.

Similarly, the relevant schemata that help listeners make sense of particular listening texts serve no purpose if

they are simply stored in listeners’ minds. The schemata need to be activated by the listening text. This is not to

say that bottom and top information do not exist but that interaction is both between top and bottom information

and between listener and listening text.

2.1.2 Perception, parsing, utilization

Anderson (2000) argues for a three stage view of comprehension: perception, parsing and utilization. When applied

to listening, this means that listeners first store the input as a sound string (Anderson 2000, p 388). They then

parse the sounds into the combined meaning of the words (Nagle and Sanders 1986). The third stage is when

the listeners use the mental representation of the message. This may be simply a question of storing the meaning

in memory or listeners may combine it with other elements in memory or context to make inferences.

While listening, listeners are not just involved in one of these stages.

These three stages - perception, parsing and utilization - are by necessity partly ordered in time;

however, they also partly overlap. Listeners can be making inferences from the first part of a sentence

while they are already perceiving a later part. (Anderson 2000, p 388)

This also means that ambiguities at the perception stage may be resolved or rendered unimportant by

information at the parsing or utilization stages.

If listeners are able to carry out the three processes of perception, parsing and interpretation without any

difficulty, listening should be a straightforward process. However, listening is often not straightforward and most

language users experience problems with comprehension. To gain an insight into the difficulties that listeners,

and in particular L2 listeners, face, we need a model of how people learn to carry out skills such as listening.

2.1.3 Learning to listen

Information processing models of learning see the development of skills as having at least three stages. The first

is the cognitive stage during which learners acquire knowledge about listening, sometimes called declarative

knowledge. This would include, for example, information about the grammatical structure of the target language.

Secondly, at the associative or controlled stage, declarative knowledge is gradually proceduralized (Anderson

2000, p 282). For example, knowledge about grammatical structure becomes an ability to parse a listening text.

At this stage, listening is a demanding activity.

Learning of a skill initially demands learners’ attention and thus involves controlled processing . . .

Controlled processing requires considerable mental “space” or attentional effort (Saville-Troike 2006, p 73)

72 IELTS Research Reports Volume 9

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Richard Badger and Xiaobiao Yan

In the final stage, which Anderson terms autonomous (2000, p 282), listeners carry out the listening in a more

and more automatic fashion.

Learners go from controlled to automatic processing with practice. Automatic processing requires less mental

“space” and attentional effort (Saville-Troike 2006, p 73).

In this model, learning essentially involves development along a continuum from controlled to automatic use of

the skills and sub-skills involved in listening, freeing learners’ controlled capacity for new information and higher-

order skills.

We draw the implication from this that controlled processes are more likely to be conscious, and thus we

interpret the term ‘automatic’ as meaning that the processes at this stage are not under conscious control.

If this model is correct, people who are learning to listen in a second language are at least partially at the

controlled stage and so have limited capacity for perceiving, parsing or interpreting the listening texts to which

they are exposed. In a test situation, such people need to come up with some way of dealing with the problems

they face. These solutions are often labelled “strategies” (Bialystok 1990; O’Malley & Chamot 1990; Oxford 1990).

2.2 Strategies and tactics

Strategies are frequently defined within a learning context. Oxford (1990, p 8) defines strategies as “specific

actions taken by learners to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective,

and more transferable to new situations”. Goh (2002, p 186), takes a broader view, saying strategies are “mental

steps or operations carried out to accomplish cognitive tasks such as map-reading, memorization, processing

information and problem solving.”

While there is extensive discussion of strategies in the literature on learning (eg, O’Malley & Chamot 1990;

Oxford 1990), here we are concerned with the processes that listeners go through in order to understand a

listening text, and whether or not these lead to learning. Our concern is primarily with communication strategies

but our understanding is informed by what people have written of learning strategies.

Although some writers suggest that strategies can be conscious or unconscious, for most authorities strategies

are conscious steps taken by language users and this is coherent with the view of strategies being adopted to

compensate for the fact that some part of the listening process has not become completely automatic. This is

consistent with the research instrument we are using, think-aloud protocols, which assume that listeners can talk

about the strategies they are using.

Goh (1998; 2002) makes a distinction between general and specific strategies. She describes tactics as ‘individualized

techniques through which a general strategy is operationalized’ (Goh 2002, p 187). For example, a meta-cognitive

sub-strategy such as directed attention can be operationalized through tactics, such as concentrating hard and

identifying a failure in concentration.

2.3 A taxonomy for strategies and tactics

There is considerable disagreement about the best taxonomy for describing strategies and tactics in listening.

For this study, we drew on Goh’s (2002) taxonomy (see Appendix 3). This follows Purpura (1999) in identifying

two broad strategies, cognitive and meta-cognitive, with cognitive strategies broadly covering the perception,

parsing and interpreting process of listening, and metacognitive strategies covering problem solving activities.

These two broad strategies were divided into sub-strategies which were partly drawn from the literature and

partly derived from Goh’s data in line with a grounded theory approach to data analysis (eg, Brown & Rodgers

2002; Glaser & Strauss 1967; Glaser 1992; Senior, 2006). One of the most significant differences between our

research and that of Goh is that ours related to an examination paper, and this raised the question of the extent

to which the strategies, sub-strategies and tactics used in an examination would be found to differ from a non-

examination context.

Goh identified eight cognitive and six metacognitive strategies. Each sub-strategy was realized in a set of tactics.

For example, within the cognitive strategy, she identified a sub-strategy labelled fixation which could be realized

by the following four tactics:

! stop to think about the spelling of unfamiliar words,

! stop to think about the meaning of words,

! memorize/repeat the sounds of unfamiliar words,

! memorize words or phrases for later processing.

IELTS Research Reports Volume 9 73

The use of tactics and strategies by Chinese students in the Listening component of IELTS

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Again metacognitively, she labelled one sub-strategy, directed attention, which was realized through two tactics:

! concentrate hard,

! continue to listen in spite of difficulty.

A complete list can be found in Appendix 3.

2.4 Think-aloud protocols

It is common to investigate strategies using questionnaires. Oxford’s (1990) development of an inventory of

learning strategies has produced a range of questionnaire-based studies (eg, Phakiti 2003; Vanijdee 2003).

However, we felt that this would not be appropriate with the kinds of learners we were investigating, particularly

given the fact that we were not sure how accurately a questionnaire would capture strategy and tactic use.

Instead, we drew on the research instrument of the think-aloud protocol (Brown & Rodgers 2002).

A verbal protocol is the data which is produced when a person ‘is asked to either “talk aloud” or to “think aloud”’

(Green 1998, p 1). It is made up of utterances made by an individual, either while or after the individual carries

out a single task or a series of tasks; verbal protocols, thus, can be either concurrent or retrospective (Brown &

Rodgers 2002). For listening the technical problems that arise in recording what listeners are saying at the same

time as they listen to a text and the difficulty that listeners have in talking aloud while trying to comprehend a

text meant that we had to adopt a retrospective approach. However, the nearer the protocol is to the event that

the listeners are talking about the greater the validity and so we divided the IELTS Listening Test into sections at

natural breaking points, and asked the listeners to think aloud about what they had just done.

Goh (2002, p 189) comments:

Verbal data on listening processes are predominantly retrospective. Because of the rapid flow of

information, the working memory has to be freed for processing continuous input. What listeners will

typically do is to process the heeded input first before reporting through retrospective verbalization.

Bearing in mind Anderson’s (2000) model of learning above, we hypothesised that native speakers/expert

speakers of English would report fewer cognitive strategies than learners of English because they would have

been automatized and so no longer accessible to the think-aloud protocol.

2.5 Research questions

Having reviewed the literature we were in a position to pose more specific research questions

1What differences are there between native speakers of English and non-native speakers of English in

terms of the strategies, sub-strategies and tactics they use when taking an IELTS Listening Test?

2What differences are there between Chinese speaking candidates preparing for undergraduate and

graduate studies in terms of the strategies, sub-strategies and tactics they use when taking a

Listening Test?

3To what extent are the strategies, sub-strategies and tactics used by native and non-native speakers of

English in an IELTS Listening Test different from those reported in Goh’s studies of listening?

74 IELTS Research Reports Volume 9

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Richard Badger and Xiaobiao Yan

3THE STUDY

The study was carried out in Guang Dong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS), Guang Zhou, China and the

University of Leeds (UOL), Leeds, UK.

3.1 The participants

We collected data from twenty four volunteers on an IELTS preparation programme at GDUFS who had or were

expected to obtain a score of between 5.5 and 6.5 on the Listening element. These bands were chosen because

they are significant in deciding whether candidates are admitted to English medium tertiary education.

Twelve of the students were preparing for undergraduate studies through the medium of English (4 males and 8

females) and twelve were preparing for postgraduate studies (4 males and 8 females). We collected information

about the participants’ disciplinary background. Eight different majors and four different majors were expected

to study for pre-postgraduate and pre-undergraduate groups respectively. Subjects’ previous IELTS scores were

collected at the same time. Information on the subjects is presented in Tables 1 to 4.

Accounting 5

Human Resources 1

Fashion Design 1

Tourism Management 1

Hotel Management 1

Management for Information System 1

Culture and Translation 1

Finance 1

Table 1: Subjects of pre-postgraduate study participants at GDUFS

IELTS Band scores Number of students

5.5 3 (one score predicted by the teacher)

6.0 4

6.5 5

Table 2: IELTS scores of pre-postgraduate study participants at GDUFS

International Relationship and English 1

International Trade and English 1

International Business 6

Accounting 4

Table 3: Subject of pre-undergraduate study participants at GDUFS

IELTS Band scores Number of students

5.5 3

6.0 4

6.5 5

Table 4: IELTS scores of pre-undergraduate study participants at GDUFS

IELTS Research Reports Volume 9 75

The use of tactics and strategies by Chinese students in the Listening component of IELTS

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We had hoped to investigate the impact of disciplinary background and gender but the numbers of students from

particular disciplines and the relatively small overall sample meant that this was not practicable. The fact that the

levels of the students as measured by IELTS were comparable between the pre-postgraduate and pre-undergraduate

course meant that we were able to explore the impact of educational level on strategies, sub-strategies and tactics.

In addition, we collected data from eight self selecting participants with native levels of competence in Leeds

(three undergraduates, three master’s level and two doctoral). One of the doctoral students was not a native

speaker of English but had a native-like command of the language. She had lived in the UK for over two years

and prior to arrival had obtained a score of 8 on the IELTS Listening Test.

3.2 Ethical issues

The participants were all volunteers and saw and signed the consent forms, the English version of which appears

in Appendix 5. The institutions in which the research was carried out are identified in this paper. This meant that

if we linked information about gender, level of study or discipline to a particular think-aloud protocol, it would be

possible to identify particular participants and so we decided not to include this information, where it was linked

to what participants said or did, to ensure anonymity as far as we could.

3.3 Data collection

The data were collected from participants individually. We first gave the participants training tasks to accustom them

to producing a protocol. These involved two mental arithmetic calculations and two anagram puzzles. The participants

then took the attached test and completed a blank version of the answer sheet. We had asked the assistant

director in Cambridge ESOL’s Research and Validation Unit for permission to use an IELTS past paper in listening

for this project but unfortunately this was not possible. Drawing on criteria proposed by Terry (2003, pp 66-76)

and Saville and Hawkey (2004, pp 73-96), the sample test (McCarter & Ash 2003) was judged to be fairly close to

an actual IELTS Test. It was also appropriate because of the test paper’s unfamiliarity for the research participants.

At naturally occurring stages in the test (e.g. between sections, between reading the questions and listening to

the recording) we asked the participants to say what mental processes they had gone through in arriving at or

failing to arrive at answers. The researchers limited their contribution once the participants had started doing

the tests to the following utterances:

! Keep talking

! Comment on what you have just heard or read / question XX, section XX

If participants said they had nothing to say about a particular section we asked them once to comment and,

if they did not say anything at that stage, we continued to the next section. In the transcription for data analysis

we removed all utterances from the researchers for ease of coding.

GDUFS participants were able to respond in English or Chinese. The think-aloud protocols were recorded on a

mini-disk recorder or else directly on to a laptop computer by Xiaobiao Yan in GDUFS and Richard Badger in Leeds.

The recordings were transcribed and, if the think-aloud had been carried out in Chinese, translated into English.

A sample non-native speaker protocol is provided in Appendix 1, and a sample native speaker protocol appears

in Appendix 2.

3.4 Data analysis

The data were first chunked into what appeared to be plausible units that corresponded to Goh’s tactics.

The following extract from one GDUFS participant’s protocol, was divided into two chunks.

A and C is much…., um, A is certainly not the answer, so I just choose between B and C (C-I). He said he

is free in, in, um….I am not quite sure about this question, because in the last section, the woman said,

she will call. I don’t remember what she said. She will call the man very soon (M-CM).

In the first chunk (ending C-I), the participant was trying to process utterances directly in order to infer the

answer, which we treat as a cognitive strategy. In the second chunk (ending M-CM), comprehension monitoring

tactics were used to check, and confirm understanding during listening. We classified this as metacognitive.

Initially we separately chunked data from two participants, discussed differences and then coded a further data

set from another participant. Our chunking on the third data set agreed in over 95% of cases. We did not

compare chunking on later data sets but did check each other’s view on problematic instances.

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3.4.1 Revising Goh’s taxonomy

The data were analysed using Goh’s categories (see Appendix 3). However, we had to make some changes at

the level of sub-strategy and tactic. Our final taxonomy is given in Appendix 4.

We reorganised Goh’s strategies so that the cognitive sub-strategies corresponded to Anderson’s stages of perception

(fixation), parsing (reconstruction) and utilisation (inferencing). We also treated the tactics that Goh classified as

realising the cognitive strategy of prediction as a realisation of the meta-cognitive strategy of pre-listening

preparation. Further changes were made to render the taxonomy more consistent with our understanding

model of listening. For the sub-strategy of fixation, Goh identified four tactics:

! stop to think about the spelling of unfamiliar words,

! stop to think about the meaning of words,

! memorize/repeat the sounds of unfamiliar words,

! memorize words or phrases for later processing.

In our taxonomy, we added a further tactic to cover the situation where a listener focused on the sound of a

phoneme (CFP in our taxonomy in appendix four), on the assumption that listeners would focus on the sounds in

unknown words. This came up several times in our data for both UOL and GDUFS participants, not to do with

individual phonemes, but related to the sounds of letters in a post code

The postcode, I suppose that’s 8PB (UOL participant).

The nearest our participants came to commenting on the processing of phonemes was in the following data.

I just heard the pronunciation, but…Wahace. I don’t know what word it is, may[be] it’s a new word for me?

Um ‘Wahace’ [Wales] (GDUFS participant).

This was treated as a fixation on a word rather than a phoneme (CFW- see appendix four). Generally, both groups

of listeners had automatized their perception of individual sounds to the extent that they were no longer able to

report on them.

These changes related to our views of the listening process. Most of the other changes related to the fact that

we were working in an examination context.

We eliminated the sub-strategy of elaboration because it did not appear in our first three data sets and we did

not require it in the remaining data sets, presumably because elaboration is not a common tactic in examinations.

The sub-strategy of visualisation also did not appear in these three data sets although we had thought that

learners might use visualisation in the examination.

We also eliminated the sub-strategy of prediction because it overlapped with the tactics under the sub-strategy

of Inferring answer. For instance, the tactic ‘anticipating details while listening’ under the sub-strategy of Prediction

seemed very similar to ‘using co-text’ from the sub-strategy of inferring.

At the level of tactic, we made several changes which related to the fact that our participants were taking an

examination. So for example, under the sub-strategy of ‘reconstruction’, we added the tactic of ‘reconstructing

meaning from an examination question’ and under the sub-strategy of ‘inferring’ added ‘inferring the answer by

using information from the text with the examination question paper’. These are discussed in more detail below

where we address our third research question which relates to differences between the ways people in Goh’s

study listened as compared to those in an IELTS Test.

Our taxonomy uses letter codes such as CRQ and CIQ to describe strategies, sub-strategies and tactics. The C in

CRQ stands for ‘cognitive’, the R for ‘reconstruction’ and the Q for ‘examination question’. Similarly in CIQ, the C

stands for ‘cognitive’, the I for ‘inferring’ and the Q for ‘examination question’.

The changes in the metacognitive group were rather greater. First, we introduced the new sub-strategy of real

time assessment of output (MAO, where M stands for ‘meta-cognitive’ and AO for ‘assessment of output’)

because participants referred quite extensively to tactics such as making sure their answers had the right

numbers of words.

We also made eleven changes at the tactical level, particularly realisations of comprehension monitoring (while

listening) and comprehension evaluation (post listening).

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3.4.2 Applying the new taxonomy

We jointly coded two data sets and discussed differences until we had reached agreement. We then coded a

third data set independently and our coding agreed over 90% of the time.

3.5 Findings

In this section we address each of our research questions in turn.

3.5.1 Research Question 1

What differences are there between native speakers of English and non-native speakers of English in

terms of the strategies, sub-strategies and tactics they use when taking an IELTS Listening Test?

At the level of strategy, the UOL participants reported an average of just over one hundred instances of strategy

use compared to just below eighty for the GDUFS participants. This was almost all accounted for by differences

in terms of cognitive strategies where the figures were just under thirty for the UOL participants and just over

twenty for the GDUFS participants. We were surprised that the UOL participants were able to report this number

of cognitive strategies However, at the level of strategy, the differences were not significant at p≤0.005

(see Table 5).

At the level of sub-strategy, the differences between the groups were again largely not significant. However,

there were significant differences at p≤0.005 for two metacognitive strategies, directed attention (i.e. monitoring

attention and avoiding distraction) and comprehension monitoring (i.e. checking interpretation for accuracy

while listening), as shown in Tables 6 and 7.

NSS N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean

CNESE849.1333.75311.934

NC 24 20.21 10.384 2.120

MNESE8 56.0021.8247.716

NC 24 59.17 20.459 4.176

TNESE8105.1332.52011.498

NC 24 79.45 26.493 5.408

C=Cognitive M=metacognitive T=total

NSS=Native speaker status NESE=Native/Expert speaker of English NC= Native speaker of Chinese

Table 5: Descriptive Statistics at the level of strategy

In both case the GDUFS participants used these strategies more frequently than the UOL participants. The UOL

participants were probably less likely to need to calm themselves down or perhaps they did not engage in as

much comprehension monitoring after listening to the listening text given their reduced commitment to scoring

well on the test. It was surprising that the number of reports of the assessment of output metacognitive sub-

strategy was not significantly different between the two groups, perhaps indicating that the Leeds participants

were less familiar with the IELTS question types and were likely to spend more time on the process of listening in

order to answer the answers than expected.

Sub-strategy NSS N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean

Metacognitive: NESE 8 0.75 1.39 0.49

directed attention

NC 24 4.13 2.42 0.49

Metacognitive: NESE 8 6.88 4.58 1.62

comprehension monitoring

NC 24 20.63 6.16 1.26

NSS=Native speaker status NSS= Native speaker status

NESE=Native/Expert speaker of English NC= Native speaker of Chinese

Table 6: Descriptive statistics for significantly different sub-strategies

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Sub-strategy t df Sig Mean Std. Error 95% Confidence Interval

Difference Difference of the Difference

Lower Upper

Metacognitive: -3.720 30 .001 -3.375 .907 -5.228 -1.522

directed attention

Metacognitive: -5.780 30 .000 -13.750 2.379 -18.608 -8.892

comprehension monitoring

Table 7: Independent Samples 2-tailed t-test for significantly different sub-strategies

At the level of tactics, there are significant differences at p≤0.005 for two cognitive tactics (‘fixation on spelling’,

‘inferring information using world knowledge’) and five metacognitive tactics (‘identifying a failure in

concentration’, ‘identifying a problem with the amount of input’, ‘identifying a problem with the process of

answering a question’, ‘confirming that comprehension has taken place’, ‘identifying partial understanding’), as

shown in Tables 8 and 9. We discuss each of these briefly.

‘Fixation on spelling’ (CFSP) was not reported at all by the UOL participants but this tactic does seem to be

reported by several of the GDUFS participants (1.58) as a way of fixing, or not, what they have heard

I knew it was ‘Wales’, but I did not know how to spell it (GDUFS participant).

Tactic Native speaker N Mean SD SEM

status

Cognitive: fixation – spelling NESE 8 0.00 0.00 0.00

NC 24 1.58 1.79 0.37

Cognitive: Inferring answer – NESE 8 5.63 3.96 1.40

using world knowledge

NC 24 0.71 1.12 0.23

Metacognitive: directed attention – NESE 8 0.38 0.74 0.26

failure of attention

NC 24 3.38 2.06 0.42

Metacognitive: real-time assessment NESE 8 6.88 2.90 1.02

of input- problem with the amount

NC 24 2.46 2.36 0.48

Metacognitive: real time assessment NESE 8 6.25 4.27 1.51

of output – process

NC 24 2.50 2.41 0.49

Metacognitive: comprehension monitoring –NESE 8 0.88 2.48 0.88

confirm comprehension has taken place

NC 24 7.25 3.63 0.74

Metacognitive: comprehension NESE 8 0.63 0.74 0.26

monitoring – partial understanding

NC 24 3.13 1.77 0.37

NESE=Native/Expert speaker of English NC= Native speaker of Chinese.

SD=Standard Deviation SEM= Std. Error Mean

Table 8: Descriptive Statistics for significantly different tactics

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Sub-strategy t df Sig Mean Std. Error 95% Confidence Interval

Difference Difference of the Difference

Lower Upper

Cognitive: fixation – spelling* -4.329 23 .000 -1.583 0.37 -2.340 -.827

Cognitive: Inferring answer – 5.598 30 .000 4.917 0.88 3.123 6.710

using world knowledge

Metacognitive: directed -3.995 30 .000 -3.000 0.75 -4.534 -1.466

attention – failure of attention

Metacognitive: real-time 4.335 30 .000 4.417 1.02 2.336 6.497

assessment of input –

problem with the amount

Metacognitive: real time 3.111 30 .004 3.750 1.21 1.288 6.212

assessment of output –

process

Metacognitive: -4.602 30 .000 -6.375 1.39 -9.204 -3.546

comprehension monitoring –

confirm comprehension

has taken place

Metacognitive: -3.861 29 .001 -2.505 0.65 -3.833 -1.178

comprehension monitoring –

partial understanding

*=Equal variance not assumed (Levene’s test for equality of variance).

CI=Confidence Interval. See Appendix 4 for an explanation of the tactic acronyms.

Table 9: Independent Samples 2-tailed t-test for significantly different tactics

Inferring information using world knowledge (CIW) was, rather surprisingly, used more by the UOL participants

(5.63) than by GDUFS participants (0.71)

You actually have to use your own knowledge to think of the best answer, so it’s different and strange in

one set of questions, but I suppose that might be the object of it (UOL participant).

Amongst metacognitive strategies, ‘identification of a failure in concentration’ (MDAF) was reported more by the

GDUFS participants (3.38) than the UOL participants (0.38). Again this is probably related to the fact that the UOL

participants were less concerned about their performance on the test.

I was absentminded at that time (GDUFS participant).

‘Identifying a problem with the amount of input’ (MAIA) was rather surprisingly reported more by the UOL

participants (6.88) than the GDUFS participants (2.46), perhaps because of the unfamiliarity with the exam

format.

So I miss, I miss a lot of the blanks. Yeah. Yes, because I have to read and listen at the same time

(GDUFS participant).

I mean because those two are quite close together at least that’s what I thought, I thought those two

[questions] were answered quite quickly (UOL participant).

This last comment reflected a common assumption among both UOL and GDUFS participants that the

information needed for questions would be distributed relatively equally throughout the listening text.

‘Assessment of output related to the process of answering a question’ (MAOP) was reported an average of 6.25

times by UOL as opposed to 2.50 for GDUFS participants. The following comment from a UOL participant related

to where the numbers appeared on the answer paper.

I mean I suppose in order to be able to fill it out in an official way you need some indication of where you

have to write especially there, if someone wasn’t confident about their own writing abilities in English it

could make it difficult, could be confusing. It seems a bit needless because all the others are at the end

of the sentence apart from that one [question 15].

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Differences in the amount of experience of IELTS style examination paper resulted in the UOL group

commenting more on the layout of paper or question than their more practiced GDUFS colleagues.

I wanted to write the first of July, but that’s four words (UOL participant).

Oh, I think in this [section], um, gap-filling, I think it is very difficult (GDUFS participant).

‘Confirming that comprehension has taken place’ (MCMC) was reported 0.88 times by UOL and 7.25 by GDUFS

participants. Again, this is likely to reflect both the higher confidence of the UOL participants about their ability

to answer questions and the lack of a felt need to check what they had done.

The interest question was fairly straightforward (UOL participant).

And the name, and the first name, he said that slowly, so I can hear very . . . very clear (GDUFS participant).

For the tactic of ‘identifying partial understanding’ (MCMP), the UOL figure was 0.63 as against 3.13 for the

GDUFS participants. This is in line with the view that GDUFS participants were less likely to feel they had

completely understood what they had heard.

I didn’t quite remember clearly, only that the man grunted that when he was handing in fees in the bank,

he had given some extra money (GDUFS participant).

The data from the native/expert users was related to more than one question as in the example below related to

the final part of the test.

Again quite a lot of, quite difficult I thought. I didn’t get it all (UOL participant).

While the differences between the groups in tactics usage, where these are significant, do raise some interesting

issues, such as why inferring information using general world knowledge was not more widely used by the

GDUFS participants, most of the differences are easier to account for in terms of attitudes to the examination

rather than an issue with the validity of the IELTS examination.

Generally, there do not seem to be any significant differences between native speakers of English and non-

native speakers of English in terms of the strategies, sub-strategies and tactics they use when taking an IELTS

Listening Test.

3.5.2 Research Question 2

What differences are there between Chinese speaking candidates preparing for undergraduate and

graduate studies in terms of the strategies, sub-strategies and tactics they use when taking an IELTS

Listening Test?

The pre-undergraduate students reported over one hundred and sixty strategies compared to just under one

hundred and forty for pre-postgraduates with most of this difference accounted for by meta-cognitive strategies

where the figures were about one hundred and twenty as against about one hundred respectively. However, the

analysis of the protocols in terms of strategies, sub-strategies and tactics indicates that the difference between

the means for undergraduate and postgraduate students were not significant.

3.5.3 Research Question 3

To what extent are the strategies, sub-strategies and tactics used by native and non-native speakers of

English in an IELTS Listening Test different from those reported in Goh’s studies of Listening?

We address this question using the data from the differences between to Goh’s taxonomy (Appendix 3) and the

taxonomy we used on our data sets (Appendix 4). The process by which we altered Goh’s taxonomy is described

above in section 3.4.1. As noted there, some of the changes relate to differences in our conception of listening

rather than the IELTS context and so are not relevant here.

A second group of changes concerns tactics which are typical of examinations rather than listening beyond the

exam hall but which would be extremely difficult to eliminate. The relevant tactics are listed below:

! Comprehension monitoring: confirm that an exam question has been answered (MCMQA)

! Comprehension monitoring: identify examination questions not answered (MCMQN)

! Comprehension monitoring: Identify examinations skills not applied (MCMS)

! Comprehension evaluation against examination questions (MCEQ)

! Comprehension evaluation against experience of examinations (MCEP)

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A third group of changes related to the ways students used skills other than listening in the examination.

Four relate to reading:

! Reconstruct meaning from examination question (CRQ)

! Inferring information from the listening text and exam question paper (CIQ)

! Prepare using exam paper questions (MPQ)

! Pay selective attention to exam questions (MSAQ)

! Assess input in terms of links between elements in listening text and examination questions (MAIQ)

Three relate to writing:

! Real time assessment of output in terms of quantity required (e.g. one or two words) (MAOQ)

! Real time assessment of output in terms of process required (e.g. multiple choice vs., gap fill) (MAOP)

! Real time assessment of output in terms of intermediate processes (e.g. note taking) (MAOI)

It would be hard to design a listening examination which did not involve the use of other skills but it might be

worth considering whether some of the reading could be replaced by further listening.

Finally at the level of sub-strategy we eliminated Goh’s strategy of elaboration and, while we kept in the sub-strategy

of visualisation, we found no instances of this in our data sets. The lack of elaboration reflects the fact that,

unlike many other kinds of listening, exam listening rarely requires the listener to use the information obtained

from a listening text in some other communicative activity. It is hard to see how this might be done if the focus is

to remain on listening though a more holistic view of language use might permit this.

The absence of visualisation again seems to relate to the largely verbal nature of the examination paper. This may

well be appropriate in a text which replicates a phone conversation, as in the first section on the examination

paper we used, but seems less appropriate with the academic lecture in the final section. Academic lectures are

increasingly multimodal (O’Halloran 2004) and the test writers might consider whether this could be built into

future tests.

While many of these changes raise issues related to the examination, they can also be interpreted in a way

which relates to the role of native or expert users in research into the effectiveness of the IELTS examination.

This is illustrated in differing frequencies of the use of what we term examination tactics by UOL and GDUFS

participant (see Table 10).

The difference between the means for the tactics for UOL and GDUFS participants were not significantly

different. However, we were surprised that native/expert users often made more use of the examination specific

tactics than did the potential candidates. This may reflect the fact that the relative unfamiliarity of native/expert

users with this examination leads them to rely on general examination taking strategies and tactics.

Whatever the reason, it does raise some quite difficult issues about how data from native/expert users can be

used to inform test design. The native/expert users are treating the IELTS as a specific kind of task in its own

right, independent of the TLU tasks that test writers relate it to. In terms of the strategies and tactics, the test

does not have task authenticity even for native speakers/expert users of English, though this may be seen less a

critique of the IELTS Tests than of the use of task authenticity as a criterion for test evaluation. An exam is almost

always perceived as an exam rather than as a replication of some other language task.

The aim of the IELTS Test is in some sense to evaluate the relationship between the competence of those taking

the examination and expert users of English in the TLU. However how this relationship can be informed by the

way expert users of English behave in an exam needs further exploration.

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Tactic Native speaker N Mean SD SEM

status

Metacognitive: Comprehension Monitoring: NESE 8 0.63 0.92 0.32

confirm that an exam question has

NC 24 1.75 2.21 0.45

been Answered

Metacognitive: Comprehension Monitoring: NESE 8 3.38 3.78 1.34

identify examination Questions Not answered

NC 24 4.75 2.36 0.48

Metacognitive: Comprehension Monitoring: NESE 8 0.13 0.35 0.13

Identify examinations Skills not applied

NC 24 0.42 0.83 0.17

Metacognitive: Comprehension Evaluation NESE 8 5.63 5.40 1.91

against examination Questions

NC 24 2.54 2.25 0.46

Metacognitive: Comprehension Evaluation NESE 8 2.00 2.88 1.02

against experience of Examinations

NC 24 2.50 3.19 0.65

Cognitive: Reconstruct meaning from NESE 8 1.86 2.61 0.99

examination question

NC 24 0.08 0.28 0.06

Cognitive: Inferring information from the NESE 8 3.88 6.14 2.17

listening text and exam question paper

NC 24 2.50 2.41 0.49

Metacognitive: Prepare using exam NESE 8 11.88 11.28 3.99

paper Questions

NC 24 1.58 2.13 0.43

Metacognitive: Pay Selective Attention NESE 8 0.25 0.46 0.16

to exam Questions

NC 24 0.46 0.83 0.17

Metacognitive: Real time Assessment of NESE 8 2.38 4.10 1.45

Output in terms of Quantity required

NC 24 0.42 0.78 0.16

(e.g. one or two words)

Metacognitive: Real time Assessment of NESE 8 6.25 4.27 1.51

Output in terms of Process required

NC 24 2.50 2.41 0.49

e.g. multiple choice vs., gap fill

Metacognitive: Real time Assessment of NESE 8 0.25 0.71 0.25

Output in terms of Intermediate processes

NC 24 2.42 2.48 0.51

e.g. note taking

None of the differences are significant at p<0.05 SD=Standard Deviation. SEM=Std. Error Mean

NESE=Native/Expert speaker of English NC= Native speaker of Chinese

Table 10: Descriptive statistics for “examination” tactics

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4DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This study has shown that there are relatively few significant differences between the performances of

native/expert users of English and potential IELTS candidates with Chinese as a mother tongue and the way in

which they carry out the examination. This provides evidence for arguing that the IELTS Test does provide an

accurate representation of candidates’ language abilities.

The study found that there were no significant differences between pre-undergraduate and pre-postgraduate

students taking the IELTS Test. Again, this supports the validity of the IELTS test. However, this lack of significant

differences may have been partially related to the small numbers of participants in this study and it would be

worth investigating this issue with a larger number of participants.

The study found that the range of tactics reported by participants taking the IELTS Examination differed somewhat

from the strategies reported in a non-examination context. This raises at least two issues about the IELTS Examination

which may need further investigation: firstly what texts are used in the IELTS test and, secondly, the use of

native/expert users of English as one way of assessing the validity of the IELTS task

4.1 Choice of texts

At the moment, students are exposed to a listening text and a written text comprising the test rubric and

questions. The form of the examination requires that candidates make use of the written text to answer question

and it may be worth exploring whether some of the written texts may be replaced by additional listening texts.

For test taking purposes, one advantage of written questions in a listening examination is that it reduces reliance

on memory. So, for example, in some sections of IELTS Listening, there may be ten or more items and candidates

would need to have a very good memory to answer all ten items based on a single hearing of the text, particularly

for questions where candidates have to fill in the blanks.

If a decision were made to have more spoken questions, this might be addressed by reducing the length of the

sections, though this would reduce the text authenticity of what students hear. An alternative is to move to a

system where the candidates hear the recording of both text and questions twice. This could be justified in

terms of authenticity on the grounds that the second hearing compensates for the lack of contextual information

that would be available to listeners outside a test or language learning situation.

However, our preferred solution is to maintain the convention that candidates only listen once to the spoken

text but without seeing or hearing the questions. Although such a change would make the ability to take notes a

more significant part of the listening construct, it would ensure that the listening was focussed more directly on

understanding spoken input rather than on combining more or less authentic spoken and more or less

inauthentic written text.

Candidates might then listen to, or read, the questions in their current format. Providing a way of staging access

to the written text might well be difficult and would also make it harder to separate out listening and reading

abilities so we would favour the questions being spoken rather than written. This would involve a major change

to the IELTS test and so would need to be trialled on native/expert speakers of English.

In addition, many of the TLU tasks that the IELTS Test is based on, e.g. lectures, are now multi-modal events and

it may be that test constructors need to consider the inclusion of other modalities such as still or moving visual

images. There are clearly logistic issues for a paper-based testing system where replicating exposure to, for example,

PowerPoint slides for relatively short periods of time are difficult but this would be less problematic for a

computer-based testing system.

4.2 The use of native/expert users of English in test validation

The second issue relates to the use of native/expert users of English as one way of assessing the validity of the

IELTS task. The data collected in this study suggests that native/expert users of English treat the IELTS not as

derived from the TLU tasks to which it relates but as a specific kind of task in its own right. This makes it difficult

to evaluate the relevance of the native/expert user data collected in this study to the validation of the IELTS Test.

One line of argument would be as follows: the IELTS examination is designed to judge to what extent candidates

can perform as well as expert users of English in non-test contexts. At the moment, we have limited information

about how expert users behave in these non-test contexts but we know how expert users behave in test contexts

and this might be thought to relate in a systematic way to how they behave in non-test contexts. So, if candidates

behave in a similar way to expert users in a test context, this is evidence for saying they will behave in a similar

way to expert users in non-test contexts. At several points, this argument relies on plausibility rather than evidence.

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In particular, the claim that expert users’ behaviour in test contexts relates to their behaviour in non-test contexts,

though not unreasonable, is largely unsupported. Indeed, it is hard to see how we might collect evidence for

such a link in most non-test contexts. How would one collect data about how someone processes and interacts

with a credit card call centre, without the possibly distorting effects of setting up an experimental context?

However, in at least one context that is used in IELTS, the lecture, it would be possible to carry out research into

how native speaker /expert users of English reach understandings of what is going on. When students attend

lectures in higher education institutions, they are not provided with explicit questions to which they must find

answers (Badger, Sutherland, White and Haggis 2001). Instead, they annotate handouts or write notes which

then contribute to answers to examination question or assignment tasks. It would not be very difficult to research

using interviews (Sutherland, Badger and White 2002) or stimulated recall (Hodgson 1997). This research could

also link fairly directly to the design of tests of academic listening in IELTS.

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teaching and studying in Higher Education, 2nd ed, eds F Marton, D Hounsell and N Entwistle, Scottish Academic

Press, Edinburgh, pp 159-171

McCarter, S, & Ash, J, 2003, IELTS testbuilder, Oxford: Macmillan,

Nagle, S, and Sanders, S, 1986, ‘Comprehension theory and second language pedagogy’, TESOL Quarterly,

vol 20, no 1, pp 9-26

O’Halloran, K, 2004, Multimodal discourse analysis: Systemic-functional perspectives, Continuum, London

O’Malley, J, and Chamot, A, 1990, Learning strategies in second language acquisition, Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge

Oxford, R, 1990, Language learning strategies: What every teacher should know, Heinle, Boston, Mass

Phakiti, A, 2003, ‘A closer look at gender and strategy use in L2 Reading’, Language Learning, vol 53, no 4, pp 649-702,

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Purpura, J, 1999, Learner strategy use and performance on language tests: a structural equation modeling

approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

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in language testing, eds L Cheng, Y Watanabe and A Curtis, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, pp 73-96

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Culture in second language teaching and learning, ed E Hinkel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 13-27

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Higher Education, vol 26, no 4, pp 377-388

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APPENDIX 1: NON-NATIVE SPEAKER PROTOCOL

The method I used to deal with the section 1 is to circle the key words while I was reading the introduction. And

then I looked through the former questions roughly and judged the speaking speed and difficulty while he was

reading the examples. Afterward I just did it according to the question order.

Shall I talk them one by one? You can make a brief analysis if you think there are some difficult questions.

I’m not very sure about the question 4 ‘day of birth’ because I was a little bit absent-minded then.

And when it came to the tenth one, since I habitually do it according to the question order, he talked about the

tenth one first during the ninth and tenth part which is different from my habit, therefore I just guessed it.

I’ve got some but they just flashed by.

Yes, I probabl y recalled a litt le and then I guessed them.

Section 2 is different from section 1 because of the faster speed and the gaping filling part. The fast speed is

acceptable in the multiple choice part because I just circled the key words, but the gap-filling is relatively hard

for it has word limit. Besides I think section 2 usually includes two parts and the second part is faster than the

first part.

And question 17, he said ‘he give up smoking’ and another word which I can not catch, so I just guessed its

meaning and filled in a familiar word.

And when it came to the eighteenth and the twentieth, I didn’t catch them and do it orderly due to the faster

speed. I just filled in a word probably because of my poor memory. So that’s probably how I did them.

Maybe I have more confidence in the nineteenth and the twentieth but little in the seventeenth and the eighteenth.

Oh, one by one? In the first question [question 11] he said that he did some exercises while he went to take part

in a class. Since he felt painstaking if he smoked and he needed to ‘touch his toes’ when he did that exercise.

Then, he couldn’t do that. I was a little bit hesitant to choose B or C that is ‘smoked’ or ‘couldn’t touch his toes’.

I had thought about it after the listening of this question and I finally chose C because his problem was always

about the ‘smoke’.

And question 12 I got it clearly in which he said ‘he travel across London in order to get cigarette’. It mentioned

about his fancy for cigarettes.

I also had hesitation in question 13 on whether he gets to sleep or get up early in the morning because the

former section has mentioned that he gets up at 3 am. to smoke, so I chose D according to my former memory.

Um, I didn’t hear question 14 clearly, ‘stopped smoking’, I just heard a date—July 1st and I filled it in.

The whole sentence has mentioned about it in question 15, but I was not familiar with that word, so I can just

spell it based on my experience.

And question 16, what he said seemed not like the original words and he seemed not to mention about the

whole sentence ‘work side effect’. As for this question, I filled in the answer for question 16 after I heard the key

word—’giving up smoking’ of question 17.

Because it mentioned ‘habit’ during the process of ‘cut down smoking and ‘give up smoking’ of Q15. Then according

to ‘work side effect’, I thought it should be ‘habit’.

Just some words which I cannot spell out. Yes, spelling, especially in gap-filling.

Your attentio n will be distra c ted usual ly by two hesitatin g answers .

I think section 3 is a little bit simpler in content and slower in speed compared with section 2, may be we were

more familiar with its content, so we catch it easily.

I’m quite sure about the question 21 and 22, in which 21 is ‘past three years’ and 22 is ‘got a job’. I can do questions

like gap-filling more fluently because I know something about abbreviation.

When it came to question 23, the first time I heard…the Lorraine said that she would ‘turn to exam week’, so I wrote

‘exam week’ firstly.

But later I heard ‘turn to Wales’, in which I saw the preposition ‘to’ and so I filled in Wales. I guess it’s a place name.

And then for question 24 since he didn’t said clearly that he had ‘any mistake in his project’, I just guessed that

it’s probably because he was too ‘easy to make mistake’, so I chose A.

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I think the answer for question 25 is B because he has mentioned that……because I chose ‘he has some mistake’

as the answer for question 1 (Q24) and later I heard that there is something wrong with his end, so I chose B

Besides I often made some written mistakes, like B and D. Since there is time for us to fill in the answer sheet in

IELTS and I would look through that question again while I was writing, so it’s not a big problem in this part.

Question 26, it seems that there is an ‘end’ to modify, so I chose C.

Question 27 is just a copy of the original sentences.

I was hesitant to choose the answer for question 28 because both B and D were mentioned and I had to choose

a better answer—B.

About this? Since he has mentioned that Frances’ project is better than before and ‘you can get a PhD’ in the

last question, therefore I thought if he has mentioned that he did better than other classmates as he kept

studying. I think it should be a summary because I didn’t get it from the original text

As for question 27, I just roughly heard a time and I filled it in the blank for there was little time to look through

the former part.

In question 30, Steve has mentioned that not to ‘go on his research’ firstly because he had to ‘turn to his work’.

I was a little bit uncertain about answer D until he later mentioned that ‘he didn’t earn some money to do the

things he would like to do’. So I finally chose C : ‘He goes to earn some money’

There is still the problem about spelling in question 21 and 23, because I forgot the spelling of some words and

I just spelt them out according to the pronunciations. And next, there are also ambiguous choices in section 3,

so I cannot fill it in the black successfully by getting it from the original text and I had to think it over like I did

question 28.

Compared with question 29, I did question 25 and 26 sooner for I got the answer in the text and their answers

are shorter. Actually I often spend some time on those equivocal answers.

Section 4 is a little bit difficult for its speed is faster than the former three sections. According to my experience

of taking IELTS, section 4 usually refers to something about geography, biology and technology, so there will be

some unfamiliar words in this section.

I missed question 35 while I was thinking question 34 because I felt puzzled about his former words

Usually I would give it up usually in that case and turn to make sure the other questions. And the method is

circling the key words as the former three questions. I heard ‘technics and training’ clearly in question 32 but I

was not very sure about question 32, so I just wrote ‘special economic’. What I heard was like ‘ishal economic’,

and then I cannot catch it because it’s a little bit fast.

Later, I circled ‘experience, security and lack’ in No. 33. According to the three key words I knew that its original

text is based on this order, so I listened to it seriously when he mentioned ‘insecurity’ at the thought of the

coming answer. Then I filled in ‘a lack of awareness of the part of managers’ for question 33

and ‘set the management tasks’ for question 34. Since he didn’t read the whole sentence in No. 34, what I wrote

is not the same as the original text, then…

probably. I missed No. 35 may be because the former two ‘goalposts’ are beyond my knowledge so that I could

not catch the following part. Maybe it’s related to my psychology to some extent. Speed is only one of the

reasons but the unfamiliar words matters most. My mood will be influenced if I was not familiar with the word

before the blank.

When it came to No. 36, I was slightly puzzled at first until I heard he ‘replying to email’ I recalled that the former

part has mentioned that he ‘mentioning the calling’, so I wrote ‘contact her’ according to the text though I would

change it a little while I wrote the answer on the answer sheet.

No. 37 I heard the answer directly from the text: ‘you cannot expect your staff respect you’. Yes, I just very sure

about this question.

I circled the key word for No. 38 which was ‘technology’

Soon in No. 37 I heard ‘your staff respect you’ and then ‘technology’ was mentioned later. And I wrote the answer

for this question according to its text that is ‘company’s strategy or practice’.

In No. 39……based on my key word ?In groups……? and it is ?tasks to…make…in groups or something else?? As for

this question, I heard its text which is not always about this and he said ?other bullying strategies?, so I wrote a

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very familiar word ?brainstorm?. At the first, I thought he would read the whole sentence directly but actually he

divided it into two or three sentences. Afterwards I heard ‘and way’, since ‘and ways in which’ was directly

mentioned in the latter part ‘in which they can be counted’, I just filled in ‘counted’.

The major problem is the speed and the new words in section 4. Since the majority of the section 4 is gap-filling,

the new words became a big obstacle. The only way is to spell them out according to their pronunciation even

though they were still unknown.

Besides there are some traps in section 4 because of its requirement. Sometimes it requires ‘no more than three

words’. What I have met is ‘no more than two words’, so we have to pay attention to it or else you will fail.

APPENDIX 2: NATIVE SPEAKER PROTOCOL

Right so you want me to describe how I’m working it out ok,

well obviously it’s an anagram,

so that one seems quite easy because instantly I’m seeing well I think it’s table

and it’s not that really separated it’s just, they’ve just put the t in the middle rather than the a and the b.

I suppose because I’ve instantly seen those letters together and that’s the most likely pattern, I’ve seen them

before and instantly thought that

I’m having some trouble with the second one it seems a lot less immediate,

maybe they’ve scrambled the letters a lot more effectively,

possibly because it’s, are there more vowels, yes I think there are, there’s three vowels

Oh it’s a mouse that’s what it is. I just thought,

I started looking at it backwards then it becomes a lot easier

because I suppose the first bit which is O S U

if you look at that reading it backwards it becomes a lot easier,

I can’t really describe it better than that.

It is important to blank temptation,

I would say shun because I suppose that just sounds like quite a formal sentence and shun possibly but I think

shun would fit best in keeping with the character for that sentence

There is nothing so . . . practical

I suppose because possible doesn’t make sense,

plausible makes sense very loosely but not really the correct use,

I think potential is a bit big, and doesn’t make any sense

so I’m going to say practical.

Read the following text and choose the best answer, say why you reject the wrong answer,

right, what was the weather like?

I think brillig because, this is just a guess but I’m guessing that, I’m mean because it’s not strictly a word

obviously but um, I think he is sort of using that as a disambiguation to make that a word forming brilliant

describing the weather, that’s the best I can do,

I’ll go down to six.

What came through the talgy woods,

um, the jabberwock, yes because it says the jabberwock with eyes aflame came wiffling through the talgy wood,

yes so the jabberwock, so that’s b for that question

Seven, the jabberwock is dangerous; because it says beware the jabberwock, the jaw that bites the claws that

catch, which insinuates danger.

[subject listens to instructions for the test]

I thought the instructions were very clear,

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I don’t know I suppose it’s one of those things where you are listening to it but sort of thinking more about what

you are actually going to be doing

I mean it was very well phrased and everything and it seemed very clear

the only bit I don’t really understand is why you have to transfer your answers at the end, that might be

confusing.

So is that then the second I’m going to hear this conversation.

[subject listens to section one of the tapescript]

Seemed quite complicated for a, I’m just imagining if I wasn’t speaking English.

Yes I suppos e it’s fairly clear, so they want you to basic ally writ e what you hear down , yes that’s fine.

It’s quite fast;

it’s good that obviously because I did not know how to spell Moore

yes it is quite fast.

There is potentially the bit where it says the 13th of 7th

but I mean probably most people would get that.

It’s strange it’s very different to any other speaking and listening tests I’ve ever done, because it’s very specific

about interest payments and banking, which is very strange,

but I mean the questions all seem fine they are all fairly self explanatory to me.

Once again I think it’s quite fast, but I suppose if you where, oh I don’t know. I mean I think there fine, they’re

fairly, well they say what you are suppose to do and they say it in simple language so yes.

It is another payment to another restaurant but that’s not really the right answer because the thing that he is

really worried about,

but I suppose that’s just a bit of a tricky question, there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a bit mean, fair enough.

Once again, I suppose there’s no ambiguity him saying the interest has gone up and she’s saying it has gone

down,

so that means C,

but I wouldn’t be entirely sure if it’s clear whether we are saying what the caller thinks what’s happened to the

interest or what has actually happened.

The only thing about that was, this might sound a little bit silly, if I had been learning say, if this was in German, you

know this thing where they say 020 I don’t know if people would understand that because surely they would have

learnt zero, I mean maybe not I suppose it would be how colloquial their teaching had been, just a thought anyway

[time for checking answer]

Seems kind of pointless, because you wouldn’t, I mean that half minute thing because you wouldn’t really, I mean

you can’t hear it again and you are going to have been concentrating hard on each question so you’re not really

going to have anything more than just worrying about did I get that one right, you know if you could check maybe

having a summary of the conversation that might be more effective but I don’t really see the point of that bit.

[subject listens to section 2]

Yes that l ooks fine simple.

I didn’t get thirteen,

I think, I can’t be sure that he mentioned all of those things actually

I mean because he did have trouble giving up smoking,

but obviously doing those things

so that didn’t seem very clear.

I mean that one’s more complicated than the previous one because it’s sort of going through each section,

bit by bit, it’s giving you a whole conversation,

I mean because those two are quite close together at least that’s what I thought, I thought those two

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[QUESTIONS] were answered quite quickly,

but that one I was sort of listening for, because in comprehensions like this you often find like there’s the little bit

saying, ‘did you have trouble giving up smoking’? ‘Yes I did have trouble giving up smoking’ (time 8.38) and so

you look out for that bit,

but I didn’t, but that just might be a habit from doing this kind of thing,

but I didn’t, well the answer certainly didn’t leap out at me, I didn’t get 13

I suppose if I was doing the test I would just go right, well he’s given up smoking so I’ll put that because, it’s probably

most likely to be correct,

but I didn’t actually get it.

Sorry is this, [subject looking at question 14-20] is there going to be more of him talking, or do we fill that out

from what I’ve just heard.

[Subject listens to section 2b]

Oh better do all this quickly.

Well I didn’t get the first one

it seemed very fast,

he just said a date

and it was like almost the first word he said and I was going, what was that?

But then he kept talking, so that was tricky apart from that as I was saying before he sort of, he says, it’s basically

paraphrasing the sentence, so that’s quite easy,

but apart from that it seemed fairly …

apart from just because it’s something people can panic about in exams because it’s got a little line, I mean I

suppose in order to be able to fill it out in an official way you need some indication of where you have to write

especially there, if someone wasn’t confident about their own writing abilities in English it could make it difficult,

could be confusing. It seems a bit needless because all the others are at the end of the sentence apart from

that one [question 15] . So it’s not like testing really, I mean their ability in the middle of the sentence with only

one, so it seems strangely done.

[30 second to check answers]

Once again I don’t really see the point because you can’t really check it unless you’ve got a really good memory or

you hear it again, because, all you can do it brood on how well you think you did. I don’t think that it’s a good idea

that the question number is; I think that might be confusing because the question number is put immediately

after the rest of the sentence, [in questions 21 to 23] so it seems very confusing. Just then I was looking at it

and thinking have they tried to incorporate the question number into the question, it seems a bit strange. But

then I realised it’s just where they want you to write the answer, so I think it would be quite easy to just put 21

on the left of the question like it is and all the others rather than on the right, it seems a bit strange and

probably a bit confusing I would think.

Yes apar t fro m the numbe r thing i t’s very simple.

The only think I would say about that one is, it’s all fine apart from, there’s quite a lot at the beginning where they

don’t really answer any of the questions

and then it say’s 28, what the tutor thinks about Francis’s chances of getting funding,

and it very quickly say’s

like well three years ago,

and at that point you have to be going very quickly, and so you would just lose is through no fault of your own,

just because you have to concentrate on that, and by the time that you got back to the tape it had gone onto

the next one,

or so it says, I mean for question 30 it says return to his job

which left me thinking if that was actually the case because he says he has got a job lined up,

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I mean if you where just looking at it purely from a I suppose a tactical point of view he not really returning to a

job, he’s got a job, so that could be confusing.

Might make some think that it was C. but that’s all I’ve got for that section.

Just because this one on each question you are getting more information than you are previously, I suppose the

half minute could actually do a bit better because you are not having to rely on so much on your own memory

you can think, well da, dum, da, dum, da, dum oh right, sorry that wasn’t particularly well phrased.

Just because you get more information in the actual questions and in the answer you would stand a better

chance of checking in that half minute

[subject reads questions 31-33]

Once again it’s a bit confusing having the number, but not so much there because, having the number in the

question it’s not as confusing as it was previously there because it’s., it seem more incongruous than it did before.

[subject lists to tape script for questions 31-33]

I don’t need to say once again that could be confusing because I was starting to think, oh are we going straight

on, because he kept talking. But no I suppose maybe if it was more clearly phrased it just the 31 to 33

Actually looking back it did but I suppose you could panic, I don’t know that’s ambiguous

Once again it’s one where the answers aren’t necessarily in order

they’re a conversation well not a conversation a speech,

quite a realistic speech, not the most exiting one.

I think it says not blank or replying to e-mails,

and I thought that might be memoing

but I wasn’t sure if that was a word, and obviously if I didn’t know English that would be more of a problem.

Also with 35 it says stopping individuals blank to criticism

and for 34 and 38 and 37, I was waiting for the right word because I thought he would say it

but that one he didn’t

so I put capacity because [that’s the closest word I could think of]

from the gist of what he was saying that’s the closest word I could think of

but it seems different to instead of picking out the word from a sentence which is what you do for most of the

other questions, well 34, 37, 38, 39 and 40,

you actually have to use your own knowledge to think of the best answer, so it’s different and strange in one set

of questions, but I suppose that might be the object of it

that’s all I’ve got for that section.

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APPENDIX 3: GOH’S 2002 TAXONOMY

SSub-strategy Tactic

Inferencing use contextual clues, use familiar content words,

draw on knowledge of the world,

apply knowledge about the target language

Elaboration draw on world knowledge,

draw on knowledge about the target language

Prediction anticipate general contexts,

anticipate details while listening

Contextualisation place input in a social or linguistic context,

find related information on hearing a key word,

relate one part of text to another

Translation find L1 equivalents for selected key words,

translate a sequence or utterance

Fixation stop to think about the spelling of unfamiliar words,

stop to think about the meaning of words,

memorize/repeat the sounds of unfamiliar words,

memorize words or phrases for later processing

Visualisation imagine scenes events, objects etc being described,

mentally display the shape of key words

Reconstruction reconstruct meaning from words heard,

reconstruct meaning from notes taken

Pre-listening preview contents, rehearse sounds,

encourage oneself to relax

Selective attention listen to words in groups, listen for gist,

listen for content words,

notice how information is structured pay attention to repetitions,

notice intonation, listen to specific parts of the input,

pay attention to visuals

Directed attention concentrate hard,

continue to list in spite of difficulty

Comprehension monitoring confirm that comprehension has taken place,

identify words or ideas not understood,

check current interpretation with content of the message,

check current interpretation with prior knowledge

Real-time assessment of input assess the importance of problematic parts that are heard,

determine the potential value of subsequent parts of input

Comprehension evaluation check interpretation against some external sources,

check interpretation using prior knowledge,

match interpretation with the context of the message

S=Strategy

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Cognitive

Meta-cognitive

APPENDIX 4: ADAPTED TAXONOMY OF STRATEGIES, SUB-STRATEGIES AND TACTICS

Cognitive strategies

Fixation (F) (Focussing attention on decoding a small part of a text)

! Spelling (Sp)

! Phonemes or sounds (P)

! Words or parts of input (W)

! Repeat /Memorise sounds (RS)

! Repeat/ Memorise words phrases (RW)

Reconstruction answer from input (R) - using key words/phrase to recreate meaning including answering

question (staying with literal meaning)

! Reconstruct meaning from word heard (W)

! Reconstruct meaning from phrase heard (P)

! Reconstruct meaning from notes taken (N)

! Reconstruct meaning from examination question (Q)

Inferring answer (I) by using information from the text plus one of the following(going beyond literal information)

! Co-text (C) - something from the listening text

! Familiar word (F)

! World Knowledge (W)

! Knowledge of target language (L)

! Visual clues (V)

! Exam question paper (Q)

Contextualization (C) (Relating new information to a wider familiar context)

! Social or linguistic context (SL)

! Find related information on hearing a key word (K)

! Relate one part of text to another (T)

Translation (T)

! Find L1 equivalents for key words (K)

! Translate a sequence of utterances (U)

Visualisation

! Imagine scenes being described (I)

! Mentally display the shape/sound of key words (K)

Metacognitive tactics

Pre-listening preparation (P)

! Preview contents (C)

! Rehearse sounds of potential key words (K)

! Encourage oneself to relax (R)

! Using exam paper questions to prepare (Q)

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Selective attention (SA) (Decision to focus on specific aspects of input or identifying from something other than

the listening text what to listen for).

! Listen to words in groups or phrases (P)

! Listen for gist or general meaning (G)

! Listen for key words/phrases (K)

! Listen for discourse markers (D)

! Listen for repetition (R)

! Intonation features (I)

! Pay attention to visuals and body language (V)

! Pay attention to exam questions (Q)

Directed attention (DA) (monitoring attention and avoiding distraction) (C)

! Concentrate hard (C)

! Concentrate hard in spite of difficulty (D)

! Identify a failure in concentration (F)

Real-time assessment of input (AI) (determining the value of specific parts of the input)

! Assess the importance of problematic parts that are heard (P)

! Determine the potential value of later parts of the input (L)

! Determine links between elements in listening text and examination questions (Q)

! A problem with the speed/clarity of the input (S) e.g. the speaker speaks too fast or mumbles

! A problem with the amount of input (A) e.g. too much to read or listen to

Real time assessment of output (AO)

! Quantity required (Q) (e.g. one or two words)

! Process required (P) (e.g. multiple choice vs., gap fill)

! Requirement for intermediate processes (e.g. note taking) (I)

Comprehension monitoring (CM) (Checking interpretation for accuracy while listening)

! Confirm that comprehension has taken place (C)

! Identify words or ideas not understood (N)

! Confirm that an exam question has been answered (QA)

! Identify examination questions not answered (QN)

! Check current interpretation with context of the message (M)

! Check current interpretation with world knowledge (W)

! Identify examinations skills not applied (S)

! Identify partial understanding (P)

Comprehension evaluation (CE) (Checking interpretation for accuracy after listening)

! Against examination questions (Q)

! Against world knowledge (W)

! Against context of message/rest of message (M)

! Against experience of examinations (P)

! Check interpretation using linguistic knowledge (L)

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APPENDIX 5: CONSENT FORM FOR THE RESEARCH

Research background and aims

Thank you for agreeing to participate in this research, which focuses on investigation of how people do an IELTS

listening test. Research findings will be used in the research project for the British Council.

As a researcher, I have an obligation to those taking part in the project to make sure that nothing negative arises

from their involvement. The ethical principles governing my research are set out below.

Code of ethics

! What participants tell me will be treated in the strictest confidence.

! No individual will be identified by name.

! Any data which I might use when reporting the findings of this research will be anonymised.

! Participation in the project is entirely voluntary.

! Participants are under no pressure to answer any question they may feel uneasy about.

Consent

I would very much value your participation in this project and am happy to answer any further questions you may

have about it. RMB 150 (£10) will be paid to each participant in this study.

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