title: Cognitive processes, sub-skills and strategies in academic lecture
      listening at a Saudi Arabian university
title: a needs analysis study
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Alkhelaiwi, Sahar
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2017

description: A needs analysis (NA) is widely viewed to be a key process in the
      development and ongoing revision of Language for Specific Purposes
      programmes (e.g. Brown, 2016), of which English for Academic Purposes
      (EAP) is typically considered a part. Determining and describing learners’
      language needs is important, as such information can be used when
      selecting or developing instructional activities for language learning,
      teaching and assessment, including L2 academic listening comprehension
      development. Though some EAP listening NA studies in a number of contexts
      exist, there has been a dearth of detailed analyses of lecture-listening
      processes. Moreover, past EAP listening NA studies are limited in their NA
      methodology. Therefore, the present exploratory, sequential mixed-methods
      NA research sets out to address these gaps by investigating the cognitive
      processing demands of Saudi Arabian students’ listening in academic
      lectures (in an English Language and Literature department). The study
      aims to investigate their target and present listening needs, and
      language-learning listening wants. This study collected, sequenced and
      triangulated data through a five-phase NA approach. The qualitative strand
      began with a spoken target language analysis of five real-world
      (linguistics and literature) lectures (Phase 1) to establish target
      listening needs in terms of cognitive processes and sub-skills. Following
      this, stimulated-recall interviews (Phase 2) were conducted with seven
      students who listened to the lectures collected in Phase 1 to identify
      their present listening needs in terms of cognitive processes, sub-skills
      and strategies. Interviews with five content lecturers and three students
      were then carried out (Phase 3), in which some data from Phases 1 and 2
      were discussed to gather data on processes, sub-skills and strategies in
      relation to target, present and language-learning listening needs. Data
      generated from these three qualitative phases were analysed according to a
      listening framework developed on the basis of the literature (Field, 2013;
      Khalifa &amp; Weir, 2009; Young, 1994; Vandergrift &amp; Goh,
      2012; Aryadoust, Goh &amp; Lee, 2012). Next, an expert panel review
      session was held with four participants (Phase 4) to validate the
      processing needs identified by the researcher by means of randomly
      selected excerpts from Phases 1–3. This fourth phase thereby aimed to
      bridge the qualitative strand (Phases 1–3) and the next quantitative one
      (Phase 5). All previous phases in turn informed a student questionnaire
      designed for Phase 5. This questionnaire was completed by 205 students, it
      collected data pertaining to all of this study’s types of needs.
      Descriptive statistics and a principal component analysis were conducted
      to analyse the questionnaire data. The qualitative results generally
      reveal that academic lecture listening triggers an array of lower-level
      (input decoding, lexical search, syntactic parsing and propositional
      meaning) and higher-level (inferencing, building a mental model, creating
      a text-level representation, creating an intertextual representation)
      cognitive processes as well as different processing sub-skills related to
      these seven cognitive processes. They also show the use of cognitive and
      metacognitive strategies in order to process aural input from lectures in
      the study’s target language use (TLU) situation. Although the qualitative
      strand shows the use of several lower-level cognitive processes and
      sub-skills, considerable focus seems to be given to higher-level
      processes, in particular building a mental model and creating an
      intertextual representation while listening. The quantitative results show
      various similarities to the processes found in the qualitative strand,
      though a number of differences are also present. On the basis of the
      quantitative strand, 12 components are shown to emerge in terms of both
      target and present listening needs. Methodologically, the study suggests
      that NA research should employ different methods in which data collection
      and analyses are sequenced and blended. Furthermore, the study identifies
      several cognitive demands (processes, sub-skills and strategies) that are
      recommended to be enhanced in L2 EAP listening courses so that learners
      can function competently in their future study area, i.e. the TLU. On the
      basis of the findings, an (L2) academic listening model in the context of
      real-world lecture listening processing is formulated, one which
      specifically includes sub-processes that deal with lengthy discourse
      processing. Such sub-processes include the imposition of a hierarchal
      structure on speech, which might be less prominent in other types of
      listening.