Point-Driven Understanding in Engineering Lecture Comprehension  

Oleh:

Olsen, Leslie A. ; Huckin, Thomas N.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: English for Specific Purposes (Full Text) vol. 9 no. 1 (1990), page 33-48.
Fulltext: 09_01_Olsen.pdf (1.1MB)

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/ESP/9 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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Normative speakers have long been known to have trouble understanding academic lectures. ESP researchers and teachers agree that the problem lies mainly at the discourse level, not at the sentence level; accordingly, a body of discourse-oriented teaching materials for lecture comprehension is now on the market. Though a step in the right direction, these materials fail to do justice to the rhetorical, strategic nature of academic lectures. As our study shows, students may understand all the words of a lecture (including lexical connectives and other discourse markers) and yet fail to understand the lecturer's main points or logical argument. Our study was an exploratory one. Fourteen NNS graduate and undergraduate students watched an authentic 16-minute videotaped lecture on a topic in mechanical engineering and then were asked to provide immediate-recall summaries, which were then analyzed in consultation with the lecturer. Although the lecture was clerly structured around several main points, most of the students failed to grasp these points. These results are discussed in terms of listening strategies: the successful students used a "point-driven" strategy while the unsuccessful ones used an "information-driven" strategy. We conclude that students should be taught how to listen to lectures in a more rhetorical, strategic way. More generally, if we are to teach students to understand and communicate more effectively, we should help them see how the organization of their discourse fits into the larger goals, agendas, and contexts in their fields.

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