Abstract

This study explores the lecture comprehension of a group of first-year electronic engineering undergraduates taking a course on “The Human-Computer Interface” in Hong Kong. Following Olsen and Huckin (1990), we focus on the way that discourse structure relates to the comprehension of a lecturer's main points. Our subjects had relatively few difficulties in identifying most of the main points of a chosen lecture extract, which described how filtering can be used to offset information overload in human information processing. There were, however, frequent misrepresentations and omissions in subjects' summaries of one of the main points concerning a warning that errors might result from overuse or misuse of filtering. These misrepresentations appear to have been prompted by differences between the type of lecture format that the students expected and the actual format of the lecture. We describe the implications of our findings for lecture comprehension and EAP teaching.

Introduction

Olsen and Huckin (1990) conducted an exploratory research study into ESL students' comprehension of engineering lectures. They concluded that some of these 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” (p. 33). As an explanation of such outcomes, they argued that many students only expect to gain information from lectures, and thus fail to recognise and appreciate evidence of more complex speaker intentions.