Editor's introduction to Part II

This section of the collection contains four chapters all concerned with different cognitive aspects of academic listening. In the first chapter, Tauroza and Allison report on a study in which subjects had difficulty understanding a lecture when its discourse structure varied from the type of structure with which they were most familiar. The most common discourse pattern in the subjects' field (informatics) is analyzed by the authors as a SITUATION-WHAT TO DO pattern (a variation on the Hoey (1983) PROBLEM-SOLUTION pattern), whereas the lecture the subjects listened to had a more complex PROBLEM-SOLUTIONEVALUATION pattern. It was the EVALUATION section which proved problematic. Although the authors are careful about reading too much into the relation between schemata (a psychological concept) and text structure, their findings nevertheless add support to the idea that schema theory applies as much to lecture comprehension as to other discourse genres, an idea which surprisingly has not been previously investigated empirically. Another feature of the Tauroza and Allison research worthy of mention is the large corpus of informatics lectures which the authors were able to draw on to establish what is a typical and what is a less typical discourse pattern of the lectures their subjects (informatics students) are normally exposed to. Such large corpora allow more generalizable statements to be made about the discourse of lectures than do some of the very small corpora on which previous research has been based.