ABSTRACT
This chapter examines listener performances and listener strategies in transactional discourse. It focuses on those aspects of understanding and non-understanding that can be inferred by listener performance on tasks that have tangible outcomes. The chapter defines the cognitive skills that underlie effective listening in transactional discourse. It discusses the reference to situations involving extended listening, situations such as classroom lectures in which a participant is expected to listen continuously for up to a few minutes at a time. Retrospective tasks are those which require responses formulated after listening to a text. The on-line task performances of listeners in closed tasks are easier to interpret than on-line performances in open tasks such as note-taking, because they force the listener to enact selection strategies in real time. Listener performances on prospective tasks, that is, on tasks involving predictions, provide another indirect type of evidence of listener text-representation strategies.
