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So what are we listening for? A comparison of the English listening constructs
in the Japanese National Centre Test and TOEFL^® iBT

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Appendix C: TOEFL^® iBT & J-NCT's
conversational listening taxonomy

Abilities		TOEFL® iBT Examples*	2006 J-NCT Examples*
Phonetic	Discriminate distinctive sounds
	Recognize stress patterns, rhythm, and intonation
	Identify stressed and unstressed words in situations
Syntactic	Recognize word order patterns, indirect forms of grammatical units and sentences	•	#11, #24
Semantic	Recognize vocabulary, cohesive devices		#6
	Detect key words	#5 (Table18)	Sec 4A
	Guess the meaning of words from the contexts	•
	Detect paraphrases	•	•
	Understand colloquial language (idioms, slang, et cetera)	#5 (Table18)	#15
Discourse	Recognize communicative functions of utterances	#4 (Table18)	•
	Reconstruct or infer situations, goals, participants, et cetera	#2 (Table17)	#14
	Use real-world knowledge & experience	•	#4
	Predict outcomes, causes & effects	•	#16
	Recognize coherence in discourse (main, supporting ideas, et cetera)	•	#17 - 19
	Understand rules of conversational interaction (negotiation, turn taking, et cetera)	•
	Recognize performance variables (hesitations, pause, false starts, corrections, et cetera)	•	#2

Adapted from Richards (1983) as cited in Coombe et al (1998, p. 27)
NOTE: This is not an exhaustive list of examples from either test.
• = multiple examples of this characteristic can be found in this test

Main Article	Appendix A	Appendix B	Appendix C	Appendix D	Appendix E
Appendix F	Appendix G	Appendix H	Appendix I	Appendix J	Appendix K

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2006 Pan SIG-Proceedings: Topic Index Author Index Page Index Title Index Main Index
Complete Pan SIG-Proceedings: Topic Index Author Index Page Index Title Index Main Index

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