Students ask, tests don’t listen: The misalignment between changing demands of academia, and academic listening pedagogy and assessment

The nature of academic lectures, particularly in North America, is changing from traditional monologic lecturing towards a more dialogic one, where listening is both interactional and transactional, as opposed to solely transactional (i.e., listening to achieve tasks). One important strategy students employ in these increasingly dialogic lectures is questioning. However, empirically, we know too little about student questioning overall, let alone additional language student questioning, particularly in interactive academic contexts, and we lack an interactive listening construct and model that reflect the current ability and strategy demands of academia. Our limited empirical understanding and integration of a key component of interactive listening (i.e., student questioning) can result in limitations in listening pedagogy and assessment. To contribute to our endeavors in reflecting the interactive nature of lecturing in pedagogy and assessment, I propose and explicate a construct and a model that I argue better reflect the nature of academia today, and illustrate their applicability with a demonstration task.