Monitoring Listening Comprehension in Real Time: Early Observations from the <scp>ReMoDEL</scp> Project

Abstract Developing strong listening skills in a second language (L2) can be challenging for a variety of reasons. Within the context of L2 use in higher education, accurate and timely processing of aural input can be crucial for academic success, particularly because vast amounts of disciplinary‐specific content are delivered via academic lectures in the students' and/or teacher's L2. This brief report introduces and shares early observations from the ReMoDEL project (Real Time Monitoring of Dynamic English Listening), which focuses on student listening comprehension in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) courses set within a multicultural, multilingual context, namely, Sweden. Employing a novel footpedal device to register moments of comprehension and noncomprehension, ReMoDEL identifies instances within EMI lectures when students report challenges in understanding and investigates the cause(s) of those challenges with the overall aims of identifying the myriad influences on comprehension of lecture content, cataloging student recovery strategies, and working to raise teacher awareness of the volatile and individualized nature of listening in EMI. The combination of footpedal data and stimulated recall interviews yielded 89 coded instances of noncomprehension (including multiple coding, when appropriate) that arose during a pilot study, of which a majority related to top‐down aspects of listening (53), followed by affective, multimodal and environmental factors (10 each). Bottom‐up processing issues were sparsely reported (four), and two mistaken pushes occurred. This brief report describes the project as well as quantitative and qualitative data from the pilot study.