Table 2.

Listening attributes/subskills and relationship with existing listening skill taxonomies.

Listening attributes/subskills and definitions	Listening Cognitive Ability of China Standards of English (He and Chen, 2017)	Field's (2009)	Aitken's (1978)	Sawaki et al.'s (2009)
A1: Sound discrimination	Identify/retrieve	Input decoding	Understand prosodic patterns
A2: Less frequent vocabulary and expressions	Identify/retrieve	Lexical search	Understand vocabulary	Understand vocabulary
A3: Difficult structures	Identify/retrieve/analyze	Parsing	Understand syntactic patterns
A4: Facts and details	Identify/retrieve/analyze	Meaning construction		Understand important information
A5: Main idea	Analyze/summarize/create	Meaning construction; Discourse construction		Understand overall topic/gist;
A6: Situational context and cultural background inference	Analyze/summarize/ create/evaluate	Meaning construction; Discourse construction	Identify speaker's purpose, attitudes, views, and intentions; Making inferences;	Making inferences
			Identify rhetorical devices.	Understand the structure (rhetorical, discourse).

The attributes and definitions stem from the study of Meng (2013, p. 78, p. 95).