Transformative Teachers
Webinar 10 - Listening and note-taking
Summary notes
Thank you for participating in the Trinity College London teacher support webinar series. We are delighted to have over 1000 teachers from 70 countries participate in the series.
In this webinar Senior Academic Language, Cathy Taylor is interviewed by University Recognition Manager, Jonathan Frank. Cathy and Jonathan discuss listening and note-taking. During the discussion, they explore tips for note-taking skills and reflect on how this can support learners' listening.
If you were unable to attend the webinar, you can watch is again via the following link:
Webinar 10 video - Listening and confidence
Summary of questions and responses
Interview: Cathy Taylor and Jonathan Frank
Why is it important to develop students’ note-taking skills?
- Firstly, we need to acknowledge it is a very difficult yet rewarding skill to master; which is why we should be encouraged to help develop students
- Effective note-taking is very important in education – particularly at secondary/high school and university - and in the workplace. Students commonly listen to a lecture and take notes. At work we attend meetings – F2F or virtual - and need to take notes and action points. In daily life we may need to jot down instructions from a phone message or make a note of a book we want to read when listening to the radio for example.
- Effective note-taking is a skill which needs to be learnt – it doesn’t come naturally to all of us. As I said, it’s especially important at university and it’s becoming more common for universities to provide guidance on note-taking for new students
And what role do teachers play in this development?
- it is difficult to take good notes which you can understand at a later date, especially if you’re listening to speech and need to write quickly at the same time as processing the information and trying to identify the key points. This is where teachers can help their students understand why note-taking is important and then help them develop effective techniques.
Review of what Robin says about note-taking in the video
- Robin discusses the issues around note taking whilst listening, which is a very common task in high school and universities. This is challenging and therefore it’s better to start with quantifiable facts such as dates and numbers, which are in the ISE I exam. He goes on to cover key points in effective note taking: using abbreviations, not writing sentences or even full words, as there isn’t time and quite often you may only hear it once.
- He also makes the key point that everyone should develop their own style as the notes are for future reference and not an end point in themselves. So the writer needs to be able to understand the notes at a later date, which may not be immediately after the lecture. Teachers can help their students’ note-taking abilities by providing practice activities in class, including note-taking as part of other language learning activities in their lessons.
What implications are the wider implications of mastering this skill?
- Firstly, you can’t take notes if you’re not listening, and while you’re taking notes you’re also processing the content, putting your own interpretation on it, which aids retention of the information. You’re sifting through the information, discarding irrelevances, repetitions etc and noting the most important facts for you.
- Studies have proven that students who take good notes that are useful afterwards, are more likely to get higher marks in their exams, so that’s a definite plus.
- The cognitive processes involved in note-taking – paraphrasing, selecting key info, making connections. Later on there’s reviewing, summarising (and discarding!) reordering to fit your own learning style are all key 21st century skills as covered in the OECD global competencies which are valuable in daily life as well in your careers – critical thinking, creativity and communication.
In ISE I ( B1 on the CEFR) note-taking is focused on simple numbers and words. If we were to look at typical B1-level materials, we might consider this an overly-simple and easy task, mightn’t we?
- Not really. There are a few reasons for this. As we’re learning a language we do a lot of decoding of language at the sound and word level and frequently occurring words and groups of words - collocation- phonemically, lexically and grammatically - so asking learners to identify dates, numbers or quantities is very appropriate at B1 level learner.
- As Robin said it can be difficult to distinguish between 13 and 30, 15 and 50. Which are typical at ISE I/CEFR B1. As a learner we need to study and master these lower order or bottom up listening skills so they become automatic – like riding a bicycle.
- Once these lower order listening skills are mastered – then we free up brain capacity to use our top-down and meaning inference capacities to build a mental model of the content.
The use of abbreviations was covered in Robin’s video. What are your thoughts on this?
- I think they’re a great idea. If we’re taking notes from live speech it’s too quick to write full words or sentences and start thinking about spelling or punctuation. One of the key issues with abbreviations is that you need to have a consistent system otherwise you won’t be able to read your notes. There are some obvious abbreviations which are commonly used – Robin showed some of them on the video e.g.' yr' for year.
- It’s also possible to use symbols – mathematical e.g.+ for plus, < for less than, > for more than, or even chemical – e.g. H20 for water. Abbreviations also make it easier to read – you’re not using valuable brain capacity to read full sentences – so the more you can use abbreviations the better.
- Using standardised and learnt abbreviations also frees up the learner to think more about content of the listening than act of writing itself.
Limiting note-taking relieves cognitive load whilst exposing students to a listening text and avoids them being distracted by reading – are there any other classroom activities which can be used to achieve this goal?
- It’s important to give learners the tools to decode spoken language and we can help them do this by breaking down language into the micro skills e.g. identifying features of connected speech, learning collocation patterns. Practising bottom up listening skills to help learners master them is very useful.
There is a lot of research to support a process approach to listening and note-taking
- John Field – a renowned and respected expert on listening skills has researched this extensively. He proposes that we teach listening skills rather than simply practise them. Micro-listening skills for example - asking learners to distinguish between individual phonemes e.g. /i/ and /i:/ /æ/ and /ɑ:/ . We can cover features of connected speech to help learners recognise and understand as well as practise. What’s important though is to have examples of realistic connected speech and not too unnatural and forced diction. Transcripts of the text can be used to predict the sentence stress or practise fixed phrases like: What do you mean?
- We can ask learners to look at the lexis and patterns of how we use words – which words collocate together. We can also look at how the grammatical patterns work and how they fit into the linguistic context. Learners can then use this knowledge to apply meaning to what they’ve heard and make connections to a wider narrative where they use their world knowledge to interpret and infer meaning.
As we progress to B2 and C1 on the CEFR, what type of listening activities and exam tasks might we be looking at to accurately develop and assess this skill?
- As we become more proficient we need to move on from word recognition, accessing our memory banks to retrieve lexis, discourse analysis and pull these together to establish meaning. Higher order listening skills are inferencing, building a mental more and understanding the meaning of what the speaker is saying. At this level we’re applying world knowledge of the subject matter and also genre knowledge. We can identify a news bulletin from a lecture or a story from a business proposal. Therefore suitable tasks would be identifying advantages, challenges, key points, speakers attitudes, criticisms, values etc.
Is it possible to adapt traditional materials to try and develop students’ note-taking?
- There’ a lot you can do. Dictogloss is versatile. It can be teacher-led or student-led. For example a text is read out loud and student writes down what they think are the key words. In pairs or groups they then reconstruct the text. These versions can then be compared to the original.
- There are note-taking strategies, for example the Cornell method. A page is divided into 2 columns with a section across the bottom. The left hand column is labelled key words. The right hand column is labelled notes and the section across the bottom is for the post listening summary. Other methods just divide the page into 2 columns – one for main ideas and other for secondary ideas. Mindmaps and diagrams are equally useful – it really depends on what kind of learner you are.
- You can use note-taking activities as the ground work for a quiz the next day or next lesson, especially if it’s for more concrete information.
- It’s important to show your students what good and ‘not-so-good’ notes look like so you can use your own to demonstrate but don’t forget to encourage learners to develop their own sets.
- Listen and note key words. Give the transcript and see if they’re right.
- Students can swap notes and not what is the same, different and techniques they’d like to borrow.
Questions from the floor:
Is note-taking the right place/time for checking spelling, use of punctuation and even reinforcing grammar rules?
- Anxiety and lack of confidence kill language, and if a learner believes their work will be checked this will defeat the purpose of note-taking, which is meant to lighten the cognitive load and not burden it further. A teacher can evaluate how successful the learner’s note-taking is from the resultant output (e.g. spoken or written response).
- If such output shows no/little improvement over time, review the abbreviations and techniques being used, but do not evaluate it on grammar, punctuation etc, as it is not relevant to this interaction.
A lot of students have poor orthographic control – how does this effect their note-taking skills?
- The most important things, as above, is that they are able to use their notes to complete a communicative act; therefore, as long as they understand what they’ve written, they’re okay!
- Other types of note-taking were discussed in the webinar, including mind-maps, spider-grams, charts and tables – these can help organise notes and make it easier when retrieving information post-listen.
Many students worry about the presentation of their notebooks, and use different colour pens and highlighters. Is there a limit as to how helpful it might be to use different colours?
- It may add to the stress of note-taking as when listening in authentic contexts we cannot (generally) pause and rewind for replies
- While highlighting and colouring may be useful for note-taking analysis, if used for an initial phase it may limit the information a learner is able to note, and therefore raise their anxiety and affective filter, making it much harder for them to master this skill
Could students note-take in their first language, or code-switch, or even translanguage?
- Absolutely; if used appropriately this could lighten the cognitive load significantly
- It would be recommendable to introduce this once learners have been trained in the principles of note-taking, otherwise the danger is they will attempt to translate everything – which would be too demanding to do at most/all levels of language proficiency
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We very much look forward to welcoming you to the 11th webinar on Wednesday 18 July at 13:00 UK time, when Alex Thorp, Lead Academic, Language (Europe), will be interviewing Anna Bennett, Academic Support, Italy. They will be discussing listening strategies, from gist to detail - exploring how we can teach strategies to help learners improve their listening.
Click on the 'Join Webinar' link below at the appointed time for the next webinar.
