1 WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT ACADEMIC WRITING DEVELOPING NOTE TAKING STRATEGIES IN LISTENING COMPREHENSION AMONG ENGLISH MAJORED STUDENTS Hà Nội, tháng 28 tháng 1 năm 2021 2 TABLE OF CONTENT Page Introduction.
WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT ACADEMIC WRITING DEVELOPING NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES IN LISTENING COMPREHENSION AMONG ENGLISH-MAJORED STUDENTS Hà Nội, tháng 28 tháng năm 2021 TABLE OF CONTENT Page Introduction Literature review What are listening comprehension and note-taking? 1.1 Listening comprehension 1.2 Note taking skill Do note-taking strategies improve Listening comprehension skill? Recommendation for students in practicing the skill of note- taking 10 References INTRODUCTION English-majored students at universities have been studying Listening-Speaking courses with a wide variety of listening and speaking practice in both natural conversations and academic English through interesting topics To listening strategies in specific, in each course, students are expected to be able to listen to the audio in terms of different academic subjects and ideas, get key words and main ideas or necessary details from authentic listening exercises by using listening skills (Nguyen, 2010) As a result, effective listening becomes one of the determinants of the students’ success or failure (Taron & Yule, 1989) However, language learners, who learn English as a foreign language in a nonnative setting, often meet difficulties in capturing the main ideas and necessary details from original versions Particularly, this shows a problem that during the listening tasks, many English-majored students feel at a loss when listening to some new phrases or cannot understand the speakers’ ideas (Luo, 2008) Therefore, it is necessary for these students to be equiped with more appropriate and effective strategies to develop their listening comprehension Fortunately, one of the most indispensable sub-skill of listening seems effective to help English-majored learners listen well is the note-taking According to Pialot (2005), note-taking as a process of collecting information from single or multiple sources to retain memory and to allow listeners to carry out events and activities Moreover, Castallo (1976) defined note-taking as a two-step process in which students must listen for the important information and then write it in some organized way Fajardo (1996) indicated that “note-taking is the combination of different skills like reading or listening, selecting, summarizing and writing”, and it is also a requirement of selecting the related information from the unnecessity Therefore, the present article is given to clarify the relationship between note-taking skills and listening comprehension based on the following questions: 1) What are listening comprehension and note taking? 2) Do note-taking strategies improve Listening comprehension skill? 3) What recommendations are given to develop English majored students’ notetaking skill in listening comprehension? LITERATURE REVIEW This literature review contains three sections The first section is an overview of theories about listening comprehension The second section outlines the role of notetaking in relation to listening mentioned in previous studies Finally, the last section presents some suggested techniques of note-taking for students to apply to listening section What are listening comprehension and note taking skill? 1.1 Listening comprehension The definitions of listening comprehension have been given by many writers who analyzed listeners’ responses and the skills used Wolvin and Coakley (1985) points out that listening is “the process of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli” This definition suggests that listening is more than the sound perception and a complex, problem-solving skill with which listeners pay more attention to main aspects of aural input, construct meaning and connect the input to common knowlegde (Le, 2012) “Listening is the activity of paying attention and trying to get meaning for something we hear” (Underwood, 1989, p1) Listening comprehension is also defined by Morley (1991) as “an act of information processing in which the listener is involved in two-way communication or one-way communication” In one-way communication, the listener listens to the speaker but does not react because the input is from a variety of sources like lectures, films, music, news, etc In contrast, in two-way communication, the reciprocal speech chain of speaker-listener is produced In addition, it is Vandergrift (1999) in “Facilitating second language listening comprehension: acquiring successful strategies” that rejected the conceptualization of listening as a passive act: Listening comprehension is anything, but a passive activity It is a complex, active process in which the listener must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intonation, retain what was gathered in all of the above and interpret it within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of the utterance (p168) In fact, with the above views, listening comprehension is considered a hard task, which demands a great deal of mental analysis on the part of the listener In order to construct the message that the speaker intends, the listener must actively contribute skills and both linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge These include having an appropriate purpose for listening, social and cultural knowledge and background knowledge (Morley, 1991) It cannot be denied that listening comprehension plays an important role in language learning For example, Luo (2008) indicates that listening comprehension is foundational in learning a foreign language because it is the most important skill of the five and also the basic way of receiving language input Furthermore, listening comprehension levels influence the capacity for improvement in other language skills such as speaking, reading, writing and translating The evidence from Luo’s study suggests sound reasons for emphasizing listening comprehension, which highlights the importance of spending much more time doing it To agree with above idea, Dunkel (1986) pointed out that most researchers of listening comprehension agreed that “listening comprehension should be the focal methodology in foreign/second language instruction, particularly at the initial stage of language study” The general conclusion is that in a non-native English setting, listening comprehension skill plays the more significant role than ones in the context where a native language is used Listening comprehension is therefore, an essential skill that EFL or English-majored learners should acquire as early as possible (Nguyen, 2010) 1.2 Note-taking skill Frequently, note-taking occurs in various everyday life situations such as to make purchases, to plan future events and activities, to study for examinations, to prepare a technical talk, to design a model in an industry, to record the minutes of work meetings, ect Note taking is a complex activity in which comprehension and selection of information and written production processes are required (Piolat, Olive & Kellogg, 2005) In a condense way, Castallo (1976) has defined note-taking as a two-step process in which the students must listen for the important information and then write it in some organized way Fajardo (1996) has pointed that note-taking is involvement with the combination of different skills like listening or reading, selecting, summarizing and writing, and it is also a requirement of selecting the relevant information from the nonessential Note-taking involves putting onto paper the data received through any of our senses These data could range from simple figures, letters, symbols, isolated words, or brief phrases to complete sentences and whole ideas Otto (1979) stated that note-taking is useful because when people listen to some kind of discourse, they try to extract information, either factual or effective The information is then applied to some further need which may be casual conversation, technical writing or answering test questions The ability to listen for a certain kind of information and apply it to one of these needs is a note-taking skill which can be learned and practiced To sum up, note-taking is an important skill for students, especially at the college level Note-taking can be considered as the practice of rapid transcription of information or selecting and writing pieces of information to store information in long-term memory It often requires comprehension and organizing in an informal or unstructured manner Many different forms are employed to structure information and allow large amounts of information to be put on paper very quickly and to find or use later such as shortened words and substitution symbols, abbreviating operations, syntactical shortcuts, paraphrasing statements, and often a physical formatting of the notes that differs from the linear text of written source material (Boch & Piolat, 2004; Beecher, 1988) Do note-taking strategies improve Listening comprehension skill? Note-taking is important because it improves the listening ability by increasing the listener's attentiveness and prevents sidetracking In other words, it helps to keep note-taker focused on their subject area and to the task at hand and prevent wandering off Note-taking also increases the listener's chances of reviewing what he has heard, therefore remedying weaknesses in listening In addition, note-taking improves the learner's ability to learn from the spoken word as well as improves memory of what is heard (Hartley, 2002) According to Craik and Lockhart, 1972; (cited in Smith and Tompkins, 1988), the benefits of note-taking result from the heightened activation of several cognitive processes First, the students have to actively attend to the message and select important ideas to retain in the notes Second, students who paraphrase and add their own comments are relating their own prior knowledge to the new information Third, as students elaborate on content by paraphrasing, indicating relationships among ideas, and developing their own examples, they are processing the content more deeply This increased depth of processing multiple encoding increases the likelihood of comprehension and retention Finally, in creating their own notes, students generate a transportable and permanent storage of important information that is available for review With a research on the impact of note-taking strategies on listening comprehension of EFL Learners, Hayati (2009) concluded that the teaching of note-taking strategies to English majored students at universities is possible to help them promote their achivement in listening Recommendation for students in practicing the skill of note-taking To develop this complex but essential skill, students indeed need much support from their teachers They must be exposed to a variety of input sources in the form of listening through skills of note-taking Nguyen et al (2020) in the study “Developing the skill of taking notes for English majors through listening to English news” came up with the strategies consisted of both qualitative and quantitative variables as following: Effective note-taking with the students’ own words Students can express the ideas with their familiar words, which helps them understand and remember what they hear and key information Note-taking strategies that involved content (i.e., writing down the main ideas and important facts, as opposed to trying to write down everything the speaker said) reflect a focus on content of the materials Because recording notes presents multiple opportunities to learn the information (for example, once in class and later as they review or study their notes for a test), teachers should try to maximize these opportunities The more that teachers to present the crucial information in a clearly organized manner, the easier it will be for students to understand it and record notes (Boyle, 2007) Note-taking strategies involving efficiency (abbreviations, symbols, paraphrases, using content words and omitting function words) represent an encoding or transformation of verbatim information into the listener’s own comprehension system These techniques will help students record more notes (Hughes and Suritsky, 1994) Using designated pauses during the lecture also allows students to review their notes with another student Typically, in the pause procedure, students are paired together and, at natural breaks in the lecture, are given a two-minute break to discuss main points in their notes with a partner Research indicates that students whose teachers used the pause procedure increased their recall and comprehension of lecture information (Ruhl et al., 1990) Note-taking strategies involving the organization of the notes (e.g., using diagrams, outlining, indentation, numbers, lists, arrows; using circles, boxes and highlighting) reflect how information in the notes was overtly organized or emphasized by the notetakers In terms of helping students during the cognitive processing phase, organizing information and relating it to previously learned content helps them understand the information in their notes A number of studies (Howe, 1974) have shown that organization aids students in recording clearer and a greater number of notes In addition, researchers have found organized notes result in greater student achievement Although some students may be able to organize information presented in a disorganized form, if teachers organize information prior to the presentation, they can be assured that students will spend more time recording notes and less time organizing information Other organizational techniques include cognitive organizers, study guides, strategic note taking, PowerPoint slides, and guided notes (Austin et al., 2004) 5) Listening strategies recommended by teachers Depending on how the listener processes the input, listening strategies can be classified into five types: Discrimination listening, Listening for comprehension, Therapeutic listening, Critical listening, Appreciative listening (Wolvin and Coakly, 1985) Beside the above well-known classifications, Rost’s theory (1990) introduced four types of listening: Transactional listening, Interactional listening, Critical listening, Recreational listening In conclusion, although note taking is a complex process, teachers can help students become better note takers through a number of lecture modifications and explicit training By helping students attend to important lecture information, students will record more notes Through cues or signposts, teachers can high-light those points that students need to record By pre-organizing lecture information into categories, teachers can help students see the logical sequence and connections between lecture ideas and content By using abbreviations and teaching students how to abbreviate, teachers can help them record more notes Finally, by stressing the importance of reviewing notes, teachers can help students create accurate and complete notes that can later assist them during study periods REFERENCES 1) Austin, J L., M Lee, and J E Carr 2004 The effects of guided notes on undergraduate students’ recording of lecture content Journal of Instructional Psychology 31 (4): 91–96 2) Beecher, J (1988) Note-Taking: What Do We Know About The Benefits? 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