How to teach notetaking in ELT: An action research intervention

The importance of note-taking skills for ESL/EFL students is increasing, with the attraction of attending English lectures while on study abroad programmes, the increase of English-medium courses offered in EFL contexts, and the importance of note-taking on tests like TOEFL and IELTS. For teachers, notes provide visual representations of comprehension and tools to monitor student uptake. Learners also benefit from taking notes, not only because the act engages them with the incoming speech of the lecturer/speaker (i.e., the encoding effect) but also because it generates an external record that they can use for future tasks and review (i.e., the storage effect) (e.g., Piolat, Olive & Kellogg, 2005).

Despite the popularity of ESL/EFL note-taking, few descriptions of instructional practices exist in the literature, and guidance from teacher manuals or teacher training programmes is lacking. Classroom practice that asks students to "write what you hear" or "note key words" seems too general and simplistic. Approaches like these fail to recognize the complexity of taking notes and to present the skill in suitably sized tasks for teachers to teach and for learners to utilize. While ample note-taking materials have been produced, pedagogical methods have lagged far behind.

To address the need for pedagogy that focuses on the stages of note-taking, this presentation reports findings from an action research project involving four in-service upper secondary school English teachers in Sweden. The presentation starts by discussing challenges associated with note-taking instruction in a second language and then describes how this group of teachers collaborated to: a) identify areas for improvement in their pedagogies; b) apply changes in the classroom; and c) document the effects of these changes. Attendees will gain insights into how reflective practice and pedagogic interventions can improve the teaching and learning of note-taking in EFL/ESL.