This article is based on a presentation given at 2014 CATESOL titled “Note-Taking Instruction With TOEFL-iBT Integrated Writing and Speaking Tasks.” This presentation was driven by the fact that many international students try to improve their speaking performance but they need to improve their listening comprehension first so that they can understand the content and then prepare their responses efficiently. When there are no multiple-choice items to help the students guess the main ideas of the content in the speaking section, they have to rely on their overall understanding of the audio input and their notes to prepare their answer in the timed speaking test section. Thus, as a former TOEFL test taker and later an ESL instructor, I helped my students develop some listening strategies to monitor their attention so that their attention would not be interrupted too often when trying to take notes while listening. Second language (L2) listening researchers have found that the key for teaching listening strategies is to help L2 students develop schema to process the meaning of the audio input by forming units and concentrating on important units rather than trying to translate and memorize all of the units (e.g., Goh, 2002; Young, 1997).

Therefore, I provide TOEFL-iBT instructors with the following teaching tips:

1. Start with the integrated writing or speaking tasks rather than listening-alone section when teaching students how to take notes. Learners tend to think that the structure of the short lectures used in the integrated speaking/writing tasks is clearer and easier for them to predict the key information and to take notes. The L2 listening comprehension process is complicated because each unit of meaning can be connected to either one language or both languages at one time. Thus, starting with a shorter lecture in the integrated speaking/writing section will help them build confidence in taking notes to summarize main ideas.

2. Use why and how questions as the guiding questions to help students identify the purposes of a specific term/problem/example. Due to their lack of background knowledge to process the given English listening passage from a top-down approach, students often have difficulty in guessing why the lecturer/speaker mentions something and how important the example/detail mentioned in the passage is. According to Goh (2002), advanced learners can process the audio input with both top-down and bottom-up approaches more effectively than less proficient learners. Being able to process the audio input from both top-down and bottom-up approaches concurrently and effectively requires the learners to have developed a schema related to the given topic of content or a master model that can be applicable to almost any topics of lecture/conversation when they can sense their similar structures. Hence, in the following section, I will introduce how to use how and why questions to guide learners’ development of such a schema that will work like a master key to help them access the global understanding of the listening passage.

Unpacking the Listening and Note-Taking Strategy Into Specific Steps

Forming a Global Understanding First Before Thinking About Note-Taking

English learners’ attention to listening comprehension is often distracted when they hear unfamiliar words in the audio input. They should focus on listening comprehension first instead of trying to take notes concurrently because their proficiency level is not high enough to process multiple tasks. At this stage, teachers can help learners develop greater tolerance of unfamiliar words by letting students do short discussion with peers right after listening to a short lecture or conversation without taking any notes. Encourage them to tell each other why the speaker mentions X and how X is discussed/described in the listening passage. Then, the teacher can explain the coverage of the why and how questions that will include their initial understanding or guessing from the piece of information related to the wh- questions (what, who, when, and where). That is to say, the teacher can demonstrate how to use two guiding questions (why and how) to recall key information from the lecture and think beyond the minor details for the fact-recall type of wh- questions so that the thinking process will focus on using the comprehensible part of information to form a more global understanding of the information. Then, the teacher gives students a set of integrated speaking tasks from the TOEFL-iBT to practice listening and speaking with peers. For example, when a student can explain the purpose of a professor’s talk about a famous biological experiment to his peers by answering the why and how guiding questions, he will notice what key information should be written in his notes and ignore the minor information that will not help him come up with short and clear answers for the why and how questions. At this stage, the teacher should also tell students not to worry too much about their speaking fluency or grammatical errors and focus on helping each other express their overall understanding from listening. By hearing and recalling the key information or words more than one time in the listening and speaking practice, students will accelerate their response time and gain more confidence about their listening comprehension to help them reduce test anxiety, which is also tied to one’s self-perception of listening skills and memory workload (Tsai, 2015).

Thinking From the Speaker’s Perspective in Selecting Information to Take Notes

The speaker’s attitudes toward the topic can be presented in his or her way of saying it (e.g., the intonation pattern, the use of rhetorical questions and examples) and teachers should present a variety of speech samples to develop students’ sensitivity to the change or speaker’s attitudes. The how question is also tied to the listener’s understanding and interpretation of the speaker’s attitude when addressing the key concept. I have used the listening strategies and sound tracks in Sharpe’s (2012) TOEFL-iBT test preparation book to help learners become more familiar with different ways of showing one’s attitude in speaking. The guiding questions in this book are well designed and can help listening instructors prepare their mini-lessons on specific listening strategies easily.

Summarizing of the Key Concepts and the Supporting Examples in the Notes

Some English learners come from cultures that emphasize neat handwriting and complete messages in taking lecture notes (e.g. China, Taiwan). However, such a detail-oriented way of note-taking is not helpful in timed listening test conditions like those for the TOEFL. What will really matter in both TOEFL and regular classroom listening is the quality of information represented by the student notes and how the students use their notes after listening. Although both learners and teachers may already know the importance of developing a shorthand note schema (e.g., using abbreviation and symbol drawing) to shorten the writing time and stay focused for better listening comprehension, the importance of summarizing information with one’s own words to simplify the whole passage has not been deeply studied in the context of TOEFL listening. A similar suggestion on writing a summary or comment after noticing the overall meaning of the lecture notes is also found in the study conducted by Hayati and Jalilifar (2009). They compared the listening comprehension of the experimental group who received the Cornell method note-taking instruction with the control group in the same undergraduate courses and found that learners who wrote a summary and comment on the margin of the lecture notes after class (i.e., using the Cornell method) performed better than the control group. However, in timed test conditions similar to the TOEFL-iBT, learners will not have much time to apply the Cornell method like they can in regular classroom listening. Hence, teaching students how to think from the speaker’s perspective to predict the possible how and why questions as the first level of thinking to sort out the ongoing audio input will help test takers come up with concise information to write down as post-listening notes to prepare them for the following writing or speaking questions. That is to say, this type of test taker’s notes will be like a short summary or comment about the main concept mentioned in the given listening passage. After students are guided to take post-listening notes, they can do peer review and discuss their uses of notes to help each other see how to shorten their writing time and be more selective in note-taking.

Both L1 Words and English Words Can Be Used in Shorthand Notes

As long as students can recall and remember the functions of the words in their notes and their relevance to the how and why questions, which are usually the sources of test questions in official TOEFL-iBT tests, writing in L1 or in English should both work well.If sometimes writing in L1 will shorten students’ writing time and reduce their test anxiety during listening, teachers should not force those students to take notes only in English, which will require them to make more effort to recall spelling and split their attention for processing the ongoing audio input.

References

Goh, C. (2002). Exploring listening comprehension tactics and their interaction patterns. System, l30, 185–206.

Hayati, A., & Jalilifar, A. (2009). The impact of note-taking strategies on listening comprehension of EFL learners. English Language Teaching, 2(1), 101–111.

Sharpe, P. J. (2012). Outsmart the TOEFL: Barron's test strategies and tips. Hauppauge, NY: Barrons.

Tsai, S. (2015, March). A case study of international students’ academic listening and note-taking strategies used in TOEFL-iBT. Poster session presented at the Annual Convention of TESOL International Association, Toronto, Canada.

Young, M. Y. C. (1997). A serial ordering of listening comprehension strategies used by advanced ESL learners in Hong Kong. Asian Journal of English Language Teaching, 7, 35–53.

Originally from Taipei City, Taiwan, Shiao-Chen Tsai has taught ESL/EFL for more than 5 years in Taiwan and the United States (Ohio and California). She is fluent in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English, and enjoys learning about other cultures.