Academic Listening Skills

When you attend lectures, you need to apply the highest level of listening skills you have. Not only do you have to listen to your professors expounding abstract and sophisticated concepts, but you also have to be effective in taking notes that will help you with learning the topics covered in the lecture. Thus, daily listening comprehension that suffices for most interactions is not enough in a lecture.

You need to be doing the following:

• Evaluate information

• While listening, you need to be able to identify which parts are important to jot down.

• Organize information

• Even as you write, you need to capture the relationships between the ideas/concepts that are being presented.

• Predict information

• Being able to anticipate how the information that comes up connects with what has been presented so far enhances your ability to understand the lecture.

Useful Tips:

• Read ahead of your lecture and keep up with assigned reading. This will enable you to be familiar with key vocabulary and develop an awareness of concepts.

• Do not attempt to take note of everything. Just note the main points.