Listening week eight

Note taking

Adapted from Unit 4: English for Academic study

In this unit you will:

discuss the reasons for taking notes in a lecture
learn the principles of effective note taking
practise taking notes from lectures

Discussion

Do you usually take notes during lectures? Why/why not?
How does technology like lecture capture and the VLE affect your motivation to take notes?
If you do take notes, what kind of information do you write down, and do you write it in English or your first language?

Pre-listening

You are going to listen to an extract from a lecture on dealing with traffic problems in the UK. Before you listen, discuss the following questions:

Why do you think there are so many cars on the road in Britain?
What kind of problems does this create?
Can you think of any ways of reducing the amount of traffic on Britain's roads? What are they?

Task one

Listen to the recording and read the extract from the transcript at the same time.
Look at the notes below taken by a student during the lecture:
1. Why has the student chosen this information to note down?
2. From your reading of the lecture extract, is there anything else the student should have noted down?
3. Are the notes clear? When the student reads the notes a week later, will she be able to understand them?
4. What techniques did the student use to make the notes clear and to save time?

Transcript

So Britain's roads, and especially those in the south-east, are overcrowded.There are too many cars on the roads,and at particular times of the day and particular places, traffic is either very slow or at a standstill. Now, this has a number of effects. Firstly, there is the economic effect, all the time wasted in traffic jams, which means a loss of productivity. Then there's the environmental effect. Cars produce a lot of pollution, which damages the local environment, but it also contributes to global warming. And there's also an effect on people's health. In addition to the poor air quality and the damage this causes people's lungs, the stress of being stuck in traffic each day leads to higher risk of heart disease.

UK’s roads overcrowded → effects - economic; loss of prod - env; pollution, glob. wrmng - health probs; lung/heart disease

Task two

Look at how the student has selected the key ideas from what the lecturer said. The extract has been annotated to show the unimportant information she omitted from her notes.

So Britain's roads, ~~and especially those in the south-east,~~ are overcrowded. ~~There are too many cars on the roads,and at particular times of the day and particular places, traffic is either very slow or at a standstill~~. Now, this has a number of effects.

Listen to parts two, three, four and five of the lecture and make notes. Before you listen to each part of the lecture, check you understand the meaning and pronunciation of the words in the boxes using the dictionary.
Compare your notes with a partner. Did you both write down the same things?

Part 2: policy - measure (n) - politically sensitive

Part 3: integrated - investment

Part 4: (road) lane - CCTV - congestion

Part 5: pressure - scheme - coalition

Advice: when taking notes, you need to be:

Selective - decide what is important according to the speaker and according to your knowledge of the subject.
Brief - use abbreviations and symbols.
Clear - make sure you can understand from the notes how the ideas relate to each other.

Task three

Below are some examples of shorthand symbols you can use to make your writing more efficient.

Leads to - →
Means - =
Does not mean that/is not the same as - ≠
Money - £
Less than - ≤
Greater than - ≥
Therefore - ∆

Write an inspirational message to your partner using shorthand symbols and abbreviations. For example:

in order to be whole, one must first be broken.
We are gods but for the wisdom.
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down.

Not this though, obviously.

Task four - note taking practice

You are going to listen to extracts from a lecture on the history of development economics and practise taking notes.

Before you listen, discuss:

Which East Asian countries have developed rapidly since the 1990s?
Can you explain the reasons for this fast economic growth?
What are the meanings and pronunciations of the following words. How many syllables are there in each, and where is the stress?
- Liberalism
- Intervention
- Labour rates
- Stimulus

Listen to part one and part two and take notes, then compare what you've written with your partner.

Microskills: sentence stress

We saw previously how word stress affects the pronunciation of syllables in the word. In a similar way, in any spoken utterance, certain words are stressed, and this affects the pronunciation of other words in the utterance.

Task one

Listen to the following extract. The main stressed words in this sentence are marked in bold.

That you could always hire a lot of people at low labour rates, but who were in reasonably good health, who were literate and who had reasonable skills.

The speaker chooses to stress words which are particularly important to what he is saying. These tend to be the content words rather than the function words.

One problem in listening is that often the unstressed words tend to be:

pronounced in unexpected ways, e.g. that /ðət/ and were /wə/
compressed together in fast speech, so that it is difficult to hear where one word ends and another begins, e.g., a lot of people /əlɒtəvpi:pəl/

Listen to the following sentence:

The Japanese _______________ never run _______________ purely free-market economy. Neither _______________ the Koreans.

Complete the sentences with one word in each space.
The missing words are function words, which are unstressed.
- How easy or difficult was it to hear these words?
- If it was difficult, could you work out what they were from context?

Task two

Read the following extract from a lecture about market research. Listen to the extract and complete the sentences with two to seven words in each space. When you've completed the missing words and phrases, decide:

Which words were stressed?
What kinds of words were unstressed? How were these words pronounced? Was it difficult to hear them?

You need to pre-test the questionnaire. This is really important. Those of you, some of you, will be doing this for, you know, your dissertation. Some of you, I know, _________________________________________________________ . You need to pre-test the thing because you're the researcher. You're very _________________________________________________________ . You know what you're talking about, but you've got to check that other people do as well. And if you want s statistically valid sample of a hundred or two hundred people, _________________________________________________________ you're collecting the data properly. And it's here that these _________________________________________________________ they're going to tell you whether it's going to work or not.

So make sure that you do pilots and, you know, this can be, sort of, _________________________________________________________ different people that you question. I mean, you'll soon find out whether you've got any potential... or any doubts about the length of the questionnaire, _________________________________________________________ or whether the sort of questions that you're asking are valid. You'll soon find out from that. So, piloting or pre-testing is really important.

Teacher's notes

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