Notetaking and active listening in a second language: Exploring student habits and performance

Taking notes is an essential practice for university students who often rely on notetaking to aid concentration while listening and to create records of lecture content to be reviewed later.

This one-year sabbatical will allow for comprehensive exploration and analysis of a variety of existing data collected from students taking English medium instruction (EMI) courses at Swedish universities and those on academic tracks in upper secondary schools who are preparing to do so. Data include surveys, samples of student notes, listening test scores, and recordings of student-student discussions.

All notetaking data was collected between 2017-20 and has generated academic publications and contributions related to a variety of topics: pedagogic approaches, affects on test performance in a quasi-experimental design, and an examination of how “good” notes are defined.

However, several valuable avenues of exploration remain untapped: patterns and descriptions of translanguaging (i.e., the use of more than one language) in notes and the resulting affects on learning; the longer term effects of notetaking instruction; and the potential for student-student discussions based on notes and the related developmental opportunities for content learning and notetaking strategy use.

This project will allow for exploration into these topics and will generate a series of publications in high-level scholarly journals.