An Empirical Study Of Note-taking Strategy In College English Short Passage Listening Comprehension

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four important parts of language learning,among which listening is considered as the largest part in English communication. For a longtime, listening teaching has always been an indispensable part of English teaching. The processof listening teaching aims to enable students to understand the speaker’s intention accurately andmaster an effective language communicative ability rather than only a single word or a sentence.In routine English listening teaching classes, teachers seldom taught the students how tolisten to the material, but more often just “poured” a huge number of listening materials tostudents. In the long run, students would find such teaching model boring and finally lose theinterest in listening. For the above mentioned reason, listening in college English teaching hasbeen the “bottleneck” in China for many years. There hasn’t been an effective way or model toimprove students’ listening comprehension proficiency yet. For most of the students, listening isalways a weak link in their English study.Note-taking is an important learning strategy. Psychologists have been researching itsystematically since1970s. Applying note-taking strategy into English listening comprehension,for the foreign language learners, is thought of an advanced skill to be used at high levels ofproficiency. It has important practical value and gradually this skill has become more importantin English teaching programs. The most important function of note-taking is to removeredundant information involved in the listening materials, to summarize the general idea anddevelopmental sequence of the story and to write down significant details. As one of the mainquestion types, the difficulty of short passage listening comprehension is how to avoid theinterference of redundant information and to grasp the main idea of the passage. Accordingly, itis necessary to take notes in short passage listening comprehension. How to remove redundantinformation determines the understanding and further reasoning of the passage for examinees.In view of the problems that exist in college students’ English listening comprehension andthe characteristics of short passage listening comprehension, this thesis is written with thepurpose of analyzing the feasibility and effectiveness of note-taking strategy in college Englishshort passage listening comprehension on the basis of early theoretical research, and helping students set up confidence in listening learning via guiding them to carry on note-taking training.For this purpose, the author carried out an empirical study for15weeks in the first half yearof2012in Shandong Jiaotong University. The research subjects are Ninety-nine sophomoresmajoring in Electrical Engineering and they are divided into two classes. One class is chosen asthe Experimental Class and the other one is assigned as the Control Class. The teaching methodused in the Experimental Class focuses on incorporating the note-taking strategy training intolistening courses and the teaching method used in the Control Class followed the normal onewithout the training process of note-taking strategy. The instruments utilized in this study includethe pre-test, the post-test, pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire, and the data collected fromthe study are analyzed through SPSS17.0and the major findings are gained as follows:ⅰ. It is feasible and efficient to apply note-taking strategy in college students’ shortpassage listening comprehension. After a period training of note-taking strategy, the studentshave mastered this kind of listening skill and their comprehensive competence in listening hasbeen improved to a certain extent.ⅱ. Taking notes as much as possible is not an efficient way to get high-quality notes. Thenumber of questions answerable from the notes is proved closely correlated with theachievement of listening comprehension. The other three indices of the total number of notes, thecontent words notes and the notations have no significant correlations with subjects’ quality ofanswers.The study has positive implications not only in listening teaching but also in the wholeEnglish teaching process. Since note-taking can do a great help not only in the listeningcomprehension but also in the academic learning and interpreting work, note-taking should beconsidered to join in the listening classes as an important part. It is also imperative that teachersshould pay more attention to the process of listening and train learners to use various learningstrategies to help them develop their learning efficiency and activity rather than to simply addcomprehensive input on them. Meanwhile, because of the insufficiencies in samples andmeasurement tools and other research variables, the study remains to be explored and perfected.