A Study Of Senior One High School Students' Note-taking Features

Note-taking is generally considered as a consolidation and supplement to classroom knowledge points,which can facilitate students' memory and thinking,control their cognitive process and information processing,and construct the internal relationship between previous and new knowledge.Numerous researchers and scholars have devoted themselves to the study of note-taking,but few have made specific researches into the general features of high school students' note-taking in English,leaving it a virgin area.In order to fill up this gap,this paper is undertaken to investigate status quo of High School students' note-taking in English.The research questions addressed in this thesis are:1)What are the general features of Senior One students' notes,including the quantity of notes,forms of notes,and contents of notes?2)What are the differences between high achievers and low achievers in note-taking(including the quantity of notes,forms of notes,and contents of notes)?3)What is the relationship between Senior One students' note-taking(including quantity of notes,forms of notes,and contents of notes)and their English performance?This paper investigates the features of high school students' note-taking bin English.40 Senior One High school students from Jingshan Middle School of Yancheng city participate in this experiment.The researcher first collected all the students' English notebooks and then copied them one by one in order to analyze the general futures of high school students' notes.Then,the research counted the notes carefully.After the numbers of notes are fed into the computer and analyzed by using SPSS 18.0.Then a semi-structured interview is carried out with 10 students selected from both the high-achieved group and the low-achieved group.The interview is carried out in Chinese and the whole process is tape-recorded.Afterwards,the results are transcribed into English and the transcriptions of the interview are carefully analyzed.Detailed analysis of both quantitative and qualitative research yields the following findings.Firstly,the overall use of High School students' note-taking in English represents the following characteristics:1)The majority of Senior One students have the awareness of taking notes in class.Also,English characters are far more commonly used in the process of taking notes than the Chinese characters.2)The most commonly used Form of notes by Senior One School students is Complete Chinese characters and phrases,followed by English words or phrases,Symbols and English abbreviations in the order of decreasing quantity.3)Most Senior One students tend to employ several pages to record down the knowledge points in the Reading part and the Word List part in the English book.Secondly,there are some significant differences in the use of English notes between high achievers and low achievers in High school.Among the Quantity of notes,the high achievers take down more notes than the low achievers,no matter in the pages of notes and the total number of characters.The more notes a students take,the better scores he/she achieves.With regard to the Form of notes,there is a obvious difference in the use of Complete Chinese Phrases or characters between the high achievers and low achievers.However,there is not much difference between high achievers and low achievers in English abbreviations and Symbols.Thirdly,Senior One students' note-taking in English is positively correlated with students' English performance at the 0.01 level.Among Quantity of pages of notes,it has a highly positive correlation with students' scores because the value reaches to.781.The more notes a student takes down,the better he/she performs in English learning.When it comes to each forms of Senior One students' notes in English,Complete Chinese Phrases or characters and English words or phrases are positively and highly related to the students' English performance.However,there is not any apparent correlation between English abbreviations,Symbols and Students' academic performance.In light of the findings,this paper makes some pedagogical implications both for teachers and students in English notes:For teachers,they should gradually instruct students the principles and skills of note-taking,guide students to use some specific note-taking techniques and pay more attention to low achievers in the note-taking instruction.For students,they should realize the importance of English notes,form the good habit of note-taking.