Note-taking

NOTE-TAKINGAND SUMMARISING SKILLS

AIMS

The aims of this unit are as follows:

• To give practice in extracting main/relevant/supporting ideas from a text or article
• To ensure that students can take useful notes
• To ensure that students are able to summarise ideas without 'lifting' sections of a text verbatim.

Although most students will have had practice in note-taking, many may still be unable to recognise main ideas in a text. Students often have a tendency to make notes on everything, rather than being selective. A further problem is an inability to summarise clearly in their own words. A tendency to plagiarise in producing a piece of extended writing can be a major problem in students' work. This perhaps stems from the fact that many students have a different academic background from that of an English-speaking country, perhaps from a lack of confidence in their own command of English and/or from an inability to extract relevant information from a text. It is important to emphasise that plagiarism is unacceptable and can readily be detected. This unit is therefore primarily concerned with developing good note-taking skills and students' confidence in their own ability to summarise/report ideas without resorting to copying from source material.

As well as practising note-taking and summary-writing, this unit also aims to encourage students to be selective in extracting from a text only the information that is relevant to the topic they are writing on.

It is of the utmost importance to stress that students must use their own words in academic work (apart from, of course, quotations). Even students of a high language level often have difficulty in extracting and summarising information. For this reason, all students should benefit from the material in this unit. With good students the emphasis should be on summarising skills rather than note-taking, although you might like to use one of the note-taking tasks (Tasks 1-3) to check their note-taking skills.

The texts used in this unit are of a general academic nature. Nevertheless, students may show resistance to some of the content. To some extent, however, there is room for choice on the basis of students' subject orientation rather than language ability.

NOTE-TAKING

This section is meant to provide examples of different styles only; they are not intended to be rigidly prescriptive. Students may have developed their own style of note-taking which, even if not ultra-economical, serves their purposes adequately. 'Mind-mapping' can be suggested as a useful exercise for EFL learners at this stage in their studies – it can help not only to avoid plagiarism but also to practise expressing ideas in English with a minimum of information. For many students, this section will be purely for quick revision and is not to be dwelt on. For some, it may be necessary to teach note-taking from scratch – students may think that copying 'relevant' chunks of text is enough. On the other hand, those who are well acquainted with techniques may still have considerable trouble isolating main ideas.