FACTORS AFFECTING NOTETAKING PERFORMANCE

ABSTRACT

Listening to academic lectures in a second language (L2) can be a daunting task, as the listener faces various challenges related to processing the speech stream, prioritizing the importance of information, and deciding when, where and how to take notes. A host of factors can contribute to student comfort in and ability to take “good” notes during L2 lectures. This study explores student perspectives on personal, speaker, and contextual factors that impact notetaking in L2 lecture settings. To determine the extent to which these factors affect notetaking ability, participants (N = 711) studying on English for academic purposes (EAP) programs in five countries (Indonesia, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and the US) responded to an online survey. The present paper reports results holistically and from a cross-cultural perspective, leading to pedagogic implications and recommendations for students, EAP teachers, and English medium instruction (EMI) lecturers as well as any teachers who may teach groups with varying language proficiencies.

Introduction

For students in higher education around the globe, the act of listening to academic lectures and taking notes is a major, almost expected, part of the academic experience. When taking notes, students encounter a number of options, ranging from overall notetaking formats, to tools used for recording information (e.g., traditional pen and paper or digital methods), to strategies for making notes of specific pieces of information (e.g., writing verbatim, using abbreviations, paraphrasing, etc.). While notetaking abilities and subsequent performance on post-lecture tests are often used to gauge the effectiveness of various formats, methods, and tools for notetaking, few studies have elicited student viewpoints regarding the factors that they feel affect their notetaking performance. Since notetaking is a highly-individualized activity, where notetakers each have their own preferences for how to take notes as well as idiosyncratic background knowledge related to a given topic, understanding their perspectives on the factors that they view as fostering comfortable notetaking conditions is a valuable research gap to address.

Notetaking can be challenging even when listening to and taking notes in one’s L1, as the notetaking act demands, among others aspects, concentration, listening endurance, an active aural vocabulary, some knowledge of the lecture genre, the capacity to prioritize information, and the ability to multi-task. These challenges are further exacerbated for students learning in L2 environments such as English for academic purposes (EAP) and English medium instruction (EMI). The former typically aims to develop students’ L2 English proficiency at the high school or preparatory level so that they can succeed in learning tertiary-level content via English (i.e., the latter).

Students in EMI likely rely heavily on their notes to learn and stimulate their recall of lecture content and to put that knowledge to use in a variety of ways (e.g., a written summary; a final exam). When taking notes while listening to an L2 (English in this case), students face additional challenges of first comprehending the lecture input and then integrating it into a notetaking cycle that draws extensively on both cognitive and physical attributes operating under continuous time pressure. The listener must first comprehend the input, separate important from extraneous information, decide when, where and how to record the information, and finally write or type. The task can be exacting for those operating in their L1; thus, it is only logical to assume that those using L2 English as an academic language face additional obstacles.

This paper explores EAP student perspectives related to aspects that affect their ability to take “good” notes. These factors are divided into the three categories of personal, speaker and contextual factors. Student viewpoints (N = 711) were ascertained via an online survey, with respondents in EAP courses studying in five countries: Indonesia, Japan, Spain, Sweden and the US. After providing theoretical and research background on notetaking, drawing from both L1 and L2 contexts, data collection methods are described. Findings generated from the survey are discussed both holistically and from a cross-cultural point of view, leading to pedagogic implications.

Background

Theoretical background

The value in taking notes, from a theoretical perspective, is two-fold. First, during the actual act of taking notes, listeners are forced to engage actively with the incoming input. In doing so, they make decisions about how to encode the selected information. This encoding effect is thought to strengthen learning and retention of the material in ways more effective than simply listening (e.g., DiVesta & Gray, 1972). The second advantage of notetaking is the creation of a record of information that can be stored, accessed at a later date (i.e., beyond the initial listening event), and used for a variety of post-listening activities and assignments. The present paper is more concerned with factors that students believe impact the quality of their notetaking at the encoding stage; in other words, the factors in focus are those that coincide with the actual processing of lecture input and taking notes in real time.

Lecture notetaking presumes that at least some accurate listening comprehension occurs, thus generating potential material for the notetaking act. Theoretical models for listening often include multiple sets of operations that contribute to successful listening and accurate understanding of aural input. One influential model of the listening process was put forth by Clark and Clark (1977), who proposed a three-step process involving phonetic perception, parsing and utilization. The initial stage involves recognizing isolated phonetic sounds and sound combinations. Parsing, the second stage, relates to recognizing where each word begins and ends in the speech stream, a process that is not always straightforward, given blending and elisions. During utilization, the listener places the sounds and words they have deciphered within the immediate context as well as in relation to their previous knowledge and expectations about what they would hear. Another oft-cited model of listening suggests the interaction between bottom-up and top-down listening processes (e.g., Lynch & Mendelsohn, 2002; Siegel & Wang, forthcoming). The former involves sound recognition and follows discrete sounds in an upwards direction as sounds combine to form syllabus, which combine into words, phrases, and so on. With top-down processing, the listener draws on world, topic-related, contextual, and/or genre knowledge to form expectations about what they hear and uses that combined knowledge to create meaning in conjunction with the incoming acoustic input. In the present study, factors such as accent, rate of speech, and volume relate to phonemic perception, parsing and bottom-up processing, whereas utilization and top-down processing link to, for instance, topic-knowledge, and expectations and experiences within the lecture genre.

Once some meaning has been extracted from aural input during an academic lecture, notetaking becomes possible. The act is usually intended to alleviate pressure on cognitive load and memory; that is, by recording information in notes, the listener can feel comfortable that the information has been preserved and can be revisited at a later time. They do not need to rely solely on their memory of said information. Thus, in theory, notetaking not only improves learning (i.e., the encoding effect mentioned above) but it also connects to cognitive load theory by reducing the need for immediate memorization of information, thereby freeing up additional mental resources to focus on the listening and notetaking. Apart from the acoustic signal received by the listener, multimodal aspects of the lecture genre, such as the teacher writing on the board, using slideshows, playing videos, and/or using body language to support lecture content may also influence the notes students take. Since information can be delivered and received via any or all of these various paths, precisely which one(s) students attend to (more or less) while taking notes may impact notetaking performance.

From L1 contexts

Notetaking habits and practices have been the object of increased research attention in recent years, particularly in L1 contexts. For example, Morehead, Dunlosky, Rawson et al. (2019) conducted a survey (N = 577) of college students at a university in the US. Their findings reiterated the ubiquitous nature of notetaking in higher education, with 96% of students reporting to take notes in classroom lectures and 88% believing that taking notes is necessary for academic success (p. 812). The survey also probed the topic of student preferences for traditional longhand notes in comparison with digital options (i.e., laptops and tablets) and found that pen and paper notetaking remains more popular (86% to 46%). Students also reported their preferred organizational strategies, such as rephrasing notes, using bullet points or an outline system, and employing the Cornell notetaking system (p. 812). The survey, in short, provides valuable insights into current notetaking practices of L1 college students; it does not, however, address more affective elements that may impact student success in notetaking.

The issue of technology in relation to notetaking in L1 contexts has been explored via a series of quasi-experimental studies. Research, including that conducted by Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014), Luo et al. (2018), Morehead, Dunlosky, Rawson. (2019), and Artz et al. (2020), describes groups of pen and paper notetakers who were compared to groups who took notes using computers. Computerized notetaking generally resulted in more total words being recorded than the pen and paper method, indicating the potential speed and convenience of digital options. In terms of notetaking effects on lecture comprehension, Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) first reported that pen and paper notetaking leads to better test performance. However, a replication by Morehead, Dunlosky, Rawson et al. (2019), using the same listening materials, failed to replicate the original finding. Artz et al. (2020) also observed that computerized notetaking does not necessarily disadvantage notetakers compared to the longhand method. Given these somewhat inconclusive results, as Morehead, Dunlosky, Rawson et al. (2019) point out, more research is needed before any claims can be made about which type of notetaking is “better” in general. These studies did not involve collecting student viewpoints about the varying notetaking methods and factors that may help or hinder notetaking performance.

From L2 contexts

Notetaking has also received attention in L2 contexts, sometimes in the forms of surveys of student habits and preferences and pedagogic intervention studies aimed at improving notetaking ability. Crawford et al. (2016) explored several avenues related to student and teacher views of notetaking in high school and university English classes in Japan. In one part of the study, 94% (n = 408) reported copying down what teachers wrote on the board and more than half (58%) stated that they use abbreviations when taking notes in English. Students also expressed their desire for more notetaking practice, exposure to different systems of notes, and for additional abbreviations and symbols (p. 282). Interestingly, in another part of the study that involved university lecturers, 8 of 30 content teachers believe students should avoid taking notes and instead focus all of their cognitive energies on listening carefully (p. 280).

İpek (2018) conducted a survey in the Turkish context that asked students to self-evaluate their abilities to, for example, separate and organize main ideas, select and write only the most important words, and paraphrase lecture content (pp. 211–212). While respondents in this study (N = 61) stated their abilities as “good” or “needs improvement,” the survey did not probe possible factors that led to these self-judgments. Other researchers (e.g., Kusumoto, 2019; Siegel, 2019a) have conducted pedagogic interventions and surveyed students as to their views on which aspects of the intervention were more or less useful for them. A large-scale survey study (N = 1072) in Taiwan (Chen, 2021) investigated student use of in-class and after-class notetaking strategies, demonstrating that, for example, key point selection and comprehension monitoring strategies were most often reported for in-class work. However, none of the survey studies mentioned here have specifically targeted factors that students believe affect their notetaking performance in general (i.e., as distinct from their notetaking performance set within a specified period of instruction).

The survey study that arguably most closely begins to address the factors that influence notetaking for L2 English students who are listening to academic texts in English is Sakurai (2018). As part of her quasi-experimental study involving notetaking instructions, students in both the experimental and control groups responded to questions about what they perceive as difficulties when listening to lectures in English. In response to the question “What were the difficult points in listening to the lectures in English?,” speed was the top answer for both groups, with recognizing details, vocabulary, data and concentration as other factors reported (p. 1034). Sakurai (2018) also found that more than 60% of students in both groups believe the simultaneous acts of listening and notetaking are challenging, followed by choosing what to write and spelling (p. 1034).

Three types of factors

This study aimed to collected student perspectives on three distinct types of factors: personal, speaker, and contextual. Personal factors investigated in this study were the notetaker’s interest in the topic and their own notetaking skills. Interest in the topic of an academic lecture can be viewed from different angles. A basic assumption is that if an individual is interested in a topic, they will find enjoyment in listening to it being discussed and may find the exercise more motivating and engaging than feeling forced to listen to a talk about a topic they are disinterested in. The notion of motivation, after all, has an extensive research regard in regards to L2 learning in general (e.g., Dörnyei, 2005; Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2021). At the same time, an individual typically attends a lecture to learn things they previously did not know, a notion that also applies to notetaking directly; that is, a person typically takes notes on new information that they feel compelled to write down for future reference. If an individual already knows the point being expressed, they may be less likely to write it down (since they already know it). As such “interest in the topic” can be a two-edged sword: it can stimulate motivation, cognitive engagement, and enjoyment but may also imply some background knowledge that could unconsciously curtail notetaking.

Regarding an individual’s own notetaking skills as an influencing factor, one must consider how they rate their own capacity to listen and simultaneously take notes. This factor also encourages respondents to reflect on past notetaking experiences and the extent to which they have been satisfied with their notetaking performance. Since notetaking consists of a wide range of choices and sub-skills (e.g., listening, organizing, prioritizing, paraphrasing, etc.), the factor “my own notetaking skills” was intended as a broad statement that subsumes these more discrete elements that many, if not most, notetakers rarely consider. This option also focuses on the respondent’s own skills as a potential influential factor, which can be improved if need be. At the same time, it provides an option that deflects blame from the speaker or contextual factors that are beyond the control of the individual notetaker. In this sense, the concept of attribution theory (Williams & Burden, 1997, p. 104) is relevant. This theory posits that people make sense of what happens to them by attributing outcomes to certain aspects of one’s life. Thus, those who acknowledge their own notetaking skills as a factor affecting their ability to take “good” notes may have at least some characteristics of an “internalizer,” one who accepts responsibility for one’s performance and feels responsible for life events, rather than as an “externalizer” who might hold others (e.g., regarding lecture notetaking, the speaker, the scheduler, the technology, etc.) accountable for their own notetaking ability (e.g., Williams & Burden, 1997, p. 101).

Speaker factors investigated in the project included accent, rate of speech, and volume of speech. In previous research on EMI lecture comprehension, students have often pointed to unfamiliar accents as a main reason why they struggled to understand a given lecturer. For example, Ali (2020) reports Omani students complaining about teacher accents, and students in Sweden stressed similar problems (Bolton & Kuteeva, 2012). At the same time, one typically expects to hear the same teacher multiple times during a course. Therefore, accent familiarity, where a listener has an easier time understanding familiar accents and may struggle with unfamiliar accents and/or those different from their own (e.g., Ockey & French, 2016; Tauroza & Luk, 1997), can come into play and positively affect comprehension and comfort while also reducing listening anxiety. How familiar a listener is with a given accent clearly relates to their previous exposure to the accent, which may involve variables such as family, foreign travel, and cross-cultural experiences and interest.

Rate of speech is another area that often causes L2 listeners trouble in terms of listening comprehension. When the speed of input is too high, listeners likely struggle to accurately parse the speech stream into meaningful chunks. Indeed, research by Goh (2000) established that one of the main challenges of listening for L2 learners was the ability to recognize words in the speech stream that they actually know in written form. In the context of a lecture, where a single speaker talks for an extended period of time, the amount of speech coupled with a high rate, can lead to cognitive overload, making notetaking extremely challenging. As reported by Piolat et al. (2005), speaking speed is approximately 2–3 words per second whereas writing speed lags well behind, at .02-.03 words per second. A further problem can arise when speakers frequently adjust their rate of speech; for instance, speaking very rapidly when excited before reducing speech rate to delivery less interesting material more slowly.

Volume of speech can be categorized as both a speaker trait and a contextual factor. In regards to individual speakers, the effort they put into projecting their voice may vary depending on biological (e.g., lung capacity, vocal cords, etc.) as well as psychological traits (e.g., their confidence with, interest in, and/or the relative importance with which they view the subject). Finding an appropriate volume to meet the basic needs of information transfer to an audience of people who are sitting in different proximities from the speaker and who have ranging levels of hearing, speech processing, and language comprehension skills can be challenging for speakers. Further, speakers likely adjust their volume based on their auditory perception of their own speech. In a contextual sense, speakers need to be generally aware of room size, their proximity to listeners, etc. when making volume adjustments.

To support the speaker’s projection, microphones may be used in lecture settings to amply sound and deliver it via speakers. Thus, volume is also a contextual factor, one that depends on technology. If the electronic equipment itself is problematic (e.g., too soft or loud, muffled sounds, etc.), listening and therefore notetaking can suffer. Both types of volume can affect phonetic perception and parsing of the speech stream, as volume must be sufficient enough to be heard above competing sources of noise (e.g., footsteps, coughs, etc.). Since volume depends on the relation between the individual speaker set within a specific location, in this paper, volume is viewed as a contextual factor.

Other contextual factors include the purpose for notetaking, the difficulty of the topic, and time of day. Purpose for notetaking is interpreted as the motivation for listeners to engage in notetaking. In academic lecture contexts, there is an assumption that content learning is a general goal. More specific reasons for notetaking may include the intention to review notes, to share them with classmates, and/or to prepare for a variety of post-lecture assignments (either linked to a specific lecture or accumulated for a final exam or term paper). Depending on which purpose or purpose(s) the notetaker perceives as applicable for any individual notetaking event, notetaking performance may differ.

Topic difficulty, meanwhile, is in some ways pre-determined and in other ways individualized. Course titles and prerequisites give some indication of the level of difficulty of the content and the amount of background knowledge and skills students are expected to have. The level of difficulty, however, is also perceived through each individual listener’s background knowledge and motivation for the topic. In other words, those with more previous experience with the topic will likely find listening easier, thus freeing up more cognitive resources for notetaking. Those motivated to listen and learn about the topic may view the task as a challenge in a positive sense; on the other hand, those who are generally uninterested may view topic difficulty as a limiting factor. Regardless of these various perspectives, topic difficulty is distinct from personal listener traits or those of the individual speaker; it is positioned here as an impersonal part of context.

A third contextual factor is time of day, which relates to when the lecture is held. Since the act of lecture listening and notetaking in an L2 is likely a cognitive demanding and time-sensitive undertaking, doing so at an optimal time of day may affect perceived success. Since instructors and/or educational administrators often dictate lecture schedules, students may not have the option to attend when they think best; as such, they must listen and take notes at a time beyond their control, qualifying time of day as a contextual factor.

Need for Student Voices

As demonstrated above, previous research has begun to account for the impact that various notetaking systems, tools, and instructional methods may have on notetaking performance. Further, survey studies have presented broad overviews of student habits, preferences, and practices. All of these studies are valuable in giving attention to this crucial academic skill and providing insights that help teachers and students to be more effective in teaching and learning. However, the emphasis on quantitative performance in quasi-experimental studies and the general nature of questions presented on previous survey studies have omitted the more qualitative and personal experiences of each individual notetaker in terms of factors that they feel affect their performance through personal, speaker, and contextual factors. As such, the present study aimed to address the following research questions relative to this gap:

1. To what extent do students feel personal, speaker and contextual factors affect their notetaking performance while listening to L2 academic English?

2. What level of agreement does a cross-cultural comparison show related to factors affecting notetaking ability?

Method

All participants (N = 711) were studying on EAP courses in one of five countries: Indonesia (n = 44), Japan (n = 256), Spain (n =91), Sweden (n = 272), and the US (n = 48). Apart from being currently enrolled in an EAP course where notetaking was part of the curriculum, no strict controls for L2 English proficiency were used. Students completed an online survey that asked the following question: “What affects your ability to take ‘good’ notes while listening to academic English? Choose all that apply.” Respondents were presented with several options, which were developed in consultation with some of the teachers and piloted with a small group of students similar to those in the main data collection. The options were: a) the speaker’s accent; b) the rate/speed of speech; c) the difficulty of the topic; d) my interest in the topic; e) the time of day; f) the volume of the speech; g) the purpose for taking notes; and h) my own notetaking skills. They were prompted to select “all that apply,” resulting in 2,444 total cases. Data were exported from an online survey website to Microsoft Excel. These data were then used to calculate and report total cases, percent of cases, and ranges. Findings from the questionnaire results are presented in Tables 1 and 2 below, which report totals for each of the factors under investigation as well as a cross-cultural comparison, though it is important to point out that personal information such as country of origin, ethnicity or L1 was not collected. Students were studying in these respective countries but do not necessarily identify with the respective culture or ethnicity.

TABLE 1. Total numbers of case by country

	Sweden	Japan	Spain	US	Indonesia	Total students	% of students
	n = 272	n = 256	n = 91	n = 48	n = 44	n = 711
Accent	73	55	54	22	26	230	32%
Rate of speech	195	142	59	30	24	450	63%
Topic difficulty	129	76	54	28	26	313	44%
Interest	154	132	53	28	24	391	54%
Time of day	119	32	32	10	7	200	28%
Volume	80	69	47	22	20	238	33%
Purpose	91	114	26	20	16	267	38%
My own notetaking skill	129	134	50	25	17	355	49%
Total Cases	970	754	375	185	160	2444

TABLE 2. Percentages of case by country

	Sweden	Japan	Spain	US	Indonesia	Average	Range
Accent	27%	21%	59%	45%	59%	42%	21–59 (38)*biggest range
Rate	72%	55%	65%	63%	55%	62%	55–72 (17)
Topic difficulty	47%	30%	59%	58%	59%	51%	30–59 (29)
Interest	57%	52%	58%	58%	55%	56%	52–58 (6)**most agreement
Time of day	44%	13%	35%	21%	16%	26%	13–44 (29)
Volume	29%	27%	52%	46%	45%	40%	27–52 (25)
Purpose	33%	45%	29%	42%	36%	37%	29–45 (16)
My own notetaking skills	47%	52%	55%	52%	38%	49%	38–55 (17)

A potential point of contention on the survey item could be that the context of notetaking and what notes will be used for may influence how quality is determined. This investigation asked students about their L2 notetaking experience in general, along the lines of Morehead, Dunlosky, Rawson et al. (2019) and Crawford et al. (2016) rather than about their notetaking experience in specific instructional instances (e.g., Kusumoto, 2019; Sakurai, 2018; Siegel, 2016). Moreover, various methods for judging how note quality can be determined have been presented in the literature, ranging from total words to test answerability to complete information units (e.g., Dunkel, 1988; Siegel, 2018; Siegel et al., 2020) with no consensus. As such, the respondents’ own interpretation of what constitutes “good” notes was involved, although some conceptual variations likely existed.

Findings

This section first displays the total number of cases (see, Table 1), arranged by context and factor before then displaying data related to overall percent of cases (see, Table 2).

Table 1 lists the total number of respective cases from each country. From the 711 participants, a total of 2444 cases were reported in response to the survey item, which allowed for multiple answers. As expected, countries with higher participant numbers contributed higher numbers of total cases. Rate of speech was most frequently chosen as a factor affecting notetaking ability (450 cases). It was the factor chosen the most in four of the five countries (i.e., all expect Indonesia). Personal interest in the topic (391) and one’s own notetaking skills (355) were the second and third most common response, respectively. Accent and time of day were selected less often than the other options, at 230 and 200. Other contextual factors were also selected less frequently, especially compared to the personal factors: topic difficulty (313), purpose (267), and volume (238). In terms of overall percentages of students who selected each factor, percentages ranged from 63% (rate of speech) to 28% (time of day), indicating that all of the factors registered as relevant to a minimum of approximately one-third of respondents. Three factors were selected by at least approximately half: one’s own notetaking skill (49%), my interest in the topic (54%), and rate of speech (63%). Finally, all factors were recognized by seven or more students in each country, suggesting that these factors impact notetaking across all contexts, although possibly to greater or lesser degrees.

Table 2 presents the findings as percentages of cases in relation to location of study and factor. Percentages are used here in order to account for the imbalance in the number of participants in each location (e.g., 272 participants from Sweden and only 44 from Indonesia). This presentation allows for a more refined understanding of how each factor was viewed in each respective context in an arguably more even way than the raw number of total cases displayed in Table 1. Using these percentages, cross-cultural comparisons can be made to illustrate any distinctive patterns in regards to factors affecting notetaking.

As seen in Table 2, rate of speech was the factor that registered with the highest percentage of respondents in four of the five contexts (i.e., Sweden, Japan, Spain, and the US); only Indonesia had higher top percentages for factors other than rate of speech, namely accent and topic difficulty, at 59% of cases, respectively. While topic difficulty did receive over 50% in three contexts, less than half of respondents in Sweden and Japan noted this as an influential factor, with only one-third in Japan choosing this option. When viewed in light of the three types of factors outlined earlier, these results showed students pointing to speaker factors (i.e., rate of speech and accent) and personal factors (i.e., interest in the topic and one’s own notetaking skills) more often than contextual factors (i.e., volume, time of day, and purpose for notetaking).

When viewing the overall averages of percent of cases, rate of speech had the highest percentage (62%). Other factors with greater than 50% were interest in the topic (56%) and topic difficulty (51%). One’s own notetaking skills (49%), accent (42%), and volume (40%) all received at least 40% on average across all countries. Purpose for notetaking (37%) and time of day (26%) were selected with less frequency. Examining the range in percentages across the contexts also provides useful insights as to how these factors were perceived in various national contexts. The largest range was for accent, with percentages ranging from 59% in Indonesia down to 21% in Japan, indicating that the impact accent has on notetaking generates wide-ranging viewpoints. Topic difficulty, time of day and volume all had ranges of 25% or more, again suggesting broad views in relation to these factors. Rate of speech, despite receiving the highest overall average percentage of cases (62%) and total cases (450), had a smaller range at 17%, thereby indicating closer agreement that this is a common issue with regards to notetaking. One’s own notetaking skills (17% range) and understanding the purpose for taking notes (16%) showed similarly consistent responses. The highest rate of agreement came from interest in the topic (only a 6% range), a finding clearly demonstrating that this factor affects notetaking consistently based on the input of these respondents.

Discussion

The first research question aimed to extrapolate which factors EAP students perceive to affect their notetaking abilities. These factors were differentiated into three categories: personal, speaker, and contextual. All of specific factors within each category were selected in each context, indicating that all factors affect at least some listeners at least some of the time. Respondents report that, in general, speaker and personal factors influence their notetaking ability more than contextual factors. The speaker characteristic rate of speech was reported as the most impactful factor, likely with the implication that speech that is too fast can negatively affect notetaking. One can also infer that a slower, steady rate of speech (but one that is not over-compensating or pedantic) would facilitate good notetaking practice. Teachers who insert purposeful pauses at various points in lectures may also be providing listeners time to digest and prioritize information, and then to record notes. Such pedagogic practices may help alleviate the obstacles to comprehension and notetaking presented by high rates of speech, a problem also reported in other studies (e.g., Blackwell, 2017). Rate of speech as a confounding factor is hardly a surprise, as research on L2 English listening has shown that, for example, phonetic decoding and inability to parse rapidly incoming input is a main challenge to developing L2 listening abilities (e.g., Field, 2008; Goh, 2000).

Two personal factors, namely an individual’s interest in the lecture topic and their own notetaking skill, were also chosen with relative frequency across all contexts. While topic interest likely relates to general world knowledge, experience, and motivation, this factor may be challenging to adjust or refine. In other words, an individual cannot force themself to become genuinely interested in a topic, as such interests are idiosyncratic. A high level of intrinsic motivation for learning the lecture content would be ideal, but a strong intrinsic motivation for general academic success would also be beneficial; that is, concentrating on the topic may not be pleasurable but the goal of learning the material and/or achieving a good grade may stimulate some students to take interest in the lecture and generate quality notes. Teachers can, of course, make efforts to engage students with the materials, lecture in an entertaining style, use visual aids, and/or include interactive elements in lectures with the intention of stimulating student interest, but these will likely have varying levels of effectiveness.

In contrast to personal interest, which students and teachers may not be able to manipulate or support directly, a person’s own notetaking skills can more explicitly be addressed. Students can practice various notetaking techniques, including overall notetaking schemes (e.g., the Cornell method, the outline method, etc.) and strategies for recording pieces of information (e.g., abbreviation, paraphrasing, translanguaging, etc.; e.g., Siegel, 2021a). They can also enlist the use of various digital tools such as laptops for typing speed and tablets for an electronic option that can mimic handwriting (with a stylus). In addition, students can apply listening strategies (e.g., metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective) during academic listening, which can help them monitor and comprehend the input as well as to manage their emotions while doing so (e.g., O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 2017). By taking one or more of these steps, students would be taking active control of and responsibility for their notetaking performance, an act linked to the “internalizer” within attribution theory (Williams & Burden, 1997).

Teachers in EAP programs have introduced pedagogic interventions, many of which have demonstrated improvements in the quantity, quality and usefulness of notes students take (e.g., Crawford, 2015; Sakurai, 2018; Siegel, 2019b, 2020a). By doing so, teachers are explicitly addressing the situation where L2 English users need to have adequate notetaking skills in EAP and EMI contexts. In addition, teachers can be aware of how teaching materials for notetaking instruction are evaluated for effectiveness (Siegel, 2021b). EMI lecturers can also acknowledge the need for notetaking support among their L2 English students by providing explicit opportunities during lectures to take, revise, and review notes both individually and with partners. Recent research in L1 contexts (Luo et al., 2016) has shown that students who revised notes during planned pauses in lectures outperformed those who revised notes after lectures, indicating that such planned pauses coupled with pair revisions to notes is a new student-centered means to boost lecture notetaking and achievement.

The fact that these respondents pointed to rate of speech, personal interest and their own notetaking skills as the three major factors affecting notetaking ability is particularly interesting because speaker accent has often been cited in previous research as a major confounding factor related to EMI lecture comprehension in several international contexts, including Japan (Blackwell, 2017), Oman (Ali, 2020) and Sweden (Bolton & Kuteeva, 2012). On the surface, accent can be easy to identify and point to as a possible reason for struggles with comprehension. Thus, it is noteworthy that this group of respondents did not perceive accent as being one of the main factors affecting notetaking during EMI lectures.

The second research question took a cross-cultural perspective in comparing the factors and responses in relation to the context from which they came. To address this issue, data were viewed in terms of relative agreement or disagreement in relation to the overall percentages of cases. Interest in the topic was the factor that generated the most agreement among respondents in all five countries, indicating that this personal factor plays a role in notetaking regardless of national context. Interestingly, and in relation to the discussion of accent in the previous paragraphs, accent demonstrated the largest range of responses (a 38% point variation). This finding shows that students in some countries may have more experience with and/or higher comfort levels listening to English spoken via a variety of accents; specifically, students in Sweden (27%) and Japan (21%) indicated that accent tends to impact notetaking performance less than in other countries such as Indonesia (59%) and Spain (59%), although these claims do not account for the actual accents and sources of input to which the students have been exposed. Some moderate agreement (ranges of 16–17%) was evident in relation to rate of speech, purpose for notetaking, and one’s own notetaking skills. The contextual factors of topic difficulty, volume, and time of day demonstrated noticeably less agreement between the five countries, ranging from 25–29%. Overall, the data indicate more general agreement in relation to personal factors affecting notetaking rather than individual speaker or contextual factors.

Pedagogic Implications

Given the difficulty of lecture listening and notetaking, teachers and students might consider how they can prepare for and/or support comprehension and learning in relation to the factors addressed in this paper. Some factors are directly within the realm of student control, the most prominent of which is one’s own notetaking skills. By drawing on metacognitive planning before notetaking, such as which organizational method to use, having a set of abbreviations or short-hand codes, etc., can help one prepare to be successful during the notetaking act. Independent training in listening and notetaking can help develop procedural ability and simulate the multi-tasking that goes on during lecture notetaking. Online videos and recorded lectures provide potential practice material, along with commercially published notetaking books.

EAP teachers can dedicate class time for explicit notetaking training that goes beyond a general “take notes” and instead focuses on discrete aspects of notetaking, including decision making, paraphrasing, and making connections between ideas (e.g., Crawford, 2015; Hayati & Jalilifar, 2009; Sakurai, 2018; Siegel, 2019b, 2021a). Students themselves can also offset topic difficult by doing assigned pre-lecture readings, previewing lecture slides if available and reviewing content of previous lectures. Making glossaries of key terminology can also aid in faster aural recognition of such terms. Social strategies, in particular collaborating with peers in relation to lecture notes, as suggested by Luo et al. (2016), is yet another option.

In terms of speaker factors such as accent and rate of speech, students themselves can avail themselves of opportunities to become exposed to various delivery styles, especially if they know beforehand that particular traits manifest themselves in certain lecturers. EAP teachers may want to ensure bringing in listening materials that intentionally include accents their students find challenging to understand as well as a range of speech rates in order to better prepare students for multicultural, real-world interactions in academic contexts. Using slower rates of speech earlier in the course and then gradually increasing the speed may help students feel a sense of progression and accomplishment. Introducing strategies such as interrupting and asking for clarification can be beneficial for comprehension, just as paraphrasing and abbreviation for taking the actual notes. Actively practicing these types of strategies in a more sheltered EAP environment can get students accustomed to and confident in using them. In relation to purpose for taking notes, teachers can set up a number of different tasks in connection with notes (e.g., multiple choice test, written summary, etc.) so that students get used to taking notes for different purposes. Other activities, include trading and circling important information in a peer’s notes, and taking notes with various forms of input (e.g., speech only, visuals only, etc.) and comparing and discussing the results (Lowen & Metzger, 2019).

EMI lecturers also have a major responsibility in monitoring their spoken delivery and make adjustments depending on their student audience. Given the growing trend for students to study via L2 English, an onus is on the lecturer to be aware of the proficiency levels of their students and accommodate by adjusting their spoken output accordingly. Use of visual aids, including text and images on slides, can help to reinforce important ideas that some students might miss because of accent comprehension and/or rate of speech.

Allowing time for accent familiarity can also help to offset any negative notetaking effects that accent might bring. Adding pauses with the expressed intention of letting students catch up on their notes and/or to revise notes is a pedagogic idea gaining attention (Luo et al., 2016). The idea of institutions providing training courses for EMI teachers has also been promoted (e.g., O’Dowd, 2018; Ozer, 2020), the adoption of which can raise lecturer awareness of second language acquisition and listening concepts with the intention of delivery lecture material more clearly, thus facilitating better notetaking and learning.

Conclusion

This study investigated possible factors that affect notetaking performance among EAP students who listen to academic content in a second language. Using a survey completed by 711 EAP students in five countries, the study aimed to understand how personal, speaker, and contextual factors impact notetaking. Survey respondents were allowed to choose multiple options to indicate which factors they believe impact their notetaking. Data were presented in the forms of total cases, percent of cases, and range. Comparisons were made between each factor as well as from a cross-cultural perspective. Findings showed that rate of speech, personal interest in the topic, and each individual’s own notetaking ability were the factors most frequently identified. The cross-cultural comparison revealed that some factors, such as interest in the topic, were viewed similarly across several countries whereas the impact of others (e.g., accent) can range widely depending on educational context. While this study has provided some insights into factors affecting notetaking among EAP students, further research in and between both L1 and L2 academic environments is needed.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.19174268

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.19174268.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [SAB20-0054].