VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

PHÍ THỊ BÍCH

APPLYING NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES TO DEVELOP
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILL – A
QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH AT VAN XUAN –
HOAI DUC HIGH SCHOOL
ÁP DỤNG CÁC CHIẾN LƯỢC GHI CHÉP ĐỂ PHÁT TRIỂN
KĨ NĂNG NGHE CHO HỌC SINH TRUNG HỌC PHỔ
THÔNG – NGHIÊN CỨU BÁN THỰC NGHIỆM TẠI
TRƯỜNG THPT VẠN XUÂN – HOÀI ĐỨC

M.A. Minor Thesis

Field: English Methodology
Code: 60.140.111
HANOI – 2013

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

PHÍ THỊ BÍCH

APPLYING NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES TO DEVELOP
Phí Thị Bích
ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First and foremost, I would like to send my sincere thanks to my supervisor, Assoc.
Prof. Dr. Trần Xuân Điệp, for his valuable guidance, helpful advice,
recommendation, and encouragement during the time I tried to complete this minor
thesis. Without his supervision, this work would never have been possible.
My deepest thanks also go to Ms Trịnh Thị Nhung – an English teacher at Van
Xuan high school and her 40 students in class 12 D1 (2012 - 2013) who were so
generous and willing to help me during six weeks of conducting my research.
I would like to thank all the teachers of Post-Graduate Department for their valuable
lectures, whose knowledge is the foundation for my thesis.
Finally, I would like to express my biggest love and thanks to my family for their
unconditional contributions during the time I conducted my research. It was my
parents and my husband who gave me the will to complete this challenging work. Phí Thị Bích
iii

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of note-taking in listening comprehension was investigated in
many previous studies. This quasi-experimental study conducted upon forty
students of class 12D1 at Van Xuan high school aimed at finding out the note-
taking strategies used by high-school students, the difference in students‟ listening

v

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

EFL English as Foreign Language
ESL English as Second Language
SD Standard Deviation
SLA Second Language Acquisition
TOEFL Test of English as a Foreign Language
ULIS University of Language and International Studies
VNU Vietnam National University
vi

TABLE OF CONTENT PAGE
Declaration i
Acknowledgement ii
Abstract iii
List of tables and figures iv
List of abbreviations v
Table of content vi
PART A: INTRODUCTION 1
1. Rationale for the Research 1
2. Objectives of the Research 2
3. Research Questions 2
4. Scope of the Research 2
5. Significance of the Research 2
6. Design of the Research 3
PART B: DEVELOPMENT 3
CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 3
1.1 Listening comprehension 4
viii

PART C: CONCLUSIONS 36
1. Recapitulation of main ideas 36
2. Limitations of the study 37
3. Recommendations for further studies 38
REFERENCES 39
APPENDICES I 1

PART A: INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale for the Research
Listening clearly plays an important role in communication. There has been a
number of researchers who investigated the ways to improve listening skill for EFL
learners. Among those, the impact of note-taking was also investigated for a long
time. Crawford (1925) began his study in the 1920s, centering on whether note-
taking could improve students‟ performance. Over the years, researchers have tried
to verify that note-taking help students “encode” the information involved.
Nowadays, it is very common for teachers to implement the note-taking strategies in
the EFL listening class because they think that taking notes can help students catch
the main points easily, so they can effectively promote their listening
comprehension. However, this situation causes some researchers‟ great concerns
about whether taking notes is effective for students to enhance their listening
comprehension or not. Some researchers disagree with note-taking strategy because
of lack of vocabulary capacity (Lin 2004; Hsu, 2005); in addition, students cannot
concentrate on the text because they have to spend much time on taking notes

listening tasks designed in the textbook. Furthermore, this study only focuses on
listening comprehension, not all aspects of listening skill.
The number of participants of the research is only 40. They are students of class 12
D1 (2012 – 2013) who are at the same age and have the same total years of learning
English – 9 years with the same curriculum.
5. Significance of the research
This study will look at a number of issues. These include the use of note-taking
strategies in listening lessons, the students‟ attitudes towards and their perceptions
of note-taking strategies in the light of developing their listening skill, and the effect
of note-taking strategies on high school students‟ listening performance. Therefore,
the author hopes this research will be able to find out the strong points of note-
3

taking strategies as well as the feasibility to apply them to teaching listening skill at
high school in the future. It could also be the suggestions and implications for other
English teachers in Vietnam who are searching for the better ways to improve their
students‟ listening skill.
6. Design of the research
There are three main parts in this study, namely Introduction, Development, and
Conclusions. The Introduction begins with the rationale, objectives, research
questions, scopes, signification, and the design of the study. The second part
includes three chapters namely Theoretical Background, Methodology, Findings
and Discussions. In the first chapter, Theoretical Background, presents definition of
major terms used in this study, including overview of listening comprehension,
types of listening comprehension, factors affect listening comprehension, overview
of note-taking strategies, note-taking methods; as well as the review of related
works concerning advantages and disadvantages of note-taking, and the relationship
between note-taking and listening comprehension. The second chapter provides the
methodology including settings, participants, data collection methods, data
collection procedure, data analysis methods. The findings and discussions are

discourse structure, discourse type, and social relationships, all at the same time.
Previous researches have identified a number of factors as determinants of
proficiency in a second or foreign language. According to Richards and Schmidt
(2002, p. 313), listeners have to construct meaning by both linguistic and non-
linguistic knowledge. They are required to employ knowledge of words or lexical
items, grammatical rules, and cognitive and social skills in order to negotiate an
understanding of a passage or text. Moreover, Morley (2001, p.74) proposes that
listening comprehension involves both top-down and bottom-up process. In top-
down processing, learners are required to activate schematic knowledge and
contextual knowledge while they are listening to the texts. Schematic knowledge
includes an activation of the content schemata, which is the background information
on the topic, and formal schemata, which is knowledge of how discourse is
5

organized. Contextual knowledge refers to an understanding of the specific listening
at hand like the knowledge about the participant, setting, and topic. In a bottom-up
process, prior knowledge of the language system such as phonology, grammar and
vocabulary comes in to play a role. Learners have to activate all kinds of knowledge
required in order to be successful in listening process.
Furthermore, Lian (1985, p. 168) points out that listening comprehension is a
dynamic process involving the interaction between itself and the text during which
meanings are negotiated. This means that listeners do not just extract or draw the
meaning directly from the words or texts. Rather, they have to create the meaning
by filtering the new information through their own accumulated experimental
history, or socio-historical background. The meaning created or constructed,
therefore, will depend upon, and vary between each individual person. Nunan
(1991, p. 9) also proposes that listening comprehension involves utilizing both
bottom-up and top-down knowledge: “In comprehending aural language, listeners
do a great deal of constructive and interpretative work in which they integrate what
they hear with what they know about the world.”

1.1.2. Listening comprehension process
According to Brown (1994), the process of listening may be understood as the
decoding an aural message and making sense of it. He suggested that after the
process of receiving sounds waves through the ears and transmitting nerve impulses
to the brain, the process of comprehension immediately takes place. However, this
is a complex process which consists of three following stages:
Perception: Perception is the initial stage of comprehension in which the
hearer processes what is called “raw speech”, and holds its image in short-
term memory. This image consists of the constituents (phrases, clauses,
cohesive markers, and intonation or stress patterns) of a stream of speech.
Decoding: the second stage is decoding in which the hearer step by step:
 determines the type of speech event that is being processed.
 infers the function of the message.
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 brings a plausible interpretation to the message by recalling
background information relevant to the particular context and
subject matter.
 assigns a literal meaning to the utterance
 assigns an intended meaning to the utterance
Recording for storage: After the hearer has successfully decoded the oral
input, the information is stored through the two following steps:
 the hearer determines whether information should be retained
in short-term or long-term memory. Short-term memory is
appropriate in contexts that simply call for a quick oral
response from the hearer. Long-term one is more common
when the hearer is processing information in a lecture.
 The hearer deletes the original form of the message in 99
percent of speech acts. Important information, if any, is
retained conceptually.

Extensive listening is listening for pleasure and interest without having to pay much
attention to content and language. Extensive listening keeps the students‟
motivation and interest high. Students feel satisfied as they can understand the
passage well. Moreover, the topics are various and entertaining, which motivates
students to develop their listening skills as well as exposes them to valuable extra
contact with spoken language.
1.1.4. Factors affect listening comprehension
Since listening is a complex active process in which learners decode and construct
the meaning of the text by drawing on their previous knowledge about the world as
well as their linguistic knowledge, there are many factors that affect listening
comprehension. Teng (1993) further divided these factors into a comprehensive list
as presented in the following table.
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A. Listener Factors
1. Language facility, including phonology, lexical, syntactic, semantic,
pragmatic knowledge
2. Knowledge of the world
3. Intelligence
4. Physical condition
5. Metacognitive strategies
6. Motivation
B. Speaker Factors
1. Language ability: native speaker vs. nonnative speaker
2. Accent/dialect
3. Speech of delivery
4. Degree of pauses and redundancies
5. Prestige and personality
C. Stimulus factors
1. Discussion topic


serve as an external repository of information that allows later revision and review.
Therefore, note-taking can be divided into two phases: encoding and reviewing.
1.1.6. Note-taking methods
In this part, five methods applied in taking notes including Cornell method, Outline
method, Mapping method, Charting method and Sentence method are presented.
Cornell method: The notes are written in the main space – the right-hand side
and label each idea and detail with a key word or “cue” in the left-hand
space. At the bottom of the page, the summary of notes is written. By using
this method, the information is well-organized and systematic for recording
or reviewing later. This method is simple, easy to use, efficient, time and
effort saving.
Outline method: The information is written in an organized pattern based on
space indention. To show the level of importance, note-takers use the
distance from the major point and space relationships indicate major or
minor point. This is a well-organized system which records the content as
well as the relationship. It is most effective when note-taking skills are good.
Mapping method: It is a graphic representation of the content. The notes
begins in the middle of the page and the ideas are added by radiating
branches from the centre idea or from previous branches. All the ideas are
expressed in key words. Topic comes first, the sub-topic and next supporting
details. To show the links between parts of the map, note-takers use arrows
and words. This format helps learners to visually track the information they
hear regardless of conditions. Little thinking is needed and relationships can
easily be seen. It is also easy to edit notes by adding numbers, marks, and
colour coding.
Charting method: Note-takers record information (words, phrases, main
ideas, etc.) into the appropriate category. This method helps track
conversation and dialogues where learners would be confused and lose out
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note-taking did facilitate college and lower-intermediate level EFL learners‟
listening comprehension (Carrell, Dunkel and Mollaun, 2004; Liu, B and Hu, Y.,
2012). However, the performance level of note-taking depended on the length and
the topic of listening passages. Note-taking was more beneficial in answering
general questions rather than the detailed ones (Zhou and Gou, 2007). Kiewra
(1989) claimed that note-taking promoted listening comprehension thanks to its
external repository of information which permitted later revision and review to
stimulate recall of the information in listening passages.
In contrast, other scholars found no positive effect of note-taking strategies on
listening comprehension including Dunkel, 1985; Hale and Courtley, 1994. They
investigated effect of note-taking on EFL listening comprehension and in the
context of TOEFL test. They failed to find positive effect of note-taking.
In conclusion, by reviewing related studies, it is clear that there is still no common
theoretical background for the widely-held belief that note-taking is facilitative to
listening comprehension. The effectiveness of note-taking strategies on listening
comprehension still needed further investigation. In addition, these above previous
studies on note-taking were conducted upon college students. It was of great
concern to conduct studies upon high-school students. Therefore, this study was
conducted upon students at Van Xuan – Hoai Duc high school in Hanoi, Vietnam to
apply note-taking strategies to improve students‟ listening skills.

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CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY
2.1. Settings
This quasi-experimental study was conducted at Van Xuan – Hoai Duc high school
in the suburb of Hanoi. It is a public school which was founded twelve years ago
with thirty-six classes of three grades 10
th

selective lesson. In total, they had four English lessons every week. Of all four
skills: reading, speaking, listening, and writing, the most challenging for them is
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listening skill. They really hoped to improve their listening skill. In the study, they
were divided into two groups of twenty students in each group. One group was the
control group and the other was the experimental group. The following table
presents main background information about participants including gender, age, and
their English proficiency level.

Experimental Group
Control Group
Total number of
participants
Male
3
3
6
Female
17
17
34
Total
20
20
40
Age
18
18
18