Developing vocabulary learning through effective listening and appropriate Note-Taking

Abstract

From a student’s perspective, lessons are usually taken to be learned for the day of the exam; for that, we believe that students need more practice concerning both developing listening skills and taking notes skills. To reach a good level in both, we can talk about developing vocabulary acquisition. The experiment is done in three levels. The first level is developing the listening skill of students through different types of listening: tape-recorders and teacher’s talk, the aim by the latter is to make the students get important information from teachers’ body language and not just verbal language and then compare it to the other types of listening. Taking notes is in the second level because after students become familiar with the listening skills, they will take notes. Making students effective listeners does not mean that they are going to take appropriate notes. During listening, students cannot take every single word the teacher says, so they are obliged to use abbreviations and symbols, that is why we aim to teach the different note-taking skills. Even if the notes taken by students are correct and readable at the moment, after a period of time, they are not going to be as readable as the first time, for that we give a regular memorization of lessons. The third level is vocabulary acquisition. In this level, we focus on both listening and note taking in the sense that students have acquired both skills, and then they have to apply what they have acquired on vocabulary. The research aims at giving importance to the connection between what students learn in different modules. In the current experiment, we take the connection between oral expression and written expression modules, especially that any topic when it is discussed orally is different from when it is written. One difference could be vocabulary, the aim here is to raise students’ awareness of these differences. In order to achieve that, two hypotheses are put. If students use listening strategies, they will take appropriate notes, and if students take notes in an organized way and followthem with memorization, their acquisition of vocabulary will be better and last long. The vocabulary used by students is given by the teacher, but practised by students. In general, students used the vocabulary given in writing their essays. The results showed good performances by students and developed through the fulfillment of the research. Students’ notes started to be organized and clear, and their most used method is the outline method because of its easiness and clearness. Students, also, developed their use of abbreviations and symbols and started to use the same abbreviation for the same word.