The Impact of Five Note-taking Techniques on Academic Listening Comprehension of EFL Student Teachers

This study aims to investigate the impact of five note-taking techniques namely: Sentence, Outlining, Charting, Cornell, and Mapping on the academic listening comprehension of EFL student teachers. The participants included thirty four student teachers enrolled in first year, English department, at Port Said Faculty of Education. The study adopts a pre-posttest quasi experimental design. The researcher divided the participants randomly in to two groups: control group participants who did not apply note-taking techniques during the lectures and experimental group participants who applied note-taking techniques during the lectures, using each time one different type of note-taking. In each lecture, participants were pretested and post tested using an item gap filling listening comprehension test prepared by the researcher. In order to probe the differences between the two groups and examine the effectiveness of the five note-taking techniques, t-test was carried out in addition to a questionnaire eliciting participants' views about each administered technique. T-test results of the scores of the control and experimental group in the pretest and posttest of listening comprehension revealed that there were higher levels of listening comprehension in favour of the participants who applied note-taking during the lectures. Moreover, results revealed that participants considered all techniques beneficial and applicable with a definite prioritizing. The study recommended all types of note-taking techniques to be applied in the TEFL context in general and in higher education context in particular to gain various educational benefits.