Investigating Notetaking Strategies: An Academic Listening Skill in EFL Classroom

aries yulianto; dr. santi chairani djonhar, ma; h. ujang suparman, ma, ph.d;

EFL Students are hardly getting used to catch important points and they do not understand the whole English lecture content. The main aims of this research are to potray lecture’s delivery and to investigate notetaking strategies used by the students in EFL classroom. The focus of this study is to answer “how and why questions and the behavior cannot be manipulated” (Yin, 2003). So the type of descriptive case study is used in this research to describe an intervention or phenomenon and the real-life context in which it occurred, in an EFL setting particularly (Yin, 2003; Creswell, 2012). Based on the results of data analysis, there were some similarities in delivering lectures (Leech and Svartvik’s, 1975; Chaudron & Richards, 1986). But when the context is different, several discrepancies were also encountered. Signals such as “There is”, “And then”,“Just”, “You have to know”, “So”, “And”, “Okay”, and “Like that” functioned in various ways. Other markers were also observed such as references, substitution and ellipsis, and lexical cohesions. Some other signals found in the context of EFL lectures are questioning and recalling. Teaching style is also an emphasized aspect considered in her research. On the other hand, cases occurred in students’ notetaking demonstrated the way how they applied strategies as elaborated by Yamamoto (2011). EFL students occasionally had topic, originality, and reflection over their notes. But some aspects were in major number, such as in accuracy, details, keywords, notetaking devices, and organization. The teacher or lecturer are suggested to apply proper lecture’s delivery in teaching-learning process, especially when using EFL as language instruction. Whereas the students are expected to keep taking notes and learn to improve their comprehension especially in academic listening. They should apply some strategies to achieve efficiency of notetaking as well.