Note Taking While Listening

Most of the strategies for note taking while reading also apply to note-taking while listening: you need to think about your purpose for listening, recognize the main ideas, and make decisions about what information is relevant to your purpose. But there are two important differences. First, your note-taking must keep up with the speaker, so you have to take notes quickly. And second, your initial notes will follow the order and outline of the speaker’s talk, so you may need to review and re-organize your notes later so that they make sense to you.

Here are some tips for effective note taking while listening:

1.Listen carefully to the introduction of the presentation because most presenters will give an overview of their talk in the introduction. 


2.Use symbols and abbreviations to speed up the process of taking notes. You can develop your own system of symbols and abbreviations, but make sure you use them consistently so that you always remember what they mean.

3.Listen for phrases (signposts) that indicate how the presentation is organized and signal different parts of a presentation/lecture. For example:

a)    Introducing the topic: The topic of my presentation today is ...; I intend to show that ... 


b)   Indicating the organization: First, I’d like to talk about ...; In the second place ...; And finally..


c)    Reviewing information: As I mentioned previously ...; It’s clear that ...; You probably remember that ... 


d)   Emphasizing information: I’d like to stress that ...; The main point is that ... 


e)    Starting a new point: I’d like to move on to ...; Now let’s turn to ... 


4.Listen for logical connectors that express the relationship between ideas. For example, as a result of, in contrast to, although.

Task 2:

Listen to this presentation and answer the following questions.

How many parts are in the talk?

     There are 4 parts in the talk.

Write the main topics that the presentation will address. Take notes on key information.

This presentation is about two provinces in Canada: Alberta and Saskatchewan.

He was talking about similarities and differentiates between these two Canadian 's provinces. 

Write headings for your notes.

1- Geographic and location

2- Climate

3   3- Economic and natural resources.

     4- Population 

Compare your notes with two of your peers and discuss the strategies you used (listening for key words, using abbreviations, using a chart).

 List all the new vocabulary that you have picked from the presentation and use them in sentences of your own.

Predominate - In Brazil, the population are predominate happy.

Landlocked - Belo Horizonte is a landlocked city.