Baku, Azerbaijan| 93 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL of ACADEMIC RESEARCH Vol. 5. No. 1. January, 2013 T. Gur, T. Dilci, İ. Coskun, B. Delican. The impact of note-taking while listening on listening comprehension in a higher education context. International Journal of Academic Research Part B; 2013; 5(1), 93-97. DOI: 10.7813/2075-4124.2013/5-1/B.16 THE IMPACT OF NOTE-TAKING WHILE LISTENING ON LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN A HIGHER EDUCATION CONTEXT Tahir Gur 1 *, Tuncay Dilci 1 , İbrahim Coskun 2 , Burak Delican 1 1 Cumhuriyet University, 2 Trakya University (TURKEY) Corresponding author: tahirgur@yahoo.com DOI: 10.7813/2075-4124.2013/5-1/B.16 ABSTRACT Currently, lecturing dominates higher education as the most frequently used method due to certain conditions in this context. Various methods and techniques have been developed and some research studies have been carried out to help learners avoid being passive listeners in a context where lecturing is frequently used. This study aims to research how listening to different lecture types (informative, narrative and philosophical) by note- taking affects listening comprehension. The study, carried out in the Department of Turkish Language Teaching at the Faculty of Education, Cumhuriyet University, adopts an experimental design with a pretest and posttest. To analyze the data, t-test was carried out using SPSS 18. According to the results of the study, there were higher levels of comprehension for all three lecture types in favour of the participants who took notes while listening to the lectures. It is recommended that learners be trained to acquire active learning, active listening and note-taking skills. Key words: Listening, active listening, university students, note-taking 1. INTRODUCTION Humans recognize, comprehend and evaluate the world and other members of the human race through language skills that have developed within the context of understanding and explaining. As a comprehension skill, listening provides people with the largest input during the process of language acquisition and knowledge improvement (Hunsaker, 1990), and it also forms the basis of other language skills (Ozbay, 2005:9). In brief, listening, which is defined as the process of making meaning out of the perceived audio input via various operations, is actively done for different purposes and motives all through the life beginning with the foetus period (Gunes, 2007: 73). People listen to audio language to acquire knowledge and interpret, criticise or enjoy the material (Akyol, 2012, p. 5-9). Listening activities carried out by learners at school are intended for gaining knowledge; such activities are based on the principle that involves storing information by using mental listening comprehension mechanisms and recalling the stored information later. In listening activities carried out at school to understand and gain knowledge, it is possible to mention both passive and active listening techniques. In the literature, as there are techniques applying certain directions developed by people and institutions (e.g., the Cornell technique), learners mostly develop their own note-taking techniques. To prevent forgetting nearly 80% of the content of a listening material, it is recommended that learners take notes while listening (Ozbay, 2005, p. 85). In the overall sense, it is seen that note-taking helps learners not only in learning, but also in developing writing skills (Boch and Piolat, 2005). When the available time and the number of students are considered, it is commonly known that the most frequently used method is lecturing (Gage and Berliner, 1984, p. 454). Therefore, for students to develop "academic listening skills" is highly significant to be successful in higher education. Academic listening skills are considered as the most significant element of communicative competence used in a higher education context (Plowerdew, 1994, p. 7). Quite a few researchers (Buck, 2001; Dunkel, 1995; Dunkel and Davis, 1994; Flowerdew, 1994; Chaudron, Loschky, and Cook, 1995; Mendelsohn and Rubin, 1995; Richards, 1983; and Rost, 1990) contributed to the literature on academic listening skills. In these studies, the differences between conversational and academic listening were also addressed. In short, it is possible to define conversational listening as an activity that is mutually carried out, while academic listening is a one-way activity that is done to understand a subject or the contents of a course. In daily communication, listeners also assume the role that of a speaker. On the other hand, students rarely take their turn to speak in academic listening; this only occurs when a question is directed to them. In later parts of his study, Flowerdew mentions five steps of note-taking: decoding the message given, understanding, identifying the main points, deciding on when to record these points and speed writing. An individual takes down notes in line with this process and he/she reviews them and uses the meaning that is driven out of these notes in connection with the information that is still in the working memory to remember information in the long run. In this regard, notes function as either the second or an external memory.