Authentic materials such as TED Talks have become an everyday presence in the ELT classroom, often for practice listening and taking notes. However, teachers can struggle to teach the sub-skills that are involved in notetaking, and instead often simply tell students to 'take notes'. This approach lacks the scaffolding required for the complex…

This article will consider using TOEFL scores for purposes of placement and advising for international graduate students at a northern California research university. As the number of international students is on the rise and the funds for the graduate ESL program are diminishing, the way in which the university is handling the influx of…

Describes a study which investigated the effect of training in nonverbal and verbal cue identification on notetaking and listening comprehension by 100 Chinese graduate students. The paper also provides a model for future materials development, teaching methodology, testing, and research in this area. (Author/SED)

For many years (1995-2002), the Department of English of the University of Blida witnessed low rates of academic achievement of students preparing an English Degree. An analysis of the second year students' course grades in academic years 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 and data from a preliminary survey with some teachers reflected signs that the…

Eight commercially-available listening and note-taking courses are reviewed and a matrix for comparing their characteristics is presented. "Listening and Note-Taking" (Virginia Yates) was written for college-bound high school students and college students who need to improve listening and note-taking skills, while the "Sack-Yourman Study Skills…

A teacher of English in China describes his experiences teaching the listening component of a summer course designed to help 37 doctoral students improve their English skills before beginning an agricultural economics program. In the listening component, students were to gain experience in notetaking while listening to extended academic lectures.…