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. Problems associated with this instruction included lack of language laboratory or authentic listening materials, course books more appropriate as teacher resources than texts, and a single book in economics. Course organization and classroom presentation are described. Issues arising in evaluation are also examined, including explicit discouragement of communicative skills testing, conflicting directives about testing approaches, disagreement over standardized test use, and factual errors in the material taught. Course-related materials, including a program description, class schedule, test and lecture examples, and a lecture sample with notetaking directions are appended. (MSE)