Note-taking in the Academic Writing Process of Non-native Speaker Students: Is it Important as a Process or a Product?

Non-native speaker (NNS) students often have to be persuaded of the value of note-taking from texts when they are preparing academic essays. though research indicates that note-taking can enhance learning from texts, it is not clear how it contributes to the essay writing process, especially for non-native speakers. Is note-taking a valuable process in terms of facilitating learning from texts for NNS students as well as providing a tangible product from which they can write their essays? In a qualitative study, 6 students were followed through an authentic essay writing task. Introspective, retrospective, and concrete data (the students' notes and essays) were obtained and analyzed according to both the information processing approach to cognitive psychology and the dialogic approach. In terms of process, it was found that note-taking behaviors could facilitate learning from text, but that depth of processing and the students' self-positioning in the discourse community were more important than their overt behaviors. As a product, the students' notes were useful as a framework from which to write, particularly if they included wordings from the texts which could enable students to express themselves academically in their essays.

In teaching academic skills, I have sometimes found that non-native speaker (NNS) students may be resistant to the idea of note-taking as part of the reading-writing process in preparing assignments. Native speakers have generally been trained to take notes from sources during their high school or even primary school education, but students from other cultural backgrounds may not have had experience writing assignments or research papers, let alone taking notes as part of this process. For many NNS, the challenge of writing academic assignments in a foreign language is immense, and to be asked to take notes can be perceived as just an added burden. "What's the point of taking notes?" they say. "It's not efficient!"

To find some good answers to my students' questions, I decided to investigate the function of note-taking in the assignment or paper preparation process of non-native speakers. Is note-taking significant for its process function; in other words, does it enhance and facilitate learning from text? Or is it important for its product function, that is providing the student with prompts for the actual writing process?

What Does the Literature Tell us About Note-taking?

Note-taking in the second-language writing process is not a well-researched area, perhaps because of the traditional divide in the English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum between reading and writing (see Blanton, 1994). Particularly the product-process distinction does not seem to have been explored. However, studies of note-taking in classes have investigated the product-process function of notes. Kiewra (1985) found that students who took notes in class were better able to recall the main points than non-note-takers, suggesting that note-taking as a process facilitated learning. However, those who were able to review the notes performed even better. In this case, the notes as a product served as a useful external means of storing information.

White (1996) made a somewhat similar distinction in her investigation of the role of note-taking in language learning. She felt it was important to distinguish between overt note-taking behaviors and the underlying cognitive processes which are "inaccessible to observation but central to learning" (p. 91). She commented that behaviors like underlining, listing, and copying are "traces of cognition", in that they give a tangible indication of the students' internal cognitive processing.

The literature on reading and note-taking contains both prescriptive texts and empirical research. The prescriptive texts of the past 50 or 60 years have offered a range of note-taking formulae. Most of these methods have encouraged students to pick out the main ideas of the text; to reflect, question, or comment on the material; or sometimes to transpose the information into graphic or diagrammatic form. Perhaps the most famous of these methods include the various versions of Robinson's (1946) Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review (SQ3R) in which the second `R', recitation, has sometimes been interpreted to mean noting down the main points of the text. Bird's "Inductive Outline Procedure" was an even earlier reading and note-taking method; the main points were summarized on the left side of the page and students added their comments on the particular and overall significance of these points in two columns on the right side (as cited in King & Eilers, 1996). More recently, Pauk (as cited in King & Eilers) proposed "the Cornell Method" in which the text is summarized in point form on the right, keywords are jotted down in a narrow column on the left, and an overall summary is noted down at the bottom of each page of notes. Various forms of concept mapping and other graphic organizers also became fashionable during the 1960s and 70s, popularized in particular by Buzan (1976). In postmodern times, an emphasis on dialogic reflection has led to the concept of the double entry journal (Hughes, Kooy, & Kanevsky, 1997) in which students write their summary notes on the left and their reflections in the right hand column.

Empirical research has set about showing the effectiveness of various note-taking methods in promoting learning from texts. For example, Fischer and Mandl (1984) taught college students to use note-taking strategies such as highlighting, margin notes and text reconstruction and found that both high level and low level students improved their performance on recall tests. McCagg and Dansereau (1991) developed a complex system of knowledge mapping which involved picking out key ideas and showing the links between them. Recall protocols and multiple choice comprehension answers showed that students benefited from this procedure.

Working specifically with non-native speakers at an Egyptian university, Amer (1994) taught one group of students to use underlining, a second group to use knowledge mapping and a control group to use conventional ESL reading techniques focussing on vocabulary and structures. In comprehension and free recall tests, both note-taking groups performed better than the control group; however, the knowledge mapping group outperformed the underlining group in free recall. This finding supports the argument that more complex cognitive processing, such as transforming written to visual information, aids comprehension and recall.

Not all studies of note-taking have shown such positive results, however. For example, Sarig (1987) in her qualitative study of 10 Hebrew-speaking students found that self-monitoring and clarification-and-simplification strategies tended to promote comprehension more than "technical aids". In particular she pointed out that highlighting was associated with poor comprehension if students picked out lower-order propositions.

Summarizing, another form of note-taking, has also been shown to have dubious benefits in terms of learning from text if it is used inappropriately. For example, Armbruster and Anderson (as cited in Gagne, 1985) taught a treatment group to use summarizing techniques. On a recall test, the results of the treatment group were mixed. Armbruster and Anderson theorized that it is not sufficient to teach students to use an observable behavior (a note-taking technique) without stressing the underlying cognitive processes. Similarly, Hidi and Anderson (1986) found that the "copy-delete" summarizing technique led to poor performance on subsequent recall tests. They also found that some students tended to personalize the summary too much - picking out what was important to them rather than the most significant propositions in terms of the text.

Another recent study (Beeson, 1996) found that writing after reading contributed more effectively to synthesis of knowledge than note-taking. Beeson divided 111 college nursing students into 3 groups: one group read a given text and took notes; one group read without any pen-to-paper activity; and a third group was asked to read and then write a short essay about the texts. The note-taking group was found to have the best recall of facts in a subsequent test. However, the reading-only group and the essay writing group were both more able to synthesize the readings later into an essay. This is a significant study because the synthesizing task attempted to assess how well students could apply the knowledge they had gained from the texts. In contrast, most earlier studies had merely tested the quantity of students' learning from text through comprehension tests or recall protocols which typically count the number of macro or micro-propositions recalled by the subjects. However, the study does not differentiate between note-taking techniques unlike the more recent study by Lahtinen, Lonka and Lindblom-Ylanne (1997).

Lahtinen et al. (1997) used an authentic academic test, the entrance exam to a medical school, to investigate the qualitative outcome of students' spontaneous note-taking behavior. In this test, the 502 candidates were asked to read two texts before writing three short essay questions on the same topic. The students were unlikely to have had prior knowledge of this topic. Before writing, the texts and the students' notes were removed. As this was an authentic test situation, the students were free to choose their own note-taking techniques. The researchers analyzed the students' techniques into the following categories: no notes, underlining only, verbatim notes, summarizing and/ or concept-mapping. They related these to the students' performance and found that students who used no notes wrote the poorest quality essays. The best essays were written by students who used generative note-taking techniques such as summarizing and concept-mapping rather than merely underlining or verbatim notes. The authors concluded that "constructive mental activity is facilitated by study strategies aiming at transforming knowledge into a coherent whole through generative processing" (p. 15). Unfortunately, this claim is too sweeping, as the generative note-taking strategies may have been selected by students who were already more inclined to write analytically. Nevertheless, this study does suggest that there is a relationship between generative note-taking and good essay writing.

To summarize, the literature overall shows that note-taking, particularly what Lahtinen et al. (1997) term "generative" note-taking, can have beneficial effects on students' ability to recall and use information from texts. However, previous studies have not investigated the function of note-taking in the context of the academic assignment writing process. Lahtinen et al. removed the texts before students could write, whereas in an assignment-writing situation, students would continue to have access to textbooks, photocopied journal articles and printouts from the Internet. Moreover, students in real life have access to computers as well as pen-and-paper. In these circumstances, what note-taking strategies do NNS students employ and how do these strategies relate to the quality of their essays?

A Qualitative Study of NNS Students' Note-taking Strategies

In order to explore NNS students' note-taking strategies in depth, I conducted a qualitative study with a small number of students and investigated in detail how these students traveled through an authentic essay writing process.

I invited NNS students from a second-year Humanities unit to participate in the study and 6 students volunteered: Annie, Toni, Jim, Mei Wen, Chu Li and Emma. Coincidentally, all these students came from Chinese backgrounds (PRC, Taiwan and Hongkong). They had been in Australia between 3 and 9 years and were all in their early twenties. Five of the students were female and only one was a migrant to Australia. All of the students, except one, had passed a first year university writing course for non-native speakers.

The students were about to write a 3000-word essay worth 20% of their mark for the semester. They were told to use at least 5 sources, including journal articles as well as the recommended textbooks.

In order to obtain data which were as full, rich and reliable as possible, I used three sources. First, I asked the students to keep all their notes, computer print-outs, essay drafts, final drafts and the lecturer's comments. Second, I asked them to tape-record an introspective protocol of their thoughts as they were taking notes. Third, I interviewed each student before and immediately after they prepared their essays.

Note-taking as a Process

The students in the study all used some form of note-taking from the source texts in their assignment writing process. The first stage of note-taking for most of the students was highlighting or underlining sections of text--usually the keywords. One student (Chu Li) also sprinkled her text with translation equivalents in Chinese. Jim and Toni added a few margin notes. Several students used page stickers to mark particularly useful parts of the texts. Annie, Jim and Toni also started to write point-form, or outline, notes from the various texts.

At a fairly early stage, all 6 students decided upon an overall structure for their essays and started to keep notes under the headings they had identified. Annie was the most systematic note-taker: she kept separate pages for each main section of her essay and used different colored pens to identify the different texts she had used. She used outline notes, summarizing key points in brief phrases. Jim followed a similar procedure but wrote relatively few notes, which included more wordings from the text than rephrasing. Toni was ebullient in her note-taking! She took copious outline notes, drew up charts, developed concept maps and took notes of her notes.

The other three students relied almost entirely on verbatim copying in their notes. In some cases they did this by hand, but generally their "note-taking" consisted of copying chunks of texts - sometimes several paragraphs in length--from the textbooks on to their computers. As Mei Wen said, "I give that a heading and then I copy all this stuff."

Their mechanism for selecting suitable passages was often to identify keywords which fitted their essay outline rather than picking out macro- or micro-propositions.

a. Information processing. From the perspective of cognitivists such as Ausubel (1960), Anderson (1985) or Chamot and O'Malley (1994), the note-taking techniques described above were means by which the students were able to process the information from the texts. In particular, note-taking was useful in relating the readings to the task, and in organizing the material under task-based headings which in turn enabled the students to synthesize material from different texts.

Note-taking also helped students to understand the material. Even verbatim copying appeared to be useful in this regard to some extent. Mei Wen, for example, said that copying pieces of text was useful "to give my mind more balance and ... to give your mind more understand what it's all about." As Lee Wing On (1996) points out, learning by repetition does not preclude a "deep approach" to learning. He cites these words of the Confucian scholar, Zhu Xi: "Learning is reciting. If we recite it then think it over, think it over then recite it, naturally it'll become meaningful to us" (p. 36).

Unfortunately, this understanding-by-repetition technique was not always successful. As Mei Wen said:

    If I don't understand it, I probably won't write it, but maybe I will...    Well, I think that every time I write something down I want to try to    understand it...Probably it won't be important but it gives me idea. 

Jim, on other hand, used note-taking as a way of monitoring his understanding of the texts: "In jotting down the notes, everything I took down I sure I understand. If I don't understand I don't put it in my notes." Other students commented on the use of note-taking to help them memorize the information in the source texts.

While the note-taking process appeared to help the students with the practical task of selecting and organizing information, the important aspect of note-taking in terms of cognition was not WHAT the students did but HOW they did it. For example, the activity of copying verbatim was helpful not because of the sheer repetition but because of the underlying thinking processes used by the students in attempting to make sense of the information. In other words, the important aspect of "learning by reciting" is not the repetition but the cognitive activity which accompanies it. To further expand on Zhu Xi's quote (as cited in Lee, 1996): "Learning is reciting ... if we recite it but do not think it over, we still won't appreciate its meaning" (p. 26).

b. Dialogic interaction. The note-taking process can also be analyzed in terms of the students' dialogue with the texts. According to Bahktin (1994)(1), for meaning to exist, at least two voices must interact: those of the speaker and the listener. Vygotsky (1978, 1987) describes learning as both an intermental and intramental process; in other words dialogue takes place between writer and reader (intermental activity), but also inside the reader's own mind (intramental activity). This dialogic view of learning contrasts with the information processing approach of cognitive psychologists such as Ausubel (e.g., 1960, 1968) in which knowledge is transmitted from the source and assimilated by the reader, rather than being reconstructed or transformed.

From a dialogic point of view, then, the essay writing process entails reading and transforming the ideas of the source texts in order for the student to write in his/her own voice. Note-taking can be a manifestation of this dialogue between student and text. Most of the NNS students in this study participated only as listeners in this process, however. They assumed the role of "mute outsiders" (Penrose & Geisler, 1994), rather than becoming active participants in constructing meaning. This role is particularly clear in the verbatim copying technique, in which students shuffled around bits of disconnected texts rather than attempting to construct meaning.

However, other students were more active in their note-taking. Annie, for instance, in summarizing and using outline notes, was making something of an attempt to transform the texts. Although Annie's own voice was not strongly evident in her notes, she was attempting to understand by what Bakhtin (1994) calls "laying down a set of answering words" (p. 77).

Jim was yet more active. In Jim's notes, we hear his voice, as well as the voice of the texts. For example, Jim added question marks, comments and brief summaries in the margins of his texts as well as underscoring pieces of text. In contrast to the verbatim note-takers, Jim clearly distinguished his own comments or summaries from 'the pieces of text that he copied by using quotation marks. Jim used other techniques to gain a voice in the content area besides pen-to-paper note-taking. He discussed the texts with his friends, framing examples of his own to test out the theories presented in the texts, comparing case studies in the journal articles with his previous experience (however limited), and asking whether these theories would be practical in the cultural context of his home country. Nevertheless, Jim remained a deferential participant in the discourse community. For example:

       Kate: Are there things that the textbook says that you don't agree with?        Jim: At this stage I don't have enough knowledge to criticize. I like to    think about it. But I don't have enough knowledge to criticize ... I may do    something like comparison or contrast, but not criticize. 

The most vociferous student was Toni. In her notes, her own voice dominates. She used no verbatim quotes: her T-charts and concept maps, although stimulated by the text, were constructed from her own head. In the recorded protocol, she talked with enthusiasm of the ideas she had developed. This extract from the interview illustrates her use of intramental dialogue:

    Those are the things you discuss with yourself ... [You] speak to your    brain about what you are going to do and probably that step will help you    lay down what you want to do in your essay in your own ideas, talking ...    You do some time overworking in your brain. 

The data give a picture, then, of how the note-taking process can be used by students to enhance their dialogue with the texts. Again, however, it is not so much what students do in note-taking as how they do it. The dialogic analysis of students' note-taking demonstrates how important is the role assumed by the student in terms of the discourse community: outsider or participant; attentive listener or confident generator of ideas.

Note-taking as a Product

Next, I would like to discuss how the students in this study used their notes as a product from which to write their essays.

a. The cut-and-paste technique. The three verbatim copiers used their word-processed notes as a first draft for their essays. They used the cut-and-paste technique to assemble the final draft from their copied chunks of text and sometimes paraphrased sections of these "notes". They added introductions and conclusions and sometimes topic sentences in their own words. They included citations at judicious intervals. The end result in each case was an essay which read well and fitted the requisite features of the essay genre, including reasonably academic grammar and academic expression. All these essays received a pass grade, and it was plain from the lecturer's comments that she could not detect the copying that had taken place, although more than 50% of the texts, sometimes several paragraphs long were plagiarized.

This essay writing technique has been observed in NNSs by other researchers including Currie (1998), Leki (1995) and Adamson (1993). While the approach is a successful coping strategy, and several authors recently have called for academics to reexamine the concept of plagiarism (Pennycook, 1996; Scollon, 1995; Wilson, 1998), it is questionable how much students benefit from writing in this way. The verbatim-copiers in this study found the essay writing process time-consuming, unrewarding and painful. For example, Mei Wen said:

    When you write essay, since you write down some of the words are not your    own and unless you write you wouldn't remember it ... After one or two week    I'll probably forget everything. 

She explained that the most important thing for her was "to get it down and finish it off".

As Chu Li complained:

    My assignments is too many and the time is not enough to think in my own    words ... I think I put a lot of time into my study but not efficiency.    Probably I spend many hour to study, but thing I really need to learn is    not much. I always need to spend a lot of time to read a lot. 

Chu Li, in fact, submitted her essay without understanding much of what she had "written". She claimed that the most useful part of her essay-preparation process had been my explanation, as study adviser, of the meaning of some of the passages she had copied into her text.

b. The back-to-the-textbook technique. Surprisingly, Annie, who had been so thorough in preparing outline notes, abandoned them when it came to writing. She explained that she had not included sufficient "phrases and wordings" from the texts to support her writing. So although she followed the structure she had used in her note-taking, she was forced to refer back to the texts for the language she wanted to use. She intended to rephrase much of what she had written, but in the end she ran out of time. The result was that about 90% of the language she used in her essay was plagiarized. Unlike the verbatim copiers, however, Annie was able to synthesize pieces from many different texts (she had used 15 sources as opposed to the average of three used by the verbatim copiers). The note-taking process had allowed her to organize and structure the information, even though the end product was not very useful as a prompt for her writing. Her essay received a credit minus.(2)

c. The free-flight technique. Toni, unlike any of the other students, used neither the texts nor her notes when it came to writing. For her, the note-taking process had been so constructive that she was able to write without recourse to any prompts. She was so familiar with the structure and content of her notes that she did not need to refer to them. She said:

    Normally, I do all the notes and then when I start to write, I tend to    write and not to go back to the textbooks. Just put the textbooks away.    Before I start to write I organize my notes again: my introduction, the    content and then I feel like writing the introduction and write, write,    write. 

Toni likened the essay writing process to an international flight. You have to do lots of preparation, but once you get on board, you just sit back and enjoy it. And enjoy it she did! Toni was excited by the new ideas she had formed, and deeply satisfied by both the learning process and the essay she had written. Her grade, however, was a disappointment: credit minus. There were two reasons for this. First of all, Toni's essay contained few references to the source texts. Ironically, this suggested plagiarism to the lecturer. Secondly, the level of grammar errors was appalling (five times as many errors as Annie). At times it was difficult to understand the point she was making. From a dialogic point of view, Toni's voice was not balanced with the voices of the source texts. Instead of listening and responding, Toni's voice took over the essay - not an appropriate role for an undergraduate. Instead of expressing the intermental dialogue between texts and reader, her essay was an expression of her intramental dialogue.

d. The notes-as-a prompt technique. Only Jim used his notes as a prompt for writing his essay. Although he had to refer back to the textbooks at times, Jim's notes contained sufficient wordings from the texts to allow him to write efficiently. Instead of agonizing for days as Chu Li had done, Jim spent only four or five days and enjoyed the process as well. He said:

    I didn't worry about this essay. It took me four or five days. I had been    thinking about this essay for a week and then I start writing and I just    keep writing, writing ... In the night you just keep writing until you    cannot stand and then you go to sleep. 

Jim's essay contained almost 40 % wordings from the texts, but well synthesized into a coherent argument. Unfortunately he shied away from making a forceful conclusion, where it would have been appropriate for him to express his point of view more clearly and this lowered his final grade to a credit rather than a distinction.

To sum up, the students' notes were useful to them as a structure on which to base their essays. However, they were most useful to the students in actually writing their essays if they contained wordings from the text which could be used to support their academic expression. Such wordings, as in Jim's case, could be sentences or even phrases, rather than whole paragraphs.

Conclusions

The data indicate, then, that for the NNS students in this study, note-taking served both a process function, in facilitating learning from text, and a product function in providing a skeleton outline and some of the flesh for the essay itself.

Observing the students in this study made one thing very clear: it was not the physical behavior of note-taking that enabled students to interact with the texts. More important were the underlying cognitive strategies which the students used and the way in which they positioned themselves in the discourse community. For example, like the verbatim note-takers, Jim also copied sections of text into his notes. However, while he did so, Jim was making comparisons and contrasts, relating the theories to his prior knowledge, evaluating the texts and self-monitoring his own comprehension.

In dialogic terms, the verbatim note-takers were outsiders to the discourse community. In contrast, the more successful note-takers positioned themselves as participants in the discourse community, although striking the right balance between listening to the voices of the source texts and speaking in their own voices was a major difficulty for these students.

It was also apparent from this study that NNS students rely heavily on wordings from the texts to support their writing. The only student who used her own words (Toni) ended up being penalized for the poor quality of her expression. Thus if notes are to be useful to NNS students as a product which can support their essay writing, they must be rich in wordings from the texts. This suggests that, rather than censuring students for plagiarism and burdening them with the notion of "putting it into your own words", we should be encouraging them to increase their academic language base by using more (but using more wisely) the language of the source texts. This is a challenging notion which I have discussed in more detail in Wilson (1998).

The findings of this qualitative study depend on a specific group of students, a specific task and the assessment criteria of a specific university lecturer. However, three conclusions can be drawn which may be more widely applicable:

1. Effective note-taking behavior in academic writing depends on underlying cognitive strategies.

2. Note-takers need to position themselves as participants in the discourse community--both listening attentively and responding in their own voice.

3. The product of note-taking for NNSs is more helpful if their notes contain wordings from the source texts.

However, my students' original question remains unanswered: is note-taking efficient? While the more successful note-takers in this study certainly enjoyed and benefited from the essay writing process more than the verbatim copiers, it is not clear whether indeed it would have been more "efficient" for the students in the latter group to change their note-taking style. Perhaps verbatim copying was more suited to these students' attitudes to study; it certainly allowed them to complete the assignment successfully and obtain a pass.

In the interview, Chu Li said miserably:

    ... some textbook is just so hard for me I couldn't read it. I will ask    myself to read it but every time I need to check the vocabulary. I will sit    for many hours like that reading but after a few days I just don't want to    do that. 

Would teaching note-taking strategies to such a student allow her to break through the fetters of virtual academic illiteracy, or would it just add an extra burden to her load?

As Hidi and Anderson (1986) point out, it is not enough to teach note-taking formats. Students like Chu Li need to be encouraged as well to adopt a much deeper approach to study (Biggs, 1991; Ramsden, 1988) in order to engage in more interactive cognitive strategies. Above all, they need to be encouraged to see themselves as valued members of the discourse community, and to develop an intrinsic interest in the content area.

If students like Chu Li can be welcomed into a community of scholars and encouraged to participate rather than remaining marginalized; and if students like Toni can be helped to understand their roles as attentive listeners as well as confident contributors, then they will be able to benefit from note-taking in the academic writing process both as product and as process.

Notes

(1) For a clear explanation and synthesis of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, I recommend Wertsch (1991).

(2) In Australian universities, assignments are graded Pass, Credit, Distinction or High Distinction. Only the very best assignments, usually in the 80th and 90th percentile, are graded D or HD respectively; a Credit, is often around the 70th to 80th percentile, so a Credit Minus is reasonable.

References

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Kate Wilson is Head of the Academic Support Program at the University of Canberra, Australia. Her work involves providing language and study skills support to international and non-English speaking background Australian students. She has published a book with Judy Bell entitled Critical Reading Strategies.

Note-taking in the Academic Writing Process of Non-native Speaker Students: Is it Important as a Process or a Product?

Non-native speaker (NNS) students often have to be persuaded of the value of note-taking from texts when they are preparing academic essays. though research indicates that note-taking can enhance learning from texts, it is not clear how it contributes to the essay writing process, especially for non-native speakers. Is note-taking a valuable process in terms of facilitating learning from texts for NNS students as well as providing a tangible product from which they can write their essays? In a qualitative study, 6 students were followed through an authentic essay writing task. Introspective, retrospective, and concrete data (the students' notes and essays) were obtained and analyzed according to both the information processing approach to cognitive psychology and the dialogic approach. In terms of process, it was found that note-taking behaviors could facilitate learning from text, but that depth of processing and the students' self-positioning in the discourse community were more important than their overt behaviors. As a product, the students' notes were useful as a framework from which to write, particularly if they included wordings from the texts which could enable students to express themselves academically in their essays.

In teaching academic skills, I have sometimes found that non-native speaker (NNS) students may be resistant to the idea of note-taking as part of the reading-writing process in preparing assignments. Native speakers have generally been trained to take notes from sources during their high school or even primary school education, but students from other cultural backgrounds may not have had experience writing assignments or research papers, let alone taking notes as part of this process. For many NNS, the challenge of writing academic assignments in a foreign language is immense, and to be asked to take notes can be perceived as just an added burden. "What's the point of taking notes?" they say. "It's not efficient!"

To find some good answers to my students' questions, I decided to investigate the function of note-taking in the assignment or paper preparation process of non-native speakers. Is note-taking significant for its process function; in other words, does it enhance and facilitate learning from text? Or is it important for its product function, that is providing the student with prompts for the actual writing process?

What Does the Literature Tell us About Note-taking?

Note-taking in the second-language writing process is not a well-researched area, perhaps because of the traditional divide in the English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum between reading and writing (see Blanton, 1994). Particularly the product-process distinction does not seem to have been explored. However, studies of note-taking in classes have investigated the product-process function of notes. Kiewra (1985) found that students who took notes in class were better able to recall the main points than non-note-takers, suggesting that note-taking as a process facilitated learning. However, those who were able to review the notes performed even better. In this case, the notes as a product served as a useful external means of storing information.

White (1996) made a somewhat similar distinction in her investigation of the role of note-taking in language learning. She felt it was important to distinguish between overt note-taking behaviors and the underlying cognitive processes which are "inaccessible to observation but central to learning" (p. 91). She commented that behaviors like underlining, listing, and copying are "traces of cognition", in that they give a tangible indication of the students' internal cognitive processing.

The literature on reading and note-taking contains both prescriptive texts and empirical research. The prescriptive texts of the past 50 or 60 years have offered a range of note-taking formulae. Most of these methods have encouraged students to pick out the main ideas of the text; to reflect, question, or comment on the material; or sometimes to transpose the information into graphic or diagrammatic form. Perhaps the most famous of these methods include the various versions of Robinson's (1946) Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review (SQ3R) in which the second `R', recitation, has sometimes been interpreted to mean noting down the main points of the text. Bird's "Inductive Outline Procedure" was an even earlier reading and note-taking method; the main points were summarized on the left side of the page and students added their comments on the particular and overall significance of these points in two columns on the right side (as cited in King & Eilers, 1996). More recently, Pauk (as cited in King & Eilers) proposed "the Cornell Method" in which the text is summarized in point form on the right, keywords are jotted down in a narrow column on the left, and an overall summary is noted down at the bottom of each page of notes. Various forms of concept mapping and other graphic organizers also became fashionable during the 1960s and 70s, popularized in particular by Buzan (1976). In postmodern times, an emphasis on dialogic reflection has led to the concept of the double entry journal (Hughes, Kooy, & Kanevsky, 1997) in which students write their summary notes on the left and their reflections in the right hand column.

Empirical research has set about showing the effectiveness of various note-taking methods in promoting learning from texts. For example, Fischer and Mandl (1984) taught college students to use note-taking strategies such as highlighting, margin notes and text reconstruction and found that both high level and low level students improved their performance on recall tests. McCagg and Dansereau (1991) developed a complex system of knowledge mapping which involved picking out key ideas and showing the links between them. Recall protocols and multiple choice comprehension answers showed that students benefited from this procedure.

Working specifically with non-native speakers at an Egyptian university, Amer (1994) taught one group of students to use underlining, a second group to use knowledge mapping and a control group to use conventional ESL reading techniques focussing on vocabulary and structures. In comprehension and free recall tests, both note-taking groups performed better than the control group; however, the knowledge mapping group outperformed the underlining group in free recall. This finding supports the argument that more complex cognitive processing, such as transforming written to visual information, aids comprehension and recall.

Not all studies of note-taking have shown such positive results, however. For example, Sarig (1987) in her qualitative study of 10 Hebrew-speaking students found that self-monitoring and clarification-and-simplification strategies tended to promote comprehension more than "technical aids". In particular she pointed out that highlighting was associated with poor comprehension if students picked out lower-order propositions.

Summarizing, another form of note-taking, has also been shown to have dubious benefits in terms of learning from text if it is used inappropriately. For example, Armbruster and Anderson (as cited in Gagne, 1985) taught a treatment group to use summarizing techniques. On a recall test, the results of the treatment group were mixed. Armbruster and Anderson theorized that it is not sufficient to teach students to use an observable behavior (a note-taking technique) without stressing the underlying cognitive processes. Similarly, Hidi and Anderson (1986) found that the "copy-delete" summarizing technique led to poor performance on subsequent recall tests. They also found that some students tended to personalize the summary too much - picking out what was important to them rather than the most significant propositions in terms of the text.

Another recent study (Beeson, 1996) found that writing after reading contributed more effectively to synthesis of knowledge than note-taking. Beeson divided 111 college nursing students into 3 groups: one group read a given text and took notes; one group read without any pen-to-paper activity; and a third group was asked to read and then write a short essay about the texts. The note-taking group was found to have the best recall of facts in a subsequent test. However, the reading-only group and the essay writing group were both more able to synthesize the readings later into an essay. This is a significant study because the synthesizing task attempted to assess how well students could apply the knowledge they had gained from the texts. In contrast, most earlier studies had merely tested the quantity of students' learning from text through comprehension tests or recall protocols which typically count the number of macro or micro-propositions recalled by the subjects. However, the study does not differentiate between note-taking techniques unlike the more recent study by Lahtinen, Lonka and Lindblom-Ylanne (1997).

Lahtinen et al. (1997) used an authentic academic test, the entrance exam to a medical school, to investigate the qualitative outcome of students' spontaneous note-taking behavior. In this test, the 502 candidates were asked to read two texts before writing three short essay questions on the same topic. The students were unlikely to have had prior knowledge of this topic. Before writing, the texts and the students' notes were removed. As this was an authentic test situation, the students were free to choose their own note-taking techniques. The researchers analyzed the students' techniques into the following categories: no notes, underlining only, verbatim notes, summarizing and/ or concept-mapping. They related these to the students' performance and found that students who used no notes wrote the poorest quality essays. The best essays were written by students who used generative note-taking techniques such as summarizing and concept-mapping rather than merely underlining or verbatim notes. The authors concluded that "constructive mental activity is facilitated by study strategies aiming at transforming knowledge into a coherent whole through generative processing" (p. 15). Unfortunately, this claim is too sweeping, as the generative note-taking strategies may have been selected by students who were already more inclined to write analytically. Nevertheless, this study does suggest that there is a relationship between generative note-taking and good essay writing.

To summarize, the literature overall shows that note-taking, particularly what Lahtinen et al. (1997) term "generative" note-taking, can have beneficial effects on students' ability to recall and use information from texts. However, previous studies have not investigated the function of note-taking in the context of the academic assignment writing process. Lahtinen et al. removed the texts before students could write, whereas in an assignment-writing situation, students would continue to have access to textbooks, photocopied journal articles and printouts from the Internet. Moreover, students in real life have access to computers as well as pen-and-paper. In these circumstances, what note-taking strategies do NNS students employ and how do these strategies relate to the quality of their essays?

A Qualitative Study of NNS Students' Note-taking Strategies

In order to explore NNS students' note-taking strategies in depth, I conducted a qualitative study with a small number of students and investigated in detail how these students traveled through an authentic essay writing process.

I invited NNS students from a second-year Humanities unit to participate in the study and 6 students volunteered: Annie, Toni, Jim, Mei Wen, Chu Li and Emma. Coincidentally, all these students came from Chinese backgrounds (PRC, Taiwan and Hongkong). They had been in Australia between 3 and 9 years and were all in their early twenties. Five of the students were female and only one was a migrant to Australia. All of the students, except one, had passed a first year university writing course for non-native speakers.

The students were about to write a 3000-word essay worth 20% of their mark for the semester. They were told to use at least 5 sources, including journal articles as well as the recommended textbooks.

In order to obtain data which were as full, rich and reliable as possible, I used three sources. First, I asked the students to keep all their notes, computer print-outs, essay drafts, final drafts and the lecturer's comments. Second, I asked them to tape-record an introspective protocol of their thoughts as they were taking notes. Third, I interviewed each student before and immediately after they prepared their essays.

Note-taking as a Process

The students in the study all used some form of note-taking from the source texts in their assignment writing process. The first stage of note-taking for most of the students was highlighting or underlining sections of text--usually the keywords. One student (Chu Li) also sprinkled her text with translation equivalents in Chinese. Jim and Toni added a few margin notes. Several students used page stickers to mark particularly useful parts of the texts. Annie, Jim and Toni also started to write point-form, or outline, notes from the various texts.

At a fairly early stage, all 6 students decided upon an overall structure for their essays and started to keep notes under the headings they had identified. Annie was the most systematic note-taker: she kept separate pages for each main section of her essay and used different colored pens to identify the different texts she had used. She used outline notes, summarizing key points in brief phrases. Jim followed a similar procedure but wrote relatively few notes, which included more wordings from the text than rephrasing. Toni was ebullient in her note-taking! She took copious outline notes, drew up charts, developed concept maps and took notes of her notes.

The other three students relied almost entirely on verbatim copying in their notes. In some cases they did this by hand, but generally their "note-taking" consisted of copying chunks of texts - sometimes several paragraphs in length--from the textbooks on to their computers. As Mei Wen said, "I give that a heading and then I copy all this stuff."

Their mechanism for selecting suitable passages was often to identify keywords which fitted their essay outline rather than picking out macro- or micro-propositions.

a. Information processing. From the perspective of cognitivists such as Ausubel (1960), Anderson (1985) or Chamot and O'Malley (1994), the note-taking techniques described above were means by which the students were able to process the information from the texts. In particular, note-taking was useful in relating the readings to the task, and in organizing the material under task-based headings which in turn enabled the students to synthesize material from different texts.

Note-taking also helped students to understand the material. Even verbatim copying appeared to be useful in this regard to some extent. Mei Wen, for example, said that copying pieces of text was useful "to give my mind more balance and ... to give your mind more understand what it's all about." As Lee Wing On (1996) points out, learning by repetition does not preclude a "deep approach" to learning. He cites these words of the Confucian scholar, Zhu Xi: "Learning is reciting. If we recite it then think it over, think it over then recite it, naturally it'll become meaningful to us" (p. 36).

Unfortunately, this understanding-by-repetition technique was not always successful. As Mei Wen said:

    If I don't understand it, I probably won't write it, but maybe I will...    Well, I think that every time I write something down I want to try to    understand it...Probably it won't be important but it gives me idea. 

Jim, on other hand, used note-taking as a way of monitoring his understanding of the texts: "In jotting down the notes, everything I took down I sure I understand. If I don't understand I don't put it in my notes." Other students commented on the use of note-taking to help them memorize the information in the source texts.

While the note-taking process appeared to help the students with the practical task of selecting and organizing information, the important aspect of note-taking in terms of cognition was not WHAT the students did but HOW they did it. For example, the activity of copying verbatim was helpful not because of the sheer repetition but because of the underlying thinking processes used by the students in attempting to make sense of the information. In other words, the important aspect of "learning by reciting" is not the repetition but the cognitive activity which accompanies it. To further expand on Zhu Xi's quote (as cited in Lee, 1996): "Learning is reciting ... if we recite it but do not think it over, we still won't appreciate its meaning" (p. 26).

b. Dialogic interaction. The note-taking process can also be analyzed in terms of the students' dialogue with the texts. According to Bahktin (1994)(1), for meaning to exist, at least two voices must interact: those of the speaker and the listener. Vygotsky (1978, 1987) describes learning as both an intermental and intramental process; in other words dialogue takes place between writer and reader (intermental activity), but also inside the reader's own mind (intramental activity). This dialogic view of learning contrasts with the information processing approach of cognitive psychologists such as Ausubel (e.g., 1960, 1968) in which knowledge is transmitted from the source and assimilated by the reader, rather than being reconstructed or transformed.

From a dialogic point of view, then, the essay writing process entails reading and transforming the ideas of the source texts in order for the student to write in his/her own voice. Note-taking can be a manifestation of this dialogue between student and text. Most of the NNS students in this study participated only as listeners in this process, however. They assumed the role of "mute outsiders" (Penrose & Geisler, 1994), rather than becoming active participants in constructing meaning. This role is particularly clear in the verbatim copying technique, in which students shuffled around bits of disconnected texts rather than attempting to construct meaning.

However, other students were more active in their note-taking. Annie, for instance, in summarizing and using outline notes, was making something of an attempt to transform the texts. Although Annie's own voice was not strongly evident in her notes, she was attempting to understand by what Bakhtin (1994) calls "laying down a set of answering words" (p. 77).

Jim was yet more active. In Jim's notes, we hear his voice, as well as the voice of the texts. For example, Jim added question marks, comments and brief summaries in the margins of his texts as well as underscoring pieces of text. In contrast to the verbatim note-takers, Jim clearly distinguished his own comments or summaries from 'the pieces of text that he copied by using quotation marks. Jim used other techniques to gain a voice in the content area besides pen-to-paper note-taking. He discussed the texts with his friends, framing examples of his own to test out the theories presented in the texts, comparing case studies in the journal articles with his previous experience (however limited), and asking whether these theories would be practical in the cultural context of his home country. Nevertheless, Jim remained a deferential participant in the discourse community. For example:

       Kate: Are there things that the textbook says that you don't agree with?        Jim: At this stage I don't have enough knowledge to criticize. I like to    think about it. But I don't have enough knowledge to criticize ... I may do    something like comparison or contrast, but not criticize. 

The most vociferous student was Toni. In her notes, her own voice dominates. She used no verbatim quotes: her T-charts and concept maps, although stimulated by the text, were constructed from her own head. In the recorded protocol, she talked with enthusiasm of the ideas she had developed. This extract from the interview illustrates her use of intramental dialogue:

    Those are the things you discuss with yourself ... [You] speak to your    brain about what you are going to do and probably that step will help you    lay down what you want to do in your essay in your own ideas, talking ...    You do some time overworking in your brain. 

The data give a picture, then, of how the note-taking process can be used by students to enhance their dialogue with the texts. Again, however, it is not so much what students do in note-taking as how they do it. The dialogic analysis of students' note-taking demonstrates how important is the role assumed by the student in terms of the discourse community: outsider or participant; attentive listener or confident generator of ideas.

Note-taking as a Product

Next, I would like to discuss how the students in this study used their notes as a product from which to write their essays.

a. The cut-and-paste technique. The three verbatim copiers used their word-processed notes as a first draft for their essays. They used the cut-and-paste technique to assemble the final draft from their copied chunks of text and sometimes paraphrased sections of these "notes". They added introductions and conclusions and sometimes topic sentences in their own words. They included citations at judicious intervals. The end result in each case was an essay which read well and fitted the requisite features of the essay genre, including reasonably academic grammar and academic expression. All these essays received a pass grade, and it was plain from the lecturer's comments that she could not detect the copying that had taken place, although more than 50% of the texts, sometimes several paragraphs long were plagiarized.

This essay writing technique has been observed in NNSs by other researchers including Currie (1998), Leki (1995) and Adamson (1993). While the approach is a successful coping strategy, and several authors recently have called for academics to reexamine the concept of plagiarism (Pennycook, 1996; Scollon, 1995; Wilson, 1998), it is questionable how much students benefit from writing in this way. The verbatim-copiers in this study found the essay writing process time-consuming, unrewarding and painful. For example, Mei Wen said:

    When you write essay, since you write down some of the words are not your    own and unless you write you wouldn't remember it ... After one or two week    I'll probably forget everything. 

She explained that the most important thing for her was "to get it down and finish it off".

As Chu Li complained:

    My assignments is too many and the time is not enough to think in my own    words ... I think I put a lot of time into my study but not efficiency.    Probably I spend many hour to study, but thing I really need to learn is    not much. I always need to spend a lot of time to read a lot. 

Chu Li, in fact, submitted her essay without understanding much of what she had "written". She claimed that the most useful part of her essay-preparation process had been my explanation, as study adviser, of the meaning of some of the passages she had copied into her text.

b. The back-to-the-textbook technique. Surprisingly, Annie, who had been so thorough in preparing outline notes, abandoned them when it came to writing. She explained that she had not included sufficient "phrases and wordings" from the texts to support her writing. So although she followed the structure she had used in her note-taking, she was forced to refer back to the texts for the language she wanted to use. She intended to rephrase much of what she had written, but in the end she ran out of time. The result was that about 90% of the language she used in her essay was plagiarized. Unlike the verbatim copiers, however, Annie was able to synthesize pieces from many different texts (she had used 15 sources as opposed to the average of three used by the verbatim copiers). The note-taking process had allowed her to organize and structure the information, even though the end product was not very useful as a prompt for her writing. Her essay received a credit minus.(2)

c. The free-flight technique. Toni, unlike any of the other students, used neither the texts nor her notes when it came to writing. For her, the note-taking process had been so constructive that she was able to write without recourse to any prompts. She was so familiar with the structure and content of her notes that she did not need to refer to them. She said:

    Normally, I do all the notes and then when I start to write, I tend to    write and not to go back to the textbooks. Just put the textbooks away.    Before I start to write I organize my notes again: my introduction, the    content and then I feel like writing the introduction and write, write,    write. 

Toni likened the essay writing process to an international flight. You have to do lots of preparation, but once you get on board, you just sit back and enjoy it. And enjoy it she did! Toni was excited by the new ideas she had formed, and deeply satisfied by both the learning process and the essay she had written. Her grade, however, was a disappointment: credit minus. There were two reasons for this. First of all, Toni's essay contained few references to the source texts. Ironically, this suggested plagiarism to the lecturer. Secondly, the level of grammar errors was appalling (five times as many errors as Annie). At times it was difficult to understand the point she was making. From a dialogic point of view, Toni's voice was not balanced with the voices of the source texts. Instead of listening and responding, Toni's voice took over the essay - not an appropriate role for an undergraduate. Instead of expressing the intermental dialogue between texts and reader, her essay was an expression of her intramental dialogue.

d. The notes-as-a prompt technique. Only Jim used his notes as a prompt for writing his essay. Although he had to refer back to the textbooks at times, Jim's notes contained sufficient wordings from the texts to allow him to write efficiently. Instead of agonizing for days as Chu Li had done, Jim spent only four or five days and enjoyed the process as well. He said:

    I didn't worry about this essay. It took me four or five days. I had been    thinking about this essay for a week and then I start writing and I just    keep writing, writing ... In the night you just keep writing until you    cannot stand and then you go to sleep. 

Jim's essay contained almost 40 % wordings from the texts, but well synthesized into a coherent argument. Unfortunately he shied away from making a forceful conclusion, where it would have been appropriate for him to express his point of view more clearly and this lowered his final grade to a credit rather than a distinction.

To sum up, the students' notes were useful to them as a structure on which to base their essays. However, they were most useful to the students in actually writing their essays if they contained wordings from the text which could be used to support their academic expression. Such wordings, as in Jim's case, could be sentences or even phrases, rather than whole paragraphs.

Conclusions

The data indicate, then, that for the NNS students in this study, note-taking served both a process function, in facilitating learning from text, and a product function in providing a skeleton outline and some of the flesh for the essay itself.

Observing the students in this study made one thing very clear: it was not the physical behavior of note-taking that enabled students to interact with the texts. More important were the underlying cognitive strategies which the students used and the way in which they positioned themselves in the discourse community. For example, like the verbatim note-takers, Jim also copied sections of text into his notes. However, while he did so, Jim was making comparisons and contrasts, relating the theories to his prior knowledge, evaluating the texts and self-monitoring his own comprehension.

In dialogic terms, the verbatim note-takers were outsiders to the discourse community. In contrast, the more successful note-takers positioned themselves as participants in the discourse community, although striking the right balance between listening to the voices of the source texts and speaking in their own voices was a major difficulty for these students.

It was also apparent from this study that NNS students rely heavily on wordings from the texts to support their writing. The only student who used her own words (Toni) ended up being penalized for the poor quality of her expression. Thus if notes are to be useful to NNS students as a product which can support their essay writing, they must be rich in wordings from the texts. This suggests that, rather than censuring students for plagiarism and burdening them with the notion of "putting it into your own words", we should be encouraging them to increase their academic language base by using more (but using more wisely) the language of the source texts. This is a challenging notion which I have discussed in more detail in Wilson (1998).

The findings of this qualitative study depend on a specific group of students, a specific task and the assessment criteria of a specific university lecturer. However, three conclusions can be drawn which may be more widely applicable:

1. Effective note-taking behavior in academic writing depends on underlying cognitive strategies.

2. Note-takers need to position themselves as participants in the discourse community--both listening attentively and responding in their own voice.

3. The product of note-taking for NNSs is more helpful if their notes contain wordings from the source texts.

However, my students' original question remains unanswered: is note-taking efficient? While the more successful note-takers in this study certainly enjoyed and benefited from the essay writing process more than the verbatim copiers, it is not clear whether indeed it would have been more "efficient" for the students in the latter group to change their note-taking style. Perhaps verbatim copying was more suited to these students' attitudes to study; it certainly allowed them to complete the assignment successfully and obtain a pass.

In the interview, Chu Li said miserably:

    ... some textbook is just so hard for me I couldn't read it. I will ask    myself to read it but every time I need to check the vocabulary. I will sit    for many hours like that reading but after a few days I just don't want to    do that. 

Would teaching note-taking strategies to such a student allow her to break through the fetters of virtual academic illiteracy, or would it just add an extra burden to her load?

As Hidi and Anderson (1986) point out, it is not enough to teach note-taking formats. Students like Chu Li need to be encouraged as well to adopt a much deeper approach to study (Biggs, 1991; Ramsden, 1988) in order to engage in more interactive cognitive strategies. Above all, they need to be encouraged to see themselves as valued members of the discourse community, and to develop an intrinsic interest in the content area.

If students like Chu Li can be welcomed into a community of scholars and encouraged to participate rather than remaining marginalized; and if students like Toni can be helped to understand their roles as attentive listeners as well as confident contributors, then they will be able to benefit from note-taking in the academic writing process both as product and as process.

Notes

(1) For a clear explanation and synthesis of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, I recommend Wertsch (1991).

(2) In Australian universities, assignments are graded Pass, Credit, Distinction or High Distinction. Only the very best assignments, usually in the 80th and 90th percentile, are graded D or HD respectively; a Credit, is often around the 70th to 80th percentile, so a Credit Minus is reasonable.

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Kate Wilson is Head of the Academic Support Program at the University of Canberra, Australia. Her work involves providing language and study skills support to international and non-English speaking background Australian students. She has published a book with Judy Bell entitled Critical Reading Strategies.