CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Although the study presented in this article had a very limited coverage, some conclusions concerning the use of note-taking strategies and their helpful-ness, as reported by EFL students at the academic level, could be drawn. On balance, it has to be noted that the students’ questionnaire responses reflected their ability to exploit quite a number of note-taking strategies that they had neither been trained to use explicitly nor instructed how to use in the tasks they embarked on in the present study. What is more, the students found many of them to be of high utility for performing autonomously the overlapping reading to learn, note-taking and summary writing tasks as in-class assignments, yet with no teacher help offered to them. Participating in the study has undoubtedly fostered their awareness and appreciation of the use of note-taking strategies.

When interviewed after the study had been completed, the majority of the stu-dents claimed that they felt that they had improved their note-taking strategies

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by having an opportunity of practicing them. By studying the inventory of note-taking strategies in order to fill in the questionnaire they felt motivated to have some formal instruction in note-taking in the future. What is more, they saw all the tasks employed on the course as contributing to the development of their academic reading and writing skills.

Generally speaking, the students used and highly valued note-taking strate-gies as they helped them select, encode and retain the most important ideas due to concentrating on the relevant points while reading and simultaneously elimi-nating the irrelevant details. (There was, however, one student who showed preference for working on the original text only). They also found it imperative to pay attention to selected linguistic properties of the text such as key words and phrases as well as to new terms and important definitions so helpful in conceptual learning from content-oriented tasks. Despite the fact that there were some strategies the majority of the students opted for, working individually the students always made choices of their own, some of which proved not to be best suited for the task (identifying some strategies as unhelpful). The students were aware of the fact that in order to achieve their goals they had to optimize their performance, which in turn required effective implementation of note-taking strategies.

As for further study, better insights should be gained into the quantity as well as the quality of reading notes produced by L2 students — an objective ev-idence of the use of some of note-taking strategies — in different reading con-texts in relation to different goals established for their use. Similarly to the situation demonstrated in this paper, when reading notes served summary writ-ing, it is recommendable to examine note-taking strategies functioning as a component of different types of content-based reading assignments, that is, as a task-induced behaviour. It would also certainly be enlightening to analyze the differences between the performance of good vs. poor reader as note-takers, as well as to observe students’ work under some kinds of restrictions concerning the time for performing the task or strict limitations as to its length.

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