The effect of note-taking and working memory on Iranian EFL learners’ listening comprehension performance

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the effect of note-taking and working memory on Iranian EFL learners' listening comprehension. The primary purpose of this study was to see whether there was any difference among the listening and note-taking participants in the application of note-taking strategies and whether there was any difference in listening comprehension test performance of listening only and listening and note-taking groups. Also, this study explored whether the participants' working memory capacity correlates with their listening comprehension performance. In so doing, 44 lower-intermediate L2 learners were selected from Sobhe Sadegh Institute of Higher Education in Esfahan, Iran. The experimental and control groups, twenty two students in each, included both female and male native speakers of Farsi, of the age range between 18 and 30. The data were collected based on listening sections of TOEFL. All the participants listened to one listening passage in each session, each passage was accompanied by multiple-choice, essay and recall questions. Then, a test was administered at the end of the sessions to find the difference between the achievement of the experimental group (listening and note-taking) and the control group (listening only). The results indicated that there were differences among the participants' listening comprehension test scores and their note-taking strategies. Comparing the mean scores of the two groups of students, by independent samples T-test indicated that the note-taking group outperformed the listening only group. Additionally, the data analysis via correlation indicated a positive correlation between working memory and listening comprehension performance.