یادداشت های ستون

Taking Notes - Column Notes

In this lesson, I’m going to talk about a strategy that’s very helpful for conversations and taking notes during conversations. That’s for much of the listening section, for the speaking section. And well, just the listening and the speaking. The writing only has lectures, no conversations. So, Taking Notes.

Your normal notes are structured, as I talked about in another lesson based on the relationships between ideas. So, here is a example of notes for a lecture. This works. We have an idea here and then some subtopics of that idea. This is great for lectures, but for conversations, it doesn’t really work.

In a conversation, we have a man and a woman talking and the man says something and then the woman asks a question and the man responds and the woman responds. Everything is related to the previous sentence or the previous response. So, it doesn’t quite have the same structure. It’s not a main idea and then examples of it. It’s not a main idea and then a reasons for it.

It’s many different small ideas that are related to the last thing that was talked about. So, how do we structure this? Well, let’s take this one person’s phrases. Let’s take the woman here and let’s move them into a different column. So, we take this and we put this over here.

Now we can better see the interaction between the man and the woman, and how they go back and forth, and I’m going to make this a little bit neater here. This is closer to what you’ll actually do on test day. I don’t need to write man after everything he says, I can do it just once and I don’t need to write woman many times. And this works, because on the TOEFL in a conversation, there will always be one man and one woman.

You don’t need to differentiate, hear the differences between a man’s voice and another man’s voice, because that would be tricky. This gives you clear differences between the people. It’s easier to hear that these are different people, because the man will have a lower voice and the woman will have a higher voice. Now in the beginning of a conversation, you can just prepare by making these columns and by making this note at the top for this is what the man says, this is what the woman says.

And then when you listen, you just play the notes in the columns appropriately. This really helps keep track of who said what, of what the man’s opinions were and what the woman’s opinions were. So if you have a question that asks, what does the man think about? Then you can just look in this column. Or if you have a question about what does the woman think about?

Then you know who said those things. When you have the notes all in one column, it’s harder to tell who said what and it’s harder to find information from a specific person. It also helps you to stay organized in general. If you don’t do the columns, then yes, you might take up less space if you put everything in one column here.

Let’s ignore all this and put everything in one column and then maybe yes, it takes up less space, because you have just one column instead of two. But typically, when people try to do with conversations, they end up having trouble differentiating between things and the structure doesn’t look like this. It ends up looking kinda scattered, it doesn’t stay in one place.

They will try to move the woman’s ideas over here and then they’ll maybe move back, and then it’s over here. And then if you try and organize it afterwards, it becomes confusing. If you know ahead of time to use this structure, you can organize your notes and make sure they only take this space and they don’t start to move onto other parts of the page.

You can contain them more and make them a little bit more comfortable to read, because they are organized. So, you can do this for any conversations. It’s a third of the listening, so that means two or three listenings and it’s also a third of the speaking tasks. It’s task three and task five.

Tasks four and six are lectures and tasks one and two have no listening. So we don’t need to use the columns for these, but for tasks three and five, it is helpful to have those columns. So that’s it for when you’ll hear them, but it can help to just be prepared before a listening task to listen for the introduction, to listen for what the narrator says in the beginning.

So you’ll hear a man say, for example. Now, listen to a conversation between a student and her professor. And in that introduction, you hear the word conversation. So if you hear that word, now listen to a conversation, then go to your notes and do man, woman. You’re prepared.

Now you know what the men will say and what the women will say, and you can keep organized. Again, you might hear two students. A student and her professor. Conversation or some other phrase at the beginning that gives you a hint, that you’re going to hear two people and then you can be prepared to use that organization.