Section 3. Outlining. The Standard Topic Outline Form. Lectures and notetaking.
Notetaking is a complex activity which requires a high level of ability in many separate skills. Today I'm going to analyse the four most important of these skills.

Firstly, the student has to understand what the lecturer says as he says it. The student cannot stop the lecture in order to look up a new word or check an unfamiliar sentence pattern. This puts the no-native speaker of English under a particularly severe strain.

Often, as we've already seen in a previous lecture, he may not be able to recognize words in speech which he understands straight away in print. He'll also meet words in a lecture which are completely new to him.

While he should, of course, try to develop the ability to infer their meaning from the context, he won't always be able to do this successfully. He must not allow failure of this kind to discourage him however. It's often possible to understand much of a lecture by concentrating solely on those points which are most important.

But how does the student decide what's important? This is in itself another skill he must try to develop. It is, in fact, the second of the four skills I want to talk about today.