Effects Of Note Taking In L1 Or L2 On L1 Oral Interpretation

The present study aims at exploring the effect of note taking in Li or L2 while listening to lectures in L2 and their respective effect on Li oral interpretation. The study deals mainly with the following questions: 1. Is the influence of note taking in L2 on Li oral interpretation positive or negative? Or is the influence of note taking in Li on Li oral interpretation positive or negative? 2. Should LI thinking/planning be encouraged or avoided in teaching L2? Correspondingly, we formulate two hypotheses: First, taking notes in LI (Chinese) while listening to lectures in English will facilitate subjects?comprehension and long-term recall of the lecture content better than taking notes in L2. Second, the added processing load needed to do mental translation when taking notes in Li while listening to lectures in L2 forms a greater demand on subjects?cognitive resources and attention, which may interfere with their listening to the ongoing lectures, and may slow down the speed of note taking in Li. To deal with these questions, the experiment was performed with the Junior college Non-English Majors in UIBE. Answers to these questions will cast light on issues of L2 teaching as well as L2 acquisition in a broader sense. The thesis will be divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 will introduce the research on the impact of LI and L2 acquisition and the purpose, the method, the function of previous studies on note taking. Chapter 2 will focus on the theoretical background and studies of mental models theory (information processing theory and psycholinguistic theory) and provide the hypotheses which will be evidenced in the present study. Chapter 3 will deal with the research design and methodology including participants, materials, criteria for rating and procedures in the experiment. Chapter 4 will report and discuss the findings. Chapter 5 will summarize the whole thesis and provide suggestions for future study. The results supported the hypotheses made in the study: the quantitative comparison showed that the Chinese group note taking produced oral translation better than the English note-taking group in the oral translation. First, taking notes in LI (Chinese) while listening to lectures in English will facilitate subjects?comprehension and long-term recall of the lecture content better than taking notes in L2. The reason is that the mental translation done by students who take notes in Li is aform of deep processing to shallow processing. This processing requires subjects not only to focus on the form of materials including the sound of words, phrases, and sentences but at the same time on the meaning of intaken information. It also forces students to pay more attention to the lectures while listening and associate more frequently and more actively with both existent schema and newly intaken information than students who take notes in L2. Certainly, this deep processing will in turn facilitate subjects?long-term retention of lecture content and will have better output of (LI) oral translation than students who take notes in L2. The second is that the added information processing load (because of the need to do mental translation for Chinese note taking) may require more attention and cognitive resources, so may interfere with their listening to the ongoing lectures, or make them lose some information. From the data presented in the present experiment, this h...