Teaching with Priorities in Note-taking Principles: A Case Study with Undergraduate Students in English-Korean Consecutive Interpreting Class

Note-taking is one of the critical skills for consecutive interpretation. While students have expressed difficulties in mastering this particular skill, the pedagogical discussion on note-taking remains relatively lacking as it is believed to be very personal, and therefore, has no rules. With some principles of note-taking discussed, this study aims to review those principles and identify ones that demand more attention than others from the pedagogical perspective by exploring notes taken from undergraduate students. In class, it would be efficient and effective to address first the difficulties that many students share as opposed to the ones that are less common. The analysis of 90 notations taken by 33 students reveals three principles that students commonly have difficulties in application: employing a vertical structure in a functioning manner; preserving links; utilize abbreviations for long words or phrases. It also showed that many students do not distinguish facts from claims in their notes, which is not discussed much in the principles proposed by previous literature.