Effort in Reading/Writing/Note-taking in L1 & L2

This research was primarily aimed at studying the attentional load entailed by reading, notetaking, and writing from an electronic document in L1 and in L2. Concerning cognitive effort, there was no significant difference between L1 and L2. On the other hand, reading and note-taking were significantly more costly than writing.

Participants abbreviated almost twice as many words noted in L2 than in L1. Again, the ways of abbreviating in L1 were apparently not transferred to L2, and the use of this process seems to entail the acquisition of language-specific conventions. Nonetheless, word abbreviation in note-taking is an effective strategy for saving time and transcribing as many words as possible without having to go back to the source document.

Compared to note-takers in L1, L2 participants did more verbatim copying of their notes during the writing process. In contrast, the L2 participants benefited from the word-processor condition, since they were able to copy and paste far more ideas than the L1 participants, as if they sensed the difficulty of selecting relevant information.

I think that this article is great in terms of the impact of note-taking in the L2 (English for our students). Realizing how difficult it is to write notes in a new language and how much concentration it takes to do so can help in our pacing of our speech.