Rationale
Note-taking and summarizing are essential academic writing skills that can be difficult to learn without explicit teaching (Çetingöz, 2010; Kırkgöz, 2010; Siegel, 2018; Watkins & Wilkins, 2011). These are skills that EAP students need to develop in order to succeed in future university studies, therefore it is important that their university preparation courses cover note-taking. Research has shown that English language learners tend to treat note-taking as dictation, which leads to them struggling to understand everything or write every word, which in turn makes it difficult for them to produce useful, appropriate notes (Kırkgöz, 2010, p. 4347). In addition to this, students may struggle with taking notes in an organized form, noting main ideas clearly and finding cause and effect relationships (Çetingöz, 2010, p. 4107). Participants in Kırkgöz's (2010) study also had difficulties recognizing "the function of discourse markers, topic shifts and the value of singling cues" (p. 4347). Explicitly teaching students note-taking skills has been shown to "[bring] students to a stage where they [can] take notes selectively, confidently and independently," (Kırkgöz, 2010, p. 4350) and results in higher quality notes (Çetingöz, 2010, p. 4107).
Though note-taking skills can be successfully taught in the traditional classroom, research has shown that incorporating online task-based exercises positively correlates with better language development. Research by Yang and Lin (2015) explicitly supports the use of online collaborative methods in teaching note-taking to students, as they found that online note-taking strategies enhanced learners’ literacy development, produced more peer interactions, and allowed for immediate feedback and revisions (p. 137). These findings are corroborated by Chiu, Wu and Cheng (2013), who found that taking notes collaboratively using Google Documents seemed to correlate with an increase in students' quiz grades, particularly when students collaboratively wrote a summary of their notes for review (p. 236). Other studies such as Suwantarathip and Wichadee (2014) and Ambrose and Palpanathan (2017) also show that, when used effectively, Google Documents is a useful classroom tool. Like Chiu et al., Suwantarathip and Wichadee looked at the use of Google Documents in collaborative note-taking exercises, and found that these activities tended to lead to more participation and collaboration among students, along with better task performance (p. 154).
Thus, this online module mainly uses Google Documents as a tool for students to complete learning tasks. In addition to Google Documents, it also utilizes YouTube (particularly TED Talks), online corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and blogs. TED Talks are a good source of speeches and lecture content, because they are short and usually have transcripts available (Watkins & Wilkins, 2011), making them a useful tool for language learners who are still learning to navigate lecture content. In regard to online corpora, the decision to use this as a resource for learners was inspired by research conducted by Deroey and Taverniers (2012), who used the British Academic Spoken English corpus to identify discourse markers that mark lesser relevance in academic lectures. Finally, blogs allow students to critically evaluate what they read (or see) on the Internet and also allow students to easily interact and share information with their classmates (Hungerford-Kresser, Wiggins & Amaro-Jiménez, 2011, p. 327). However, in order to effectively use blogs in the classroom, care must be taken while implementing them. Hungerford-Kresser, Wiggins and Amaro-Jiménez (2011) suggest framing blog discussions around students' interest in a topic (p. 333) and encouraging students to respond with more than text (p. 334) in order to make blogs more engaging and not just like another learning task (p. 330). The blog portion of this module was designed with this in mind and all learning tasks, including this blog post, will have a direct impact on students' grades.