How to Make the Most of Your Notes

Posted on December 4, 2018

By Emily Stallard, Owner at Orchid English

 

Do you make notes in your English classes? I’m always amazed by the number of adults who don’t make notes on corrections or new information given by the teacher. If you don’t make notes, the teacher’s advice may be very difficult to recall. After the class, you need to make the most of your notes by reviewing them.

 

Making notes enables you to review what you have done after class and you are less likely to make the same mistake over and over again. The following tips detail how you can improve your English fast by making the most of your notes:

 

Write Notes by Hand

 

There is a lot of evidence that taking notes on a device won’t help you remember the information. In addition to being ineffective, using devices in your class almost always creates some typing noise, and popups on the device are distracting.

 

OK so the first step is to make handwritten notes during the class, but then how do you make the most of your notes between classes?

 

Read Notes Both Silently and Aloud

 

At home, read your notes aloud as well as silently. Often the word feels different to pronounce to how you had expected, especially a long word or a word with a tricky sequence of sounds. And if your objective is to improve your speaking, it will help to familiarise yourself with the feel of the word.

 

Note Down the Pronunciation

 

English doesn’t have as high a correlation between spelling and pronunciation as we may hope when learning it. It’s no good if you know the spelling but not the pronunciation, which makes noting down irregular pronunciation really essential. Otherwise when you return to your notes you will fall into traps with the pronunciation. Learn more about spellings and pronunciation in English here.

 

Are you familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA? Lots of advanced speakers of English know the IPA, so they can note down the pronunciation of a new word. To be honest, if you feel that learning the whole IPA is too much, you can get a very long way just learning the vowels, and the two “th” sounds.

 

Do More Research Online

 

When you are presented with a new concept in English, do some more research on it online. When your teacher intruduces the past perfect tense, for example, search for different sources for past perfect quizzes and explanations to really ingrain your understanding.

 

Controlled Practice Writing

 

There are structures that you really want to commit to memory. Say you always hear the phrasal verb “get up to“.

 

• What did you get up to this weekend?
• Up? I wasn’t up! What do you mean?

 

You ask your teacher who explains that “get up to” a casual way to say “do”, especially for something interesting or mischievous. Now you realise why people ask you about it all the time, and it’s a useful phrasal verb to be able to use too.

 

Much better than reading about it, make some sentences of your own with this phrasal verb, transforming the tense. Writing lines seems unfashionable these days but I think it can be a good way to ingrain knowledge and use the language actively.

 

1. What did you get up to on the bank holiday?
2. It’s so busy at work I haven’t been getting up to much in the evenings recently
3. Those children look like they’re getting up to no good!
4. When we were unsupervised, my brothers and I used to get up to a lot of mischief

 

Make your Own Charts and Posters

 

I really enjoy making my own wall charts from my class notes to help me learn Spanish! You can add mnemonics and colours according to your learning style. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re a great artist, what’s important to make the most of your notes is to ingrain the new words or grammar points in your mind.

 

If you have a list of gerunds and infinitives for example, you could design a poster with all the words that trigger the gerund on the left and words that trigger infinitives on the right. If you combine them into a scene you will be more likely to remember them.

 

So in summary we have: reading your handwritten notes silently and aloud; making a note of pronunciations; doing more online research; writing your own practice sentences and making your own charts and posters. Do you have any more tips? How do you make the most of your notes from your English classes? We’d be interested to hear them.