Authentic materials such as TED Talks have become an everyday presence in the ELT classroom, often for practice listening and taking notes. However, teachers can struggle to teach the sub-skills that are involved in notetaking, and instead often simply tell students to 'take notes'. This approach lacks the scaffolding required for the complex…

Describes an attempt to bridge the gap between the English learned in the classroom and the English encountered outside of class and to improve listening comprehension by putting engineering undergraduates through an experimental course in which a weekly academic lecture would be the point of focus. Discusses outcomes of the experiment. (SED)