In the UK, you will generally be expected to take responsibility for what you learn during lectures and to make effective notes for your own use later.

It is important to be well prepared for lectures and useful to have done some preparatory reading. If English is not your first language, it is a good idea to try and identify some key vocabulary that you might need because this will help you understand the lecture and take effective notes.

It is usual practice to take notes during lectures in the UK. Lecturers will expect you to be able to identify the main points that a lecture contains. It is also helpful to note useful examples and any diagrams. Your lecturer probably won't tell you what you should or shouldn't make notes on. Even if you are given a handout, it is advisable to take your own notes as well to help you concentrate actively on the lecture and so that you have a written record of things that were said for future use (e.g. revising for exams).

The level of formality of lectures at British universities can differ from university to university and according to the preferred style of the individual lecturer.

Typically in the UK, lecturers have a structure or lecture plan that they work from, but they might appear quite informal in the way in which they present their information. International students can sometimes find some lecturers' occasional use of humour surprising and slightly confusing.

In the UK, rhetorical questions are quite commonly used by lecturers and occasionally students can also expect to be asked challenging questions during a lecture. These techniques are used to engage students; encourage them to reflect on the issues, and to check their understanding.

Questioning techniques like these may be unfamiliar to some international students. Rhetorical questions are questions which the lecturer asks aloud but does not expect someone else to answer; this is a stylistic device and lecturers who use this device will go on to answer the questions themselves. Some of the kinds of questions that are asked may require you to think about your own opinion, and may not have a clear right or wrong answer. At the end of a lecture, there may be a few minutes during which a lecturer is willing to take (and answer) more questions about the topic from the audience. This is a good opportunity to ask for clarification about parts of the lecture that you did not fully understand or would like more information about.

In the UK, it is considered important to take notes during lectures because they give background information about your subject area as well as often being important for assignments and for exam revision. A handout, if available, is unlikely to contain all the information or ideas that are mentioned in a lecture; therefore, it is important to be able to take you own notes to add to these.

At university in the UK you will be expected to make notes. An effective note-taking strategy is to identify the main points that the speaker makes and note these down as well as some supporting examples. Diagrams can also be useful when reviewing your notes at a later date.

Just copying from slides and other visual aids is generally not an effective method in the UK because lecturers include a lot of other useful information to explain the key points on their slides. It is not advisable (and also very difficult) to try to write down everything that the lecturer says, but you will need to listen carefully to pick out the main points.

Remember that you should use notes rather than full sentences, when you take notes. This means using key words, lists of points, abbreviations and symbols, which allow you to take down ideas on paper much faster. Some lecturers will allow students to record their lectures if they ask beforehand. However, this should be used to help improve notes, rather than instead of taking notes.

At most British universities you can expect lectures to last between 40 minutes and 1 hour. If you have not had to make notes during lectures before or are inexperienced at making notes in English, it may be a good idea to practise taking notes using radio or TV programmes of about this length.