QUANG NAM UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES GRADUATION PAPER Title: ASTUDY ON DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING LISTENING - COMPREHENSION OF THE FIRST YEAR ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT QUANG NAM UNIVERSITY By ĐINH THỊ Ý ANH Student Code: 2111010801 MAJOR: ENGLISH ACADEMIC COURSE: 2011-2015 Supervisor: NGUYEN THI THẢO M.A TRUONG BAI HOC QUANG NAM ,TRUNG TÂM HỌC LIỆU VÀ CÔNG NGHỆ THÔNG TIN Quang Nam, May 2015 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP Honestly, the thesis has been resulted from my own interest as well as difficulties in learning English of the first year students at Quang Nam University. I directly distributed the questionnaires to the right beginner learners. Therefore, the entire statistics given must be reliable. Moreover, all the reference information was quoted or summarized with the clear original sources which have been shown in the references.
| truthfully assure that the thesis has been completed by me. ii ABSTRACT Listening is one of the most necessary skills to communicate in the real life. In learning a foreign language, it is extremely important to learn this skill. Everybody knows that listening to a message is not as simple as hearing it, so the listener has to understand the message and respond in the right manner.
Realizing the problems from learning experience, the author would like to do a research titled: A study on difficulties in learning English listening comprehension of the first year English major students at Quang Nam University. The thesis will study the subjective and objective difficulties of the beginning learners in learning the listening skill. Then, it will find out the reasons for those problems and the sollutions for learners in learning the listening skill. Therefore, the author applied the qualitative and quantitative methods and descriptive methods to do the research.
Data collecting instruments like questionnaires were used to do the study. The results of the research will point out the difficulties that beginners meet when they learn the listening skill at Quang Nam University. More importantly, it helps the author find out the causes of those difficulties so that the author can work out the right solutions to the problems. With the hope of improving beginner learners’ listening competence, the author has tried her best to do this thesis by her own experience and knowledge in English learning methodology.
iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My graduation thesis has been completed with a lot of encouragement and support from my teachers, colleagues and family. First of all, I would like to express my deep great thank to my supervisor, Nguyen Thi Thao, MA for her indispensable and useful advice, suggestions and support. And I wish to thank my teachers at Quang Nam University from whom I could get background knowledge to complete this thesis. In addition, I am grateful to all my friends in my class, who have encouraged me a lot to finish the thesis and shared useful information with me.
Moreover, it is my pleasure to acknowledge the teachers who permitted me to do the survey on the two classes. My thanks are also given to the all the first year English major students who willingly completed the questionnaires. Finally, | am happy to acknowledge my family members, who always approved and encouraged me during my study. Quang Nam, May, 2015 Dinh Thi Y Anh iv TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP.
TABLE OF CONTENTS. LIST OF TABLES LIST OF FIGURES CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION, 1.1, Rationale for research. Aims for research.3, Objectives for research 1. Scope of the study.
The significance of the study 1. Organization of the study CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND. What is listening skill? What are sub-skills that involve listening- comprehended skill 2. What are types of listening-comprehension?.
The importance of the listening-comprehension skill. CHAPTER 3: METHODS AND PROCEDURES.14 CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS. The attitude of the first year English major students on learning listening skill. Difficulties in learning listening - comprehension of the first year English major students.
Causes of difficulties in learning listening - comprehension. The different ways to enhance the first year English major students’ skills. Suggestions for learners. Practicing the listening — comprehension skill regularly.
Using the effective ways to practice listening skill. Having special strategies for three listening stages 4. Suggestions for improving the learning environment ot ening skill .3, Limitations of the study.4, Suggestion for further researches. vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1; Learners’ interest in different listening activities.
Table 2: Statistics about causes from the listeners. Table 3: Causes from listening material. Table 4; Causes from physical setting, Table 5: Using different means to enhance listening skills. Table 6: Suggesting solutions.
vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The learners' opinion on learning listening skill Figure 2: Difficulties in learning English listening — comprehension. Figure 3: Improving the different skills of students for their listening skill .28 Figure 4: Practicing the listening - comprehension skill regularly. Rationale for research In recent years, along with the quick development and cooperation of the world’s economy, people need a common language to communicate with each other. Therefore, English is used more and more widely and becomes the international language.
Learning English is becoming a must in this modern world. Students need to effectively obtain basic language skills such as reading, speaking, writing and especially listening at the beginning. Listening - comprehension is the most important skill in communication because we are only able to communicate well effectively when we understand what is said to us. Moreover, in learning English, listening- comprehension is a useful means of the whole learning English process.
Failure in listening causes big obstacles in the process of learning English and leads to bad results in English learning. Therefore, learners have to be able to listen well at the beginning. However, listening-comprehension is a challenging task for the first year students. They always face problems during listening.
The reason is that when they listen to information on TV, radio or from forcigners., they don’t have many opportunities to refer back to the information to understand clearly like reading. As Harmer said, “Whereas, the written word stays on the page and can be looked at more than once, the spoken word, unless recorded on tape or record cannot be repeated. Of course in a conversation, it is possible to ask someone to say something again, but the fact remains that while a reader can look back at something as many times as he wants, the listeners cannot.” (Harmer, 1991) In addition, first year students seem to first approach listening skill when they enter the University, so they have not known how to listen effectively. On the other hand, practicing listening skill is difficult and takes a long time.
This makes them become lazy. ‘They are not interested in learning the listening skill. It is necessary for learners to have methods of listening- comprehension in relaxation and pleasure. As a student who haye studicd and met many problems in learming English listening -comprehension, I have realized that first year English major students cope with a lot of problems and difficulties when dealing with listening - comprehension because of some objective and subjective reasons.
Moreover, listening —comprehension is really important at the first stages. Therefore, I would like to choose the title “4 study on difficulties in learning listening- comprehension of the first year English major students at Quang Nam University” to point out the difficulties and its causes to help the English major freshmen have the effective strategies in listening- comprehension. Aims for research The study is carried out to help the first year English major students have strategies for listening — comprehension. Objectives for research The study is done with the following objectives: Firstly, the study would find the common difficulties that the first year have just started learning English, face when they learn English listening skill at Quang Nam University.
Secondly, the study will identify the reasons of the difficulties in learning English listening skill at Quang Nam University. Finally, the study would like to suggest some possible solutions to those difficulties, 1. Scope of the research The researcher selected the first-year English major students at Quang Nam University to investigate about the existed problems in learning listening skill. The study mainly focuses on the difficulties and causes that the beginners cope with in learning English listening skill.
Research questions The thesis mainly focuses on answering the three following research questions: 1. What are the difficulties the first year English major students face in learning listening skill at Quang Nam University? 2. Why do the first year English major students face difficulties in learning listening skill? 3. What can be done to improve listening skill? 1.
The significance of the research The study will research the subjective and objective difficulties of the first year English major students in listening-comprchension skill. The result of the research will help the first year English major students develop effective learning strategies and ultimately improve their listening-comprehension competence in the next years. It is necessary for leamers to identify their difficulties in listening comprehension to ascertain what further learning strategies are necessary. Learners need to be aware of the factors which contribute to their difficulties in listening; when listeners know something about their own problems, they will be able to improve their listening practice and become better listeners.
Moreover, it also helps them have confidence to communicate fluently in the real life. Organization of the research The study is presented in five chapters as follows Chapter one: Introduction will introduce the general information about the thesis. Firstly, the rationale for the research is about the main reasons to do this thesis. Then, aims of the study introduce the purpose to do this research and after that are objectives of the study.
Next, the scope of the study gives the details about the objects that the thesis studies and the main content that the thesis covers. The next part is research questions. And the significance of the study talks about an importance of the research. Finally, organization of the study briefly introduces the main parts of the thesis.
Chapter two: Literature review and theoretical background, briefly reviews the literature review, previous studies that related to the thesis and theoretical background for the matters of study. Chapter three: Methods and procedures, the research will introduce the participants, the data collection instruments as well as research methods, data analysis. Chapter four: Findings and discussions, it involves data collection and gives the finding of the study and discussion about research questions and from that giving solutions. Chapter five: Conclusion and Implications, briefly summarizes the results obtained from the analysis and put forward some implications for teaching and learning English listening skill.
This chapter also mentions the limitations and suggestions for further researches. ow CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Although listening is now well recognized as a critical dimension in language learning, it still remains one of the least understood processes. Listening comprehension is generally acknowledged as an important facct of language learning. Nevertheless, “much work remains to be done in both theory and practice” (Morley, 2001, p.
In this chapter, an attempt will be made to clarify what has been discussed in the literature for the past years. Literature review Listening-comprehension plays an important role in second language instruction for several reasons (Rost, 1994). If you cannot hear it well, you will find it hard to communicate or you cannot pass your listening examination. In fact, students often take the wrong way when they listen.
This leads them to the poor result. It should be noted that the learner’s awareness of listening problem and strategies can affect their comprehension positively and negatively (Wenden, 1986). Thus, in order to help students improve their listening skill, it is needed finding out their listening problems which cause difficulties to them. A numbers of research have been carried out to point out the problem in listening.