HONG DUC UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES PHUNG THUY DUONG USING WEBSITE “BREAKINGNEWSENGLISH.COM” TO IMPROVE SOPHOMORES’ SELF-STUDY OF ENGLISH LISTENING SKILLS AT HONG DUC UNIVERSITY Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English Language Teacher Education THANH HOA, 2022 DECLARATION I certify that this thesis is the result of my own study and the substance of this research has not been submitted for degree to any other university or institution. Student Phung Thuy Duong i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT In the process of completing of this graduation paper, I have benefited a great deal of useful and practical support from my teachers, friends and family. First and foremost, I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my respected supervisor, M. Nguyen Thi Thuy Ngan for her close and experienced guidance.
She has been my source for inspiration throughout my study. Secondly, I would like to show my sincere thanks to Dr. Nguyen Thi Quyet – the Dean of Faculty of Foreign Languages for giving me a chance to do the thesis and all the lecturers of the Department who have enriched my academic knowledge of English during the past four years. Thirdly, I wish to acknowledge my thanks to all the authors of the books, magazines, and the other materials listed in the reference part for their ideas that have been reflected and developed in the study.
In addition, I warmly thank all my friends for their encouragement and precious assistance. Especially, I am grateful to 60 second-year students at Hong Duc university for their enthusiastic and effective cooperation in the process of completing survey questionnaires and the tests. Lastly, I am greatly indebted to my parents who believed in me. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DECLARATION .ii TABLE OF CONTENTS.
vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. vii LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES. Research aims and objectives. Scope of the study.
Methods of the study. Organization of the study. Understanding English listening skills. Definition of listening.
Definition of listening skills. Strategies of listening skills. Using website to improve listening skills. Definition of website.
Research about using online website to improve listening skills. Overview of website BreakingNewsEnglish. Features of the site. Advantages and disadvantages.
How we use this website. The setting of the research. Participants of the study. Steps of the intervention.
Instruments of data collection. Pre-test and post-test. Data collection and analysis procedures. RESULTS AND DATA ANALYSIS.
Results of questionaires. The results of questionaire before application. The results of questionaire after application. The results of pre-testing and post-testing.
Limitation and suggestion for further studies. I v ABSTRACT This research aims to suggest a method of using the website BreakingNewsEnglish.com for sophomores at Hong Duc university to improve listening skills by self-study and to see how effective the website help learners understand and be more prepared to use English as a language both in and outside of the classroom in general and self-studying in particular. Using a method such as listening audio from native speakers on the website is something that with the correct testing has shown a major improvement in the understanding, pronouncing of new words and more importantly the use of those new words in conversation more frequently. The method used in this research was questionnaire for interview sophomores at Hong Duc university to collect the necessary information for the analysis and assessment of the current status of the students’ listening ability and the difficulties that they have faced with.
And action research in using website to learn English, then evaluate its effectiveness. Moreover, the researcher used observation questionnaire to collect the data. To analyze the data, the researcher uses descriptive quantitative to present the result of the study in the form of descriptive explanation. Statistics analysis is used to analyze the data about the improvement of students’ English listening skills.
Based on the results of this research showed that using the website to improve learners’ listening skills is an effective method. In conclusion, the writer hopes this thesis can be used as an additional reference, there will be a further researcher with different discussion. vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 1. BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation 2.
EFL: English as a Foreign Language 3. Etc: Et cetera 4. FFL: Faculty of Foreign Languages 5. HDU: Hong Duc university 6.
TEFL: Teaching English as a Foreign Language vii LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Chart 3.1 The time period of learning English Chart 3.2 Students’ purpose of studying English Students’ attitudes toward the importance of English listening skills Chart 3.3 The students’ interest in learning listening skills Chart 3.4 Time to practice listening skill every day Chart 3.5 Students’ difficulties in learning listening skills Chart 3.6 The ways the students use to improve English listening at home Chart 3.7 The amount of the students who have use website to learn listening Chart 3.8 skills and ones never The students’ experiences when using online websites to learn Chart 3.9 listening skills The students’ interests in using the website Chart 3.10 The students’ improvement after using the website Chart 3.11 The comparison of the students’ marks before application and after Chart 3.12 application viii PART I. Rationale In today’s globalization movement, the influence of English cannot be rejected and overlooked because they universally use it in all parts of the world. English is the official language of over 53 countries and territories, and it is the official language of the European Union. We can say that English has become a global language and is like a travel ticket, a bridge to help you easily get a steady career with higher wages.
Especially for a developing country like Vietnam, English was taught very early, from the late 1980s, in the early 1990s when the country implemented innovative policies, and the relations with The United Stated were normalized, the movement to learn English thrived. Since then, English has been introduced into the national education system in Vietnam as a compulsory subject. Besides, there are many young people who are aware of its importance for reasons such as finding a high-quality job, communicating with the outside world, accessing the scientific resources that they are following. So, that is also the reason many universities and colleges now teach a lot of content in English and regulate foreign language output standards (English) for graduates.
Therefore, teaching and learning English has been a concern of many universities and colleges nationwide. In fact, Vietnam is currently in the group of countries with average English ability, ranking 41/88 according to the report on English skill of the public Education First (EF) published November 2018. The reception of the new language will make learners face many obstacles related to the four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. But most learners have many difficulties with listening skills.
As a final year student in the Faculty of Foreign Languages, the writer realized that listening is an important skill but difficult to practice. So, my research will focus on difficulties of sophomores’ listening skills at Hong Duc University. Then, to suggest and check the effectiveness of the website. And to find out some solutions to help sophomore to improve the self-study English listening skills for further research.
There are many reasons for me to choose this topic for research. The first reason comes from the fact that the second-year students’ English listening skills are quite weak in listening comprehension. Most second-year students are all too familiar with the 1 high school curriculum. They only focus on learning grammar and vocabulary but are less interested in practicing language skills such as English listening practice.
Scores for listening tests at university are very low. Most sophomores are afraid of learning to listen or listen to tests. Besides, listening is also the most important input means of learning a foreign language and increasing students’ verbal perception and supporting foreign language learning. Indeed, listening is an important and difficult skill.
Listening is a technique that cannot be ignored when learning a foreign language. Listening plays an important role in other remaining skills such as speaking, reading, and writing. All skills are related to each other and used in combination in everyday life. Most learners will find their listening skills difficult and choose to avoid listening to English.
However, as students of the FFL, second- year students need to raise awareness of the importance of listening skills and try to overcome difficulties. Unlike students of other departments, FFL students need to be aware of the relationship of listening skills with other skills, learners should not focus on a certain skill that they find easy to ignore other skills. One of the other reasons is the personal experience the writer has had a lot of difficulties in learning and practicing listening skills. In fact, in my first year, my listening test scores were the lowest compared to the other 3 skills.
And that continued in the second year, I was very sad because I tried but the results still did not improve. Like other students, I want to improve my listening skills so that I can use specialized English well after graduation and then have a stable job for myself. Of course, to get this, learners need a lot of effort. Sophomores have a lot of time and opportunities to research and improve their skills.
Therefore, the researcher wants to, through this study, provide sophomores at Hong Duc university a website to improve their listening skills, and offer practical solutions for themselves. I hope the results of this study bring benefits not only for me but also for the second-year students who are weak in English listening skills. Moreover, there have been many types of research on the listening skills of HDU students, but very few people have studied specifically about difficulties in listening skills that second-year English students have experienced. Therefore, I have more motivation to be addicted to the research on this topic to help students in FFL.
2 So, I would like to present the research with the title: “Using website BreakingNewsEnglish.com to improve sophomores’ self-study of English listening skills at Hong Duc university”. Research aims and objectives The study is carried out with the following aims and objectives: - To give general view about the website BreakingNewsEnglish. - To investigate students’ attitudes towards listening learning. - To evaluate the effectiveness of applying the method.
Scope of the study First, the scope of the study is the students’ attitudes to learning English listening skills experienced by second-year English majored students at HDU. The study focuses on applying the website BreakingNewsEnglish.com in self-studying. Second, the researcher only concentrated on the second-year student of HDU's English Department. The research objects are limited and zoned.
The participants are 60 students randomly selected in the class K23D – English Pedagogy. The researcher will invite participants to fill up the survey questionnaire from each of the mentioned class. The thesis does not study or interview other subjects such as teachers or parents. Research questions The study was carried out in order to find out the answers to the following research questions: 1.
What are the students’ attitudes towards listening learning? 2. How effective is the website BreakingNewsEnglish. Methods of the study The research methodology used is the quantitative method. The researcher designed two questionnaires: before application (9 questions) and after application (2 questions).
These questions include closed ones (questions are available with answers). The questionnaires were delivered to 60 students who were selected, then 3 the questionnaires were retrieved for results. Results are transferred to specific number data and the data are clearly analyzed. Questionnaires are an indispensable part; it gives a realistic assessment of learning attitudes, assessments of students’ learning methods for English in general and listening skills in particular.
The author also used the method of pre-testing and post-testing.