VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY - HCMC THE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES Candidate: Chau Thi Bich Van HOW AN UNDERSTANDING OF SUPRASEGMENTAL FEATURES HELPS IMPROVE LISTENING COMPREHENSION SKILLS IN IELTS PREPARATION CLASSES AT THE HCMC UNIVERSITY OF INDUSTRY Submitted In Partial Fulfilment Of The Requirements For The Degree Of Master Of TESOL Supervisor: Ivon Katz HCMC October 2007 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY Months of diligent work and effort having gone into my research, I herein assure you that the research is done by the very author, me myself. More importantly, at no time it has been taken advantage of to secure any other certificates, nor turned into any academic account. HCMC, October 5th, 2007 Chau Thi Bich Van ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is accomplished with the assistance and support of many people to whom I feel very deep gratitude. First of all, I would like to send my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor – Mr.
With a strong sense of responsibility, a single-minded devotion, and a wide knowledge of the professional field, he has continuously given me encouragement and invaluable ideas towards the completion of the thesis. Then my appreciation goes to my colleagues for sharing with me their teaching experience and my students for being disposed to be in on my work as the participants. And finally, I feel indebted to Mr. Pham Tri Dai – my husband as well as my colleague – for his support and encouragement during the course of completing the thesis.
ABSTRACT The research was assiduously conducted with an eye to drawing the attention from those who are taking charge of listening skill teaching in IELTS preparation classes in Vietnam. With the intention of bearing out that imparting suprasegmental features in general and sentence stress in particular is of paramount importance and, thus paves the way for an enhancement of listening skills for students in IELTS classes, the research described in this paper quantitative approach. That is, the author carried out herself an experiment to testify that teaching sentence stress does help L2 learners to develop their listening comprehension skill. With this end in view, the subjects were chosen of sixty-six freshmen majoring in Business Administration in the HCMC University of Industry (HUI), who were required to attend IELTS preparation classes over the course of two years.
They were split into two separate classes: DBA9A1 – the control group (CG) and DBA9A2 – the experimental group (EG). The groups are both obliged to sit for a pre-test and a post-test. The results of the two tests, to be precise, are processed by SPSS – the Statistical Package Software System. Between the two tests is a special treatment given only to the EG, not the CG.
Whereas the pre-test shows similar listening capacities in both groups before the special treatment, the post-test differentiates between the CG and the EG in regarding listening proficiency. After the treatment, the EG outperforms the CG remarkably. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS CG: the control group DBA: the Diploma of Business Administration EG: the experimental group HUI: the HCMC University of Industry IELTS: the International English Language Testing System L2: second language SPSS: the Statistical Package Software System TafeSA: the Technological And Further Education, South Australia TOEFL iBT: the Test of English as a Foreign Language (Internet-Based Test) TOEIC: the Test of English for International Communication TABLE OF CONTENTS CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY. iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS.
iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Background to the study. Definitions of terms. Statement of purpose.
Importance of the Study. An overview of the organization of this study. 8 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. The effect of linguistic knowledge on listening competence.
The effect of sufrasegmental features on listening competence. Remedies for listening barriers. What a listening teacher should do before the listening session. What a listening teacher should do during the listening.
A critical look at the literature review. 13-14 CHAPTER 3: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND. 18 CHAPTER 4: RESULT AND DISCUSSION. Result of the pre-test.
Result of the post-test. Pedagogical implications for teaching procedures in an Ielts preparation class. 34-36 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS. Recomendations for further research.
40 APPENDIX A: List of tables. 41-44 APPENDIX B: List of figures. 45-46 APPENDIX C: The pre-test paper. 47-50 APPENDIX D: The listening transcript for the pre-test paper.
51-55 APPENDIX E: The post-test paper. 56-59 APPENDIX F: The listening transcript for the post-test paper. 60-64 APPENDIX G: The lesson plan for the experimental treatment. BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY Qua a teacher, and like many other counterparts , upon teaching listening in an IELTS preparation class, I the author used to give it a simple thought that teaching listening was as easy a task as anything, and then started off without delay.
Having provided a few items of vocabulary and a little background knowledge apropos of the forthcoming tape recording, the author set about playing the recording, in the normal course of things let them listen again and again, up to several times, and then proceeded to examine their understanding to make comprehension questions. Some gave wrong answers; some others are right; the majority produced no feedback at all, far from uttering anything and looking more than confused. Finally, the listening session seemed to turn out less than expected, to turn out no intended results at all. And that was the usual way it came to an end.
The outcome did not, as things stood, live up to expectations. The answers having been catered for, there still lay the rub, which came as a surprise to me. And it was all too easy to notice that there was a shade of disappointment and grimaces on the students’ faces. A moment of silence wore on and they brought the problem to my notice.
“Teacher, we fail to understand anything in the recording”, they said. “They speak so fast that we can hardly get the meaning”. Those pressing words of complaint set the author thinking. It turned out that the author, as well as most of the other listening teachers, had not really done anything except for controlling the tape during the listening process to help with the listening improvement for the students; in this regard, the author followed the lead of most of her colleagues teaching listening in IELTS 1 preparation classes.
Academically, to deal successfully with IELTS listening tests is in want of many factors put together: the calibre of the teacher, the intellectual faculties of the learner, the listening materials, the teaching facilities, and so forth. And it is the high calibre on the part of the teacher that is first and foremost an ingredient. It is time for listening teachers to stop teaching listening as a series of tests and embark on teaching listening strategies instead. What most teachers of this time call “teaching listening” in fact is not authentic “teaching listening”.
Brown (1977) maintains that “many courses which purport to ‘teach’ listening comprehension in fact consist of exercises which expose the students to a chunk of spoken material on a tape and then ask ‘comprehension questions’ to try to find out whether or not the student has understood the language of the text” (p. Therefore, teachers should begin to restore the true meaning of teaching listening by getting down to teaching. Many a thing is quite expected to be passed down in the listening classes such as suprasegmental features in general, and sentence stress in particular. That is, suprasegmental features should methodologically be put in the forefront.
Evidently suprasegmental features comprise many components such as sentence stress, intonation, rhythm, etc, however, relating to the problem stated above, sentence stress shoud be the most highlighted. The reason is simple. Whereas Vietnamese, the students’ native language, is syllabic, English is stress-timed. Because this nature of the target language is completely strange to the students, the notion of sentence stress should be taken into consideration.
Once it conveyed, the learner can to a much greater extent listen to the recorded utterances with comfort and then take a good grasp of their meaning. Therefore, it is a great disservice to ignore teaching sentence stress to Vietnamese students. DEFINITION OF TERMS To begin with, the notion of suprasegmental features (which are also known as prosodic features) should be defined. According to Richard (1993), a suprasegmental is “a unit which extends over more than one sound in an utterance, e.
STRESS and tone” (p. Also, Miller (2006) refers to suprasegmental features as stress, intonation, and speech rhythm. They play a very important role in conveying the meaning of spoken language since “it is the suprasegmentals With the above definition, it is clear that stress is the most prominent features. “Stress” in suprasegmental phonology refers to sentence stress, not word stress as in segmental phonology.
With the presence of sentence stress, English has stress-timed rhythm. Richard (1993) suggests that stress-timed rhythm is “a speech rhythm in which the stressed syllables are said to recur at equal intervals of time” (p. As said above, the “stress-timed nature” of English is difficult to comprehend for Vietnamese learners. According to Avery (1992), “In a stressed- timed language, there is a tendency for stressed syllables to occur at regular intervals” (p.
In contrast, Vietnamese has syllable-timed rhythm. Avery ( ) defines it as “the amount of time required to say a sentence depends on the number of syllables, not on the number of stresses” (p. Also, Richard (1993) refers to this notion as “a speech rhythm in which all syllables are said to recur at equal intervals” (p. Finally, since “listening comprehension” is the very terminology for the research, it behoves us to know what it really is.
According to Underwood (1989), the definition of listening in a foreign language is presented in comparison with listening in the first language by stating that “it is a skill which seems to develop 3 easily for mother-tongue listening, but requires a considerable effort where listening in a foreign language is concerned” (p. In contrast, Buck (2001) defines listening comprehension in a more direct way. According to him, “listening comprehension is the result of an interaction between a number of information sources, which include the acoustic input, different types of linguistic knowledge, details of the context, and general world knowledge, and so forth” (p. What is more, he maintains that “listening comprehension is an active process of constructing meaning, and that this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound” (p.
However, how is the process? Previously, he describes the process as “the listener takes the incoming data, the acoustic signal, and interprets that, using a wide variety of information and knowledge, for a particular communicative purpose; it is an inferential process” (p. STATEMENT OF PURPOSE Phonetically, a good grasp supreasegmental featues such as sentence stress, is a sine qua non for success in an IELTS listening subtest, but aware of this is regrettably a small number of learners. A good few Vietnamese high school graduates are stuffed with items of English vocabulary and grammar, so to speak, in order to work on reading and writing sections, while the source of input of listening section is not printed words at all but sounds and sounds and sounds! Understandably, that the majority of these IELTS test takers do a bad job actually stems from the lack of phonological knowledge, peculiarly of the acquaintance with suprasegmental features in general, and sentence stress in particular. There are at least three reasons why teachers do not take seriously the teaching of sentence stress in IELTS preparation classes.
First, they come to 4 class with the mistaken belief that their students have already mastered sentence stress from the previous courses whereas actually the latter have not at all. Second, they downplay the introduction of sentence stress to a listening class, claiming that these features should be taught in a pronunciation or speaking class.