VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES HOÀNG THỊ NGÁT AN INITIAL EVALUATION OF THE ACTIVITIES TEACHERS USE FOR TEACHING LISTENING SKILL FOR 10TH TEN FORM STUDENTS AT TRAN HUNG DAO HIGH SCHOOL Đánh giá bước đầu về hoạt động giáo viên sử dụng trong giờ dạy kĩ năng nghe hiểu cho học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Trần Hưng Đạo MA. MINOR THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH METHODOLOGY CODE: 60.10 HANOI - 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES HOÀNG THỊ NGÁT AN INITIAL EVALUATION OF THE ACTIVITIES TEACHERS USE FOR TEACHING LISTENING SKILL FOR 10TH TEN FORM STUDENTS AT TRAN HUNG DAO HIGH SCHOOL Đánh giá bước đầu về hoạt động giáo viên sử dụng trong giờ dạy kĩ năng nghe hiểu cho học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Trần Hưng Đạo MA. MINOR THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY CODE: 60.10 SUPERVISOR: Vò mai trang, M.A HANOI – 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENT TABLE OF CONTENT. iv LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES.
viii PART A: INTRODUCTION. Aim of the study. Scope of the study. Methods of the study.
Design of the study. 5 Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. Theory on listening comprehension. Definition of listening.
Classification of listening. Real – life listening. Listening teaching skills. Grammar – translation method.
Audio – lingual method. Task – based method. Stages of a listening lesson. Theory on activities.
Definition of activities. 11 i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Classification of activities. Criteria for Activities Evaluation.
The setting of the study. Instrument for collecting data. Description of procedure for collecting data. 20 Chapter 3: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION.
Data analysis of teachers‟ survey questionnaire and interview. Data analysis of students‟ survey questionnaire and interview. Data analysis of class observation. 31 Chapter 4: FINDINGS AND SUGGESTIONS.
The current situation of teaching and learning listening skill. The current situation of listening activities used by teachers at Tran Hung Dao high school. The students‟ evaluation of the activities available in the text book and their suggestions. Evaluation of the listening activities used by teachers at THD high school.
The students‟ preference for class listening activities and their perception on authentic listening. 38 ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Improving the listening activities available in the text book. Improving the ways that the teachers use listening activities.
Using authentic materials and situations. Useful activities for three stages of a listening lesson. Limitations and suggestions for further study. I LIST OF TABLES AND charts Tables: iii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Table 1: The current situation of using listening activities Table 2: The ways teachers use listening activities Table 3: Students‟ attitude towards listening Table 4: Students‟ evaluation of the activities used by the teacher Table 5: Students‟ evaluation of the activities available in the textbook Table 6: Students’ perception on the authentic listening Charts: Chart 1: Pre-listening activities used by teachers and students‟ preference Chart 2: While-listening activities used by teacher and students‟ preference Chart 3: Post-listening activities used by teacher and students‟ preference ABBREVIATION THD Tran Hung Dao iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CLT Communicative Language Teaching v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale It can be denied that nowadays English is one of the most popular languages in all over the world.
In the era of globalization and international exchange, English has become the main means of communication in many fields of our life such as medicine, science, technology, sports, education, etc. Therefore, teaching and learning English have been paid much attention in every country. In Viet Nam in recent years the number of people who want to know English has become increasing and teaching and learning English have paid much more attention. In most schools, through out the country, English has become a compulsory subject.
However, how to teach and learn English effectively is not simple. Compared to other language skills, listening is considered as one of the most difficult one for both teachers and students. Many studies have been done to seek the ways to make listening lessons less difficult, to give students more confidence, and also some practical strategies to help them study listening skill better. Like many teachers at other high schools, the teachers of English at THD high school also wish and always try their best to make listening lessons more interesting and attractive to their students.
Despite their great effort, the teachers still fail to get students involve in their lessons and a lot of the students fail to take the listening input so they can hardly understand the spoken messages. That is the reason why many of them get bored or become stressful and ignorant when listening classes start even though all of them agree listening skill a very important language skill. Facing to this situation, as one of the English teachers at this school, I would like to do something to improve our teaching and learning English in general and listening skill in particular. It is obvious that the activities teachers choose and the ways they organize the activities play an important role in the success of a listening lesson as suitable and attractive activities can make the listening lesson more interesting and arouse 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com the students‟ interest in listening.
Needless to say, it is necessary for the teachers to know what listening activities their students would like to take part in and what activities are really effective to them. For those reasons, the researcher would like to conduct a study on “An initial evaluation of activities teachers use for teaching listening comprehension skill for 10th form students at Tran Hung Dao high school” with the hope of helping the teachers of English at THD high school to apply the suitable and effective listening activities to teach listening skill more efficiently. 2 Aims of the study The study aims at: Investigating the current English listening teaching and learning situations at THD high school. Identifying the activities teachers at THD high school often use for teaching English listening comprehension and giving an initial evaluation of these activities.
Giving some suggestions to the teachers at THD high school in applying suitable listening activities to make their listening lessons more effective thereby enhancing students‟ interest in listening lessons. Research questions To achieve the above aims, the study focuses on finding out the answers of the following questions: 1. What kinds of activities and the ways do teachers at THD high school use to teach listening comprehension? 2. What are teachers‟ and students‟ attitude towards these activities in term of authenticity, suitability and integration? 3.
What activities can teachers use in order to teach listening skill more effectively? 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Scope of the study Though the study focuses on evaluation of activities teachers use for teaching English listening comprehension skill, due to the limitation of time and page numbers of the minor thesis, the researcher can only conduct a survey on the students of 10th form and ten teachers of English at THD high school to identify some activities to help them better in teaching and learning listening skill. their evaluation of the listening activities used by teachers, after that suggest 5. Methods of the study To achieve the aims mentioned above, the study was carried out with data collected from different sources: two questionnaires were designed for collecting data for analysis from students and teachers at THD high school.
The researcher also interviewed some teachers and students to double-check the information obtained from the survey questionnaires. Beside survey questionnaires and interview, the researcher also makes some class observations to collect information needed for the study. Design of the study The study is divided into three parts: - Part A: presents an overview of the study in which the rationale for the research, the aims, the research questions, the scope of the study, the research method, as well as the design of the study were briefly presented. - Part B: includes 4 chapters as follow Chapter 1 presents the concepts relevant to the research topic such as theory on listening comprehension including definition, classification of listening as well as some ways of teaching listening skill and stages of listening lesson.
In this chapter the researcher also mentioned theory related to activities as definition, classification as well as criteria to evaluate activities and some ways adapting material. 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Chapter 2 deals with description of the subjects, instrument of the study and description of the procedure. Chapter 3 is a focus on data collection and discussion. Chapter 4 points out major finfings of the study and some suggestions will be given.
- Part C: summarizes the main issues of the whole study, presents limitations of the research and makes recommendation for further research in the same field. 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART B: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to the reexamination of concepts most relevant to the thesis‟s topic. It includes three sections. The first section addressed major issues reflecting the theory on listening, including definition, classification of listening, some methods to teach listening skill and the discussion of three stages of the listening lesson.
Come up next in this chapter are major issues in theory on activities including definition, classification of activities and criteria for activities evaluation. The last section included some theoretical discussions about materials adaptation. Therefore, this chapter can be seen as the theoretical foundation for the applications for the study in chapter 3. Theory on listening comprehension 1.
Definition of listening Listening is believed to be one of the most important skills in learning a language. It is considered as the key language skill; hence, there have been varieties of definitions of listening which hold different views towards the concept. According to Rost (1994), listening is referred to a complex process that enables us to understand spoken language. Harmer (2001, p197) categorizes listening into receptive skill, the way in which people extract meaning form the discourse they hear or see.
Wolvin and Coakley (1985) hold the same idea. They see listening as "the process of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli". This definition indicates that listening is a complex process which students have to deal with. The task of listening is not only perception of sound, but it also requires comprehension of meaning Scott Shelton (2008) thinks that listening effectively is a demanding and involved process.
One must be able to deal with different accents or pronunciation, unfamiliar lexical items and syntactic structures, competing background noise, and 5 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com also make a conscious effort to not 'switch off' or become distracted while listening. All of this must be achieved and dealt with more or less simultaneously in order to identify and understand the meaning in any given message. Anderson and Lynch (1988) pointed out that listening is really a receptive skill along side with reading skills and the role of the listeners is no longer passive but active. After a period of listening the learners are exposed to be able to talk or write about what they have heard, that is the objectives of listening comprehension.