MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES -R- LUU HOA LY SOME SOLUTIONS TO TEACHING OF ESP LISTENING TO ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS AT HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF ARCHITECTURE SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF TESOL HO CHI MINH CITY - 2002 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES -R- LUU HOA LY SOME SOLUTIONS TO TEACHING OF ESP LISTENING TO ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS AT HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF ARCHITECTURE M. THESIS IN TESOL CODE NUMBER: 5.02 SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF TESOL Supervisor: PHO PHUONG DUNG, M. HO CHI MINH CITY - 2002 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: SOME SOLUTIONS TO TEACHING OF ESP LISTENING TO ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS AT HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF ARCHITECTURE in terms of the statements of requirements for Theses in Master’s Programs issued by the Higher Degree Committee. Ho Chi Minh City, November 2002 LUU HOA LY i RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I hereby state that I, LUU HOA LY, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s theses deposited in the University Library.
In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the University Library should be accessible for the purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for care, loan or reproduction of theses. Ho Chi Minh City, November 2002 LUU HOA LY ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been done and finished without the help and co-operation of a large number of people who now deserve my heartfelt thanks. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Ms. Pho Phuong Dung, M., who has critically read the thesis and offered her intelligent comments on my thesis at various points in its development in an attempt to ensure that I make sense most of the time though she worked far from here.
Similar thank must go to Ms. Ngo Thi Phuong Thien, M., who has inspired me to initial thoughts of the thesis. My thanks also go to the organizers of the Master course and other staff members for instructing me to do coursework and admitting me to perform the thesis. I would like to thank the Rector of Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture and the Dean of Applied Science Department and the Dean of Basic Science Department at this University who have enabled me to use both school time and resources while I was doing this thesis.
My sincere thanks also go to those who have allowed themselves to be observed and surveyed in the class observations, the interview sessions and the questionnaire responses. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my dead mother who used to encourage me to take this Master course and support me with her love; and my affection must also go to my beloved son. iii ABSTRACT Teaching English listening has not been paid sufficient attention to in many technical universities and colleges, especially at Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture, where ESP listening seems to be neglected. However, listening plays an important part in communication.
Many architecture graduates have encountered difficulties with listening comprehension at building sites or civil engineering offices where English is a means of communication. The purpose of this study was to identify learners’ problems in learning ESP listening and applicable methods to employ in ESP listening classes. A questionnaire was designed to survey these issues and several listening classes were observed. To clarify the data from the questionnaire and classroom observations, short interviews were also conducted with architecture students and ESP teachers at Architecture University.
The findings of the study demonstrate that proper criteria for selecting materials appropriate to architecture students may facilitate their ESP listening learning. In addition, the study concludes that the harmonious combination of applicable methods can improve ESP listening teaching at Architecture University. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Background to the study.
Overview of the thesis.3 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. The importance of listening. The nature of listening. Purposes of listening.
Pre-listening stage. While-listening stage. Post-listening stage. Learners’ potential problems in learning listening.
Learners’ lack of experience in listening. The factors of a listening text. Sounds and pronunciation as obstacles to learners’ listening acquisition. Methods for teaching listening.
Grammar-Translation Method. Communicative Language Teaching Method. Summary of literature review. Aims of the study.
Methods for the study. The subjects of the study. The description of the questionnaire. 34 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION.
Experience of the students’ learning of listening. The background of architecture students. Issues concerning the experience of learning listening. Issues concerning listening learning at HCMC University of Architecture.1 Learners’ difficulties in learning listening.
Issues concerning the three stages of learning listening. Pre-listening stage. While-listening stage. Post-listening stage.
Suggested solutions to teaching and learning of ESP listening via the questionnaire and focus group discussion. Approaches to teaching of ESP listening via the classroom observations and the small interviews with the three ESP teachers. The first class observation. The second class observation.
The third class observation. Lesson plan for teaching ESP listening. A lesson plan for teaching ESP listening. Comment on the lesson plan.
64 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND SOLUTIONS. Suggested criteria for selecting listening materials. Identifying suitable topics while selecting listening materials. Considering grammar structures and specialized terms or unfamiliar words.
Choosing authentic and up-to-date materials. Choosing recorded materials with high quality. Suggested methods for teaching listening. Appropriate techniques for teaching of listening.
Limitation of the study and recommendations for future research. 113 vii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 4. 52 LIST OF TABLES TABLE 3. 65 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 1.
ESP English for Specific Purposes 2. TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages 3. HCMC Hochiminh City viii Chapter 1: Introduction CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Background to the study Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture, a state-owned university, is allowed to admit approximately 500 students annually.
Through the five years’ syllabus for a degree in architecture, the students are equipped with, in addition to their major subjects, a necessary amount of foreign language knowledge. Though they are not English-major students, they are given quite a great deal of time to learn English. Totally, the English course consists of 270 forty-five-minute periods, half of which is devoted to General English and the other half to English for Specific Purposes (ESP). A point worth noting is that the teachers at the University of Architecture realized that listening to ESP is more difficult to teach and learn than reading an ESP text.
Listening to English for architecture takes the teachers and students at the University of Architecture in Ho Chi Minh City much time and effort. Though the students always obtain bad scores on listening tests, they can easily pass their English exams thanks to the scores on other skills such as reading, speaking, writing and grammar. Since 1996 many things have been done to solve this problem but they have brought about no effectiveness so far. Another thing worth mentioning here is that although Vietnamese engineers and architects at building sites or workshops of construction may be able to understand written materials in English, they find it difficult to 1 Chapter 1: Introduction listen to spoken English.
Therefore, the problem here is not their lack of knowledge of specialized terms in architecture but their unfamiliarity to listening to such terms. Moreover, ESP listening has not been taught systematically at the University of Architecture in Ho Chi Minh City. The individual teachers teach ESP listening to their students in their own ways. Listening texts are personally and randomly selected providing that students master some terms used in specific situations.
In order to understand the nature of listening teaching, theoretical background of listening literature needs to be considered. Theoretical background Listening plays an important part in our life. This is the reason why listening is paid a lot of attention to by language researchers as well as teachers and students. Many language specialists studied and proposed theories concerning the teaching and learning of listening such as Anderson and Lynch [1], Nunan [27], Richards [27], Underwood [41] and Ur [43].
However, the studies tend to focus on teaching General English; many particular issues related to teaching of ESP listening were not mentioned. There were even fewer studies on teaching listening to Vietnamese students; in fact, there was only one thesis titled “Teaching Listening Comprehension to Non-language Postgraduate Students at Hanoi Water Resources University” written by 2 Chapter 1: Introduction Ngo Thi Mai Hien [26]. However, the difficulties in ESP listening of Vietnamese learners have not been solved in her thesis. She only offered ten sample lessons for teaching listening to non-language postgraduate students, yet the content of each lesson was not related to the students’ speciality at Hanoi Water Resources University.
In brief, there have not been any particular studies which can satisfy the demands for teaching ESP listening systematically and effectively. The present study, therefore, tries to investigate the characteristics of listening as well as factors that make it difficult for architecture students and teachers to teach and learn ESP listening. A questionnaire and a focus group were designed to ask the students of architecture about their present learning of ESP listening. Furthermore, some classrooms were observed in order to explore the current situation of teaching ESP listening so that some solutions may be suggested to help them to overcome the difficulties in ESP listening at Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture.
Overview of the thesis There are five chapters in this study. Chapter 1 introduces the background to the study. Chapter 2 presents a literature review on the importance of English listening, listening stages, learners’ potential problems in learning listening and methods related to teaching listening. Chapter 3 describes the methodology of the study and how the data were collected.
Chapter 4 presents and discusses the results of the questionnaire 3 Chapter 1: Introduction and classroom observations. Finally, Chapter 5 offers suggestions or implications for classroom teaching of ESP listening. 4 Chapter 2: Literature Review CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2. The importance of listening 2.
The nature of listening It is generally said that context facilitates listening. Listening seems to be developed easily in native environment because people hear it all the time, and “they have many different opportunities to communicate with their mother tongue” [8; 198]. Underwood [41] also says that people can listen in their mother tongue with little or no effort. On the other hand, in listening in the target language, it can be very difficult for learners to understand.
However, as pointed out by Doff [8], “listening is also a receptive skill or input source. Thus, the ability to understand spoken English may become very important to English learners” [8; 198]. Learning listening enables learners to identify and understand what others are saying. Although listening is referred to as a passive or receptive skill, listeners are active participants during the communicative act.
Lee and Vanpatten state that “listening is a dynamic process drawing on a variety of mental processes and knowledge sources” [22; 60]. This viewpoint of Lee and Vanpatten [21] is shared by Willis [45], who clarifies that listening is receptive rather than productive, and students need to learn how to listen, and how to have access to different types of listening. In the process of language teaching, listening involves students’ hearing and understanding what teachers say ([14]; [39]; 5 Chapter 2: Literature Review [30]).