VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES TRUONG THI THANH HUYEN CHALLENGES PERCEIVED BY TEACHERS IN HOW TO TEACH AND MOTIVATE ETHNIC MINORITY STUDENTS TO LEARN LISTENING COMPREHENSION SKILL AT LANG SON TEACHERS’ TRAINING COLLEGE AND SOLUTIONS (NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN CỦA GIÁO VIÊN TRONG VIỆC GIẢNG DẠY VÀ KHÍCH LỆ SINH VIÊN NGƯỜI DÂN TỘC THIỂU SỐ HỌC KỸ NĂNG NGHE HIỂU TẠI TRƯỜNG CAO ĐẲNG SƯ PHẠM LẠNG SƠN VÀ MỘT SỐ GIẢI PHÁP) MA. MINOR THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH METHODOLOGY CODE: 601410 SUPERVISOR: LE THE NGHIEP, M.A LANGSON, 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.ii PART I: INTRODUCTION. Aims and significance of the study. Scope of the study.
Methods of the study. Organization of the thesis.3 PART II: THE DEVELOPMENT.4 CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW. Theoretical background of listening comprehension.What is listening?. Nature of listening.
Significance of listening. Teaching listening skills.The process of listening. Strategies of listening. Stages of a listening lesson.
Pre-listening stage. While-listening stage. Post-listening stage. Potential problems in teaching and learning to listen to English.
Teacher’s roles in teaching listening comprehension.What is motivation?.The importance of motivation in listening classes. Current challenges in teaching and learning listening comprehension. Students’ psychological obstacles influence their listening capacity. Grammar knowledge affects listening comprehension.
Cultural background knowledge and thinking affect listening comprehension.12 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iv CHAPTER II: METHODOLOGY. General description of the current course-book and participants’ background information. General description of the current course-book. Participants’ background information.
English Major Students. Methods of data collection.16 CHAPTER III: DICUSSIONS AND FINDINGS. Questionnaire for the Teachers. Questionnaire for the Students.
Teachers’ challenges when dealing with listening techniques and some suggested solutions to those techniques………………………………………………… 30 III.Students’ preferences for listening techniques……. Teachers’ and students opinions about listening activities in the course-book ‘Listen in 1’ by David Nunan they are using……………………………………………34 CHAPTER IV: SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS TO THE TEACHING PROCEDURES. For the teachers. Some useful activities used for students during the class -time.38 PART III: CONCLUSION.
Summary of the study. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further study.I LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com v APPENDIXE II.VII APPENDIXE III.XVI LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vi LIST OF ABBRIVIATIONS - LSTTC: Langson Teachers’ Training College - DFL: Department of Foreign Languages - CFL: College of Foreign Languages - VNU: Vietnam National University - T: Teacher - Ss: Students LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vii LIST OF CHARTS AND TABLES Page Table 1: Teachers’ pre-listening techniques………………………………………….21 Table 2: Teachers’ while- listening techniques………………………………….………22 Table 3: Teachers’ post-listening techniques………………………………………….24 Table 4: Teachers’ difficulties in pre-listening techniques…………………………….…25 Table 5: Teachers’ difficulties in while- listening techniques………………………….26 Table 6: Teachers’ difficulties in post-listening techniques…………………………….27 Table 7: Students’ preferences for pre-listening techniques…………………………….30 Table 8: Students’ preferences for while-listening techniques………………………….31 Chart 1: Teachers’ comments on the listening activities in the coursebook…………….27 Chart 2: Causes that make students uninterested in listening…………………………….28 Chart 3: Students’ preferences for post-listening techniques…………………………….32 Chart 4: Students’ comments on the listening activities in the coursebook………………33 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Rationale English is, nowadays, needed in every field of our lives and for a long time it has been not only a compulsory subject in schools in Vietnam but one of three major subjects in the entrance exam to some Universities and Colleges as well. Among the four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, listening is always considered to be the most difficult for teachers to teach and for students to learn.
This leads to the fact that learners are afraid of learning listening skills. There are various reasons for this: students‟ poor background knowledge, their limited reservoir of vocabulary and structures, their lack of motivation and preparations for the task, etc. Many students have associated listening courses with pain and boredom and usually complain that they benefit little from listening lessons. This is also true to students at Lang Son Teachers‟ Training College.
Therefore, it is necessary for teachers of English language to realize the importance of how to make listening classes more interesting and know how to motivate students so that they can make progress and feel interested in listening comprehension courses. In fact, in the process of teaching and learning English, listening plays an important role since it involves various kinds of the listener‟s knowledge and it is closely related to other skills, especially the speaking skill. While, G (1998) pointed out that being a good listener involves collaborating with speakers and taking an active role in asking for clarification when you do not understand. However, in the process of teaching listening of teachers at LSTTC, the students‟ motivation in learning this skill is sometimes low and the listening lesson is said to be boring despite the teacher‟s much effort in their teaching time.
Consequently, these students‟ listening skills are poor since they are not interested in the subject, and they find it difficult to focus on listening if there are many distractions. They do not know much about the tasks of the lesson. Thus, creating a motivating learning environment for ethnic minority students in a listening class is a challenging task for teachers. This fact has encouraged the author to investigate into the challenges perceived by teachers in how to teach and motivate ethnic minority students to learn Listening Comprehension Skill at LSTTC, to find out more reasons for those problems, and then, to give some suggestions for mostly meeting and solving those challenges.
Hopefully, the study will be helpful in some way for the author and other teachers to find out most suitable techniques to stimulate their students in listening lessons. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Aims and significance of the study The purpose of this study is to find out the most suitable teaching techniques and solutions to the challenges perceived by the teachers, in order to teach and motivate ethnic minority students at LSTTC to learn listening comprehension skill effectively. To be specific, the major aims of the study are as follows: - to find out current challenges faced by teachers and ethnic minority students at LSTTC in their process of teaching and learning English listening comprehension skill.
- to study teaching techniques used by these teachers to teach their students listening comprehension skill. - to investigate students‟ attitudes and their feedbacks on the teaching techniques used by their teachers. - to provide some suggestions and practical recommendations to help in the process of teaching and learning listening comprehension skills of ethnic minority students and teachers at this college. The study hopes to give an insight into the ways used and problems faced by teachers in how to teach listening comprehension skill for ethnic minority students at LSTTC.
The result of the study is also useful for teachers at this college in reviewing their teaching practices, thus paying more attention to the issue of teaching listening skills. Scope of the study The scope of this thesis is limited to the teachers‟ challenges in how to teach and motivate ethnic minority students to learn listening comprehension skill and the recommendations to overcome these challenges at Lang Son Teachers‟ Training College. The result from this thesis could also be used to inform concerned educational administrators in Lang Son in particular and in various regions throughout the country in general. With that intention, this study is designed to cover the following issues: - Description of the course-book used for students in listening and its teaching and learning context.
- Challenges teachers often face in teaching and motivating their students to learn listening. - Recommendations on how to support teachers so that they can teach more effectively 4. Methods of the study The study was carried out on the basis of quantities research method including questionnaire and class observation LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 Questionnaires are designed as a means to make the researcher‟s evaluation more objective. The questionnaires are given to first-year ethnic minority students and teachers of English Department at LSTTC with the hope to find out their attitudes towards their current learning and teaching listening comprehension as well as their comments and suggestions for the problems they often face.
In addition, more information needed for the findings of the study will be gathered from class observation. Organization of the thesis The study consists of three parts: the introduction, the development and the conclusion. The introduction provides the basis information such as rationale, aims, significance, scope and methods of the study. The development consists of 4 chapters.
Chapter I, Literature Review, conceptualizes the nature of listening and listening comprehension skills, teaching listening skills, motivation, and current challenges in teaching and learning listening comprehension. Chapter II presents the general description of the course-book, participants‟ background information, and the methodology used in the study. Chapter III shows the detailed results of the surveys and covers a comprehensive analysis on the data collected from the questionnaires and class observations. The last chapter offers some suggested solutions to the teaching procedures that can help motivate students to learn the listening comprehension skill.
The conclusion is a review of the study, future directions for further research and limitations of the study. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 4 PART II.THE DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1. Theoretical background of listening comprehension In language teaching, the phrase „listening skills‟ is often used to mean „listening and understanding skills‟ or „listening comprehension skills‟. And this is the sense in which „listening skill‟ is used in this thesis, where „listening‟ is taken as meaning trying to understand the oral messages people are conveying.What is listening? There are different definitions of listening “Listening is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear.
To listen successfully to spoken language, we need to be able to work out what speakers mean when they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasions, and not simply to understand the words themselves.” (Mary Underwood, 1989) The quotation above suggests that listening can be done in a narrow and limited way or it can be done in a way that enriches communication. Thomlison‟s (1984) definition of listening includes “active listening,” which goes beyond comprehending as understanding the message content, to comprehension as an act of empathetic understanding of the speaker. According to Ronald and Roskelly (1985), listening is an active process requiring the same skills of prediction, hypothesizing, checking, revising, and generalizing that writing and reading demand. “Listening is an invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe.
Listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of the utterance. ” (Field, 1998:38) All in all, listening involves a multiplicity of skills. It is a complex, active process of interpretation, in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know. Nature of listening Since listening is, according to Wang Shouyuan (2003), the most important component in the five aspects of overall English competence he suggests as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation, it deserves particular attention.
Educators must actively explore the nature and process of listening comprehension and study the theory and methodology of listening comprehension in order to improve listening teaching outcomes and LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 make students recognize that listening comprehension is the crucial part of English learning. From the point of view of constructivist linguistics, foreign language teaching should focus on language form and structure, thus, listening teaching is undertaken in each of the four aspects of language form (including sounds, words, sentences and discourses). When students are taught to understand a passage of text, teachers first let them discriminate between the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, then understand vocabulary, sentences and discourses.