VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES DƯƠNG THỊ LAN DIFFICULTIES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH LISTENING SKILLS EXPERIENCED BY TEACHERS AND 10 th GRADE STUDENTS AT DƯƠNG TỰ MINH HIGH SCHOOL IN THAI NGUYEN, AND SOME SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN TRONG VIỆC DẠY VÀ HỌC KỸ NĂNG NGHE TIẾNG ANH CỦA GIÁO VIÊN VÀ HỌC SINH LỚP 10 TRƯỜNG THPT DƯƠNG TỰ MINH THÁI NGUYÊN, VÀ MỘT SỐ GIẢI PHÁP GỢI Ý M. MINOR THESIS Field: English teaching methodology Code: 60.10 Supervisor: Phạm Thị Thanh Thủy, MA. Ha Noi - 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS.
iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. vi LIST OF FINGURES AND TABLES. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Aims and Objectives of the study.
Scope of the study. Methods of the study. CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. The definition of listening and the nature of listening comprehension.
Definition of listening and listening comprehension. The nature of listening comprehension. Process of teaching listening. Process of listening .Stages of teaching listening skills 2.
The importance of listening in teaching and learning a foreign language. Listening difficulties for foreign language learners. Participants of the research. Data collection instruments.
Data collection procedures. Data analysis procedures. 15 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com v CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. Teachers and students’ attitudes to teaching and learning listening.
Listening difficulties experienced by students. Listening difficulties experienced by teachers. Discussions of the findings. Summary of the findings.
Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further research. 42 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CLT : Communicative Language Teaching DTM HS : Dương Tự Minh High School ESL : English as Second Language L2 : Second Language ULIS : University Languages and International Studies Ts : Teachers Ss : Students LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vii LIST OF FIGURES ANDTABLES Figure 1 The listening process. 7 Table 1: Teachers’ opinion about the importance of listening.
16 Table 2: Teachers’ opinions about students’ interest (and motivation) in learning listening skill and lesson. 16 Table 3: Students motivation of learning listening. 17 Table 4: Students’ difficulties in general. 18 Table 5 Factors affecting students’ participation and interests in listening lessons.
19 Table 6 Classroom conditions. 19 Table 7: The use of teaching aids. 20 Table 8: Teacher’s roles. 20 Table 9: Listening activities in the classroom.
21 Table 10: Students’ opinion about the textbook. 22 Table 11: Expectations of the students towards teachers of listening skill. 23 Table 12: The number of the teachers who participated in the listening course. 24 Table 13: Factors have influence in students’ participation and interests in the listening lesson.
24 Table 14: Teachers’ employment of teaching aids. 25 Table 15: Activities in listening lessons. 26 Table 16: Activities in Pre-listening stage. 27 Table 17: Techniques used in While-listening stage.
28 Table 18 Activities in Post-listening stage. 29 Table 19: Adaptation of the new textbook. 30 Table 20: Teachers’ effort to have effective listening lessons. 30 Table 21: Teachers’ need in having effective listening lesson.
31 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 1 PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1. Background English has been remarked with many changes, notably changes in the movement towards the teaching of English since it has become an international medium of communication in such fields as commerce, industry, science, and technology. Thus teaching and learning English in Vietnam is not excluded from the international trend due to the fact that Vietnam has recently adopted an open- door policy, which encourages broadening and improving relationship and cooperation with other countries in many aspects of life such as diplomatic, economic, cultural, scientific and technological areas. Consequently, English is taught not only as a major at many big universities in Vietnam such as Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh University, Vinh University, but also as a compulsory subject at various schools.
It is widely assumed that listening plays a very important role in everyday conversation as well as learning a foreign language. First, in real life, people wish to join in communication to exchange their information, experience, feelings and so forth. However, communication is not considered to be successful unless what is said or referred to is comprehended by another person. And there will be “communication breakdown” if the listener cannot understand the information given by the speaker.
It means that communication not only requires our abilities to produce the language but also a thorough understanding of what is directed to us. Second, in learning a foreign language, listening is in close relationship with other skills. Therefore, having a good command of listening skill helps to achieve good performance of the others. At my high school, teaching and learning listening is a really new challenging job.
In addition to the lack of well- equipped facilities, teaching listening methods are quite new and unfamiliar to teachers. Since the new English textbook was in use, they have been inexperienced in teaching listening methods and approaches. Another problem is students’ low levels of proficiency in term of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, skills and so forth. It is the reason why students find it difficult and tough to listen to and they are not confident enough to do listening tasks successfully.
In literature so far, there have been not many studies on the difficulties in teaching and learning a foreign language in general, listening in particular, at a high school in Vietnam. Moreover, not many researchers study listening difficulties experienced by high school teachers and students in using the new “ Tieng Anh 10 ” textbook. Therefore, the author of this research found an urgent need of taking a serious look at such issue. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Aims and Objectives of the study The main purpose of the study was to probe difficulties in teaching and learning listening among the teaching staff and the 10 th form students at Duong Tu Minh upper- secondary school, in Thai Nguyen Province. With this purpose the three following central questions were investigated: 1. What are the difficulties experienced by the teachers and the 10 th form students when teaching and learning listening skill in the new textbook “ Tieng Anh 10 ” ? 2. What are some factors affecting the success of the listening process as perceived by DTM HS teachers and students DTM HS? 3.
What are some effective ways to improve DTM HS students’ learning and teachers’ teaching methods of listening skills? 1. Scope of the study This study points out difficulties in listening that teachers and 10 th form students at Duong Tu Minh High School face. The study focuses on describing the problems the teachers and students meet, and the factors causing such challenges, for instance, facilities, students’ English listening proficiency, and teachers’ methods. Due to the limited time, the investigator could not implement the research for a longer time and study on a larger population.
The sample population is only 6 teachers out of 15 and 120 freshmen from three classes of the same English proficiency level. Design of the study The study is divided into five chapters which are summarized as follows: The first chapter is the introduction of the rationale for the study, the aims, and the methods, scope of the study as well as the design of the study. The second chapter is the literature review discussing the theoretical background, which is relevant to the purposes of the study. The third chapter shows the procedure of carrying out the research such as the participants, data collection instruments and methods of data analysis.
The fourth chapter reports and discusses the finding obtained from the data. Some suggested solutions are also provided to help students overcome their difficulties in learning listening skill. The fifth chapter summaries the whole study, followed by references and appendices. Methods of the study The research is done by both quantitative and qualitative methods; it is carried out on the basis of situation analysis, material collection, survey questionnaires, class observations.
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 In the first place, situation analysis has a look at the background to the study including the description of the current context at Duong Tu Minh High School and listening skill in the new textbook “Tieng Anh 10”. Secondly, for the theoretical basis, a lot of reference materials on listening teaching methods and problems have been gathered, analyzed and synthesized thoroughly with the due consideration for teacher’s teaching and students’ learning situations. Eventually, for the practical basis, questionnaires, class observations were carried out with the teachers and students to gather the most reliable data for analysis to find answers to the research questions mentioned above. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 4 PART 2: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW In this chapter, the researcher would like to provide a theoretical background to the study to know more and deeply about Listening Comprehension Teaching.
It consists of four sections. The first section examines different views on the definition of listening. The second section presents the stages of teaching listening. The third section is about the importance of listening comprehension.
The finally section is designed to look at the listening difficulties for foreign language learners. The definition of listening and the nature of listening comprehension 2. Definition of listening and listening comprehension a. Definition of listening It is believed that listening is a significant and an essential area of development in a native language and in a second language; therefore, there are different points of view on the definition of listening, which present different views of scholars towards the concept.
Listening, as Underwood (1989:1) defines: “is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear.” The author also emphasizes: “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, not simple to understand the words themselves” (Underwood, 1989:1) As Celce-Murcia (1991:88) puts it, “Listening can be defined broadly as everything that impinges on the human processing which meditates between sound and the construction of meaning”. Definition of listening comprehension There have been a large number of definitions for listening comprehension made by methodologists. Gary Buck (2001:31) points out that “ Listening comprehension is an active process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound” in which “number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic knowledge and non - linguistic knowledge”. To put it in another way, Gary Buck (2001:31) concludes “comprehension is affected by a wide range of variables, and that LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 potentially any characteristic of the speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message”.
While Brown and Yule (1983) list the four degrees of comprehension on which listening exercises can be constructed: (1) The listener can repeat the text; (2) The students should have heard and understood the meaning of particular vocabulary items as that are used in that text; (3) The student should be able to resolve anaphoric reference and to determine which was referred to; and (4) The student should be able to work out not only what is directly asserted in the text, but also what is implied. On the other hand, Wolvin and Coakley (1985) state listening “the process of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli”. This definition suggests that listening is a complex, problem- solving skill.