Graduation paper STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP Honestly, the thesis has been resulted from my own interesting as well as my difficulty in teaching the beginners in BBC English Center. I did observation in English listening class for the beginners. I also directly distributed the questionnaires to the right beginning learners in BBC English Center. Therefore, all the statistic given must be reliable.
Moreover all the reference was quoted and summarized from the clear original sources which have been shown in the references part. I trustfully assure that the thesis has been completed by myself. Hanoi, 27th April, 2015 Student Supervisor Đào Thị Trang Nguyễn Thế Hóa Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 1 Graduation paper ABSTRACT Listening is one of the most necessary skills to communicate in real life. In learning any foreign language, it is more and more important to learn this skill.
It is common knowledge that listening to a message is not as simple as hearing it because the listeners have to understand the information through message and give the right answer. Realizing the problems from teaching experiences, the author would like to do research tittled "Listening skills of the beginners in BBC English Center: the difficulties and solutions". The thesis will study the subjective and objective difficulties of the beginners in learning listening skills. Then the author would like to find out the reasons for those problems and give feasible solutions for both teachers and learners in BBC English Center.
Therefore, the author applied the quantitative method, the qualitative method and the descriptive method to do the research. And the collecting data instruments like questionnaires, interviews, observations were used to do the study. The results of the research will point out the difficulties that the beginners meet when they learn listening skills in BBC English Center. More importantly, it helps the author find out the causes of problems so that she can work out the right solutions to tackle them.
With the hope of improving the beginning learner's listening skills competence, the author has tried her best to do this thesis with her own experiences and knowledge in English teaching methodology. Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 2 Graduation paper ACKNOWLEDGEMENT My BA graduation thesis has been completed with a lot of encouragement and support from my teacher, colleagues and my family. First of all, I would like to express my deep great thank to my supervisor, Nguyen The Hoa, M.A for his dispensable and useful advice, suggestions and supports to help me finish the thesis successfully. And I wish to thank many teachers of the Faculty of English in Hanoi Open University for having taught me during the time I studied in here so that I can get background knowledge to complete the study.
In addition, I am grateful to all my friends who have encouraged me a lot and shared useful information to help me to complete the thesis. Moreover, it is my pleasure to acknowledge the director of BBC English Center, who permitted me to do survey in his center. I wish to thank all my colleagues who have given me some practical advice and suggestions and let me observe their classes. My thanks are also given to the fifty beginning learners in BBC English Center willing to complete the questionnaires.
Finally, I am happy to thank my family, who always approved and encouraged me during the time of doing the thesis. Hanoi, 27th April , 2015 Student Đào Thị Trang Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 3 Graduation paper TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. 3 LIST OF TABLE. Rationale of the study.
Aims and objectives of the study. Scopes of the study. Methods of the study. Design of the report.
12 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. Definition of listening skills. Traditional point of view on listening skills. Present point of view on listening skills.
Classification of listening. Real-life listening. Kinds of real-life listening. Characteristics of real-life listening.
18 Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 4 Graduation paper 1. Sub-skills involved in listening skills. Difficulties in learning the listening skills. 29 CHAPTER 2: PRACTICAL RESEARCH.
An overview on BBC English Center. Finding and discussion. The beginners' attitude towards listening skills. Problem in learning the listening skills.
Problem from the listeners. Problem from the listening material. Problem from the physical settings. 42 Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 5 Graduation paper 2.
The beginners' attitude towards their teachers creating listening interest and motivation. 44 CHAPTER 3: FEASIBLE SOLUTIONS TO HELP THE BEGINNERS IN BBC ENGLISH CENTER IMPROVE LISTENING SKILLS. Suggestion for the teachers. Making the beginners aware of the nature of listening process.
Promoting the beginners to be fully aware of their purpose of listening. Encouraging the beginners to have extensive listening habit. Activating the beginners to work in different stages of listening. Suggestions for the beginners in BBC English Center.
Suggested solutions to solve difficulties of the beginners in BBC English Center. Suggested activities for the beginners in BBC English Center to improve listening skills. Summary and major finding of the study. Limitations and recommendations for the further study.
60 Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 6 Graduation paper LIST OF TABLE Table 1: The beginners' attitude towards listening skills. Table 2: Problem in learning the listening skills from the listeners. Table 3: Problem in learning the listening skills from the listening materials. Table 4: Problem in learning the listening skills from the physical settings.
Table 5: The beginners' attitude towards their teachers creating the listening interest and motivation. Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 7 Graduation paper PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the study. In Vietnam in recent years the number of people who wish to know and master of English has been becoming more and more increasingly, since Vietnam adopted an open-door policy, teaching and learning English have been paid much more attention to.
English becomes a part of the general education, it is one of the main subject in almost school in Vietnam. In addition, there are many English centers which are opened to help learners have another opportunities to improve their English. Among these centers is BBC English Center. As an assistant professor of English , the author realizes that listening skill seems to be the most difficulty of the learners when they start to study in the BBC English Center.
So the author would like to present the research title: "Listening skills of the beginners in BBC English Center: the difficulties and solutions" because of some reasons: Firstly, The main objective of learning English is to communicate fluently. Hence, in order to obtain that aim, the learners not only need grammatical system, lexical system, phonological system, but they also have to practive fours skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and they are closely interrelated to one another and all necessary. Of these fours skills, listening is regarded as a the most important skill in communication in the real life, we are only to talk sensibly when we understand what is said to us. Moreover, listening is a useful means of providing learners with comprehension input, which is an essential component of the whole language learning process.
Secondly, teaching English in school still focuses on grammar, structures, vocabularies so learners are very good at doing exercises of written form, these Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 8 Graduation paper forms exercise mostly concern on grammar, reading or writing comprehension. The consequence is that learners have a lot of difficulties in listening. Lastly, many learners are not interested in learning the listening skills because they find it boring. On the other hand, practicing this skill is quite difficult and it takes long time.
Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to foster the passion for regular listening and to cater the learner's need to listen for relaxation and pleasure. Aims and objectives of the study. - To help the beginners in BBC English Center understand the reason why they find it is difficult to learn listening skills. - To give some feasible solutions with the hope that the beginners in BBC English Center can know suitable method in learning English listening skills, find the best way to improve their problem when listening and communicate with foreign people efficiently.
- To help the teachers in BBC English Center know the problem of the beginners in learning listening skills. Scopes of the study. Teaching and learning English, especially listening skills, are so sophisticated and varied among these level. However, within the study, the author will only focus on some main difficulties of the beginners in BBC English Center.
What is more, the study also give some suggestions to help them improve listening comprehension. The study mainly focuses on answering three following research questions: - What are the difficulties of the beginners in BBC English Center in learning Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 9 Graduation paper listening skills? - What factors have an influence on the listening skills of beginners in BBC English Center? - What are feasible solution to help the beginners in BBC English Center improve listening skills? 5. Methods of the study. In the research, the theoretical foundation is based on the knowledge which I have collected through materials and my supervisor's support.
In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, quantitative and qualitative research methods are used and a questionnaire is designed as a means for research to collect data. The questionnaire is given to the beginners in BBC English Center with the hope to find out their difficulties when they learn listening skills. Based on the result of the survey, data analysis was done to indicate some problems of the beginners in BBC English Center and solutions to improve learning listening skills in the center. Design of the report.
The study consists of three main parts: introduction, development, and conclusion. Part A, "INTRODUCTION" presents the basic information such as the rationale, the aims and objective, the research question, the scope, the methods and also the design of the study. Part B, "DEVELOPMENT" consists of three chapters: - Chapter one, literature review, presents different views of listening skills, the importance of listening , the classification of listening, sub-skill involved in listening skills, listening stages, as well as difficulties in learning listening skills. Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 10 Graduation paper - Chapter two, practical research, deals with analyses on general learning situation at BBC English Center.
Also in this chapter, there is a focus on data analysis, finding and discussion. - chapter three presents feasible solution to to help the beginners in BBC English Center improve listening skills. Part C, "CONCLUSION" summarize the key issues in the study, point out the limitations and recommendations for further study. Đào Thị Trang – K18A3 (2011 – 2015) Page 11 Graduation paper PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.
Definition of listening skills. "Listening" is receiving language through the ears. Listening involves identifying the sounds of speech and processing them into words and sentences. When we listen, we use our ears to receive individual sounds (letters, stress, rhythm and pauses) and we use our brain to convert these into messages that mean something to us.
According to Bulletin (1952), Listening is one of the fundamental language skills. It is a medium through which children, young people and adults gain a large portion of their education-their information, their understanding of the world and of human affairs, their ideals, sense of values, and appreciation. In addition, Howatt and Dakin (1974) defined that listening is ability to identify and understand what others saying. This process involves understanding a speaker's accent and pronunciation, the speaker's grammar and vocabulary and comprehension of meaning.
An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously.