VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES -----*----- NGUYỄN THỊ ÁNH NGUYỆT DIVERSIFICATION OF PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILL: ACTION RESEARCH AT INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS TECHNOLOGY COLLEGE (Đa dạng hóa các hoạt động trước nghe để nâng cao kỹ năng nghe của sinh viên: nghiên cứu hành động tại trường Cao đẳng Công nghệ và Kinh tế Công nghiệp. MINOR PROGRAM THESIS Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 8140231.01 HANOI – 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES -----*----- NGUYỄN THỊ ÁNH NGUYỆT DIVERSIFICATION OF PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILL: ACTION RESEARCH AT INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS TECHNOLOGY COLLEGE (Đa dạng hóa các hoạt động trước nghe để nâng cao kỹ năng nghe của sinh viên: nghiên cứu hành động tại trường Cao đẳng Công nghệ và Kinh tế Công nghiệp. MINOR PROGRAM THESIS Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 8140231. LÂM QUANG ĐÔNG HANOI – 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc.
Lam Quang Dong for his patient guidance, stimulating suggestions and encouragement throughout my research. I wish to thank all the staff members of the Faculty of Post-Graduate Studies, University of Languages and International Studies for providing me the best environment to fulfill my graduate program. My sincere gratitude also goes to my colleague Mrs. Nguyen Mai Linh.
The support that she gave me truly helped with my progress and completion of the research project. Especially, I would like to express my special thanks to my family who offered me their love, care, support and encouragement so that I could accomplish my study. Last but not least, I would like to express appreciation to my students in Industrial Economics Technology College who were very enthusiastic to support me by participating in the research and providing me with the needed data without which the study could not have been completed. i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT Although listening skill, one of the four core language competences fostered in Industrial Economics Technology College (IETC)‟s English curriculum, has always been promoted, students‟ performance in this aspect of proficiency still remains low.
Through practice, the researcher realized that the main reason for this problem is the lack of good preparation for students from the pre-listening stage. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to conduct an action research with the aim of improving students‟ listening comprehension by diversifying pre-listening activities. In the study, a pre-test and post-test were employed to check the students‟ listening comprehension and the questionnaires to gauge students‟ attitudes when the teacher used varied pre-listening activities. The findings of this study suggest that students‟ listening skill was much boosted after they were exposed to various pre-listening activities.
The results also showed that the students had improved attitudes towards learning listening skill after the introduction of varied pre-listening activities. Hopefully, the thesis can be considered a practical contribution to more effective teaching practices at IETC and the ongoing process of renovation for teaching and learning listening. ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. ii LIST OF TABLES.
i LIST OF FIGURES. ii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Rationale of the study. Aims and scope of the study.
Scope of the study. Summary of Chapter 1. 4 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Theoretical background of listening skill.
A brief overview of listening. Listening comprehension in language learning and teaching process. Factors affecting students‟ listening comprehension. Pronunciation, stress, rhythm and intonation .4 Listeners‟ limited vocabularies .5 Length and Speed of Listening .6 Inability to concentrate.
Listening Comprehension in EFL Classrooms .1 Pre-listening stage. While-listening stage and post-listening stage .3 The roles of pre-listening activities .4 Pre-listening activities .12 iii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Summary of chapter 2. Definition of action research.
Characteristic of action research. Process of action research. Benefits of Action Research. The research questions restated.
Data collection instruments .1 Detailed description of tests. Action research procedures. Collecting the data. Analyzing data and generating hypothesis.
Implementing the action plan. Collecting data to monitor change. Analyzing data and evaluating the change. Summary of chapter 3.
28 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. Results from the pre-test. Results from the post-tesst. Comparison of the pre-test and the post-test.
Data collected by questionnaire part 1. 32 iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Data collected by questionnaire part 2. Data collected by observation.
Summary of the Result of the Study. Limitations of the Study. Implications for Further Research. Implications for Teaching and Learning Practice.
Implications for Teachers. Implications for Students. I Appendix 1: The pre-test. I Appendix 2: The post-test .VI Appendix 4: Observation sheet.
XIII Appendix 5: Result from the pre-test and post-test.XVI Appendix 6: Result from observation sheet. XIX Appendix 7: Results from learner questionnaire. XX Appendix 8: Action plan implementation of varying pre-listening activities during the experiment .XXI Appendix 9: a lesson plan of implementation of varying pre-listening activities during the experiment. XXII v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 4.
The pre-test result. The post-test results. Comparison of the pre-test and post-test. Students‟ comments about pre-listening activities.
Students‟ comments on the diversification of pre-listening activities that the teacher applied. 33 i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3. Simple Action Research Model adapted from MacIsaac (1995). Detailed Action Research Model adapted from Susman (1983).
The post-test results. Comparison of the pre-test and post-test. Students‟ comments on the varying pre-listening that the teacher applied. Students‟ comment on the varying pre-listening that the teacher applied.
Students‟ on-task behavior .34 ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the study Listening is an important skill in acquiring a language and it can be defined as the process of understanding speech in a second or foreign language. Listening is the most frequently used in communication. It is stated that during conversations, people spend 50 percent of time on listening, 25 percent on speaking, 15 percent on reading, and 10 percent on writing (Richards, 2008).
Moreover, according to Morley (1984), listening is the key to all effective communication. Indeed, without the interlocutors‟ ability to listen effectively, messages are easily misunderstood. However, generally, students are fearful of listening, and can be disheartened when they listen to something they understand very little. It is also harder for them to concentrate on listening if little or no interest in a topic or situation is developed before.
The initial pre-listening phase should prepare students by helping them activate their background knowledge and clarify their expectations and assumptions about the listening text by, for example, initiating some discussion about a picture involved in the listening text or discussion of some questions related to the listening passages. An ideal pre-listening task is the one in which the teacher, through carefully constructed questions, helps students activate their background knowledge and language components needed to comprehend the text. In general, pre-listening activities play a critical role and the main aim of this stage is to make learners focus their attention on the following while-listening stage, to build confidence and to facilitate comprehension. As cited in Medley (1977), pre-listening activities can be divided into readiness activities and guidance activities.
Readiness activities focus on motivating students‟ preliminary knowledge through asking students to read the title, make predictions or guesses what they are going to hear, explore new and/or key words that may appear in the listening text, look at accompanied pictures, interpret the listening tasks, and providing them with scaffolding support before listening. Guidance activities 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com concentrate on letting students know what they are going to do with the tasks or what they want to do with the tasks. Ur (1984) proposes that listening is an active and complex process and he believes that pre-listening activities activate student‟s background knowledge and provide them with the bases for forming hypotheses, predictions and inference. With diverse pre-listening activities, student feel less anxious, so they will become more confident in the listening lesson.
From this perspective, students will be more motivated to listen, and as a consequence, and ultimately gain a higher level of comprehension, success and become effective learners. In my college, many students are from northern midland and mountainous areas of Vietnam whose background knowledge is poor, so it is difficult to help students there improve their listening competence. Moreover, most teachers of English in Industrial Economics Technology College, to my knowledge and in my experience, tend to prepare little for the pre-listening stage due to several reasons: insufficient teaching time, or even their misconception that it is unnecessary to conduct this stage. That may be the reason why students are not motivated to participate in the lessons.
Some even feel exhausted and inactive in class, and often complain that listening is the most challenging skill. As previously discussed, the pre-listening stage is very essential in the process of teaching listening. Do teachers and students at my own college understand much about pre-listening tasks? If sufficient understanding has been secured, how do they deal with pre-listening tasks? What kind of activities do they apply and how effective are these activities? Are these activities sufficiently diverse to attract students and maintain their concentration? If not, how to diversify them? These questions require a careful study to seek their answers. For those reasons, the researcher conducted this research under the title “Diversification of pre-listening activities to improve students' listening skill: an action research at Industrial Economics Technology College”.
2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Aims and scope of the study 1. Research Aims The long-term goal of the research is to develop a series of appropriate pre-listening activities that help my college‟s students in listening comprehension. However, within the scope of this action research, the author first tried out a variety of pre- listening activities for diversification and see how they work, which works well and which not.
Based on that, a useful framework or guiding principles can then be built for developing appropriate pre-listening activities for the particular kind of students. Therefore, the objective of this action research is merely to examine whether diversification of pre-listening activities in the pre-listening stage improves my college‟s students‟ listening comprehension; In passing, the study also made some investigation on students‟ reflection towards diversification of pre-listening tasks, because feedbacks from students are highly useful to teachers who always have to design teaching-learning materials, or at least design good lesson plans to deliver the intended objectives of each lesson, especially listening lessons. Scope of the study The study concentrated on the effects of alternating pre-listening activities on improvement of students‟ listening skill in Industrial Economics Technology College. Participating in the study were 40 second-year students in class K9 at IETC who have studied English for 3 semesters with six 45-minutes lessons per week.
After studying 2 semesters of English they are now at pre-intermediate level. The textbook was adapted from Market Leader, which is an extensive business English course designed to bring the real world of international business into the classroom. It has been developed in association with the Financial Times, one of the leading sources of professional information, to ensure the maximum range and authenticity of international business content. The purpose of adaptation is to make it suitable to local students and the instructional curriculum.