VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES MAI THỊ HỒNG HÀ EFFECTS OF APPROPRIATE PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES ON 10TH FORM STUDENTS' ENGLISH LISTENING COMPREHENSION: A CASE STUDY AT BUON MA THUOT HIGH SCHOOL IN DAC LAC (Hiệu quả của hoạt động trước khi nghe phù hợp đối với việc nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10. Điển cứu tại trường THPT Buôn Ma Thuột tỉnh Đắc Lắc) M. MINOR THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 601410 Hanoi - 2010 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES MAI THỊ HỒNG HÀ EFFECTS OF APPROPRIATE PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES ON 10TH FORM STUDENTS' ENGLISH LISTENING COMPREHENSION: A CASE STUDY AT BUON MA THUOT HIGH SCHOOL IN DAC LAC (Hiệu quả của hoạt động trước khi nghe phù hợp đối với việc nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10. Điển cứu tại trường THPT Buôn Ma Thuột tỉnh Đắc Lắc) M.
MINOR THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 601410 Supervisor: ĐỖ BÁ QUÝ, Med. Hanoi - 2010 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration Acknowledgements Abstract Part A: INTRODUCTION 1. Aims of the study 2 3. Scope of the study 2 4.
Methods of the study 2 5. Design of the study 2 Part B: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: Literature Review 1.1 Theory of listening 1.1What is listening comprehension? 4 1. Types of listening 1.1 Real-life listening 6 1. Approaches to teaching listening 7 1.
Factors in teaching and learning listening 1.1 The listening texts 8 1.5 Stages of a listening lesson 1.2 What are pre-listening activities? 1.1 Definitions of pre-listening activities 12 1.2 Types of pre-listening activities 13 1.3 Factors affecting the choice of pre-listening activities 14 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.3 Summary 14 Chapter 2: Methods of the Study 2. The setting of the study 2. English teaching and learning situation at Buon Ma Thuot High Shool 15 2. Data collection instruments 17 Chapter 3: Data analysis and major findings 3.1 Results of the questionnaires 3.1 Questionnaire for the teachers 3.1 Teachers' opinions about the necessity of pre-listening activities 18 3.2 Teachers' purposes in using pre-listening activities 19 3.3 Teachers' activities to motivate students to listen and the frequency of using 20 them 3.4 Pre-listening activities which help increase students' motivation from the 21 teachers' points of view 3.5 Teachers' difficulties when applying pre-listening activities 22 3.6 Teachers' comments on the pre-listening activities available in Tieng Anh 10 23 3.2 Questionnaire for the students 3.1 Students' opinion about listening skill in learning a foreign language 23 3.2 Factors making students unwilling to learn listening English 24 3.3 Teachers' pre- listening activities that help to make listening easier for the 25 students 3.4 Students' preferences for pre-listening activities 25 3.5 Benefits that students get when teachers employ the above pre-listening 28 activities 3.6 Students' comments on the pre-listening activities available in TiengAnh 10 28 3.7 Students' suggestions with the changes in pre-listening activities in Tieng 29 Anh 10 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.8 Students' self-evaluation of their ability of listening 30 3.4 Summary 35 Chapter 4: Recommendations for implementing pre-listening activities 4.
Paying attention to students' personal factors and their proficiency 36 4. Using pre-listening activities in a flexible and appropriate way 36 4. Improving the pre-listening activities in the textbook 37 PART C: CONCLUSION 1. Limitations and suggestions for the study 39 References Appendices TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 7 Part A: INTRODUCTION 1.
Rationale It is obvious that English is the international medium of communication in the fields of science, medicine, culture, education, economy and so on. And it also plays an important role in promoting mutual understanding, developing the relationship between Vietnam and other countries. In Vietnam, the desire of using English is increasing everyday. People learn English wherever they can so teaching and learning English have been paid more attention to.
As we see, years ago, Ministry of Education and Training has made effort to improve the quality of teaching and learning. New textbooks have been issued with new methods of teaching including English. Before, we focused too much on grammar, reading, vocabulary but now, with some changes, writing speaking, listening, pronunciation have been added. Students' four skills can be improved but in learning English listening still seems to be the most difficult skill for students of high schools.
We all know, listening comprehension is one of the four skills needed for effective communication in everyday conversation and it is also a source for obtaining the necessary input for language development. In spite of teachers and students' efforts, there are still difficulties in listening acquisition. Almost students who fail to take listening input hardly receive spoken messages as the result they get bored and ignorant in listening classes although they are aware of the importance of this skill. Therefore, with the new English textbook for high school, the editors have paid attention to how to stimulate students to be keen on a listening class.
So, the application of pre-listening activities is considered the best way to motivate students' interests. As a teacher teaching English of Buon Ma Thuot High School for years, I find that although the text book has provided pre-listening activities for motivating students but the students do not achieve much from listening, they feel listening is boring because of the following reasons : First, the teachers apply these pre-listening activities mechanically, uncreatively. Next, some teachers even ignore pre-listening stage, they just begin the lesson with while-listening stage. Last, some employ inappropriate activities, which might be not suitable for students' interests and proficiency.
Therefore, it is essential for teachers to find out some ways to help students feel like studying listening and make them motivated in participating in all the activities in a listening lesson to improve their listening skills. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 8 All in all, the above has encouraged the writer of the thesis to carry out the study titled: "Effects of appropriate pre-listening activities on 10th form students' English listening comprehension. A case study at Buon Ma Thuot High School in Dac Lac" 2. The aims of the study This study is intended to: 1.
find out teachers' and students' opinions about pre-listening activities; 2. find out which pre-listening activities are used frequently by teachers; 3. explore the students' preferences for pre-listening activities and identify the effects of appropriate pre-listening activities on students' listening comprehension; 3. Scope of the study This study is carried out at Buon Ma Thuot high school in order to find out the effects of appropriate pre-listening activities on students' listening comprehension.
Methods of the study The study uses qualitative method. This involves the following tasks: - interview and discussion - survey questionnaire - class observation 5. The design of the study This study includes 3 parts. This chapter consists of: + The rationale for the research + The aim of the study + The scope of the study + The method of the study + The design of the study.
In this part, there are 3 chapters TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 9 + Chapter 1: Literature review which deals with theories on listening comprehension, pre- listening activities. + Chapter 2: Methods of the study. The researcher investigated the setting of the study. This chapter also includes the research methods which cover research questions, the subjects, data collection instruments.
+ Chapter 3: Data analysis and major findings. This chapter presents the data results, some major findings + Chapter 4: some recommendations for implementing the pre-listening activities are discussed in this chapter. This part summarizes what are addressed in the study and some limitations and suggestions for further study. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 10 PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to the reexamination of the concepts most relevant to the thesis topic.
Firstly, an account of the theory on listening comprehension in general is made. Then, literature specially focused on the pre-listening activities theory will be discussed.1 Theory of listening 1.1 What is listening comprehension? Listening is more than merely hearing words. Listening is an active process by which students receive, construct meaning from, and respond to spoken and or nonverbal messages (Emmert, 1994). Having the same view, Brown and Yule (1983) state that listening is a demanding process, not only because of the complexity of the process itself, but also due to factors that characterize the listener, the speaker, the content of the message, and any visual support that accompanies the message.
Howatt and Dakin (1974) states that listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This process involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronunciation, the speaker’s grammar and vocabulary, and comprehension of meaning. An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously. According to Buck (2001), listening comprehension involves the continuing construction of an interpretation of the spoken input, and the ability to adjust the interpretation in response to new information is especially crucial in the L2 listening.
Native speakers listen automatically without much conscious attention to word-by-word input; in contrast, the second language listener need to get the input more details, the construct, the meaning of the listening input. On the other hand, Clark and Clark (1977) proposed two definitions of listening comprehension. They suggested listening comprehension in its narrowest definition is the process by which listeners come to an interpretation for a stream of speech and listening in its broader definition involves the process by which listeners use those interpretations for their intended purposes. Wolvin and Coakley’s (1985) approach to listening was basically cognitive.
They defined listening as the process of receiving, attending TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 11 to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli. Rost (2002) defined listening as a process of receiving what the speaker actually says, constructing and representing meaning, negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding, and creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy. Shelton (2006) believes that listening effectively is a demanding and involved process. One must be able to deal with different accents of pronunciation, unfamiliar lexical items and syntactic structure, competing background noise and also make a conscious effort to not "switch off" or become distracted while listening.
All of this must be achieved and dealt with more or less simultaneously in order to identify and understand the meaning in any given message. There are two dimensions often cited in relation to listening comprehension processes- "bottom-up" and "top-down". Anderson and Lynch (1988) describe bottom-up processing as "listener as tape recorder (p.9) that involves decoding or text-based processes while top-down processing relates to the "listeners as active model builder (p.11) and involves knowledge- based processes. It means that listeners use top-down processes when they use context and prior knowledge (topic, genre, culture.) to build a conceptual framework for comprehension.
Listeners use top-down processes when they construct meaning by accretion, gradually combining increasingly larger units of meaning from the phoneme-level up to discourse-level features. It is suggested that successful listening comprehension relies on the integration of and the balance between both bottom-up and top-down facets (Flowerdew & Miler, 2005; Vandergrift, 2004). In the view of Brown (1994), in bottom-up processing, learners rely on their linguistic knowledge to recognize linguistic elements - vowels, consonants, words, sentences to do the construction of meaning. They build meaning from lower level sounds to words to grammar relationships to lexical meanings in order to arrive at the final message.
In top-down processing, learners use their prior knowledge to make predictions about the text. Prior knowledge can be knowledge of the topic, the listening context, the text-type, the culture or other information stored in long-term memory as schemata (Lingzhu, 2003) In summary, listening comprehension is not a skill which can be mastered once and for all then ignored while other skills are developed. There must be regular practice with increasingly difficult material.