MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY M. THESIS USING ENGLISH SONGS TO IMPROVE LISTENING SKILLS FOR STUDENTS AT ACADEMY OF MUSIC (SỬ DỤNG CÁC BÀI HÁT TIẾNG ANH NHẰM NÂNG CAO KỸ NĂNG NGHE CHO SINH VIÊN TẠI HỌC VIỆN ÂM NHẠC) DANG THI THANH HOA Field: English Language Code: 8220201 Hanoi – 2024 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY M. THESIS USING ENGLISH SONGS TO IMPROVE LISTENING SKILLS FOR STUDENTS AT ACADEMY OF MUSIC (SỬ DỤNG CÁC BÀI HÁT TIẾNG ANH NHẰM NÂNG CAO KỸ NĂNG NGHE CHO SINH VIÊN TẠI HỌC VIỆN ÂM NHẠC) DANG THI THANH HOA Field: English Language Code: 8220201 Supervisor: Assoc. Phan Van Que Hanoi – 2024 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled USING ENGLISH SONGS TO IMPROVE LISTENING SKILLS FOR STUDENTS AT ACADEMY OF MUSIC.
submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in English Language. Except where the reference is indicated, no other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the text of the thesis. Ha Noi 2023 Dang Thi Thanh Hoa Approved by SUPERVISOR Assoc.Dr Phan Van Que i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First and foremost, I have to thank my research supervisor, Assoc.Dr Phan Van Que Without his assistance and dedicated involvement in every step throughout the process, this paper would have never been accomplished. I would like to thank you very much for your support and understanding over these past six months.
I take this opportunity to express gratitude to all of the teachers of the English Faculty at Hanoi Open University. Their academic expertise, insightful lectures, and clear directions were all really helpful to me as I worked to finish the assignment. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the members at the Library Department of Hanoi Open University. They made it much simpler for me to search the resources needed for this thesis and borrow them.
ii ABSTRACT English listening skills is a crucially important language skill that be extremely necessary for learners to master so that they can succeed in English communication. This research aims to find out students’ attitudes towards listening skills, identify difficulties faced by students in learning listening, and assess the usefulness of applying English songs in learning and teaching listening skills at Academy of Music. The researcher uses an action research approach model. The sample of this research includes 110 students from five classes at Academy of Music, who are randomly chosen from the population of the Academy.
Four instruments of the research are pretest, posttest, survey questionnaire, and interview. After generating the data. The researcher uses quantitative and qualitative method to analyze the data. The results indicated that the student respondents identify listening skills as an important and difficult skill.
The difficulties they encounter are difficulties related to speaker and physical setting, difficulties related to listeners themselves, and difficulties related to listening materials. The results also revealed that English songs are useful to improve the student respondents’ listening skills. Keywords: English song, listening skills, Academy of Music, difficulties, and effectiveness iii LIST OF ABBREVIATION FELTE: Faculty of English Language Teacher Education 23 VNU: Vietnam National University 23 ULIS: University of Languages and International Studies 23 W: Week 32 SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 43 RQ: Research question 44 N: Number 45 M: mean 45 SD: Standard deviation 45 S: Student 48 iv LIST OF FIGURES PAGES Figure 3.1 Nunan’s (1992) action research model .1 The summary of listening score in the pretest .2 The summary of listening scores in the posttest .3 The listening achievement of the achievement in the pretest and the posttest .45 v LIST OF TABLES PAGES Table 3.1 Classification of scores .2 List of English songs .3 The action research approach procedure .4 Data analytical framework .1 Descriptive statistics of the participants’ attitudes towards listening skills .2 Descriptive statistics of students’ difficulties related to speakers and physical settings .3 Descriptive statistics of students’ difficulties related to themselves as the listeners38 Table 4.4 Descriptive statistics of students’ difficulties related to listening material. Frequency of listening test scores in the pre- test.
Descriptive statistics of mean score in the pre- test .7 Frequency of listening test scores in the post- test .8 Descriptive statistics of mean score in the post- test. Pair samples statistics. Pair samples t-test. 44 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY.iii LIST OF ABBREVIATION.
iv LIST OF FIGURES. v LIST OF TABLES. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .2 Research aim and objectives .4 Scope of the research .5 Organizational structure of the study.
4 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .1 Concepts of listening .1 Definition of listening.2 Process of listening activities .3 The purpose of listening .2 Concept of English songs .1 Definition of songs .2 Advantages of using English songs to improve listening skills .3 Difficulties when using English songs to improve listening skills. 14 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .4 Data collection procedure .5 Data analysis procedure. 33 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .1 The participants’ attitudes towards listening skills .2 Difficulties that the participants face in learning listening skills .3 The effect of using English songs in learning listening skills at Academy of Music .1 Students’ attitudes towards listening skill .2 Students’ difficulties in learning listening skill .3 The effectiveness of using English songs to improve listening skill. 47 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION .5 Recommendation for further studies.
58 viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale It is undeniable that English has been used all over the world, which means that it is a means of communication that is used worldwide to communicate with other people to convey our ideas, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and messages (Rao, 2019). Especially, in the age of globalization, English is widely used in different countries and fields. Therefore, the demand of learning and mastering English is becoming higher and higher nowadays. In Vietnam, English is taught as a foreign language.
Nowadays, students in Vietnam must learn English in their schools at all levels, from junior school to universities. This proves important role of English language as the second language in educational context and outside the context. Among four skills of English language, listening is a significantly important language skill in the acquiring process of English language; it is also one of the most difficult skills learners need to acquire. Brown (2004) indicated, “Listening performance is the invisible, inaudible process of internalizing meaning from the auditory signals being transmitted to the ear and brain” (p.
Mastering listening skills is the first step toward fully acquiring the English language (Liu, 2008). In addition, Mendelsohn (1994) reaches to a conclusion that during a communication process with total time spent, listening skills makes up 40 to 50%; whereas speaking skills needs 25 to 30 %; followed by reading skills which occupies 11 to 16%; and the last one is writing skills, about 9%. The figures above show the importance of listening skills in achieving success in communication. It may be difficult for an individual to understand a lecture and conversation in a second language; sometimes even in the mother tongue.
In some situations, both the speaker and the listener can become the cause of such difficulties. People meet difficulties in listening when speakers speak too fast; or distracted by too much noise. Or there is a hinder of talking on the phone; or listeners have limitations in vocabulary, lacks knowledge of the topic, inability to distinguish individual sounds, etc. As a result, listening ability is always a problem that makes many learners care for.
In recent years, communication-oriented language teaching has been the mainstream method widely applied to many foreign language classes. Training for learners’ communication skills is considered a basic goal in the language teaching process, in which all four skills of Listening - Speaking - Reading - Writing are given special attention. Listening comprehension is no longer a passive language skill that 1 requires receptive skills as some teachers previously thought. Listening comprehension becomes an active skill in which learners play an active role of participants in the information heard, process the information, understand and decode the information to finally respond to it.
It is exactly like the process of four operations: perceive - understand - evaluate - respond proposed by Steil, Barker and Wakson (1983). Only when the listener can respond and the listening process complete, the communication process will achieve the desired result. Bad listening skills can ruin communication. Listening comprehension, therefore, is considered a basic element of the communication process.
Learners who want to improve communication have no choice but to hone this listening comprehension skill. Presently, there are many strategies/ methods/ and tools used in learning and teaching listening skills as well as other language skills. Some people are successful in applying listening learning strategies/ methods/ and tools in learning listening skills; however, some others cannot achieve high results in listening skills. There are many factors causing the success and failure in listening skills, such as kind of listening strategy; learners’ linguistic knowledge; affective factors, etc.
Using English songs is a way to help students improve their learning skills. Songs are highly appreciated for features relating to linguistics, pedagogy, culture and entertainment. Songs are assessed to become previous materials that are utilized to teach, learn and develop all skills of the language. According to Vernon in Xiao (2013), English songs are useful to create energy in the English classroom and promote confidence of students.
In the case learners are excited with the learning material and the teaching method, they have trend to focus on studying listening and enjoy it. Furthermore, songs with many faceted merits can enrich and activate the foreign language class. As cited in Larsen-Freeman (1985), Georgi Lozanov stated that he would like to use music in his teaching as it is the instrument creating a comfortable and relaxing atmosphere in classroom, which booster learners’ language learning. Agreeably, Stanislawczy and Yavener as cited in Kusnierek (2016) mentioned about the usefulness of songs in the classroom that song is considered as a beneficial tool that language teachers should use to teach language to their students during the language practice.
The acquisition of a non-native language is a new and challengeable experience; so songs applied in teaching and learning can help students relax and achieve good results in learning. Learners can not only learn but also relax their minds through adopting 2 songs in learning language. Similarly, as cited in Arevalo (2010), Futon appreciates the role of songs in providing relaxed lessons. Song plays a crucial part in forming the foundation for language lessons.
English songs are assessed to have a great impact on language learning as it contains cultural characteristics, develops vocabulary knowledge of learners, and promotes listening skill; speaking skill; and grammatical knowledge. In other words, an English song are used for learning and teaching different language skills. Being support by Shen (2009), songs with the combination of language and music have lots of benefits that deserve to be paid attention. Songs are rich in themes and culture; songs express idiomatic and poetic sentences; the songs have therapeutic functions; etc.
So, songs are assessed to be a perfect tool for language learning and teaching, especially learning and teaching listening skill. On the word of Tri Listiyaningsih (2017), listening skill of children can be improved through listening practice to English songs. The reason is that most of children like singing songs, which is considered to be a positive change compared to traditional habits of a foreign language learning. For English teachers, they can get a nice break from following a set curriculum by using songs in the classroom.
Many international previous studies have analyzed that adopting songs is an effective teaching material in teaching a foreign language (Eken, 1996 Geoff, 2003; and Maley, 1997). In acquiring English language, most of students have difficulties in acquiring listening skills.