VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ************************* LÊ THỊ BÍCH HẠNH THE IMPACTS OF LISTENING STRATEGY TRAINING ON 10- GRADE STUDENTS’ LISTENING PERFORMANCE AT MỸ ĐỨC C HIGH SCHOOL: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY Nghiên cứu ngụy thực nghiệm về tác động của việc rèn luyện chiến lược nghe đối với năng lực thực hành nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Mỹ Đức C M. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 60.111 Hanoi – 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ************************* LÊ THỊ BÍCH HẠNH THE IMPACTS OF LISTENING STRATEGY TRAINING ON 10- GRADE STUDENTS’ LISTENING PERFORMANCE AT MỸ ĐỨC C HIGH SCHOOL: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY Nghiên cứu ngụy thực nghiệm về tác động của việc rèn luyện chiến lược nghe đối với năng lực thực hành nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Mỹ Đức C M. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 60. Đỗ Thị Thanh Hà Hanoi – 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com DECLARATION I, hereby, certify the thesis entitled “The impacts of listening strategy training on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C high school: a quasi- experimental study” is the result of my own research for the Minor Degree of Master of Arts at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, and this thesis has not, wholly or partially, been submitted for any degree at any other universities or institutions.
Hanoi, 10th March 2015 Lê Thị Bích Hạnh i TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to all those who have supported me in doing this independent study. Firstly, I would like to express my greatest appreciation to my supervisor, Dr. Đỗ Thị Thanh Hà for her enthusiastic encouragement, valuable guidance, wise suggestions and useful critiques towards the completion of this study. Secondly, I am extremely grateful to the staff members of the Faculty of Post - graduate studies for their helpful lectures.
My special thanks are also sent to my lecturers, my friends, my classmates, as well as my colleagues for their invaluable comments and criticism and also for their continued interest and encouragements. Thirdly, I appreciate the assistance and cooperation given to me by teachers and students at Mỹ Đức C high school. Without their sincere participation, this paper would not have been possible. Last but not least, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved people, my parents, my husband and my children for their love, care, tolerance and encouragement.
ii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ABSTRACT In recent years more and more studies have focused on language learning strategies and their importance, especially learning strategies in listening skill. Sharing the same concern, this research aims at exploring Mỹ Đức C high school 10-grade students’ awareness of top-down and bottom-up listening strategies, from which the researcher would like to study the impacts of listening strategy training on their listening performance. 70 students in grade 10 and 11 were divided into two groups: control and experimental with two research instruments – questionnaires and pretest, posttest. After receiving 6 listening strategy training sessions, participants showed a statistically significant improvement in listening performance.
The experimental group obtained higher mean scores in post-test in comparison with those of control group. The study result also indicated that the students in experimental group became more aware of when and how to apply both strategies, especially bottom-up ones, in doing listening tasks. This study suggests that explicit listening strategy instruction should be part of the ESL curriculum. iii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1: Teaching plan during implementation period Table 2: Bottom-up strategy use of the control group Table 3: Bottom-up strategy use of the experimental group Table 4: Top-down strategy use of the control group Table 5: Top-down strategy use of the experimental group Table 6: Bottom-up strategy use of both groups Table 7: Top-down strategy use of both groups Table 8: Descriptive statistics for the pre-test and post-test of control group and experimental group (Max score = 10) Table 9: The relationship between experimental and control group’s test scores Table 10: Pretest and posttest scores of control and experimental groups Figure 1: The difference in gain values obtained by both groups after experiment iv TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration.
iii List of tables and figures. iv Table of content. Objectives of the study. Scope of the study.
Significance of the study. Outline of the study. 5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. Definitions of listening .Learning strategies – definition.
Bottom up learning strategy. Top-down learning strategies .Listening strategy models. 15 CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Data collection method.
18 v TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Questionnaire for students. Data analysis methods. 25 CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION.
Research question 1: How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school been aware of the listening strategies?. Bottom-up strategies. Top-down strategies. Cross-comparison between the two groups.
Research question 2: How did the training of listening strategies have impact on the students’ listening performance?. Discussions on the study results. Review of the study. Limitations of the study.
Recommendations for further studies. XVIII vi TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Rationale: The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has launched Vietnam’s National Foreign Language 2020 Project (NFL2020) to build national foreign language capacity. This project aims at establishing a proficiency framework compatible with the CEFR (The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), implementing compulsory English programs beginning in grade 3 with benchmarks of A1 for primary, A2 for lower secondary, and B1 for upper secondary, college and university graduates.
This means that by the year 2020, students are not only able to master reading, writing skills but also speaking and listening ones. Among these skills, listening is generally considered as the most difficult skill by language learners. According to Nguyễn Văn Phú (2013) on Tuoitreonline, only 2-3% of secondary teachers throughout Vietnam passed the CEFR exam, especially, the number of teachers passing the listening skill was even smaller. British Council and Apollo did a research on learners’ English competence in 20 countries and found out that Vietnam rank 8th over 20 on reading and writing skills but only 19th over 20 on listening and speaking skills.
Listening skill is also considered a source of anxiety for learners of English (Graham, 2006: 165). This anxiety become more serious if the listeners are under the false impression that they must understand every word they hear resulting in low self-confidence in listening. Many of English learners attribute their problems in listening to what they perceive as their low listening ability or difficult listening texts or tasks. Such attributions indicate a sense of passivity and helplessness in language learners, thus easily resulting in their becoming demotivated and fed up with listening.
It is, therefore, difficult for learners to have a clear understanding of how to go about listening in a second language and to find ways to improve their performance. Flowerdew and Miller (2005) argued that students should be taught how to listen by equipping them with effective listening strategies (p. Chamot and O‟Malley (1989) suggested that the description of learning strategies can hinge on the distinction between declarative 1 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com and procedural knowledge. Learners can have declarative knowledge about learning strategies through formal instruction.
This will encourage the learners to be aware of their existing strategies and the choices of strategies they can use with new materials. Through verbalizing the strategies, “application and repeated applications of the strategies with various learning materials, the learners can gradually proceduralize the learning strategies. Not much research, however, has been carried out on the effects of strategy training on listening comprehension. Furthermore, the few studies that have been completed in this area have produced mixed results.
Some studies indicated no improvement in students’ listening comprehension skills after strategy training (Ozeki, 2000) while others showed slight improvement such as in the research by Flowerdew at al. (2005) Since this is still a controversial issue, it is necessary to do more research on strategy training. With a wide range of learning strategies to be chosen, it is difficult to cover many strategies just in a small thesis experiment. Therefore, this study only focuses on the training of bottom-up and top-down learning strategies for students during the listening comprehension tasks, namely, “The impacts of listening strategy training on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C High School: A quasi- experimemtal study”.
Research questions: The aims are specified in two research questions: 1. How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school been aware of the listening strategies? 2. How did the training of listening strategies have impacts on the students’ listening performance? 3. Objectives of the study In order to answer the above questions, the study aims at: - Investigating the learners’ perceptions regarding bottom-up and top- down listening strategies.
- Experimenting and investigating the effects of listening strategy training on the 10-grade students’ listening performance at My Duc C high school. 2 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com - Formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of the listening skills at My Duc C high school. Scope of the study In this study, the investigator intended to train bottom-up and top-down strategies for 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school. The training of these strategies was experimented over a period of 6 weeks and applied in the three stages of a listening lesson: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening.
The sample population is 70 students from two classes: 10A3 and 10A9, who are at the same age and have the same total years of learning English – 9 years with the same curriculum. Methodology To fulfill the above objectives, quantitative method has been chosen for the study. Comments, remarks, comparison, suggestions and conclusions are based on factual research. Data for analysis in this study are gained through the following sources: - Pre-test and post-test.
Significance of the study It is hoped that this study will be a good source of reference for both teachers and learners of English. It is conducted to provide an insight into the current perception of the students’ listening strategies and offer a period of strategy training in order to improve the students’ listening performance. Therefore, it is believed that this study will raise the teachers’ awareness of the advantages of strategy training so that they can adjust their teaching properly in order to develop students’ listening skill. Outline of the study: This minor thesis consists of 3 parts: Part A: Introduction, presents the rationale, research questions, objectives, scope, methodology, significance and design of the study.
3 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Part B: Development, which is divided into 3 chapters: - Chapter 1: “Literature review”, sets up theoretical background that is relevant to the purpose of the study. - Chapter 2: “Research methodology”, shows the setting, the subjects, the methods, the way to collect data, the training procedure of listening strategies, Data analysis methods. - Chapter 3: “Data analysis, findings and discussion”. This chapter is a detailed presentation of the major findings of the study achieved through the questionnaires and the experiment on the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school.
The implications of the study in which suggestions for improving listening skill to the students at My Duc C high school are proposed at the end of this chapter. Part C: Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the limitations and provides some suggestions for further study. 4 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.