VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES PHẠM THỊ THU THỦY USING VIDEO AS A SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILL TO SECOND-YEAR ENGLISH MAJORS AT HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION Sử dụng Video làm tài liệu bổ trợ dạy nghe hiểu cho sinh viên chuyên ngành tiếng Anh tại trường Đại học sư phạm Hà Nội M.A Minor Thesis Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60.10 Hanoi, 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 1 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES PHẠM THỊ THU THỦY USING VIDEO AS A SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILL TO SECOND-YEAR ENGLISH MAJORS AT HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION Sử dụng Video làm tài liệu bổ trợ dạy nghe hiểu cho sinh viên chuyên ngành tiếng Anh tại trường Đại học sư phạm Hà Nội M.A Minor Thesis Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 60.10 Supervisor: Nguyễn Minh Tuấn LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declarations i Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii List of tables and figures vi Part 1: Introduction 1 1. The rationale of the study 1 2. The aims of the study 2 4. The scope of the study 2 5.
The methods of the study 2 6. The design of the study 3 Part 2: Development 4 Chapter 1: Literature Review 4 1. Theories of listening comprehension 4 1.Introduction and definition of listening comprehension 4 1. Listening in language teaching and learning 6 2.
Definition and benefits of using video in language classroom 8 3. The application of video in language teaching 11 4. Previous studies 13 Chapter 2: Methodology 14 1. Type of method employed 14 3.
Procedures 18 Chapter 3: Data analysis and discussion 21 1. The findings from questionnaire 21 1. Students‘ assessment on the improvement in their listening competence 21 1. Students‘ attitude toward learning with video material 23 1.
Students‘ assessment on the role of video in learning listening skill and the 24 effectiveness of using video in listening lessons 1. Some difficulties encountered when using video in teaching listening skill 25 2. The findings of the tests 26 2. Discussion 29 Part 3: Conclusion 31 1.
The limitations of the research 31 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Suggestions for further studies 32 References 33 Appendix 1: Questionnaire I Appendix 2: Pre-test II Appendix 3: Post-test IV Appendix 4: Sample units VII LIST OF CHARTS Page Chart 1: Change in percentage of students‘ comprehension after using video 22 Chart 2: Change in percentage of students‘ retention after using video 22 Chart 3: Students‘ attitude toward learning with video material 23 Chart 4: Students‘ assessment on the role of video 24 Chart 5: Students‘ assessment on effectiveness of video material 24 Chart 6: Raw marks in pre-test 27 Chart 7: Raw marks in post-test 28 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 7 PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the study Videos are not only for entertainment, but for decades they have been used as useful materials and important tool for teaching listening and speaking in the world. In recent years, combining video with IT, information technology, is being developed.
It allows teacher to transport virtually the target language environment into classroom so that live or prerecorded news, music, sports from all over the world can be viewed by students in real time. The advantages of using video in the language classroom have been recognized by many researchers in applied linguistics. The main advantage of using video as a technology for language teaching is considered to be its ability to present and immerse learners into complete communicative situations (Lonergan, 1984). Another greatest advantage is the ability of video to cover non- verbal aspects of communication and its cross-cultural comparison potential (Stempleski & Tomalin, 1990).
In addition, using video in the classroom allows differentiation of teaching and learning according to students‘ abilities, learning styles and personalities. I myself enjoy watching videos and English movies and find that my students are interested in them, too. I have tried using some clips as well as extracts from several films for my teaching listening and found them rather promising. There have been some questions arisen.
Does video material motivate my students to learn better? Does it affect a student‘s academic listening comprehension in classroom? How should video material be designed and used in my listening lessons? These questions motivated me to carry out the study on ―using video as a supplementary material in teaching listening to second-year English majors at the Faculty of English, LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.” With this study, the researcher mainly focused on carrying out a quasi-experimental research to investigate the effectiveness of using video material on improving students‘ listening competence. Hypothesis This study was carried out to test the following hypothesis: video material can be used to enhance students‟ motivation in listening to English; improve their listening competence as well as enhance their retention. The aims of the study The study aims to reach the following target: to investigate the effectiveness of using video in teaching listening skill to second-year English major students 4. The scope of the study The research limits its scope to listening skill and to its participants of second-year English majors of intermediate level at Hanoi National University of Education.
Of four skills of language teaching, I choose listening skill to deal with as I have tried out some listening lessons using videos and I have found that listening in the classroom derived from the use of videos is very interesting and hopeful. In addition, I also realize the changes in my students‘ attitudes toward learning listening skill. The choice of participants is simply a matter of convenience as I am teaching listening for second-year English majors at HNUE. Personally, I suppose that students at this level are more suitable for the application of this teaching method.
Hence, audio-visual lessons are very demanding to most students, and require them relevant background knowledge to comprehend. The materials for my listening lessons are collected from different sources and mostly involve authentic videos such as movies, documentaries, news or clips downloaded from the internet. Although the availability of video materials for teaching listening is high, the choice of videos is the key which can make videos useful or useless in a lesson plan. Teachers picking a video without consideration of their lessons can turn a lesson into a disaster.
Stempleski and Arcario (1992) claimed that different purposes have to be served with different methods of materials. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 9 However, as Underwood (1989) pointed out that what determines the difficulty of a teaching material is not just the material itself but also what the students are asked to do with it. The methods of the study The major method which was used in study is qualitative. All comments, remarks, assumptions and conclusions of the study were based on the data and analysis.
Data collections for analysis in the study were gained through the following resources: survey questionnaire, observations, tests for students, as well as reference books. A survey was carried out at the end of the semester. The participants of this survey were students from experimental group which had been taught listening with video as a supplementary material. The aim of this survey was to investigate the students‘ attitude toward the use of video materials as well as their self-assessment on the effectiveness of video material.
Two tests, one pre-test and one post-test were delivered, marked, then the results of these tests were analyzed, compared so that the researcher could use them to support for her conclusion. The design of the study The study consists of three parts as follows: Part 1 presents the rationale the topic, the aim of the study, the scope of the study and the methods applied. Part 2 develops the theme into three main parts: Chapter 1 sets up some theoretical backgrounds that are relevant to the purpose of the research. Chapter 2 presents the methodology Chapter 3 analyzes the results collected from survey questionnaire and two tests Chapter 3 deals with the discussion of findings, some personal recommendations Part 3, Conclusion, briefly revisits the objectives, the limitations of the study and suggestions for further studies LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 10 PART 2: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.
Theories of listening comprehension 1. Introduction and definitions of listening comprehension Research has demonstrated that adults spend 40-50% of communication time listening (Gilman & Moody, 1984), but the importance of listening in language learning has only been recognized relatively recently (Oxford, 1993). Since the role of listening comprehension in language learning was taken for granted, it merited little research and pedagogical attention. Although listening played an important in audio-lingual methods, students only listened to repeat and develop a better pronunciation (for speaking).
The role of listening has been considered as a tool for understanding and a key factor n facilitating language learning. Listening has emerged as an important component in the process of second language acquisition (Feyten, 1991). Listening is an invisible metal process, making it difficult to describe. Listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammar structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of utterance (Wif, 1984).
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 11 Listening is a complex, active process of interpretation, in which listeners match what they with what they already know. Specifically, listening theory is about an active process in which individuals focus on selected aspects of aural input, construct meaning form passages, and relate what they hear to existing knowledge (O‘Malley, Chamot, Kupper, 1989: 418.) During the process of interpreting aural input, listeners extensively deploy both linguistic knowledge (phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics and discourse) and non-linguistic knowledge (knowledge about the topic and about the context, and general knowledge about the world and real life.) River and Temperly (1978: 63) defined listening as a complex operation integrating the distict components of perception and linguistic knowledge. It is not a passive but an active process of constructing a message from a stream of sound with what one knows of the phonological, semantic, syntactic potentialities of the language. All in all, listening has been conceptualized in different ways and from different points of view.
However, the role of context-based listening is also found and highlighted in many definitions. Listening processes There are two distinct processes involved in listening comprehension. Listeners use ‗top- down‘ processes when they use prior knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. 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 (typical sequences or common situations around which world knowledge is organized).
Listeners use content words and contextual clues to form hypotheses in an exploratory fashion. On the other hand, listeners also use ‗bottom-up‘ processes when they use linguistic knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. They build meaning from lower level sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings in order to arrive at the final message. Listening comprehension is not either top-down or bottom-up processing, but an interactive, interpretive process in which listeners use both prior knowledge and linguistic knowledge in understanding messages.
The degree to which listeners use the one process or the other will depend on their knowledge of the language, familiarity with the topic or the purpose of LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. For example, listening for gist involves primarily top-down processing, whereas listening for specific information, as in a weather broadcast, involves primarily bottom-up processing to comprehend all the desired details. On one hand, research from cognitive psychology has shown that listening comprehension is more than extracting meaning from incoming speech.