i MINISTRY OF INDUSTRY AND TRADE HANOI UNIVERSITY OF INDUSTRY ] BUI LAN NHI A STUDY ON USING YOUTUBE IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS TO THE FIRST YEAR ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT HA LONG UNIVERSITY MASTER THESIS IN ENGLISH LINGUISTICS Hanoi – 2024 ii MINISTRY OF INDUSTRY AND TRADE HANOI UNIVERSITY OF INDUSTRY BUI LAN NHI A STUDY ON USING YOUTUBE IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS TO THE FIRST YEAR ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT HA LONG UNIVERSITY Major: English Linguistics Code: 8220201 MASTER THESIS IN ENGLISH LINGUISTICS SUPERVISOR : 1. NGUYEN THI THU HA 2. TRAN NGOC DUC Hanoi – 2024 iii DECLARATION BY THE AUTHOR The thesis entitled <A study on using YouTube in teaching listening skills to the first year English major students at Ha Long University= is conducted under the supervision of Dr. Nguyen Thi Thu Ha, an instructor of English at Hanoi University, and Dr.
Tran Ngoc Duc, an instructor of English at Hanoi University of Industry. I declare that the information reported in the current paper is the result of my own work, except where reference is made. The thesis has not been accepted for any degree and is not concurrently submitted to any other degree or diploma candidature. Signature Bui Lan Nhi iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study has been completed thanks to the help of many people from whom I have received support.
I would like to express my appreciation to all of them. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Mrs. Nguyen Thu Thu Ha, for her support, guidance, and devotion during my study. She gave me encouragement at all the stages of completing my study.
Being supervised by her, I was not only instructed carefully but also learned many valuable things from the method of doing research and the way to consider and solve problems independently. Without her guidance, help, and support, I would not have completed my study. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Dr. Tran Ngoc Duc at Ha Noi University of Industry, who helped me complete my studies.
Besides that, I also appreciate first-year English major students at Ha Long University because of their cooperation in the data collection procedure. I am sure that I would not have completed my study without their enthusiastic participation. Last but not least, I am grateful to my parents for their mental support and encouragement. They also gave me a lot of advice and encouragement.
They motivate me to overcome all the difficulties in completing the study. In addition, I would like to say <Thank you= to my friends, thanks for their being side by side with me. Again, thank you so much! v ABSTRACT The aim of the study is to investigate students’ attitudes towards using YouTube videos to improve their listening skills. The study used the quantitative method.
The survey was employed as a tool for the research. The survey included a 15-item questionnaire to collect the data. The participants of the study consisted of 28 first-year English major students in class TAK9.2 at Ha Long University. They were chosen through purposive sampling because they enrolled in Academic English.
The course was offered during the first semester of the school year 2023. The results were analyzed by percentage, mean, and standard deviations. The study's findings showed that students had positive attitudes toward using YouTube videos in the classroom. Based on this consideration, this paper will review some of the advantages and disadvantages of employing YouTube videos in teaching listening skills.
The researcher also recommends some strategies that may help this skill through YouTube videos. viii LIST OF TABLES Table 2. Information about the course. The percentage of participants.
The duration of the participants' English studies. The percentage of the participants’ frequency of using English in daily life. The percentage of the participants’ frequency of using English skills. Watching YouTube videos frequency.
Motivation to watch YouTube videos. Mean, standard deviation and overall attitudes. Mean and standard deviation of affection. The percentage of participants’ responses for affection.
Mean and standard deviation of behavior. The percentage of participants’ responses for behavior. Mean and standard deviation of cognition. The percentage of participants’ responses for cognition.
39 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS S.D: standard deviation EFL: English as a foreign language mins: minutes 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale One essential English skill is listening. It differs from other abilities that need to be mastered. Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying.
As it is estimated that listening takes up between 40 and 50 percent of the time spent talking, compared to other skills, listening plays a significant part in communication. Through receptive skills, including listening, students gain information while learning a language. The development of students' linguistic skills depends on their ability to listen. Listening is the foundation for getting primary contact with the target language; however, listening is one of the most difficult skills in learning English.
Besides, students lack motivation since they believe mastering listening skills is challenging. While listening, students are expected to respond to and interpret the information being listened to actively. To resolve this problem, showing movies, news and videos are used in class to help learning listening (Lopez, 2020). Technology now permeates every aspect of life.
People utilize technology in their daily lives, and YouTube is formerly considered to be a good source of online videos. In the field of learning to listen, the researcher considers that it is appropriate to use YouTube as an online video to improve listening skills. Tran (2022) found that using YouTube videos helped students' listening abilities. This is due to the fact that YouTube offers audio and visual content to learners, enabling them to understand the speech or words they heard while studying the subject's content and enhancing their language skills.
Also, YouTube videos could improve students' vocabulary, pronunciation, accent, listening, reading, writing, and speaking in learning English (Chhabra, 2012). 2 Generally, YouTube videos are rich sources of authentic materials to improve students’ listening (Alqahtani, 2014). At Ha Long University, students often encounter the following difficulties while learning listening skills. Firstly, they are unable to understand the content of the listening material.
Secondly, they cannot keep up with the speaker's pace in the listening materials. Thirdly, they face many unfamiliar words. Fourth, they have difficulty in distinguishing sounds in English. Moreover, they lack background knowledge, not understand the requirements of the task.
Thus, teachers are advised to employ teaching media to simplify the teaching and learning of listening to lessen this issue. The use of YouTube videos is one of the alternate methods for language training that offers audio- visual content. It is hoped that the study will contribute to improving the learning of English in general, and listening skills through YouTube videos in particular, among the first-year English majors at Ha Long University. Aims and Objectives of the Study The aim of the study is to improve listening skills by using YouTube videos in the listening classes.
The objective of the study is to find out the attitudes of the first-year students English majors at Ha Long University toward using YouTube videos to improve their listening skills. Research Question The research aims at addressing one research question: What are the students’ attitudes towards using YouTube videos to improve listening skills? 3 4. Scope of the Study In this study, the researcher would like to work on using YouTube videos to improve listening skills for first-year students who are English majors at Ha Long University. The study could not touch upon all the students at Ha Long University.
It was restricted to the first-year students in class TAK9.2 to whom the researcher would be in charge of teaching listening skills. The English level of the students in this class is intermediate level. Therefore, this research mainly focused on intermediate students. Significance of the Study The significant finding helps the researcher understand the effect of using YouTube videos to enhance students’ English listening skills.
Based on the findings, the researcher may understand students’ attitudes towards learning by listening with YouTube videos and find some useful techniques to teach listening skills. Hopefully, the finding will enable the researcher to give some suggestions for teachers to teach these skills better, an opportunity to develop the student’s listening skills. Structure of the Study Introduction - Provides the basic information such as the topic of this paper, the study's background, the study's rationale, the study, the aims and objectives of the study, research questions, the scope of the study, the significance of the study and an outline thesis in the paper. Chapter 1: Literature review - Conceptualizes the study’s theoretical background and presents the concepts relevant to the topic of the thesis: definitions of listening, teaching listening skills, listening difficulties, and using the YouTube videos to teach listening skills, including an overview of the YouTube videos, its advantages, disadvantages, and the previous research.
4 Chapter 2: Research methodology - Consists of parts research setting, research methods, participants, and data collection instruments: data collection from the survey questionnaires, research procedures, data analysis tools and ethical considerations. Chapter 3: Results, findings and discussions - Provides the interpretation of the data, the results and the findings of the study. Conclusion - Summarizes the study, implications, limitations, and suggestions for further studies. 5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.
Definition Listening skills are considered to be a key and essential area of development in both a native language and a foreign language. Scholars have proposed many definitions concerning these skill. According to Vandergrift (1999), listening can be viewed as a sophisticated and dynamic interpretation process in which the listener connects what they hear to what they have heard in the past. As stated differently, Sharma (2011) highlights that listening may be characterized as a communication process in which the listener must comprehend and extrapolate the significance of the contents they have been exposed to.
If the listener's listening comprehension was good enough, they might be able to communicate better with others, comprehend messages better, and cooperate better. People may lack focus since they typically pay little attention to what they are listening to. Listening is one of the most crucial abilities that students studying English must acquire. Hearing the speaker's voice and deriving meaning from it are the processes of listening.
Rost (2011) states that while someone is listening, they take in what the speaker is saying and process the information. Moreover, Gu (2018) describes hearing as a listening comprehension that involves actively taking in incoming facts and interpreting them in a different way. To put it another way, listening can be thought of as an exchange of messages or information between the speaker and the listener to understand and communicate. 6 Underwood (1989) defines listening as the activity of paying attention to and trying to understand something we hear.
Besides, Howatt and Dakin (1974) asserts that listening is the ability to identify and understand what others say. This involves understanding a speaker’s accent and pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning. According to Purdy & Borisoff (1997), listening is an active and dynamic activity of attending, perceiving, interpreting, remembering, and reacting to the needs, worries, and information expressed (verbally and nonverbally) by other people. One of the widest definitions of listening is provided by this one, which characterizes hearing as a complex activity involving the connected actions of both speakers and listeners.
Not all listeners engage in listening alone. The listener's capacity to understand speakers' language, both verbal and nonverbal, is greatly influenced. Rost (2002) also says that listening is the process of taking in what the speaker actually says, developing meaning through engagement, imagination, and empathy, communicating that meaning to others, negotiating meaning with the speaker, and responding.