Luận văn thạc sĩ VNU ULIS an exploratory study on 10th form students’ listening anxiety at thuong cat high school

INTRODUCTION

Rationales of the study

English has become the international language and it is used in many countries

It is undeniable that the number of people who learns English as a second language is increasing because of its importance In Vietnam, English is getting more and more popular and it is one of the compulsory subjects in most high schools In recent years, teaching English has changed remarkably from the traditional teaching methods to Communicative Language Teaching Accordingly, learners’ ability to communicate is the first priority When learning English, learners have to master four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing Listening is one of the most important skills for a student to communicate effectively However, it seems that many Vietnamese learners have difficulty in listening to English One of the most major factors that influence on students’ listening comprehension is the anxiety

MacIntyre and Gardner (1991) asserted that “anxiety poses several problems for the students of a foreign language because it can interfere with the acquisition, retention, and production of the new language” (p 86) Every learner experiences anxiety in different degrees Feeling anxious in the classroom makes learners show negative reactions, emotions and behaviors and they are not able to develop their full ability in language learning From the reality in Thuong Cat High School, many students perform poorly and they feel stressful when they learn listening lessons Some of them are very nervous when they are faced with a difficult task

Some others have the feeling of tension when they cannot understand the words they hear Students seem afraid of listening to foreign language and unwilling to listen to the records Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to be aware of the factors that cause students’ anxiety in listening lessons and have more appropriate teaching methods to help students improve their listening ability In fact, learners’ anxiety has been great concern of the researchers and teachers because reducing anxiety is a key to success in foreign or second language learning A lot of research about listening anxiety has been conducted; however most of them are conducted with university students There are few studies about anxiety of high school students

That is motivation for researcher to do the study “ An exploratory study on 10 th form students’ listening anxiety at Thuong Cat High School.”

The purpose of the research is to find out factors causing students’ anxiety in listening English at Thuong Cat High School These factors originate from the listening process, listening texts and students’ learning habits Another aim of this study is to suggest some solutions for teachers and students to help students reduce listening anxiety and improve their listening competence

The study aims at finding out the answers to the following questions:

- What factors cause students‟ listening anxiety at Thuong Cat High School?

- What are possible solutions to reduce students‟ listening anxiety?

Awareness of the anxiety that students encounter in listening skills benefits both students and teachers This study will provide teachers’ knowledge of the foreign language anxiety, especially the causes of listening anxiety and give some guidelines for teachers to help their students overcome their anxiety

This research will also help students identify their anxiety in learning listening and from this they can find some ways to manage their anxiety level not only in listening skill but also in other skills when learning a foreign language Hopefully, the findings of this study will be of some help to the improvement of the teaching and learning listening skills of teachers and students in high schools in general and at Thuong Cat High School in particular

In this study, the researcher only focuses on the causes of listening anxiety of

10 th form students at Thuong Cat High School and gives some solutions for teachers and students to help students reduce anxiety

The study is divided into five chapters

- Chapter 1: Introduction This chapter presents the rationale, the purpose, scope, significance and the structure of the study

- Chapter 2: Literature review This chapter provides the literature review of foreign language anxiety in general and listening anxiety in particular It also gives the theories of listening comprehension

- Chapter 3: Methodology This chapter discusses the participants, method of the study, data collection instruments and data analysis

- Chapter 4: The findings This chapter presents the information about participants, the findings from questionnaires and interview

- Chapter 5: Conclusion This chapter makes a brief summary of the major findings, the implications, limitations and suggestions for further research.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Overview of listening comprehension

Listening has been defined in different ways by many researchers and from different perspectives

In the past years, listening has not received much attention compared with other skills Buck (2001, p 32) notes that “listening is an important skill but due to the practical complexities of providing spoken texts, it is neglected in many language learning situations” (p.32) Field (cited in Richard, 2012) points out that

“In the early days of English language teaching, listening was a way of presenting new grammar through model dialogues” (p.13) According to Richard (2008), listening as comprehension is the traditional way of thinking about the nature of listening and the main function of listening in second language learning is to facilitate understanding of spoken discourse It means that the first appearance of listening was just to interpret and facilitate the message in order to speak However, the view of teaching listening has already changed Listening has changed its role from a passive activity which deserved less class time to an active process through which language acquisition takes place Listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text

According to Anderson and Lynch (1988), successful listening is not only understanding something that happens because of what a speaker says but the listener also has a crucial part to play in the process, by activating various types of knowledge, and by applying what he knows to what he hears and trying to understand what the speaker means

Buck (2001) in his definition says that “listening comprehension is an active process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound” (p.31) This means that listening is the ability to recognize and realize the meaning of what the speaker is saying, by grasping the meaning and understanding the way of pronouncing the words and language that shows, accent, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary

Richards and Schmidt (2002) describe listening comprehension as “the process of understanding speech in a first or second language The study of listening comprehension processes in second language learning focuses on the role of individual linguistic units (e.g phonemes, words, grammatical structures) as well as the role of the listener’s expectations, the situation and context, background knowledge and the topic”(p.313) In other words, listening is a process of understanding a text by activating various kinds of phonology, grammar, background knowledge and experience

In short, listening comprehension is not a passive but an active process in which the listeners construct meaning from what they hear with intended meaning

Listeners need to get involve actively in the interpretation of what they hear, bring their own background knowledge and linguistic competence to reach full comprehension of what they hear

The processing of listening is viewed as interactive process including two levels: bottom-up processing and top-down processing

The bottom-up processing involves constructing meaning from the smallest unit of the spoken language to the largest one in a linear mode (Nunan, 1998) It is absolutely “text based” process where learners rely on the sounds, words and grammar in the message in order to create meaning (Richard, 2008)

Top- down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next (Richards, 2008) In other words, listener employs prior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening occurs to make sense of the information understand he/she hears.

Overview of anxiety

Anxiety has been considered one of the most important effective factors that influence second language acquisition It is defined differently by different researchers Hansen (1977) called anxiety as an experience of general uneasiness, a sense of foreboding, a feeling of tension Scovel (1978) defined that anxiety was associated with the feelings of uneasiness, frustration, sefl-doubt, apprehension or worry Spieberger (1983) gave another definition of anxiety as “the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness and worry associated with an arousal of the automatic nervous systems” (p.482)

Anxiety is usually classified into three types: trait anxiety, state anxiety and situation-specific anxiety

- Trait anxiety is defined as an individual’s likelihood of becoming anxious in any situation (Spielberger, 1983) It is usally viewed as an aspect of personality and “a more permanent predisposition to be anxious” (Scovel,

- State anxiety occurs within specific, temporary situations and fades when the threat (or situation) disappears (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991) It is the type of anxiety that that a person experiences at a particular moment in time as a response to a definite situation

- The situation-specific anxiety is the specific forms of anxiety that occur consistently over time within a given situation (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991)

It is related to a particular type of situation or event such as public speaking, examinations or class participation

In short, anxiety is a psychological concept which is associated with negative feelings such as uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension and tension

Anxiety can be experienced at three perspectives: trait anxiety, state anxiety and situation-specific anxiety

Foreign language anxiety is a situation specific anxiety that is related to foreign language learning Many researchers have considered anxiety as one of the most important factors that influence second language learning

Foreign language anxiety is defined as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” ( Horwitz and Cope ,1986, p.128)

According to Gardner and MacIntyre (1993), language anxiety is “the apprehension experienced when a situation requires the use of a second language with which the individual is not fully proficient It is, therefore, seen as a stable personality trait referring to the propensity for an individual to react in a nervous manner when speaking, listening, reading, or writing in the second language”

(Gardner & Maclntyre, 1993.p.5) Another definition proposed by MacIntyre (1999) confirmed that language anxiety “as the worry and negative emotional reaction aroused when learning or using a second language” (p 27)

Oh (1990) defined that foreign language anxiety is a situation –specific anxiety which students experience in the classroom which is characterized by self-centered thought, feelings of inadequacy, fear of failure, and emotional reactions in the language classroom

Furthermore, Spielberger and his colleagues (2005) state that foreign language anxiety is the panic that a learner feels when he has to routine a second or a foreign language in which he is not totally skillful

Horwitz et al (1986) found that foreign language anxiety included three components: communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation

- Firstly, Communication apprehension is a type of shyness characterized by fear of anxiety about communicating with people It means that communicatively apprehensive people tend to avoid communicating and interacting with other people or they are reluctant to get involved in conversations

- Secondly, Test anxiety refers to performance anxiety which stems from a fear of failure in an academic setting It is the fear of exams, quizzes, and other assignments used to evaluate students’ performance Many students experience a high level of anxiety when taking tests The unfamiliar test items, the format of the test, different materials and questions types with which leaners are not familiar are generally believed to create anxiety

When test anxiety occurs, even students with a great deal of knowledge in a foreign language may perform at a considerably lower level than their true ability

- Finally, the last component of foreign language anxiety is fear of negative evaluation Fear of negative evaluation is defined as “apprehension about other’s evaluations, distress over their negative evaluations, and the expectation that others would evaluate oneself negatively” (Horwitz, 1986, p.128) Fear of negative negation is broader in scope than the test anxiety because it may occur in any social, evaluative situation such as interviewing for a job or speaking in foreign language classes People who fear negative evaluation rarely initiate conversation and interact with other people Students who experience this anxiety tend to sit passively in the classes and do not participate in learning activities actively

In short, anxiety is a kind of troubled feeling in mind that may cause negative effects for language learners It is a feeling of tension, apprehension and nervousness associated with the situation of learning a foreign language Anxiety has an important role in determining the success or failure of the learners Horwitz

(2001) found a significant association between anxiety and poor performance in language learning Learners who have language anxiety may underrate their own abilities, avoid taking part in learning activities and have worse performance than non-anxious studentsand this may lead to poor performance Knowing about language anxiety helps educators understand how students learn language and help students manage the stress that accompanies language anxiety

A particular aspect of language anxiety is listening anxiety which refers to the feeling of anxiety of language learners when they are required to listen to English

Bekleyen (2009) defined that “foreign language listening anxiety (FLLA) is the type of anxiety experienced by language learners in situations that require listening” (p.665).In another definition, Scarcella and Oxford (1992) pointed out that listening anxiety occurs when students feel they are faced with a task that is too difficult or unfamiliar to them It means that anxiety appears when students have to listen to the tasks which do not match their levels of proficiency Moreover, foreign language listening anxiety can be defined as “the fear of misinterpreting, inadequately processing or not being able to adjust psychologically to message sent by others” (Wheel, 1975, p.263) In other words, students become anxious while listening English because they are afraid that they cannot understand the message and interpret it correctly

Listening anxiety is caused by many factors According to MacIntyre (1995), the cause of anxiety is that learners often worry about misunderstanding what they listen to and the fear of being embarrassed by interpreting the message wrongly

METHODOLOGY

Overview of current teaching and learning listening at Thuong Cat High

The study was conducted at Thuong Cat High School, Bac Tu Liem District,

Ha Noi The participants for the study consist of 130 students from three classes 10D1, 10D2 and 10D6 Most of the students have been learning English since they were at grade 3 However, with the personal teaching experiences, the researcher realized that at the secondary school, students often learned in a passive way They learnt English structure rules, did grammar exercises and translated reading text

Speaking and Listening skills was not paid much attention Moreover, in the last year at secondary school, students mainly focused on preparing for Entrance Exam to High school, they did not spend much time on studying English Therefore, when they entered High school, they had some difficulties with English at first and many students even did not have basic knowledge about English They have limited vocabulary and poor background knowledge Another problem is that students do not have the habit of learning by themselves, they only learn in class do not spend time studying at home Moreover, like most other students in suburban schools they rarely have opportunities to communicate with English speaking people in both classroom and outside classroom Consequently, their speaking and listening skills are not really good

At the moment, the 10 th form students are using the new textbooks “Tieng Anh 10” published in 2006 by Hoang Van Van, Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, Do Tuan Minh, Nguyen Thu Phuong and Nguyen Quoc Tuan “Tieng Anh 10” is developed based on the new national curriculum The book is claimed to adopt a theme-based syllabus Lessons are arranged according to topics which are true to life, and familiar with upper-secondary students The book consists of sixteen units; each unit presents a theme which is updated and relevant to many aspects of the daily life: school talks, people’s background, technology, mass media, community, national parks, music, films and cinema, the world cup … This is an important advantage of the textbook as it is relevant to the students’ needs, interests and experience of life; therefore, it motivates students The methodology used in the book is the learner-centered approach and the communicative approach with task- based teaching being the central teaching method Each unit is structured in 5 sections: Reading, Speaking, Listening, Writing and Language Focus with the purpose of developing students’ communicative language skills After every three units, there is a Test Yourself, which provides some exercises for the students to do in order to test how good they are at English Each section is supposed to be taught in one period of 45 minutes In this textbook, listening lessons make up 20% of the syllabus Listening section is divided into three stages: Before you listen, While you listen and After you listen Before you listen aims to motivate students, activate their background knowledge and provide vocabulary While you listen activities develop micro-skills such as listening for general understanding, listening for specific or detailed information In this part, students do listening tasks including matching exercise, T-F statements, multiple choice questions and open-ended questions After you listen often includes activities such as text summary, reproduction in oral or written forms and further discussion of the topic

According to the syllabus, students have four English classes a week, so the time for listening skill is one period (45 minutes) about every two weeks As a result, students do not have much time for further practice with other listening materials In addition, students do not have good condition to learn listening because there are no language labs in the school These factors can affect learning listening comprehension and cause anxiety for students at Thuong Cat High School.

Participants

The participants in this study are 130 students chosen from three classes 10D1, 10D2, and 10D6 They were chosen by cluster sampling form ten classes at Thuong Cat High school This means that instead of randomly selecting the individuals, the investigator randomly selected the groups or classes for investigation Although students studied English at secondary school, many of them had low level of English in general and listening skills in particular Through observation and with the experience of teaching 10 th form students, I saw that many studentsperformed poorly and some of them seemed uninterested in listening lessons and felt tired or anxious when they had to listen to the recordings When I talked with 10 th form students, many of them shared that they had never learned Listening skill before so their listening anxiety level seemed higher than grade 11 and grade 12 students.

Research method

In this study, the researcher used both quantitative and qualitative methods to collect data for the research work

According to Paton(2002), the advantage of a quantitative approach is that it’s possible to measure the reactions of a great many people to a limited set of questions, thus facilitating comparison and statistical aggregation of data This gives a broad, generalizable set of findings presented succinctly and parsimoniously

However, as O’Malley and Chamot (1995) state, quantitative methods like questionnaires “fail to provide the depth of information yielded in interviews”

(p.94) On the other hand, qualitative methods produce a wealth of detailed information about a much smaller number of people and cases This increase the depth of understanding of the cases and situations studied but reduces generalizability (Paton, 2002)

Therefore, in this research study, both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to help researcher get some insights into the issue of students’ listening anxiety With the multiple data collection procedures, the researcher hoped that the research findings would be more valid and reliable.

Data collection instruments

This study used two instruments to gather data They are survey questionnaire and informal interview

Survey questionnaire seems to be very popular among educational researchers in general and ELT research in particular (Cohen & Manion, 1989) Dornyei (2010) believes that questionnaires are especially valuable because they are efficient in terms of “researcher time”, “researcher effort”, and “financial resources”

(p.9).Moreover, written questionnaires reduce interviewer bias because there is uniform question presentation (Jahoda, et al., 1962) Unlike in-person interviewing, there are no verbal or visual clues to influence a respondent to answer in a particular way

The questionnaire used in this study consists of two parts Part one aims at gathering personal information about participants such as gender, time of start learning English and their attitudes toward listening skill In part two, researcher used Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS) designed by Kim (2000) to measure the level of anxiety while listening to the foreign language The original scale contains 33 five-point Likert-scale items ranging from “strongly disagree” (1 point) to “strongly agree” (5 points) It means that scale 1 indicates the lowest level of anxiety while scale 5 indicates the highest level of anxiety Students’ scores on this scale can range from 33 to 165, the higher score, the higher the level of listening comprehension anxiety In the study of listening anxiety of grade 10 th students at Thuong Cat High School, the researcher used Kim’s FLLAS; however, some items were adapted, added and removed so the original scale was reduced to

25 items for her own research purposes Based on the results from the questionnaires, 10 students were selected to interview

While questionnaires can provide evidence of patterns among large populations, qualitative interview data often gather more in-depth insights on participant attitudes, thoughts, and actions (Kendall, 2008) To get a comprehensive view of anxiety in listening, 10 students were invited for an informal interview The data obtained from the informal interviews was transcribed and analyzed so that the author of this study could gain a deep understanding of the problems of students and give possible solutions to help them reduce anxiety.

Procedure

The questionnaires were designed in both English and Vietnamese and delivered to 130 students of 3 classes at the end of the second semesters At the time of data gathering, students already finished all the listening sections in textbook

“Tieng Anh 10”, therefore, they were possibly aware of the problems they faced in learning listening skill

Teacher came to each class in three chosen classes and gave the survey questionnaires to students Before students did the questionnaires, teacher had introduced briefly about the purpose of the study and explained how to finish the questionnaires After that, students spent 30 minutes completing the questionnaires and handed in to teacher Students were also required to give their names and classes so that researchers can invite them to participate in the interviews

After analyzing data collected from questionnaire, 10 students were chosen randomly for an interview arranged by researcher.

Data analysis method

Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the participants’ background information and responses to the questionnaire as well as the overall levels of anxiety The research used SPSS to analyze means, standard deviations of all the items in the questionnaire The participants’ low, moderate and high levels of anxiety were measured through their choices in response to the Likert-scale type questions The questionnaire for this study consists of 25 items ranging from

“strongly disagree” (1 point) to “strongly agree” (5 points) When students responded with 1)“Strongly disagree”, they received 1 point, 2)“disagree” was two points; 3) “neither agree nor disagree” was three points ; 4) “agree” was four points

; and 5) “strongly agree” was five points The higher the total points were, the more anxious students were

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used in this study to group the factors that cause students’ listening anxiety The purpose of exploratory factor analysis is to identify the factor structure or model for a set of variables This often involves determining how many factors exist, as well as the pattern of the factor loadings (Stevens, 1996) The researcher carried out Exploratory Factor Analysis to reduce a larger set of initial variables to a smaller and more compatible number of underlying factors

The data from the interview were transcribed and analyzed qualitatively to help the researcher have a deep understanding of the major factors that causes students’ listening anxiety and give some suggested solutions to help students reduce anxiety

In this chapter, the overview of the current teaching and learning at Thuong Cat High School has been given as the setting of the study In addition, the participants, research methods, data collection instruments, procedure, data analysis method are also presented.

THE FINDINGS

Students’ background information

There are 130 students who participate in this research, including 72 male (55.4%) and 58 female (44.6%) Most of the participants started learning English when they were in grade 3 (93.1%), 5,4 % students stared from grade 1 and only 2

% students from grade 6 It means that the majority of students have learned English for nearly 8 years when they take part in this survey

Chart 1: Students’ time of starting learning English

When being asked about their opinion to listening skill, 55.4 % of the students respond that listening is the most difficult skill It is followed by those consider listening as difficult as other skills (36.2%) There are 6.9% of participants reporting that it is the easiest skill and only 1.5 % think it’s as easy as other skills These statistics show that many students have troubles in learning English and listening skill is really a challenge to most of them

When did you start learning English? grade 1 grade 3 grade 6

Chart 2: Students’ judgment about listening skill in comparison with other skills

For the questions “How do you enjoy listening to English?”, among 130 participants, 17 students (13.1%) say that that they enjoy listening English very much and 45 students report that (34.6%) enjoy quite much The number of students who do not like listening English is 57 students (43.8%) enjoy little and 11 students (8.5%) answer that they do not enjoy at all It can be referred that more than half of students are not interested in listening to English

In your opinion, listening skill is the most difficult skill the easiest skill as difficult as other skills as easy as other skills

How do you enjoy listening to English? very muchQuite muchLittleNot at all

Chart 3: Student’s level of interest in listening skill

For the last question which asks about the frequency of listening outside class of students, the largest proportion is the students who sometimes listen to English outside classroom (63,8%) It is followed by the number of the students who never listen outside classroom (20.8%) 14,6 % participants report that they often listen to English and there is only 1 person (1%) who say that he/she always listen outside classroom Through the interview with students, the researcher finds out when listening outside classroom they often listen to music for relax, they rarely listen with a view to improving listening skill It can be said that the proportion of student who often practice listening English is quite low

Chart 4: Student’s practice outside class

From the result above, it can be seen that the majority of participants in this study started learning English quite early, from grade 3 They have learned English for nearly 8 years However, they have difficulty in learning English, especially in listening skill More than half of them think that listening is the most difficult skill and they don’t enjoy listening to English Therefore, they don’t practice listening to English regularly Most of them sometimes listen to English songs or watch videos in order to relax, not to improve their listening skill

How often do you listen to English outside?

Nunnally (1978, cited in Linh, 2011, p.65) claimed that a Cronbach alpha value of 0,70 or above is considered acceptable Besides, Geoge and Mallerry

(2003, cited in Linh, 2011, p.65) aslo presented a standard as follows:

Excellent Good Acceptable Questionable Poor

Unacceptable The FLLA version used in this study has Cronbach alpha value of 0.975 which means that the FLLA scale is reliable

The FLLAS used in this study is comprised of 25 items scored on a five-point scale with a theoretical range of 25 to 125 A higher score indicates a higher level of listening anxiety and a lower score indicates a lower level of listening anxiety In this study, the total scores ranges from 46 to 123 with a mean of 93.65 and a standard deviation of 18.111 A mean scale score is also computed On the basis of a 5-point format, the mean score is 3.75 indicates that students experience slightly high level of listening anxiety

Exploratory Factor Analysis is used to group items into common factors, interpret each factors according to the items having a high loading on it Loading refers to the measure of association between an item and a factor A factor is a list of items that belong together Related items define the part of the construct that can be grouped together Unrelated items, those that do not belong together, do not define the construct and should be deleted (Munro 2005)

Before EFA was performed, the KMO and Barlett’s tests were computed to check the appropriateness of the data matrix for factor analysis The KMO test showed a value of 0.937 (>0.5) and the Bartlett’s test of Sphericity indicated a significance level of 000 These results suggested that the items were sufficiently correlated and EFA was appropriate

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling

Exploratory factor analysis was run to examine the underlying structure of FLLAS

According to Hair et al (1998), factor loadings of 0.5 or greater are considered practically significant In this study, all of the items are acceptable because they have factor loadings above 0.5 No items are removed

After the rotation, three factors were extracted Factor 1 included 10 items (1, 5, 7,

The 10 items loaded on Factor 1 were associated with anxiety related to Listening process, the 9 items for Factor 2 reflected the anxiety related to the characteristic of listening materials and the 6 items for Factor 3 referred to the anxiety related to the learning habits of listeners

TABLE 1 Listening anxiety associated to Listening process

15 I keep thinking that everyone else except me understands very well what an English speaker is saying .752 2.85

14 When I’m listening to English, I usually end up translating word by word without understanding the contents .721 3.43

7 When I’m listening to English, I am worried when I can’t watch the lips or facial expression of a person who is speaking

16 When listening to English, I often understand the words but still can’t quite understand what the speaker means .661 3.45

10 When I’m listening to English, I often get so confused that

I can’t remember what I have heard .661 3.50

19 English stress and intonation seem unfamiliar to me .656 3.65

5 I am nervous when I am listening to English if I am not familiar with the topic .617 3.49

11 I fear I have inadequate background knowledge of some topics when listening in English .576 3.95

1 I feel unconfident when I am listening in English .543 3.77

12 My thoughts become jumbled and confused when listening to important information in English .517 3.65

Factor 1 named “Anxiety related to listening process” includes 10 items The two highest loadings came from the item 15 “ I keep thinking that everyone else except me understands very well what an English speaker is saying” and item 14 “When

I‟m listening to English, I usually end up translating word by word without understanding the contents” These items indicated that most items in this factor focused on the anxiety caused by student’s worry about their low listening ability and their inappropriate listening strategies Items 5, 10, 11, 19 describe the anxiety of students related to their language proficiency Item 1, 7, 12, 15 shows the worry of students about their lack of confidence in listening ability Items 14, 16 indicate the anxiety caused by failure in applying listening strategies in listening process

Means of Factor 1 items showed that a majority of participants suffered from anxiety related to listening process Of all the items, items 11, 1, 19 and 12 have the highest mean values of 3.95, 3.77 and 3.65 respectively

Item 1(I feel unconfident when I am listening in English) with mean value of 3.77 and item 12 (My thoughts become jumbled and confused when listening to important information in English) with mean value of 3.65indicates that most of the participants in this study were unconfident in their listening competence and worried about their poor listening ability Some students explained clearly in the interview:

“My listening skill is really bad so I am very afraid of listening part in English tests I don‟t often get scores in this part.”(Student 1)

“When I listen to the tape scripts, I often wonder what the speakers are saying I totally do not catch any words So, I hate listening classes.” (Student 2)

“I find my listening skill terrible I cannot understand what people say in English.”

Item 11 (I fear I have inadequate background knowledge of some topics when listening in English) with mean value of 3.95 and item 19 (English stress and intonation seem unfamiliar to me) with mean value of 3.65 show that the participants in this study suffer relatively high listening anxiety because of their inadequate background knowledge and lack of phonological knowledge Lack of background knowledge causes students’ failure in guessing the word in context and understanding the message of the listening text It also makes students worry when they listen to unfamiliar topics

Some students remarked in the interview:

“I feel nervous when I have to listen to unfamiliar topic because I don‟t have enough vocabulary and background knowledge related to it.”(Student 4)

“When I hear a topic that I don‟t know anything about it, I often get upset because it‟s too difficult for me to hear any information.” (Student 5)

Participants’ suggested solutions for reducing listening anxiety

In the interview, students gave some suggestions to reduce anxiety in listening comprehension When being asked what teachers should to help their students feel comfortable in listening lessons, most of the students said that they wanted to have a relaxing and non-threatening atmosphere in class

“Teachers should provide a comfortable learning environment We will feel less stressful if teachers have a good sense of humor and give us positive feedbacks to encourage us.”(Student 2)

“Teachers can make the lesson more relaxing by letting us play games, listen to music and watch video clips or movies.”(Student 4)

“I want to practice listening by watching movies and listening to music It helps me relaxed and unstressed.”(Student 8)

“The listening class will be more interesting if teacher can combine listening with speaking For example, teachers can let us listen to a short dialogue and then act out the dialogue I think it will get a lot of fun.” (Student 10)

“I think to help us reduce anxiety, teachers should let us listen some pieces of music before we listen.” (Student 9)

Some students made recommendation that teachers should adapt listening texts and listening tasks appropriate with their levels

“Teacher should use other materials besides the text book because some listening passages in textbook are quite difficult to our levels.”(Student 1)

“Teachers should not follow all the tasks in the textbook but design easier tasks for us I think many tasks in the book are too difficult.”(Student 8)

“I only like multiple choice tasks I hate listening and answering WH questions.”(Student 4)

“Teacher should make us familiar with easy tasks first, then difficult tasks.”(Student 6)

The time for listening text is another problem that students want to be concerned by teachers

“I will not be afraid of listening if teachers can play the tapes more times until we understand listening materials.”(Student 3)

“I want to listen at my own pace, pause and listen again when necessary.”(Student

“Teachers should allow us more time to finish difficult tasks, especially in the test.”(Student 6)

Some students suggested that teachers should make the listening text more comprehensible for them by teaching them pronunciation more carefully and providing vocabulary and background knowledge related to listening topics

“I want to be taught more about stress and intonation.‟‟(Student 10)

“Lack of vocabulary makes us difficult to understand the listening text, so teachers should present new words and provide some background knowledge before we listen.”(Student 6)

Some students wanted to be taught listening strategies to improve their listening comprehension

“If teachers teach us some effective listening strategies, I will be more confident in listening comprehension.”(Student 10)

“Our teacher should teach us some useful strategies to cope with listening anxiety; otherwise, we are easy to get loss in listening tests.” (Student 9)

“I have no idea of what to do before listening test If my teacher can suggest how to prepare and monitor our listening, I am sure my confidence will increase.” (Student

Other students thought that they needed to practice listening more

“I think the most effective solution is we need to practice more.”(Student 2)

“Although I want to practice listening English at home, I do not know how to practices effectively Teachers should suggest us some ways or provide us some websites or materials to help us practice at home.” (Student3)

From these suggestions, the researchers can give the solutions for both teachers and students to reduce students’ listening anxiety

In this chapter, the factors causing students’ anxiety were presented These factors were divided into 3 groups: factors related to listening process, factors related to listening text and factors related to students’ learning habits Factors related to listening process refer to the student’s language low listening competence In other words, listeners feel anxious because they are not proficient enough while listening

Students’ lack of phonological knowledge, vocabulary, background knowledge and their ineffective listening strategies cause them difficulty in understanding listening passage In addition, factors related to listening text such as the length of the text, the difficulty of the task, speakers’ accent, new words and grammar structures in the text increase anxiety among students Moreover, the students’ inappropriate learning habits also cause listening anxiety because many students are not familiar with listening with fast speed, listening only one time or listening without written text All of the factors make students nervous when learning listening comprehension Through the interview,a number of recommendations are offered to reduce students’ listening anxiety Students suggest that teachers should choose or adapt the listening materials that are suitable to their ability and interests They also want to be provided vocabulary, background knowledge and teaching strategies so that they can listen better The atmosphere of the class is another factor that needs to be concerned by the teachers Most of students prefer relaxing and comfortable learning environment Some students think that they need more time to finish listening tasks and many students agree that they need more listening practice From these suggestions, the researcher will give the implication for teaching and learning listening skill to reduce anxiety in next chapter

This chapter gives a summary of the main findings and suggests some solutions for both teachers and students to reduce listening anxiety In the end of chapter, the limitations of the research and some suggestions for further study will be presented.

Summary of the main findings

This study was aimed at investigating the factors that influence listening anxiety of 10 th form students at Thuong Cat High School 130 students from 3 classes 10D1,10D2 and 10D6 took part in this study The researcher used both quantitative and qualitative method Data was collected from survey questionnaire and informal interview The major findings of the study were summarized and discussed below:

Most of the participants of this study have learned English for nearly 8 years; however, their English language proficiency is quite low Many of them have difficulty in learning English, especially listening skill Through the interview with students, the researcher knew that listening skill was often ignored by both teachers and students at secondary school because the exams did not require students to develop listening skills Teaching and learning English primarily focused on grammar and vocabulary As a result, students felt worried when they had to learn listening skill at high school

The findings of the survey indicated that the students had a rather high level of listening anxiety The following are the major factors that caused the most listening anxiety:

- Factors related to listening process: What made students most anxious during listening process was their low language proficiency and inappropriate listening strategies The low listening ability made student nervous and confused when listening to English Students’ lack of background knowledge, lack of vocabulary and lack of phonological knowledge (stress and intonation) also made them worried about comprehending listening text

Moreover, the fact that many students did not know to apply listening strategies in listening comprehension also caused their anxiety

- Factor related to listening text: The long texts with many new words and difficult grammar structures made students nervous while listen to spoken message Many students had troubles with native speakers’ pronunciation and accents Besides, difficult listening tasks were also believed to increase students’ listening anxiety

- Factor related to students’ learning habits: Because of their learning habits, students felt nervous if they had to listen only one time, listen without written text or listen with background noise Lack of concentrations also caused students anxiety because students were worried about missing important information Some students had difficulty in spelling the words because they are familiar with focusing on meaning only when learning vocabulary

The result of this study supports the findings of Kim (2000) who concludes that listening anxiety stems from the listener’s linguistic or background knowledge, the speaker’s speech, the content and format of the text, little processing time or misuse of listening strategies The findings are consistent with the findings of the study conducted by Chang (2008) that leaners’ low listening proficiency make them feel anxious when the listening classes or tests are required They are also in line with Vogely (1998) who asserts that characters of input which include the nature of speech, the level of difficulty and lack of visual support and process-related aspects such as inappropriate strategies, lack of processing time, not knowing what or how to prepare for a listening comprehension task were factors that caused students’ anxiety in listening comprehension

From the interview, students also suggested some solutions for teachers to help reduce listening anxiety They suggested teachers should create a relaxing learning environment, adapt listening materials appropriate with their levels, providing them with vocabulary and background knowledge and teaching them listening strategies

Students also said that they need to practice more to reduce anxiety and improve their listening comprehension.

Implication

Based on the findings of the study, the researcher suggested some solutions for both teachers and students to reduce listening anxiety As for teaches, they can help students decrease the feeling of anxiety buy selecting appropriate listening materials, providing students with vocabulary, phonological knowledge and background knowledge before they listen, instructing them listening strategies and creating relaxing learning environment On the part of students, they should have more listening practice, improve their language proficiency and build their self- confidence

5.2.1.1 Solutions related to listening text

The findings of the study indicate that one of the main factors that cause anxiety for students is listening text Therefore, selecting appropriate listening materials is very important for reducing listening anxiety

 Select the listening text appropriate to the level of the learners

First of all, listening material must be suitable for students’ level Field (2008) suggested that learners would feel more comfortable and motivated with authentic listening comprehension texts in cases whereby the instructor could provide texts according to their level The texts containing too many new words or difficult structures make students feel stressed and unconfident while listening Select material at an appropriate level of linguistic difficulty as regards syntax and vocabulary

 Select materials based on students’ interest

Teachers should choose the materials based on students’ interest Students will perform better if they listen what they like Many students said that the listening texts in the textbook are boring and out of date, which demotivate them in learning listening comprehension Therefore, teachers should adapt listening materials that match students’ interest and design more activities in listening lesson to motivate students

Besides the textbooks, teachers also need to select a wide range of materials such as lectures, radio news, films, TV plays, everyday conversations, interviews, English songs, etc

 Control the length of materials

Because most of students in this study are at low level and suffer from high listening anxiety, so teachers should give them short listening texts rather than long texts Long listening texts make them feel tired and stressful If the listening text is too long, teachers should split it up to short sections and give tasks appropriate to each short section

Because the goal of learning listening skill is to help learners comprehend spoken English language in real life, authentic texts should be introduced to make learners familiar with the features of natural speech However, authentic materials should not be much more difficult than students’ level With the students at low level, teacher should use shorter authentic listening texts on simple topic to prevent learners from becoming stressful when they are unable to comprehend what was said Teachers also explain to the learners that they don’t need to understand every word in listening text and the tasks also need to be simplified to avoid anxiety If most of the students find it too difficult to understand authentic materials because they were not familiar to them before, teacher can use semi-authentic texts for students’ listening practice Hedge (2000) also suggested that semi-authentic texts may also be used to practice listening

 Use a variety of listening tasks

A variety of tasks should be employed in order to keep interest and provide a range of purposes for listening Teachers should make students get familiar with numerous types of tasks such as numbering the pictures, answering questions, T-F statements, note-taking, gap-filling, multiple-choices questions… To reduce anxiety, tasks which are too difficult or include long questions should be adapted to be suitable for the level of students

Teachers should use visual aids such as pictures or diagrams related to listening topics to help students guess and actively imagine about what they are going to listen Visual aids also draw learns’ attentions, increase their motivation on the topic, make them feel relaxed and remind them of the ideas and language they may know but have temporarily forgotten

Visual support and transcript are two important sources of support to students In the form of pictures, graphs, diagrams, maps, etc., the visual support can help students to predict incoming listening materials easily by supplying cultural information

 Build up self-confidence for learners

Lack of confidence is one of the most important factors that affect students’ listening anxiety and actual performance Teachers can help students build up their self-confidence by setting teaching goals that are appropriate and attainable to students Moreover, teachers help students recognize that they can be successful

Teachers should give students opportunities to experience small successes to help them reduce their worry and make them more confident During the process, teachers need not correct every error the students make Besides, positive feedback and encouragement from teachers may lower the level of anxiety and enable students to develop greater self-confidence Another way to increase learners’ level of confidence is to have them list the sources of their listening anxiety on the board

After the learners see that listening anxiety is shared by nearly everyone and that most of the other learners experienced similar fears of failure, they would be motivated to overcome their own

From the investigation, one of the great causes for students’ listening anxiety is their lack of vocabulary Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to equip students with certain key words needed for listening comprehension because lack of vocabulary becomes a great obstacle to them in listening comprehension However, it is better to activate students’ vocabulary by asking them to guess the meaning of words used in the listening context before explaining the meaning to them

 Provide students with phonological knowledge

Incorrect pronunciation causes problems in listening comprehension, so teachers need to help students get familiar with precise pronunciation of native speakers Moreover, it is necessary to let students deal with different native-speaker accents by using authentic materials in listening in class and outside class Teachers should also teach students the features of natural spoken language such as stress, intonation, rhythm, elision and assimilation so that the students do not feel stressful and surprised when they listen to authentic listening materials

 Provide background knowledge for learners

Teachers need to provide background knowledge which is relevant to the listening topic, especially when the topics demand cultural backgrounds that differ from that of students When listeners have no background knowledge toward a topic regarding another culture, there is a greater possibility miscomprehension may occur (Bacon, 1989) Some types of pre-listening activities many enrich student’s background knowledge such as: questioning and discussing about the listening topic, making a list of possibilities, describing a picture, etc

 Create a relaxing and supporting environment

Students’ time of starting learning English

When being asked about their opinion to listening skill, 55.4 % of the students respond that listening is the most difficult skill It is followed by those consider listening as difficult as other skills (36.2%) There are 6.9% of participants reporting that it is the easiest skill and only 1.5 % think it’s as easy as other skills These statistics show that many students have troubles in learning English and listening skill is really a challenge to most of them

When did you start learning English? grade 1 grade 3 grade 6

Students’ judgment about listening skill in comparison with other skills

For the questions “How do you enjoy listening to English?”, among 130 participants, 17 students (13.1%) say that that they enjoy listening English very much and 45 students report that (34.6%) enjoy quite much The number of students who do not like listening English is 57 students (43.8%) enjoy little and 11 students (8.5%) answer that they do not enjoy at all It can be referred that more than half of students are not interested in listening to English

In your opinion, listening skill is the most difficult skill the easiest skill as difficult as other skills as easy as other skills

How do you enjoy listening to English? very muchQuite muchLittleNot at all

Student’s level of interest in listening skill

For the last question which asks about the frequency of listening outside class of students, the largest proportion is the students who sometimes listen to English outside classroom (63,8%) It is followed by the number of the students who never listen outside classroom (20.8%) 14,6 % participants report that they often listen to English and there is only 1 person (1%) who say that he/she always listen outside classroom Through the interview with students, the researcher finds out when listening outside classroom they often listen to music for relax, they rarely listen with a view to improving listening skill It can be said that the proportion of student who often practice listening English is quite low.

Student’s practice outside class