A Study On Difficulties That 11Th Grade Students At Nguyen Viet Xuan High School Encounter When Learning Listening Skills.pdf

35 7 0
A Study On Difficulties That 11Th Grade Students At Nguyen Viet Xuan High School Encounter When Learning Listening Skills.pdf

Đang tải... (xem toàn văn)

Tài liệu hạn chế xem trước, để xem đầy đủ mời bạn chọn Tải xuống

Thông tin tài liệu

VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** NGUYỄN CÔNG HIỆU A STUDY ON DIFFICULTIES THAT 11 TH GRADE STUDE[.]

VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY-HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** NGUYỄN CÔNG HIỆU A STUDY ON DIFFICULTIES THAT 11TH GRADE STUDENTS AT NGUYEN VIET XUAN HIGH SCHOOL ENCOUNTER WHEN LEARNING LISTENING SKILLS (NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN MÀ HỌC SINH LỚP 11 TRƯỜNG THPT NGUYỄN VIẾT XUÂN GẶP PHẢI TRONG QUÁ TRÌNH HỌC KỸ NĂNG NGHE) M.A.MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 HA NOI – 2016 VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY-HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** NGUYỄN CÔNG HIỆU A STUDY ON DIFFICULTIES THAT 11TH GRADE STUDENTS AT NGUYEN VIET XUAN HIGH SCHOOL ENCOUNTER WHEN LEARNING LISTENING SKILLS (NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN MÀ HỌC SINH LỚP 11 TRƯỜNG THPT NGUYỄN VIẾT XUÂN GẶP PHẢI TRONG QUÁ TRÌNH HỌC KỸ NĂNG NGHE) M.A.MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr KIỀU THỊ THU HƯƠNG HA NOI – 2016 DECLARATION I hereby state that I – Nguyễn Công Hiệu, being an M.A candidate of the Faculty of Post-graduate Studies, ULIS, VNU, certify my authorship of the study entitled A study on difficulties that 11th grade students at Nguyen Viet Xuan High School encounter when learning listening skills I certify that this thesis is entirely my own work and that all the information in this paper was presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct As required in the rules, I fully cited all the sources of the results that were not original to this work Hanoi, November 2016 Nguyễn Công Hiệu i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr Kieu Thi Thu Huong for her guidance, comments, enthusiasm, encouragement and heartfelt sympathy throughout the whole research process Without her assistance, this thesis could not have been completed Second, my big thanks go to all the lecturers and staff of the Faculty of PostGraduate Studies, Hanoi University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, for their profound knowledge and guidance during my two years of studying at the Faculty Third, I would like to thank all the librarians for their helping me with the reference materials and their efforts to make the atmosphere of reading rooms as pleasant as possible Especially, I wish to express my special thanks to the students and teachers at Nguyen Viet Xuan High School for their full support in completing the questionnaires and their detailed answers to the questions in the interview I also wish to send my grateful thanks to examiners who will spend their time reading and making comments on this thesis And finally, I wish to send my thanks to my family, relatives and friends who always cheer me up and support me at hard time ii ABSTRACT This study aims at discovering difficulties that the students of class 11D2 at Nguyen Viet Xuan High School encounter when they study listening skills and suggesting solutions for the teacher to improve students‟ listening competence To collect the data for analysis, two instruments have been used: the questionnaire and classroom observations The findings show that there are fourteen problems that cause difficulties to the students of class 11D2 The problems have been classified into four categories, namely (i) problems related to the bottom-up processing, (ii) problems related to top-down processing, (iii) problems related to materials and listening tasks, and (iv) other problems Based on the findings, the researcher has offered some solutions to the teacher, so that he will make changes in his approaches, methods and techniques to help his students overcome the problems and become better listeners iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION Error! Bookmark not defined ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Error! Bookmark not defined ABSTRACT Error! Bookmark not defined LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS viii LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS ix PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale of the study Objectives of the study Research question Scope of the study Methodology of the study Significance of the study Design of the study PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Notions of listening 1.1.1 Nature of listening 1.1.2 Importance of listening skills 1.1.3 Types of listening 1.1.4 Listening processes 1.2 Procedures of a listening lesson in a language classroom 10 1.2.1 Pre-listening .10 1.2.2 While-listening 10 1.2.3 Post-listening .10 1.3 Problems related to bottom-up processing 11 1.3.1 Problem related to hearing sounds .11 1.3.2 Problem of understanding stress and intonation 13 iv 1.3.3 Problem of understanding different accents 13 1.3.4 Problem of mismatch between learners‟ vocabulary and vocabulary used in listening texts 14 1.3.5 Problem of mismatch between learners‟ syntactic knowledge and syntax used in listening texts 15 1.4 Problems related to top-down processing 16 1.4.1 Problem of cultural differences 16 1.4.2 Problem of unfamiliar topics 16 1.5 Problems related to materials and listening tasks 17 1.5.1 Problem related to length and density of the text 17 1.5.2 Problem related to delivery speed 17 1.5.3 Problem related to the complexity of the task .18 1.6 Other problems 18 1.6.1 Problem of failing to apply effective learning styles and strategies .18 1.6.2 Problems of fatigue and lack of concentration .19 1.6.3 Problem related to physical settings 19 1.6.4 Problem related to lack of visibility of the speaker .20 1.7 Review of previous works 20 CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY 22 2.1 Research context, learning materials, research subjects 22 2.1.1 Research context 22 2.1.2 Learning materials .23 2.1.3 Research subjects .23 2.2 Data collection instruments 24 2.2.1 Reasons for using the questionnaire 24 2.2.2 Format of the questionnaire .24 2.3 Data collection procedure 25 2.4 Students’ background information 25 2.4.1 Students‟ time experience in learning English 25 v 2.4.2 Students‟ average scores in listening skills last semester 25 2.4.3 Students‟ perception of the importance of listening skills 26 2.4.4 Students‟ perception of the difficulty of listening skills in comparison with other skills 26 2.5 Students’ responses to the questions about problems related to bottom-up process 28 2.5.1 Students‟ responses related to problem of hearing sounds 28 2.5.2 Students‟ responses related to problem of understanding stress and intonation 29 2.5.3 Students‟ responses related to problem of understanding different accents 30 2.5.4 Students‟ responses related to problem of mismatch between learners‟ vocabulary and vocabulary used in listening texts 30 2.5.5 Students‟ responses related to problem of mismatch between learners‟ syntactic knowledge and syntax used in listening texts 31 2.6 Students’ responses to questions about the factors related to top-down processing 31 2.6.1 Problem of cultural differences 31 2.6.2 Problem of unfamiliar topic .32 2.7 Questions about problems caused by materials and tasks 32 2.7.1 Students‟ responses related to problem concerning length and density of the text, and delivery speed 32 2.7.2 Students‟ responses related to problem of the complexity of the task 34 2.8 Students’ responses to questions about other factors 34 2.8.1 Students‟ responses related to problem of failing to apply effective learning styles and strategies 34 2.8.2 Students‟ responses related to problems of fatigue and lack of concentration 36 2.8.3 Students‟ responses related to problems of physical settings 37 vi 2.8.4 Students‟ responses related to problems related to lack of invisibility of the speaker 37 2.9 Summary 38 PART III CONCLUSION 41 3.1 Recapitulations 41 3.1.1 Students‟ listening performance and their assessment of listening skills 41 3.1.2 Difficulties 11D2 students at NVXHS encounter when studying listening skills 41 3.2 Suggestive recommendations 42 3.2.1 Problems related to bottom-up processing 42 3.2.2 Problems related to bottom-up processing 43 3.2.3 Problems related to listening materials and tasks 43 3.2.4 Other problems 43 3.3 Limitations and suggestions for further studies 44 REFERENCES 45 APPENDICES I vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS NVXHS: Nguyen Viet Xuan High School L2: Second Language ESL: English as a second language EFL: English as a foreign language viii Nunan (2001), cited in Mc Clelland (1987) and Cowan (1995), proposes that as a goal-oriented activity, listening involves “bottom-up” processing (in which listeners attend to use data in the incoming speech signals) and “top-down” processing (in which listeners utilize prior knowledge and expectations to create meaning) Both bottom-up processing and top-down processing are assumed to take place at various levels of cognitive organization: phonological, grammatical, lexical and propositional This complex process is often described as a „parallel processing model‟ of language understanding: representation at these levels creates activation at other levels According to Brown (1990), bottom-up processing was developed during 1940s and 1950s and dominated teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) for decades He explains this processing as follows: You start off with recognizing phonetic sounds, you identify these as phonemes, you sort out the morphological structure – identify plural endings and so on – and so you arrive at a word Then you undertake the same procedure for the next word and eventually you identify a phrase, say a noun phrase, and so you continue, building up structures until you have a sentence You then interpret the sentence and come up with a semantic reading which will yield „a thin meaning‟, and then you look at this in terms of pragmatic context which will yield „a thick meaning‟, which will include, for instance, what you think the speaker meant by what he or she said (P 10) Brown thinks that bottom-up processing is important but insufficient on its own For the listener to fully understands what the speaker means, a crucial part of the comprehension process is needed This is the top-down processing As soon as someone begins to speak, the co-operative human listener is actively trying to work out what he is saying, what he is likely to say next and what he is likely to mean by what he says The active listener will use all relevant background knowledge – knowledge of physical context of the utterance (the immediate surroundings, the place, the time of the day, etc.), knowledge of the speaker (gender, age, known opinions), knowledge of the topic (and what the speaker is likely to know about it, or feel about it) and so on Armed with all this activated knowledge, the listener monitors the incoming acoustic signal, which will simultaneously shape and confirm his expectations Speaking of the close relationship between the bottom-up processing and top-down processing, Brown argues that even if listeners manage to develop a rich set of predictions (top-down), they still need to be able to monitor incoming acoustic signals (bottom-up) so that they know which of their predictions is being confirmed and which is not Therefore, the bottom-up processing and top-down processing are two wellintegrated parts of the comprehension 1.2 Procedures of a listening lesson in a language classroom 1.2.1 Pre-listening Pre-listening is the very first stage, where the context is established The teacher creates motivation and students some activities with the purpose of preparing themselves for what they will hear 1.2.2 While-listening The following stage is listening, where learners different kinds of tasks given by the textbook or the teacher to find out answers The aim of activities done during this phase is to help the students to catch the main meaning of the text so that they have enough information to interpret the text One of the most important functions of while-listening activities is to present the sound of the target language This presentation enables students to develop their listening comprehension skills and it also serves as a model of their speech 1.2.3 Post-listening The last stage is post-listening, which is the part where students have an opportunity to check their answers concerning what they have been listening to, to give feedback and consolidate what they have learnt This stage is useful for teachers as well, because it helps them see and analyze particular difficulties students already have with the listening activity 10 In previous parts, notions of listening and listening procedures have been mentioned, in the next part, the researcher will address different factors that affect learners‟ listening comprehension As mentioned above, when listening, students experience hearing process with different hearing organs and cognitive processes with what linguists called bottom-up processing and top-down processing Consequently, anything hindering those processes can cause challenge for the students‟ listening Considering that in mind, the researcher focuses on impeding factors related to bottom-up processing, those related to top-down processing, and those affect the hearing process 1.3 Problems related to bottom-up processing 1.3.1 Problem related to hearing sounds One of the biggest problems facing the learners when listening to foreign language is the matter of identifying sounds This problem is commonly encountered by learners of English as a foreign language As stated in Rixon (1986, p 38), one of the most common problems encountered by students is the way English words are pronounced, but unfortunately this aspect of English cannot be overlooked as pronunciation of English can cause students problems in recognition, and therefore in comprehension Rixon proposes four explanations for the difficulty caused by English sounds The first difficulty is caused by different ways to pronounce the same sound: … there are two ways how to pronounce sound /t/ In so called BBC English one of the ways engages aspiration, hissing sounds, this happens if the /t/ is placed at the beginning of the syllables Students who have no experience with aspiration in their mother tongue can hear /st/ Rixon (1986,p 38) The second difficulty appears as a result of differences between English sounds and their spellings, “As there is a difference between the spoken and written form of words in English students can fail to identify the pronounced form of words they know in written form” (Rixon, 1986,p 38) 11 Rixon asserts the necessity of students‟ awareness of English connected speech, which makes it difficult for learners to recognize individual words He goes on talking about this phenomenon in relation to stressed/ unstressed vowel sounds: In natural speech listeners can encounter three main types of a change in sound involving weak form of vowels This means that words that are in unstressed positions have different pronunciation in comparison with stressed vowels e.g when to is said in isolation it is pronounced as /tu:/, but on the other hand, in connected speech the pronunciation changes into /tə/ (Ibid.) Elision and assimilation, in Rixon‟s view, are reasons for this difficulty: Another factor of connected speech is called elision This means a loss of sounds appearing in natural speech e.g the word probably is pronounced /probli/ The third factor of connected speech is called assimilation Assimilation means that a pronunciation of a letter can be influenced by the letter before or after it so that it changes its sound e.g ten bikes can be pronounced /tem baiks/ (Ibid.) Another aspect of sounds is that there are sounds that not exist in students‟ first language or there are pairs of sounds that seem to be indistinguishable to learners The following example given by Ur (1996, p 11) is about a problem his French student faces: The sound /θ/ as in ‘think’, for example, does not exist in French; a native French speaker may very often therefore not notice at first that it occurs in English – he may simply assimilate it to the nearest sound familiar to him and say /s/ or /f/ Ur points out the fact that it may take a Hebrew learner quite a long time to practise distinguishing differences between „ship‟ and „sheep‟ or „fit‟ and „feet‟ as Hebrew does not have similar sounds At the same time, Ur (1996) is concerned about the sequences and juxtapositions of sounds For example, a chain of successive consonants (or consonant cluster) also brings a source of problems to listeners They can get the consonants in the wrong order (hearing „parts‟ for „past‟), or omit one of the sounds („crips‟ for „crisps‟) Also concerning this problem, Brown (1990) adds students are not able to use the phonological code well enough to identify which words are being used by the speaker and how these are organized into sentences He assigns the reason for this 12 to the fact that students are relatively more successful at interpreting the written form of the language 1.3.2 Problem of understanding stress and intonation When second language listener has limitation in other decoding skills, understanding the stress and intonation of the speech can be a means of support to them Though the pressures of the group may lead to some words becoming reduced in form and thus more difficult to identify, there is a compensating benefit in that focal stress serves to foreground the most important piece of information For the L2 listener, it provides a basis for forming hypotheses about what a speaker said when very little else may have been understood It has been argued that apart from instruction in pronunciation for isolated words and sentences, more attention needs to be paid to intonation training because learners who have better understanding about prosodic features are shown to be more proficient in English According to Fan (1993), instead of intonation and rhythm, English learners pay more attention to the sounds (word pronunciation), vocabulary, and grammar when they are listening to English This is the reason why many English learners complain about the speed of the listening texts being too fast from time to time In their study, Hsieh, Dong and Wang (2013) cited Gilbert (1994) that intonation allows people to follow the flow of information in spoken English They also stated Pickering (2004) and Wennerstorm (2004) that if the speaker can use appropriate intonation structure at the discourse level, recipients will perceive the speaker‟s English to be more intelligible They also indicate that with the use of intonation structure at the discourse level, not only is intelligibility increased, but learners‟ fossilized pronunciation is also found to be improved Therefore, inability to interpret intonation and stress pattern correctly will hinder listening process 1.3.3 Problem of understanding different accents Various accents can cause students another problem in acquiring listening skills If students are frequently exposed to just one or two accents and get familiar with 13 them, they will be confused when hearing someone with a different accent They can perceive that kind of accent as unfamiliar or even wrong According to Ur (1996), there is rarely such a thing as a „wrong‟ accent: there are simply accents that are more or less difficult to understand Ur also states that many foreign-language learners who are used to the accent of their own teacher are surprised and dismayed when they find they have difficulty understanding someone else Fan (1993) also argues that usually ESL/EFL listeners are used to “their teacher‟s accent or to the standard variety of British or American English” In this case, teachers have to familiarize students with both British and American accents Munro and Derwing (1998) claim that too many genres of accented speech may result in a significant reduction in comprehension This is certainly true because unfamiliar accents produced by strange speakers may make listeners unable to identify sounds correctly, and therefore, prevent their understanding the language 1.3.4 Problem of mismatch between learners’ vocabulary and vocabulary used in listening texts Owning a narrow range of vocabulary offers challenges to learners in mastering listening skills Hung (1998), as cited in Bingol (2014), agrees that listening passages with known words are easier for learners to understand, even if the theme is unknown to them His research also points out that knowing the meaning of the words might arouse students learning interest and lead to a positive effect in listening ability On the other hand, for listeners who not know all vocabulary used by the speaker, listening can be very stressful as they usually start thinking about the meaning and, as a result of this, they miss the following information (Underwood, 1989) Another problem related to vocabulary is that learners fail to recognize words they have learned There are two reasons for this occurrence First, learners often learn a 14 word in its isolation with formal pronunciation, so they find it difficult to catch that word in a stream of speech According to Ur (1996), if a word is pronounced differently in informal speech from the way it is said formally, or was said when it was learnt, the listener may simply not recognize it as the same word, or even miss its existence completely He adds that mastering new items to the stage of total familiarity is a very gradual process It takes time before a newly-learnt word becomes known well enough to be readily recognized Second, the use of the same word varies from context to context For examples, certain expressions are common in colloquial English, but more or less taboo in formal style White, in his book on listening (1998), also mentions that it is impossible for learners to make out some words or phrases at all because they are words students have never heard before, or they are words that are familiar, but not in their reduced form This can be seen as both the problem of vocabulary and the problem of pronunciation 1.3.5 Problem of mismatch between learners’ syntactic knowledge and syntax used in listening texts The listening text is usually in a more unpredictable style compared with that for reading The spoken language is not fixed as the written one and speakers can easily change their way of using language In other word, the content of listening text is not well-organized Brown and Yule (1983, p 12) also state that there are a number of differences between spoken discourse and written discourse which are important in learning EFL listening That is, while the spoken language is syntactically simpler, the written language is relatively complex Therefore if the listener is unable to segment and simplify complex sentences and turn them into more basic syntactic units, they will fail to comprehend the text Anderson and Linch (1998), as cited in Cook (1973), D‟Anglejan and Tucker (1975) that it seems that the input which is syntactically difficult for young children 15 causes comparable problems for older foreign learners, who – in the initial stages of L2 learning – appear not to benefit from their L1 experience of similarity difficult surface structures 1.4 Problems related to top-down processing 1.4.1 Problem of cultural differences According to Anderson and Lynch (1997) when students learn a foreign language, they more than learning a linguistic system, and they acquire some degree of familiarity with the foreign cultural system Language is the means used by a community to express facts, ideas, beliefs, rules, and so on – in short, to express its culture So gaps in our knowledge of the L2 culture, of the associations and references available to native users, can present obstacles to comprehension Being familiar with cultural knowledge of language plays a great role in understanding the context The marriage between language and culture is indivisible (Brown, 1994; cited in Bingol, 2014) The topic may contain completely different cultural matters than those students have In this case, students may have difficulties to imagine what has been said 1.4.2 Problem of unfamiliar topics There may be misunderstanding between two communicators even though they come from the same culture and use the same native language This happens when the listener is not familiar with the topic that the speaker is talking about Fan (1994) states that in many cases listeners cannot predict what speakers are going to say, whether it is a news report on the radio, an interviewer‟s questions, an everyday conversation, etc The listening material may deal with almost any area of life It might include street gossips, proverbs, new products, and situations unfamiliar to students Also, in a spontaneous conversation, speakers frequently change topics In addition, difficult concepts can negatively affect students‟ listening According to Boyle (1984, p 35), cited in Vu Quynh trang (2013), if the concept of a listening passage is difficult “especially if the material is abstract, abstruse, highly 16 specialized or technical, esoteric, lengthy, or poorly organized”, comprehension of that passage can be very difficult Topics about people, daily life, environment and social issues which contain simple concepts are familiar to students, while topics with theoretical concepts interfere with students‟ comprehension If the information of the spoken text is full of theoretical concepts and if it is beyond learners‟ knowledge, it will make students confused and frustrated This is because a difficult concept demands past experiences and linguistic abilities that not many students could have Ur (1996) suggests that if a listener can make a guess as to the sort of thing that is going to be said next, he will be much more likely to perceive it and understand it well 1.5 Problems related to materials and listening tasks 1.5.1 Problem related to length and density of the text Students‟ difficulty in listening can be especially caused by being continuously exposed to long and dense texts If a message contains so much information that cannot be stored easily in memory, special listening strategies will be possibly inapplicable A short spoken text reduces the complexity of comprehension by reducing tiredness and lapse of concentration With regard to the density of the text, many writers (take Underwood, 1989 and Ur, 2005 as examples) claim that information should be less dense in the spoken language than in the written language 1.5.2 Problem related to delivery speed Along with length and density of a listening text, speed of delivery also challenges listeners According to Macháčková (2009), may students feel that one of the greatest difficulties they have to deal with during listening exercises in comparison with reading exercises is lack of possibility how to control the speed of the speaker‟s speech Students believe that during the listening text they can miss important information Some students can be busy with the meaning of certain words of the first part that they miss important information of the second part or 17 they can stop listening as they are not able to select the correct information so quickly 1.5.3 Problem related to the complexity of the task Another problem making listeners confused is the complexity of the task Ur (2005) says that even native speakers find it difficult to multiple-choice listening exercises or take notes of lectures because this kind of exercise requires more of writing skills than listening skills Here, if the purpose of the tasks is to cover all language skills other than focusing on listening skills, it may be unnecessary to employ tasks that involve reading, speaking or writing, which are tiring and difficult for students Therefore, Ur (2005) and many authors agree that listening tasks should ask quick simple responses and should not demand the skills of reading, speaking and writing at the expense of listening It is advisable that listening tasks should be listening-based, rather than reading-, writing-, or speaking-based 1.6 Other problems 1.6.1 Problem of failing to apply effective learning styles and strategies Learning styles and strategies influence and determine the objectives in teaching and learning The styles and strategies also influence students‟ perception and subsequent recalling of information and also determine the way how people react (Macháčková 2009) Harmer (1991, p.183) describes these strategies, which he calls “micro skills”, as follows: (i) predictive skills, (ii) extracting specific information, getting the general picture, (iii) extracting detailed information, (iv) recognizing functions and discourse patterns and deducting meaning from contexts He says that an effective listener is the one who is capable of employing the appropriate strategies of listening simultaneously He advises that EFL listeners should employ these strategies of listening in order to be successful in listening comprehension because listeners‟ success at understanding the content of what they hear depends on a large extent in their expertise on the micro skills 18 1.6.2 Problems of fatigue and lack of concentration Students‟ concentration as well as motivation is one of the crucial factors that affect listening comprehension It can be difficult for students to maintain concentration in a foreign language learning classroom In listening comprehension, even the smallest pause in attention may considerably spoil comprehension (Bingol, 2014) According to Hamouda (2013), during listening lessons students are required to be attentive since in a very restricted time they are required to process and understand a strand of newly introduced information Failure to concentrate will result in the students missing some of the lecture content, which will eventually affect their understanding of the whole lecture According to Macháčková (2009), there are many factors influencing learners‟ concentration For example, selection of a good topic is very important as it is easier for students to concentrate if the topic is appealing for them The length of the listening exercise plays an important role as well Many linguists argue that a long text in foreign language exhausts learners and reduces the competence of every single organ of hearing as well as prevents the brain from concentrating According to Ur (1996), listeners will suffer from more fatigue than readers or speakers Reading, writing and speaking are also tiring, but at least as far as these activities are concerned, the learner can set his own pace and make breaks when he wishes In listening, the pace is set by someone else, and the breaks may or may not occur when the listener needs them 1.6.3 Problem related to physical settings In order to listen well, one must hear well first Hearing refers to the receiving process in which sound waves travel from the speaker to the listener‟s ear and are operated by a number of auditory parts before they go to the brain through nerves Every factor that affects that receiving process will certainly affect listening ability Inconvenience of classrooms is one of those factors Bingol (2014) indicates that in large classrooms students who are sitting on the back rows may not hear the 19 recording as well as students sitting in the front rows Students who prefer to stay next to the windows are also affected by the noise that comes from outside Unclear sounds resulting from poor-quality equipment can also interfere with the listener‟s comprehension (Fan, 1994) Ur (1996) agreed that one of the disadvantages of recordings is their technical quality Even professionally-made tapes are not always as distinct as they should be, and their clarity may be further impaired by faulty or inferior playing equipment 1.6.4 Problem related to lack of visibility of the speaker Lastly, lack of visibility of the speaker also causes challenges to the listener When the listener interacts face to face with the speaker, it means he/she is exposed to the visual signals, which helps enhance his/her listening comprehension The signals can be segmental to help students identify the sounds correctly or behavioral ones to help students predict what the speaker means In regard to segmental signals, Brown (1990) states that one advantage that a student in Britain who is actually face to face with his lecturer has over a student who is listening to tapes is that the former can see the face of the speaker as well as his gestures Since foreign learners need all the help they can get in the form of aids to interpret the spoken message, it seems worthwhile informing them of what visual clues they may expect to find in informal speech and what they may not expect to find In terms of behavioral signals, Fan (1994) argues that not seeing the speaker‟s body language and facial expressions makes it more difficult for the listener to understand the speaker‟s meaning Mentioning to this matter, Ur (1996) notes that the speaker is actually visible to the listener in most real-life situations, and his facial expressions and movements provide some material aids to comprehension He adds that live speech does on the whole seem to be a more useful and practical basis for practice and should be used more often 1.7 Review of previous works In Underwood‟s point of view (1994, p 16), there are seven potential difficulties in EFL listening comprehension: (1) lack of control over the speed at which speakers 20 speak, (2) inability to get things repeated, (3) the listener's limited vocabulary, (4) failure to recognize the signals, (5) problems of interpretation, (6) inability to concentrate, and (7) established learning habits Many language learners believe that the greatest difficulty with listening is that the listener cannot control how quickly a speaker speaks Tải FULL (70 trang): https://bit.ly/3JNf3sp Dự phòng: fb.com/TaiHo123doc.net Fan (1994) attributes the difficulty of listening comprehension to four sources: the message, the speaker, the listener and the physical settings Meanwhile, Bingol (2014) proposes the potential problems in listening class as follows: (1) quality of recorded material, (2) cultural differences, (3) accent, (4) unfamiliar vocabulary, (5) length and speed of the listening, (6) physical condition, and (7) lack of concentration In her research, Vu Quynh trang (2013) addresses listening problems in regard to the Text, the Speaker, the Listener and the Listening environment 21 CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY This chapter comprises six sections The first three sections introduces the context of the study, the learning material and the subject of the study Then, the instruments and procedure of data collection are described In the last section, the results of the study are presented through tables and charts 2.1 Research context, learning materials, research subjects Tải FULL (70 trang): https://bit.ly/3JNf3sp 2.1.1 Research context Dự phòng: fb.com/TaiHo123doc.net The study has been conducted at Nguyen Viet Xuan High School, a school in the rural area of Vinh Phuc Province The school was founded in 1972 and has obtained remarkable achievements This school year, there are 30 classes (10 classes for each grade) with the student popuulation of nearly 1200 and teachers of English Among 10 classes of grade 11, three are using the new set of English textbooks which follows the systematic, cyclical and theme-based curriculum approved by the Minister of Education and Training on 23rd November 2012 The students take four 45-minute English lessons per week Each term, there are three 45-minute aptitude tests, and end-of-the-term tests Besides, the students have to sit in proficiency tests during the school year It is worth mentioning that in the last two weeks before data collecting, there were two native teachers teaching English in 11D2 class, whose students are the subjects of this research They were sent to NVXHS due to a project conducted by Vinh Phuc Department of Education and Training with a view to improve language skills among students in the area A South-African teacher worked with this class for the first week and a Canadian one for the second Their participation in teaching English not only provides the students an opportunity to communicate with native speakers for the first time, but it also helps them be exposed to more accents Accordingly, the students have had more information to respond to the questionnaire 22 2.1.2 Learning materials The materials used at NVXHS are a three-level English language set of textbooks for Vietnam‟s upper-secondary schools (namely, Tiếng Anh 10, Tiếng Anh 11, Tiếng Anh 12) The aim of this set of textbooks is to develop students‟ communicative competence in listening, speaking, reading and writing so that students can achieve level of the Vietnamese Foreign Language Competence Framework (equivalent to B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) when finishing upper-secondary school The textbook of each level is divided into two volumes: Volume and Volume Each volume contains a book map (providing information about the sections of each unit and the structure of the book), topic-based units (each comprises sections taught in eight 45-minute lessons), review lessons (providing revision and further practice of the preceding units, taught in two 45-minute lessons), and a glossary (providing phonetic transcription of new words and their Vietnamese equivalents) The listening sub-section consists of four or five activities representing the three stages of the lesson: pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening The first activity is to draw students‟ attention to the topic of the lesson, making them interested in the content of the listening text This is also a chance for students to share with their peers their background knowledge related to the topic The following two activities provide students with practice of the skills of listening for gist and/or listening for details There are also tasks that help students learn new vocabulary or the new meaning of the vocabulary learnt previously in meaningful contexts The most common task types are true/false, multiple choice, comprehension questions, etc The last activity, which can be considered as a postlistening one, aims at checking students listening comprehension and asking them to express their opinions of the content of the listening text 2.1.3 Research subjects The subjects of this study are 40 students coming from class 11D2 They are all at the age of 16 and spent one year learning Tiếng Anh 10 and are now working on 23 6812510 ... being an M .A candidate of the Faculty of Post-graduate Studies, ULIS, VNU, certify my authorship of the study entitled A study on difficulties that 11th grade students at Nguyen Viet Xuan High School. .. fatigue and lack of concentration Students? ?? concentration as well as motivation is one of the crucial factors that affect listening comprehension It can be difficult for students to maintain concentration... or behavioral ones to help students predict what the speaker means In regard to segmental signals, Brown (1990) states that one advantage that a student in Britain who is actually face to face

Ngày đăng: 03/02/2023, 19:50

Tài liệu cùng người dùng

  • Đang cập nhật ...

Tài liệu liên quan