The effective strategy to learn the listening and notetaking skill of sophomores and juniors of english major at huflit graduation paper, major business english

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES GRADUATION PAPER THE EFFECTIVE STRATEGY TO LEARN THE LISTENING AND NOTETAKING SKILL OF SOPHOMORES AND JUNIORS OF ENGLISH MAJOR AT HUFLIT Instructor: Ms Ngo Thanh Phuong (M.A) Student: Ha Hoang Anh Student ID: 15DH710089 Major: Business English Ho Chi Minh City, June 18th, 2019 DECLERATION I certify my authorship of the study report title “The effective strategies to learn Listening and notetaking skill of sophomores and juniors of English major at HUFLIT” This graduation paper is my original work No other person’s work or ideas have been used without acknowledgement Except where I have clearly stated that I have used some of this material elsewhere, I have not presented this for assessment in another course or unit at this or any other situation Name/signature: June 18th, 2019 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the process of carrying out the graduation paper, I have received many great supportance and encouragements from teachers, family, and friends This graduation paper could not have been completed without the help and support from a number of people who all deserve my sincerest gratitude and appreciation First of all, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the staff of Department of Foreign Language, because they gave me an opportunity to this graduation paper Next, I am extremely appreciative of my supervisor - Ms Ngô Thanh Phượng, who has always been willing to give me precious advices and suggestions, comments, correction and inspirable guidance in order that I complete successfully this study Furthermore, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, brothers and sisters who have provided me with great spiritual support during the time I conducted this research I am very grateful to Ms Lê Thị Thanh Hà, a teacher of Up English Center, joined in the interview related to my topic Besides, I am so thankful to juniors and sophomores of Department of Foreign Languages who took part in survey in order to support my research I am equally indebted to my classmates for their suggestions and encourages in the process of my study I hardly forget to convey my thanks to good friends who help me much in completing this study for precious materials and advises ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Content Page DECLERATION i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iii-iv ABSTRACT v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1-3 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE 4-10 2.1 Problems of learning Listening and Notetaking skill 4-7 2.2 Sollutions to improve Listening and Notetaking skill 8-10 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 11-12 3.1 Setting 11 3.2 Participants 11 3.3 Data Collection 12 3.4 Data Statistic 12 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 13-24 4.1 Survey questionnaire 13-23 4.2 The interview 24 iii CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 25-31 5.1 Summary of the study 25 5.2 Limitation of the study 25-26 5.3 Suggestion for further studies 26 5.4 Recommendation to improve Listening and Notetaking skill 26-31 REFERENCES 32-33 APPENDIX A 34-36 APPENDIX B 37 iv ABSTRACT Listening and Notetaking skill is one of the most important factor affects to one’s learning, working and daily life However, notetaking skill is new type of listening process which makes students have some troubles The purpose of this graduation paper is to investigate the difficulties of students of Department of Foreign Languages (DFL) at HUFLIT when learning Listening and Notetaking skill Then, it would like to find out the reasons why for those problems and the solutions for students to overcome The research was conducted by a group survey of 50 juniors and 50 sophomore chosen randomly from Department of Foreign Languages, and interview of an English teacher to gather information and data So, the collecting data instruments like questionnaire, interview were used to the study The results of the research will point out the difficulties and solutions sophomores and juniors face when they learn Listening and Notetaking skill Besides, the most effective strategy to learn this skill was provided for sophomores and juniors to improve this skill Keywords: Department of Foreign Language (DFL), HUFLIT, sophomores, juniors, Listening and Notetaking skill, difficulty, solution, improve, strategy v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS HUFLIT: Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Information Technology DFL: Department of Foreign Languages vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Recent developments in society have heightened the need for using English It is considered the key to one’s success, and the main tool for communicating as well as working in big and small domestic and foreign companies According to Pourhosein Gilakjani and Seyedeh Masoumeh Ahmadi (2011), out the four main areas of communication called Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing, Listening is considered as one extremely significant skill in studying, working, and real life In school context, noting (Note-taking) is one of the most important skills to help people improve their ability to memorize information during lectures, tests, discussions and especially in international certification exams such as IELTS, TOEIC Notetaking skill is not involved recording all the ideas but the ideas must be recorded selectively, and presented in a clear and logical way The notes are the pictures which reflect the focus, the understanding, as well as the care of listeners and note takers Human’s memory is limited, and remembering a large amount of information such as figures, data, names of persons or places, or time is not easy Based on these problems or difficulties, recording the keywords or main ideas is extremely important, and the worthiest way for students to remember what they have learned in classes is recording everything they have heard This information is combined with new information, organized in a way that makes sense, and then stored until it is needed (Eggen & Kauchak, 2013) Nevertheless, this skill seems to be challenging for many students due to the need of combining numerous sub skills Moreover, many surrounding factors plus the constant pressure listeners often face make it tremendously difficult to learn this skill Azmi Bingol, Celik, Yidliz, and Tugrul Mart (2014) stated that there are a lot of difficulties that learners may encounter in the listening and notetaking processes and the purpose of this thesis is to be aware of these problems and try to solve them If people would like to any jobs such as translator, interpreter, teachers, speakers, or reporters, they must have a good listening skill However, to support the particular job that requires recording important information in limited time, we need the specific skill of note taking Ferris & Tagg, (1996, cited in Kim, 2004) mentioned that lack of note-taking skills and problems with note-taking as well as listening comprehension are troublesome areas most often reported by international students Listening and notetaking skill is used with different purposes in various contexts For instance, people listen to news every day, staff listens and takes note to contribute their opinions when they are in a meeting, or students listen to their teacher’s lectures Rost (2001) thought that listening skill can be mostly used in normal daily life and develops faster than the other language skills which indicates that it makes easy the development of the other language skills Because of the limitations of time and knowledge, this study cannot cover all previous researches on the issue of Listening and Notetaking skills Therefore, this research will focus on examining the troublesome of HUFLIT’s sophomores, and juniors of Department of Foreign Languages (DFL) in learning that skill Students of English majors as sophomores and juniors have to study courses of Listening and Notetaking skill, and experience different troubles of this skill Therefore, the purpose of this investigation is finding out and analyzing students' difficulties in listening and notetaking skill, which make them lose the interest in learning this subject in class Since then, the researcher will offer the most effective strategy of learning this skill to help students overcome this huge challenge This research will be structured in five sections The study opens with an introduction of Listening and Notetaking skills, and its importance to students' real life, work and learning The next section will mention the difficulties which students often face when learning this skill and some ways to overcome their troubles by themselves, as well as cover the studies of previous authors related to this topic The selection of method, and the collection of information and data will be discussed in section three Section four will mention the results obtained after analyzing and discussing The final chapter will give a conclusion with the recommendation for students the most valuable and essential process of studying Listening and Notetaking subject The research questions: What are the difficulties for sophomores and juniors in learning Listening and Notetaking skill? What should students to improve their weakness? notetaking, listening without being explained anything made they be confused It is worth noting that listening and notetaking with the large amount of information, the fast speed of the lesson, lecturers should provide the students the sample outlines so that they can refer to the most reasonable way to take note Besides, listening to boring and not interesting topics about academic such as politics, history, culture, etc or always listening to a certain topic makes students not motivated to learn Lecturers should change alternately different topics so as to create new feelings for students such as football, food or some interesting entertainment events Especially, in the case of listening and notetaking well, student should be encouraged by means of bonus one point in the midterm test or regular test is also a great motivation for them to study this subject well To be honestly, only listening in class is not enough, students need a lot of materials to improve this skill by themselves by their teachers of good materials, and sources Through the process of learning listening and notetaking skill, juniors hope that teachers will provide reliable self-learning resources, useful references for this subject Besides practice in the classroom in order to express students’ opinion through outlines that they had recorded, lecturers should let students have more tests in class so that they can reinforce what they have learned after each lesson 23 4.2 Interview The researcher interviewed Ms Ha – long experienced teacher of UP English Center - about some troubles related to listening and notetaking skill and the way she overcome these difficulties During the interview, Ms Ha shared that listening skill is a good way to understand, and remember information; however, just a few individuals can learn by heart everything they have heard, and note down what they want to focus on, for reviewing purpose or more discussing later Being an experienced teacher, she judged that when learning this skill, her students have big problems on account for many information In addition, they not have enough time to check, listen, note down, choose and arrange information in scientifically She also suggested how to learn listening and notetaking skill effectively and how to get students motivated to learn this subject Students should listen a few words first, and then 70% main idea, write down in textbook Listen to example which is far more effective than any theory Furthermore, teacher gives students more tests because they always listen and review before test, especially when the teacher say this content will appear in the test as an important question 24 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION This research attempts to investigate the difficulties when sophomores and juniors of Foreign Language Department at HUFLIT learn Listening and Notetaking skill, and the methods to improve this skill This chapter will deal with the summary, limitations of the findings, suggestions for further studies, and recommendations for students 5.1 Summary of the study In short, listening and notetaking skill is an indispensable tool in many aspects of learning, working and life Note-taking is a great skill to help students remember information during the listening process and use later It is important that students practice hard to use this skill as a tool to improve their English listening skill To support to study the difficulties as well as the solutions to learn listening and notetaking skill effectively, this research has been divided into five sections with different specific purposes 5.2 Limitation of the study Although the research has many strengths such as taking survey to collect sufficient information, interviewing with enthusiastic lecturer, this study is examined with just one method instead of two - both experimental and non – experimental method Moreover, the study has chosen few people to ask within the short period of time, the ability of researcher and other unexpected factors are also shortcomings of this research The researcher could not conduct other method like observation in the short time Besides, the researcher did not find out all aspects of problems that juniors and sophomores must go through to come up with specific solutions The researcher 25 only explores the basic and most important ones, so the research results are not generalized 5.3 Suggestion for further studies Because of the limitation, the researcher could not cover all theories related to Listening and Notetaking skill Furthermore, the researcher only focuses on the troubles when sophomores and juniors learn Listening and Notetaking skill to improve their weaknesses The further studies should choose much more participants randomly to receive the most exact results Survey combine with interview, observation, directly participate in the research process to bring more reliable results 5.4 Recommendation to improve Listening and Notetaking skill The researcher will provide both sophomores and juniors the most effective strategy in order to improve Listening and Notetaking skill They must try their best before listening, during listening and after listening to get good results Before listening and taking note, be prepared for everything, 5.4.1 Arrive on time and sit where lecturers will always see, preferably in front in order to get good take note, see and hear clearly Set up the notebook or textbook for taking note 5.4.2 Preview the material as well as discuss with classmate to understand the summary of the listening Think one minute about the materials, the purpose of the speakers before listening and taking note In addition, reinforce the vocabulary and grammar related to the topic 5.4.3 Review notes from previous lectures for reference, and have more experience the complete notes 26 5.4.4 Examine the structures of the lectures, sample outlines lecturers give to preview Connecting big ideas, small ideas, thesis with arguments by using symbols, numbers, Roman numerals, or even mind map and drawings 5.4.5 Find areas of interest topic If you are trying to improve listening and notetaking skill at home, choose topics according to their interest During listening and notetaking, keep calm and confident, 5.4.6 Concentrate and pay attention to the content, not the lecturer’s appearance or distracting habits When there are many new and difficult words, it is better to skip, not look around to prevent losing more important information during that time 5.4.7 Focus and put emotional concerns into the lecture You should put all emotions, thoughts and efforts into the lecture Since you are interested in the lesson, taking notes will lessen the burden 27 5.4.8 Notice to the stress and accents of speakers In the talks, many speakers often speak at different speeds along with emphasize on key words such as verbs or adverbs Students should pay attention to those words to record 5.4.9 Use abbreviations, symbols, and take note by students’ own words but not change the meaning of the words The first step in listening and notetaking is referring to the list of popular abbreviations to apply to quickly note like “def” for “definition”, “wth” for “with”, “b4” for “before”, “=” for “equal”, or create own words to use 5.4.10 Do not stop listening and taking note during discussion or be discouraged 5.4.11 Do not worry about the missing the part Just continue with the next section and forget about the missed one Leave space and pick up the material students missed later 5.4.12 Do not write down all the detail heard, concentrate on the main points and key information Take note selectively on keywords, main ideas, and write very short sentences Do not translate everything heard into Vietnamese You should not write technical and specialized technical words because these words will be recorded if any question relates to Additionally, take notes and organize them according to each type of lecture There are three basic types of the talks that students often encounter: conversation, lecture and process Here are some typical organizations: 28 5.4.12.1 Conversation between people One person presents the problems and then together giving the solution Finally they decide which option to choose 5.4.12.2 Lecture: Note the information provided at the beginning of the lecture because it may be related to the context of the lesson The last part is equally important as summarizing the main idea of the lesson again 29 5.4.12.3 Process: For process, draw a diagram rather than a complete description of the steps During the description process, the speaker can add additional information or another issue before returning to the main topic However the note takers must ensure the coherence of the process After listening and taking note, 5.4.13 Review the note soon After the lecture, in order to retain information discussed during lectures It is best to review the notes immediate Read through your notes, and make sure they are clear, legible, and logical Correct spelling errors and expand on abbreviations, tidy up handwriting Furthermore, fill in the missing words or information and add anything necessary from the lesson 30 5.4.14 To ensure students’ notes are accurate and detailed, please compare your notes with the notes of other students after the talks are over Ask the lecturer for better understanding if necessary 5.4.15 Practice regularly: practice through books, newspapers, movies, or listening materials that develop Listening skill to help you improve your listening and notetaking skill 31 REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Azmi, B M., Celik, B., Yidliz, N., & Tugrul, M C (2014) Listening Comprehension Difficulties Encountered by Students in Second language Learning Class Journal of Educational and Instructional Studies in the World, 4(4), 1-6 Baker, L., & Lombardi, B R (1985) Students’ lecture notes and their relation to test performance Teaching of Psychology, 12, 28-32 doi: 10.1207/s15328023top1201_9 Becton Loveless (2019), Improving Your Note Taking Education corner Retrieved from https://www.educationcorner.com/note-taking.html Eggen, P., & Kauchak, D (2013) Educational psychology: Windows on classrooms (9th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Ferris, D & Tagg, T (1996) Academic listening/speaking tasks for ESL students: Problems, suggestions, and implications TESOL Quarterly, 30, 297-320 Flowerdew, J and Miller, L (1996) Student perceptions, problems and strategies in second language lecture comprehension RELC Journal 23 (2), 60–80 Goh, C (1999) Teaching Listening in the Language Classroom Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre Hamid Reza Haghverdi, Reza Biria, and Lotfollah Karimi (2010) Note-taking Strategies and Academic Achievement, 80 Hamouda, A (2013) An Investigation of Listening Comprehension Problems Encountered by Saudi Students in the EL Listening Classroom International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 2(2), 113-15 10 Inga Dagilienė (2012) Translation as a Learning Method in English Language Teaching STUDIES ABOUT LANGUAGES, 21, 124-125 http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.21.1469 32 11 Konrad, M., Joseph, L M., Eveleigh, E (2009) A meta-analytic review of guided notes Education and Treatment of Children, 32(3), 421-444 Retrieved from 38 http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.ndsu.edu/ehost/detail?vid=6&hid=11 1&sid=3f80 adc6-3cf7-4438-b978-d94561fff8cb%40sessionmgr104 12 Oxford, R L , (1990) Language Learning Strategies What Every Teacher should know Boston: Heinle and 323Heinle 13 Piolat, A., Olive, T., & Kellogg, R T (2004) Cognitive effort during note taking Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 291-312 doi: 10.1002/acp.1086 14 Pourhosein, G A., & Ahmadi, M R (2011) A Study of Factors Affecting EFL Learners’ English Listening Comprehension and the Strategies for Improvement Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2(5), 977-988 15 Rost, M (2001) Listening In R Carter, & D Nunan (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (pp 7-13) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667206.002 16 Wilkins, D (1972) Linguistics in language teaching London: Arnold 33 APPENDIX A: THE QUESTIONNAIRE I Sophomore In your opinion, why should we study Listening and notetaking skill at university? ❏ Useful for other subjects ❏ Significant for future jobs ❏ Reinforce listening skill and train memorizing ❏ None of them ❏ All of them As a starter, you find it difficult to study this subject? ❏ Yes ❏ No What are the difficulties you often face when learning Listening and notetaking skill? ❏ Short of vocabulary ❏ Weak at listening skills ❏ Not mastering abbreviations and symbols ❏ Unable to remember ideas and details in long talks ❏ Impossible to pick up key information from the talk ❏ Unfamiliar with organizing ideas ❏ None of them ❏ All of them How you overcome your weaknesses? ❏ Learn the vocabulary and read information related to the topics beforehand ❏ Memorize the popular abbreviations and symbols ❏ Preview the new lesson and review old lesson at home ❏ Others 34 What you want from your teacher? ❏ Help improve listening skill ❏ Guide the simple but most effective way to note quickly ❏ Offer outlines to guide while note taking ❏ Others II Junior Do you find it difficult to study Listening and notetaking skill? ❏ Yes ❏ No What are the difficulties you often face when learning Listening and notetaking skill? ❏ Longer and faster lectures, therefore not having enough to take notes ❏ Unfamiliar accents, therefore difficult to master the details ❏ New and difficult words, therefore having problems understanding ❏ Others Are you satisfied with teacher’s teaching method of Listening and notetaking skill at Huflit? If “yes”, please skip this question If “no”, please choose the reason ❏ Let students listen immediately without preparation and explanation ❏ Do not provide necessary materials ❏ Do not give inspiring students when studying ❏ Others What you want from your teacher? ❏ Give tests frequently ❏ Guide for self-study 35 ❏ Practice amore in class ❏ Others What solutions you think are effective to enhance your note taking skill? ❏ Learn the vocabulary and read information related to the topics beforehand ❏ Practice listening to long talks ❏ Memorize the popular abbreviations and symbols ❏ Study rules to create own abbreviations and symbols ❏ Preview the new lesson and review old lesson at home ❏ Distinguish different types of talks to decide the suitable organizations 36 APPENDIX B: INTERVIEW Do you think that Listening and Notetaking is an important skill at university and at work? When starting to learn this skill, did you have any difficulty or problem? As an English teacher with a long term experience, could you share some effective methods to improve this skill? How did you give motivation for students to learn this skill? 37