A study on difficulties and solutions to improve ielts listening skill for the third year english major students at hung yen university of technology and education

Trang 1 FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES --- GRADUATION PAPER FIELD: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS A STUDY ON DIFFICULTIS AND SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE IELTS LISTENING SKILL FOR THE THIRD- YEAR ENGLISH MA

HUNG YEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES - GRADUATION PAPER FIELD: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS A STUDY ON DIFFICULTIS AND SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE IELTS LISTENING SKILL FOR THE THIRD- YEAR ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT HUNG YEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGYAND EDUCATION (NGHIÊN CỨU NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN VÀ GIẢI PHÁP NHẰM CẢI THIỆN KỸ NĂNG NGHE IELTS CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ BA CHUYÊN NGÀNH NGÔN NGỮ ANH TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM KỸ THUẬT HƯNG YÊN) Supervisor: Hoang Thi Ngoc Lan, MA Student: Hoang Lan Student number: 11317031 Hung Yen – 2021 HUNG YEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES - GRADUATION PAPER FIELD: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS A STUDY ON DIFFICULTIS AND SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE IELTS LISTENING SKILL FOR THE THIRD- YEAR ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT HUNG YEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION (NGHIÊN CỨU NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN VÀ GIẢI PHÁP NHẰM CẢI THIỆN KỸ NĂNG NGHE IELTS CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ BA CHUYÊN NGÀNH NGÔN NGỮ ANH TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM KỸ THUẬT HƯNG YÊN) Student: Hoang Lan Student number: 11317031 Supervisor: Hoang Thi Ngoc Lan, MA Hung Yen – 2021 i DECLARATION I certify that the thesis entitled “A study on difficulties and solutions to improve IELTS listening skill for the third-year English major students at Hung Yen University of Technology and Education” is the result of my own research and the substance of this thesis has not been submitted for a degree to any other university or institution Hung Yen, June 2020 Signature Hoang Lan ii ABSTRACT Listening is considered to a very essential skill as well as difficult skill in learning English language In addition, IELTS listening skill is one of the difficult parts in listening Most of students claimed that IELTS listening is difficult and they always get low marks Realizing the problems from learning experiences and finding the techniques to deal with these problems, the author would like to a research titled “A study on difficulties and solution to improve IELTS listening skill for the third-year English major students at Hung Yen University of technology and Education” The thesis will study the problems in IELTS listening and find out the solutions for students in learning IELTS listening skill So the data collection instrument included survey questionnaires that were distributed to 45 third-year English major students in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at UTEHY, but only 40 of them took part in this survey And the interviews were conducted by students only The result of the research will point out the difficulties those listeners meet when they learn IELTS listening and more importantly, it helps the author work out the right solutions to the problems iii ACKNOWLEDMENTS During the process of doing this graduation paper, I have received many necessary assistances, precious ideas and timely encouragements from my teachers, family and friends First of all, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Mrs Hoang Thi Ngoc Lan, MA who has always been willing to give me the most valuable advices, experienced guidance and suggestions in order that I can complete this study successfully In addition, my sincere thanks are also sent to the teachers in the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Hung Yen University of Technology and Education, who helped me collect data to complete the study and gave me a great deal of helpful and valuable support In my study, it is inevitable that the ideas of many writers in the field are reflected and developed To all the authors of the publications in the list of references, I offer my sincere thanks Last but not least, I also would like to express my special thanks to the thirdyear students in the Faculty of Foreign iv TABLE CONTENTS DECLARATION i ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDMENTS iii TABLE CONTENTS iv LIST OF CHARTS AND TABLES vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS viii CHAPTER 1: INTROCUTION 1.1 Rationale of the study 1.2 Aims of the study 1.3 Research question 1.4 Scope of the study 1.5 Methods of the study 1.5.1 Survey questionnaire 1.5.2 Interview 1.6 Organization of the study CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 An overview of listening skill 2.1.1 Definitions of listening 2.1.2 Stages of listening 2.1.3 The importance of listening 2.2 An overview of IELTS listening 2.2.1 About IELTS listening module 2.2.2 Type of questions 2.2.3 Difficulties and techniques for each type of questions in IELTS listening skill 11 v 2.2.3.1 Multiple choices 11 2.2.3.2 Matching questions 11 2.2.3.3 Plan/map/diagram labeling 12 2.2.3.4 Form/note/table/flow-chart/summary completion 13 2.2.3.5 Short-answer questions 13 2.2.3.6 Sentence completion 14 2.3 Difficulties in IELTS listening 15 2.4 Techniques to improve IELTS listening skill 19 CHAPTER 3: THE STUDY 22 3.1 The participants 22 3.2 Methodology 22 3.2.1 Survey questionnaire 22 3.2.2 Interview 23 3.3 Data analysis 23 3.3.1 Analysis of the questionnaire 23 3.3.1.1 The current situation in learning IELTS listening of third-year English major students at UTEHY 23 3.3.1.2 Students’ difficulties in learning IELTS listening for the third- year English majors at UTEHY 25 3.3.1.3 Techniques used in IELTS listening for the third- year English majors at UTEHY 28 3.3.2 An analysis of interview questions 32 3.4 Main findings 34 3.4.1 The current situation of the third- year English major students towards learning IELTS listening at UTEHY 34 vi 3.4.2 The difficulties that the third- year English major students at UTEHY face when learning IELTS listening 34 3.4.3 Techniques should be used to improve IELTS listening skill listening for the third year English major students at UTEHY 35 3.5 Recommendations for improving IELTS listening skill 35 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION 38 4.1 Summary of the study 38 4.2 Limitations of the study 38 REFFERENCES 40 APPENNDICES I APPENNDIX 1: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR STUDENTS I APPENDIX 2: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR STUDENTS VI vii LIST OF CHARTS AND TABLES Chart 1: The importance of IELTS listening skill Chart 2: Students’ assessment on difficulty of IELTS listening Chart 3: Students' self- assessment of their IELTS listening skill Chart 4: Frequency of students’ difficulty in learning IELTS listening skill Chart 5: Percentage of students practice IELTS listening skill at home Chart 6: Time students spend on learning IELTS listening skill at home every day Table 1: The difficulties third-year English major students in IELTS listening Table 2: Student’s difficulties in certain IELTS listening tasks Table 3: Student’s opinions on skills and knowledge perform in an IELTS listening 10 Table 4: Students’ opinions about the usefulness of techniques to improve IELTS listening skill viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FFL: Faculty of Foreign Languages UTEHY: Hung Yen University of Technology and Education M.A: Master of art in teaching English as a foreign language K16: the third- year English major students at Faculty of Foreign Languages in Hung Yen University of Technology and Education 33 exercise form “No more than three words or a number” because these tasks above have the same request which is to fill in the blanks with words or numbers Question 3: What are your difficulties in learning IELTS listening? When five students were asked about their difficulties in learning IELTS listening all five said that the most difficult problem they always have in IELTS listening is a lack of vocabulary That is the reason why they cannot hear new words and leave some questions without answers: “I am weak in listening because if there is a new word I don’t understand then I miss many main points or miss many words” (Interviewee 3) The second difficulty is that they are unfamiliarity with the topic They stated that they couldn’t understand some listening materials because they did not know anything about the topic When the interview data was analyzed, it was found that this factor was actually related to the previous one, namely word knowledge (or vocabulary) As seen in the comments of Interviewee 4: “Sometimes there are dialogs about different topics such as the economy I don’t know many of the words related to the economy.” Question 4: What you often to improve your IELTS listening skill? According to the collected information from the interview, most of students said that they are building a strong vocabulary to improve their IELTS listening skill Besides, they suggest that they sometimes practice IELTS listening test at home to be familiar with the test format and they choose some English websites like VOA learning English or listen English news, English songs to improve their vocabularies and listening ability In addition, they often practice listen through English videos, daily speaking English conversations Question 5: How often you practice IELTS listening skill? Based on the information gathered from the responses of the interviewees Most students said that their IELTS listening practice frequency is very low They rarely practice their IELTS listening skill at home because they find IELTS listening very difficult They often get bored while studying it However, the second interviewee said "Whenever I am interested in studying, I will take time to practice IELTS listening" None of them regularly practicing IELTS listening skill at home every day 34 3.4 Main findings This chapter discusses the findings of the study in order to answer research questions which mentioned in introduction part 3.4.1 The current situation of the third- year English major students towards learning IELTS listening at UTEHY According to the surveys, most of third-year English major students at UTEHY believe that listening skill is very important None of them thought that learning listening is not very important and not important at all Besides, as can be seen from the chart 2, most students admitted that IELTS listening is a difficult skill, no one said that it is easy or very easy Moreover, the general level of students for their IELTS listening skill is normal, so it is very difficult for students to get a high score on the IELTS Listening test However, the percentage of people who have a very good level of IELTS listening is low, so they need to improve, study a lot to well in the IELTS listening test 3.4.2 The difficulties that the third- year English major students at UTEHY face when learning IELTS listening According to the collected data and analysis, it is easy to recognize that the third-year English major students always have many problems with IELTS listening However, most of students claimed that students often get big problems that are text difficulties, unfamiliar vocabulary, and length and speed of listening, so they need to practice regularly They need to be familiar with topics that are often talked about in the IELTS listening test such as economics, news, education and training situations, social or life situations Besides, students usually have difficulties with plan/map/diagram labeling, multiple choices, and matching questions Some common difficulties in form/note/table/flowchart/summary completion of IELTS listening skill are: Answer more than the allowed number of words, spelling mistakes or not using the correct form of words Additionally, they have difficulties in multiple choice questions as: There's a lot of information in the question choices, some of the choices might be similar Moreover, students also often have difficulties with matching questions if you don't understand the different symbols and arrows in the flow chart They fill in more than the required number of words They not know the words that describe the objects, processes, 35 and cycles that appear in the problem Those are the reasons why they often get low mark on the IELTS listening test On the other hand, English majors at UTEHY are very lazy in practice IELTS listening tests at home 4.3 Techniques should be used to improve IELTS listening skill listening for the third year English major students at UTEHY After collecting and analyzing data from questionnaires and interviews, it can be seen clearly that all of students, they should get in the habit of practicing listening every day at home Students should spend time practicing IELTS listening every day for at least 30 minutes to hour in their free time to improve their listening skill They can listen actively or passively, as long as you practice listening daily, so it will create a good habit, helping you to improve your IELTS listening skill better In addition, students agreed that knowledge of vocabulary, using listening strategies such as predicting and identifying keywords and using note-taking skill are the most important knowledge to perform well in IELTS listening In particular, they need to build a strong vocabulary, familiarize themselves with common topics in the listening lesson, learn vocabulary by topic, which will help them remember better In addition, they need active listening, listen anytime, anywhere that they can listen It will help you always have the opportunity to listen and it will create good habits, help their listening skill to be improved more Moreover, during listening, students need to identify keywords, using note-taking skill and listening for targeted information so that when listening, you can clearly identify the information you need to find These are the top solutions agreed by all students 3.5 Recommendations for improving IELTS listening skill According to the information from the consultation with third year English majors at FFL, UTEHY, a large number of students say that they have to face with many problems when learning IELTS listening skill This may be caused by their limited vocabulary, misunderstanding about the text topic and speaking too fast and so on All of these reasons may be caused students have no habit in listening They are not practice listening and learn IELTS listening by themselves, but they only practice when they have teachers’ requirement Below are some suggestion techniques for improving IELTS listening skill: Building a strong vocabulary 36 Lacking of vocabulary is the biggest problems that students often have when they learn listening in general and IELTS listening in particular Therefore, they need to build a strong vocabulary by easy ways Improve vocabulary by selecting vocabulary groups to learn, you can learn to listen to English songs, through films with English subtitles or read newspapers from sites like BBC, CNN, you should use one Booklet to record words, phrases and review on a regular basis Students should be familiar with the topic and the test format As previously stated, the difficulty of unfamiliarity with the topic is actually related to the difficulty of word knowledge (or vocabulary) because in fact, there are a lot of different topics in IELTS listening, each topic has its own vocabulary and students not know all the new words of a topic, even there are some topics that they not know anything or they know only some words Therefore, students need to know the topics that the IELTS listening test usually talks about Learners should learn vocabulary by topic, so it will be easier to remember and understand vocabulary In addition, you need to know the format of the IELTS listening test so that you can understand and help better Active Listening Students should spend much more time on practicing They should practice listening to a variety of topics in order to get familiar with them Practicing everyday will be a good way for being familiar with topic and the test formats Learners should practice listening regularly and learn the right pronunciation Let’s try to spend more than hours a day to practicing listening at home Use standard phonetic dictionaries such as Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman Advanced American Dictionary and learn how to emphasize important words in each sentence Knowing the pronunciation will help you hear a lot better Hence, the background knowledge will be enriched as well as skill Students also should often practice listening to English news from websites such as BBC, VOA…There are many short news with different topics in many fields in life These websites also support you exercises to practice listening Listening to English news will help students improve their listening ability by listening to news from different native speakers, enrich your vocabulary of various topics and familiarize you with many topics that you will have when you IELTS listening test 37 Using note-taking skill You see, if we know how to note-taking in IELTS Listening, it will help us get the correct information to look for and avoid adding extraneous information, causing noise when we look back Here are some techniques to help you apply this method more effectively: To begin, not use sporadic vocabulary; instead, summarize the meaning of the sentence heard The summary of this idea can be in Vietnamese or English The reason is to avoid the candidate not understanding the whole sentence of the speaker Besides, only note-taking of what’s asked In order to avoid writing redundant and untimely information, there is more time to prepare for the next sentence To this, you need to skim the question Finally, after taking notes, compare what you have recorded with the answers At this step, choose the answer that is closest to the ideas we have written Using shorthand for speedy writing In the IELTS listening test, there are lessons that will have a fast speaking speed, which is a difficult problem for learners, so we need to apply good methods to help us the listening test effectively Students need to write down the answer faster, write only the first two or three letters of the answer you hear This shorthand approach is effective in fill-inthe-blank listening because some answers can appear in quick succession, especially at the beginning of a fill-in-the-blank passage You can complete the words in a short amount of time after the passage ends You are more likely to remember the meanings of the letters because they are the first letter of the word you just heard in the context With word answers, it will help you almost always be able to recall words 38 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION This chapter will deal with a summary of the major findings, limitations of the study and some suggestions for further studies 4.1 Summary of the study The main purpose of this study are to point out the importance difficulties which third-year English majors at UTEHY face when learning IELTS listening skill Besides, give the most effective techniques for them to improve their IELTS listening skill To achieve this aim, the study is divided into four chapters with separate purposes The first chapter is an introduction, including the rationale, purpose, research questions, scope, and research methods The second chapter presents an overview of the literature such as the theoretical basis, definitions, stages, importance, types, difficulties and techniques The next chapter of research presents research methodology, data analysis, discussion and techniques from questionnaires and interviews This chapter also finds answers to three research questions The final chapter contains a summary, limitations, and suggestions for further study After all the data collected from the two research instruments (survey questionnaire and interview) were analyzed, the author found some key findings that shed light on the research questions revealed below here: Research has been completed to help third-year English majors at UTEHY avoid the difficulties they may face in learning to listen to IELTS The findings of the study also revealed that: According to the surveys, most of third-year English major students at UTEHY that listening skill is very important but difficult skill Students' general level of IELTS listening skill is normal, so they have a lot of difficulties learning IELTS Most of students claimed that students often get big problems that are text difficulties, unfamiliar vocabulary, and length and speed of listening Besides, Students also have some techniques for studying, but the frequency is still limited and the techniques still are not enough From the reasons above, the researcher also found some recommendation techniques for improving IELTS listening skill, including building a strong vocabulary, practicing more and more IELTS listening tests, using listening strategies such as predicting and identifying keywords and so on 39 4.2 Limitations of the study In the process of conducting the study, the study has certain strong points such as collection methods, namely interviews, survey questionnaires for students Because of limited time and unsustainable knowledge of the author, some limitations are unavoidable First of all, due to the limitation of time, experience to some extent, the study only concentrates on the students’ perceptions of activities in terms of their usefulness of those activities The study does not touch upon the students’ evaluation of the effectiveness of those activities thoroughly Secondly, due to the limitations of scope of the study and the sampling population, questionnaires for students were delivered to 45 students of K16 but only 40 of them participated in the research which accounts for a small number of students at FFL, UTEHY Therefore, the result of the study cannot be generalized In spite of the mentioned limitations, the researcher hopes that this exploratory research will contribute to the better situation of learning listening skill at FFL, UTEHY 4.3 Suggestions for the study The following suggestions should be taken into considerations for further research: - This study only focus on the students’ activities in terms of their usefulness in IELTS listening lessons and tests, further studies can concentrate on specking, reading and writing lessons - Bridging the gap between learner’s listening needs and expectations is worth taking into account 40 REFFERENCES Adams and Austen Press 101 Helpful Hints for IELTS – Academic Module ‘International Edition, (2000), Sydney, Australia Anderson, Anne & Tony Lynch (1988) Listening Oxford: Oxford University Press Bejar, l.l (1985) Test speededness under number-right scoring: An analysis of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (Report No RR-85-11) Princeton, NJ: Education Testing Service Bentley & Bacon (1996), Listening in Everyday Life, A Personal and Professional Approach Brown, G (1992), Listening to Spoken English, London; Longman Press Buck, G (1990) Assessing Listening Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Dunkel, P (1991b) Listening in the Native and Second/ Foreign Language: Toward an integration of Research and Practice TESOL Quarterly Hasan, A (2000), Learners’’ perceptions of listening comprehension problems: Language, Culture & Curriculum; 13, 137-153 Laique Lodhi, Listening tips for IELTS, video 10 McCarthy, (1991), Discourse analysis for language teachers, Cambridge University Press 11 Muhammad Naeem Buttel at 2010 Listening comprehension Problems among the student: A Case Study of Three Govt Boy’s Higher Secondary Schools 12 Rost, M (1994) Listening London: Longman 13 Rost, M 2002 Teaching and Researching Listening London: Longman 14 Scott Shelton (2008), Teaching Listening to Advanced Learners: Problems and Solutions, Developing teachers.com 41 15 Thomlison, T Dean "Relational listening: theoretical and practical considerations." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the 5th International Listening Association, 1984 30pp 16 Underwood, M (1989) Teaching Listening New York: Long man 17 Ur, P (1984), Teaching Listening comprehension, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 18 Van Duzer, C 1997, Improving ESL Learners’ Listening Skill At Workplace & Beyond 19 WEBSITES: - https://patadovietnam.edu.vn/blog/ielts-listening/ielts-listening-shortanswer/ - https://www.ielts-simon.com/ielts-help-and-english-pr/2019/08/ieltslistening-multiple-choice-difficulties.html - https://wiseenglish.edu.vn/ielts-listening/dang-de-map-plan-diagramlabelling-hay-gap/ - https://wiseenglish.edu.vn/ielts-listening/form-note-table-completion-eltslistening/ - https://wiseenglish.edu.vn/ielts-listening/matching-questions-listening/ I APPENNDICES APPENNDIX 1: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR STUDENTS SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR STUDENTS Hello! My full name is Hoang Lan, I am from class TAK15.1, Faculty of Foreign Language at Hung Yen University Technology and Education This survey questionnaire is designed for my study entitled “A study on difficulties and solutions to improve IELTS listening skill for the third-year English major students at Hung Yen University of Technology and Education” Your support in completing this survey will be appreciated Please select the answer by circling the first letter of each sentence and tick the checklist items or express your ideas in the blanks All the information provided by you is for learning purposes only and you can be confident that your identity will not be disclosed in any discussion of data Your answer will help me a lot in the research process Thank you for your cooperation! Please tick ( ) for each response that you choose I General information Your gender:  Male  Female Your age: ………………………………… How long have you been learning English? …………………………… II The survey questionnaire Part 1: The current situation of learning IELTS listening skill What you think of the importance of IELTS listening skill?  Very important  Important  Not very important  Not important  Normal What you think of IELTS listening skill?  Very difficult  Difficult  Normal II  Easy  Very easy How would you rate your IELTS listening skill?  Very good  Not good  Good  Normal Part 2: The difficulties of learning IELTS listening skill for the third- year English majors at UTEHY 1.How often you have difficulties in learning IELTS listening skill?  Always  Usually  Rarely  Never  Sometimes What are the difficulties you face in IELTS listening? Strongly Difficulties in IELTS Listening Text difficulties Question difficulties Time pressure Accent Unfamiliar Vocabulary Losing your focus while Listening Length and Speed of Listening Making Spelling Mistakes Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree III Making Grammatical Errors Others…… How often you have these difficulties in IELTS listening task? Type of listening task Always Usually Often Sometimes Rarely Multiple choices Matching questions Plan/map/diagram labeling Form/note/table/flow chart/summary completion Short-answer questions Sentence completion Others… Part 3: Techniques for improving IELTS listening for the third- year English majors at UTEHY Do you practice IELTS listening at home ?  Yes  No How much time you spend on learning IELTS listening skill at home every day?  More than hour  30 minutes - hour  Less than 30 minutes  Never IV What skills and knowledge are the most important to perform well in an IELTS listening? Skills/knowledge Strongly Agree Knowledge of vocabulary Familiarity with the test format Using listening strategies such as predicting and identifying keywords Using note-taking skill Good pronunciation to catch words Others… Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree V What you think about the usefulness of the following IELTS listening techniques? Techniques Very Useful Normal useful Building a strong vocabulary Predicting information Identifying keywords Listening for targeted information Active Listening Using shorthand for speedy writing Using note-taking skill Instructions reading Others… Thank you for your kind cooperation! Not useful at all VI APPENDIX 2: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR STUDENTS How would you rate your IELTS listening skill? What type of IELTS listening questions are the most difficult? What are your difficulties in learning IELTS listening? What you often to improve your IELTS listening skill? How often you practice IELTS listening skill? Thank you for your kind cooperation!