A STUDY ON THE APPICATION OF TOP-DOWN TECHNIQUES IN

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ĐÀO THỊ HỒNG YẾN A STUDY ON THE APPICATION OF TOP-DOWN TECHNIQUES IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS TO ENGLISH NON-MAJOR 10 TH GRADE STUDENTS AT TAM DUONG HIGH SCHOOL (NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ VIỆC SỬ DỤNG PHƯƠNG PHÁP “TOP-DOWN” TRONG GIẢNG DẠY KỸ NĂNG NGHE CHO HỌC SINH KHÔNG CHUYÊN TIẾNG ANH LỚP 10 TẠI TRƯỜNG THPT TAM DƯƠNG) M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 Hanoi, 2014 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ĐÀO THỊ HỒNG YẾN A STUDY ON THE APPICATION OF TOP-DOWN TECHNIQUES IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS TO ENGLISH NON-MAJOR 10 TH GRADE STUDENTS AT TAM DUONG HIGH SCHOOL (NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ VIỆC SỬ DỤNG PHƯƠNG PHÁP “TOP-DOWN” TRONG GIẢNG DẠY KỸ NĂNG NGHE CHO HỌC SINH KHÔNG CHUYÊN TIẾNG ANH LỚP 10 TẠI TRƯỜNG THPT TAM DƯƠNG) M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111 Supervisor: Ph.D. Ngô Hữu Hoàng Hanoi, 2014 i DECLARATION I hereby, certify the thesis entitled “A study on the application of top-down techniques in teaching listening skills to English non-major 10 th grade students at Tam Duong high school” is the result of my own research for the Minor Degree of Master of Arts at University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. The thesis has not been submitted for any degree at any other universities or institutions. I agree that the origin of my paper deposited in the library can be accessible for the purposes of study and research. Hanoi, 2014 Đào Thị Hồng Yến ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest thanks to Mr. Ngô Hữu Hoàng for his assistance, encouragement as well as his guidance he gave me while I was doing my research. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all my lecturers at the Department of Post-graduate Studies, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi whose support and considerations have enabled me to pursue the course. I would also like to express my thanks to the teachers of English at Tam Duong high school who helped me in providing the materials, giving me encouragement and making constructive comments. I am also thankful to my English non-major 10 th grade students for their whole-heated participation in the study. Last but not least, I owe my sincere thanks to family who have always inspired and encouraged me to complete this study. iii ABSTRACT The research was implemented to investigate the effect of top-down techniques in teaching and learning to the English non-major 10 th grade students of Tam Duong high school. In this research the investigator attempted to apply top-down techniques in teaching listening to improve the 10 th grade students‟ listening skills. Two tests and a questionnaire survey were used as the powerful instruments to collect data. After that the data was analyzed and contrasted to check how top-down techniques can help to enhance students‟ listening skills. At the end of the research, the investigator proposed some suggestions to improve the learning and teaching listening skill at Tam Duong iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, TABLES AND CHARTS ABBREVIATIONS: % Percentage TABLES : Table 1.1: Some kinds of top-down exercises for beginners Table 1.2: Descriptive statistics for the pre-test Table 1.3: Procedures of the study Table 1.4: Paired Samples Statistics Table 1.5: Paired Samples Test Table 1.6: Activities motivated students in the pre-listening stage Table 1.7: Activities attracted students in while-listening stage Table 1.8: Useful and effective activities to students after listening CHARTS: Chart 1.1: The students‟ opinion about listening tasks Chart 1.2: The students‟ opinion about learning listening with top-down techniques Chart 1.3: The students‟ opinion about their listening skill after term learning with top- down techniques v TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION …………………………………………………………………i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………… …ii ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………… iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, TABLES AND CHARTS…………………… iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ……………………………………………………… v PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 1. Rationale 1 2. Aims of the study 2 3. Scope of the study 3 4. Significant……………………………………………………………… 3 5. Design of the study 4 PART B: DEVELOPMENT 6 CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 6 1.1. Theory on listening 6 1.1.1. Definitions of listening 6 1.1.2. Listening process………………………….…………………………7 1.2. Teaching listening skills 7 1.2.1. Stages of a listening lesson 8 1.2.1.1. Pre-listening 8 1.2.1.2. While-listening 9 1.2.1.3. Post-listening 10 1.2.2. Top-down process……………………….…………………………12 1.3. Factors that make listening difficult in learning a foreign language 14 1.4. Summary 16 CHAPTER II: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 18 2.1. Research approaches 18 2.2. Research setting 19 vi 2.3. Participants…………………………………………………… ………20 2.4. Research types 20 CHAPTER III: THE STUDY………………………………………………… 21 3.1. Study stages ……… … 21 3.1.1. Finding out a problem ………………………………………… 21 3.1.2. Setting a hypothesis…………………………………………… 21 3.1.3. Forming a pilot course………………………………………… 22 3.2. Students‟ perceptions after taking a pilot course…… ………….…….29 3.3. Discussions 35 3.3.1. For students 35 3.3.2. For teacher 36 3.3.3. Weakness 36 3.4. Summary 36 PART C: CONCLUSION 38 1. Conclusions 38 2. Pedagogical Implications………………………………………………….39 3. Limitations……………………………………………………………… 42 4. Suggestions for further study 43 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………….44 APPENDIX 1…………………………………………………………………… I APPENDIX 2………….……………………………………………………… III APPENDIX 3………….……………………………………………………… VI 1 PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Being the international language, not only is English a foreign language but it is also considered a means to communicate and promote mutual understanding and cooperation between people all over the world. With the rapid use in the fields of science, technology, culture, education, economy and so on, the need of teaching and learning becomes one of the most significant problems in each nation including Viet Nam. Recently, the number of people who would like to learn and become a master in English in their fields become more and more increasing, especially when Viet Nam adopted the policies to integrate with other countries all over the world, teaching and learning English is not only a personal concern, but it also becomes one of the noticeable nation‟s problems. Moreover, English also affirms its important role by becoming a compulsory subject at high school and universities. Thus, the teaching and learning English is one of the most crucial issues for not only students and teacher but also our society. However, the teaching and learning English is seriously influenced by the traditional methods such as Grammar Translation Method, or Audio-lingual Method and so on which mainly focus on the grammar, vocabulary and structures; and listening and speaking skills „seem to be forgotten‟ in high school. The researcher has worked as an English teacher in Tam Duong high school since 2011. With her experience in teaching English at high school, she realized some reasons which made her have a strong motivation to do this study. Although in class, students are taught and follow the English course book offered by the Ministry of Education and Training Department, in which each unit is designed to be composed of five parts - reading, listening, speaking, writing and language focus; assessment and testing only aim at students‟ knowledge of English grammar along with reading or writing. Therefore, they have encountered many difficulties in learning listening and speaking English. 2 In addition, when students studied at primary school or secondary school, teaching listening seems to be ignored. They even don‟t have enough essential equipment for their listening lessons as qualitative records or cassettes, stereos. Instead of using stereo, their teacher often read tape script for them in listening lesson so that when attending class in high school, they feel really difficult to listen to the native speaker‟s voice and listening tape script. Most of the time, the teacher used her native language to develop the class and the listening input in the second language was only evident when reading aloud sentences or phrases written on the board. It showed that learners had few opportunities to listen to the target language. One more reason is that the limited time in learning and teaching English in class. According to estimating, students are learnt one listening period (45 minutes) per week, and most of them don‟t spend their time to practice English at home. Because of these above reasons, students have little or even no motivation and interest in learning English, especially listening. According to Nunan (1998), he believes that listening is the basic skill in language learning. Without listening skill, learners will never learn to communicate effectively; in fact, over 50% of the time that students spends functioning in a foreign language will be devoted to listening. For all the reasons above, the researcher decided to do a study on the application of top-down techniques to help improve listening skills of her students in English non major 10 th grade students. 2. Aim of the study The study aims at finding the most suitable ways to improve the students‟ listening competence at Tam Duong high school. To reach this aim, the students‟ difficulties when they listen and do English tasks will be explored first, and then top-down techniques will be applied to teach listening skills for students by teacher to find out that if it is the most suitable way for enhancing students‟ ability in learning listening. Teacher will investigate the effects of using top-down techniques in teaching listening when she applies them in her listening lessons. [...]... schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of a text Below are some kinds of top-down exercises for beginners (table 1.1) 13 Goal Example Discriminate emotional - reactions Listen to statement about a vacation and decide whether or not the speaker enjoyed the vacation Get the gist or main idea - of a passage Listen to a dialogue and decide what type of weather...Simultaneously, the study also aims at studying the learner‟s perception regarding listening activities using top-down listening techniques The final aims is formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of the listening skill at Tam Duong high school The focus of the paper was directed toward high school students because the problems in listening have... teachers could take control of their own professional destinies Carr and Kemmis (1986), two of the leading advocates of educational action research, wrote that: “Action research is simply a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of those practices and the situations in which the practices are... comprehension of meaning This is a somewhat mechanistic or "data-given" (Brown, 1994) view of processing and has been the focus in some styles of teaching Top-down process may be described as holistic or "conceptual driven" in that they focus on the overall meaning of the passage and the application of schemata Schemata are mental frameworks based on past experiences which can be applied to help us interpret... - Chapter II: “Methodology”, indicates the setting, the participants, the methods 4 - Chapter III: The study , shows the way to collect data, the application of topdown techniques on teaching and learning listening skill at Tam Duong high school, the findings and some discussions Part C: Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, giving the implications of the study in which suggestions for... problem if learners lack concentration in listening work This can be caused by a number of things such as: the bad quality of machines, the poor quality of listening materials Other reason for loss of concentration is that the topic is not interesting or not familiar and learners find it difficult to understand Sometimes, listeners easily lose their concentration, as they feel tired of making a great effort... utterance they hear in the recording, not students‟ understanding of the conversation or talk In fact the learners are not provided enough information about what they are going to hear before the tape plays and they cope with a wide range of problems while they are listening and the result is that they cannot get any listening experience from the teacher For this perception, teaching listening, in the. .. emphasizes the active interpretation and integration of listeners on incoming information According to Littlewood (1981), listening demands active involvement from the hearer In order to construct the message that the speaker intends , the hearer must actively contribute knowledge from both linguistic and nonlinguistic sources Only by applying the knowledge of the language , can the hearer divide the. .. observation many of them have associated listening lessons with pain and boredom and claim that they benefit very little from them The teaching staff consists of 9 teachers of English, most of them graduated from University of Language and International Studies, Viet Nam National University, Ha Noi Their age varies from 25 to 36 The researcher is a teacher of English at this high school; she is 25 years... study was conducted with the aims of finding the students‟ perceptions in terms of using top-down techniques in listening activities for English non-major 10th grade students and the impact of this application in teaching listening in class To achieve the research goal, quantitative was applied The researcher would collect quantitative data by using the results of the questionnaires, pretest and posttest . may be described as holistic or "conceptual driven" in that they focus on the overall meaning of the passage and the application of schemata. Schemata are mental frameworks based on. listening activities using top-down listening techniques. The final aims is formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of the listening. Moreover, ineffective listeners are at a disadvantage because they fail to elaborate on what they hear; they are not able to make the connections between what they hear and their own „personal experiences‟.