A study on the appication of top down techniques in teaching listening skills to english non major 10th grade students at tam duong high school

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 10TH 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 10TH 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 Ngơ Hữu Hồng Hanoi, 2014 DECLARATION I hereby, certify the thesis entitled “A study on the application of top-down techniques in teaching listening skills to English non-major 10th 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 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest thanks to Mr Ngơ Hữu Hồng 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 10th 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 ii ABSTRACT The research was implemented to investigate the effect of top-down techniques in teaching and learning to the English non-major 10th grade students of Tam Duong high school In this research the investigator attempted to apply top-down techniques in teaching listening to improve the 10th 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 iii 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 topdown techniques iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION …………………………………………………………………i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………… …ii ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………… iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, TABLES AND CHARTS…………………… iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ……………………………………………………… v PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale Aims of the study Scope of the study Significant……………………………………………………………… .3 Design of the study PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Theory on listening 1.1.1 Definitions of listening .6 1.1.2 Listening process………………………….…………………………7 1.2 Teaching listening skills 1.2.1 Stages of a listening lesson 1.2.1.1 Pre-listening .8 1.2.1.2 While-listening 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 v 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 Conclusions 38 Pedagogical Implications………………………………………………….39 Limitations……………………………………………………………… 42 Suggestions for further study .43 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………….44 APPENDIX 1…………………………………………………………………… I APPENDIX 2………….……………………………………………………… III APPENDIX 3………….……………………………………………………… VI vi PART A: INTRODUCTION 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 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 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 a study on the application of top-down techniques to help improve listening skills of her students in English non major 10th grade students 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 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 Another important function of pre-listening is to give full play to learners‟ initiatives by activating their background knowledge Learners are not passive in their listening, rather, they are active “mental builders”, always ready to draw inferences and make predictions with the help of their “internal resources” (Anderson & Lynch, 1988) Teachers can divide learners into groups to discuss and predict what they are going to listen to with certain clues In doing so, learners can be motivated and activated to take part in the classroom activities and consequently can stand more chance of becoming active and successful listeners 2.3.2 While-listening While-listening should be a stage at which listening is accompanied by carefully designed activities and experience the pleasure of success Task-based activities are encouraged Learners are required to finish some tasks with the information they have extracted from the text Tasks can be labeling, selecting, form-filling or completing a grid Students are thus expressing agreement and disagreement, taking notes, making a picture or a diagram according to instructions Compared with traditional multiple choice questions, task-based exercises can encourage students to use different kinds of listening skills and strategies to achieve understanding in an active way Task-based activities of this kind reflect much more closely the type of response that might be given to a listening experience in real life They also provide a more reliable way of checking understanding and the task of filling forms, labeling diagrams on making choices oblige every learner to try to make something of what they are hearing Afterwards teachers should provide necessary clues such as contextual information of the speakers of the relationship among speakers, etc to help learners to cope with their problems they come across in the process of listening While-listening is not only a stage to encourage listeners to demonstrate their comprehension and to make their problems plain to the teacher rather than hide them, but 41 also a stage for teachers to teach and help learners build up their listening skills and strategies so as to increase listeners‟ chances of success in listening tasks 2.3.3 Post-listening Post-listening is a part that is often neglected by many teachers Actually, there are a lot of things to after listening Activities such as problem solving, summarizing, group discussion and writing as follow-up are necessary Instead of spending time examining the grammar of the listening text, we take post-listening as a means of reinforcing recently learned material If necessary, the teacher can play the while text again and ask the students to compare their understanding of it in pairs or in groups, encourage them to disagree with each other, and increase their motivation for a second listening After playing the text for the second time, students can revise their views Instead of telling them who is right and who is wrong, the teacher can ask students to provide evidence to support their views In this way listening becomes a much more interactive activity We can also take the chance to let students practice speaking and writing First they can have discussion and presentation, which at the same time can serve as a pre-writing activity After sharing ideas, they can write something related to the passage At the end of the stage, teachers should make sure that necessary feedback to learners‟ performance is offered and received Learners‟ problems are summarized and tackled by reviewing the difficult parts, and newly taught skills and strategies will be reinforced by encouraging learners to apply them in their out-of-class listening practice Limitations Although much effort has been made, the limitations of this research are unavoidable Firstly, top-down techniques were only conducted in one group for only weeks which may not be enough for the investigator to have precise judgments Secondly, since the investigator‟s practical experiences in teaching listening and knowledge of this field are limited Thirdly, as listening is only one of the four basic aspects in teaching and learning English Therefore, the others also should be paid attention on 42 Suggestion for a further study There are some suggestions for a further study about the application of top-down techniques in teaching listening at high school First of all, before applying these techniques the researcher should conduct them on a large scale instead of implementing with only one class The large scale will help the researcher have reliable and accurate judgments Moreover, when the researcher investigates the research, should think about the two groups pre-posttest instead of only using one group The data which is collected is more reliable and effective To avoiding the limitation in teaching experience, the suggestions are likely to be subjective and incomplete, and thus leaving the issue open to debate to get more useful opinions from the other teachers as well as professors Their opinion will help find the effective and suitable solutions for the problems in the research Besides, it is important to conduct studies on other skills: reading, speaking, writing for better English teaching and learning at Tam Duong high school 43 REFERENCES Anderson, A & Lynch, T (1988), Listening Oxford University Press Bacon, S.M (1992), Phases of Listening to Authentic Input in Spanish: A Descriptive Study Foreign Language Annals, 25 (4), 317-334 Brown, G (1986), Investigating Listening Comprehension in Context Applied Linguistics Brown, H D (1994), Teaching by Principle An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy Prentice Hall Regents Brown, G and Yule, G (1983), Teaching the Spoken Language Cambridge University Press Buck, G (2001), Assessing Listening Cambridge Cambridge University Press Burns, A (1999), Collaborative Action Research for English Language Teachers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Carr, W and Kemmis, S (1986), Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research London: Falmer Crowl, T.K (1996), Fundamentals of Educational Research (2nd ed.) City of New York: Brown and Benchmark Publisher Davies, P & Pearse, E (2000), Success in English Teaching Oxford: Oxford University Press Gardner, R.C & Lambert W (1959), Motivational variables in second language acquisition Canadian Journal of Psychology Vol.13, pp.266–272 Harmer, J (1998), How to Teach English: An Introduction to the Practice of English Teaching Longman Press Hoang, N.H (2014), Some Utilization of Project-based Learning for Vietnamese University Students of English in the Course “Intercultural Communication” Macrothink Institute, International Journal of English Language Education, Vol.2, No Jack ,C R & Willy A R, (2002), Methodology in Language Teaching-An Anthology of Current Practice Cambridge University Press 44 Jeremy, H (2004), How to Teach English Longman Press Lewin, K (1946), Action Research and Minority Problems Journal of Social Issues, 2,34– 46 Littlewood, W (1981), Communicative Language Teaching Cambridge University Press Murphy, J.M (1991), Oral Communication in TESOL: Integrating Speaking, Listening, and Pronunciation TESOL Quartery, Vol 25, No Nunan, D (1989), Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom, New York: Cambridge University Press Nunan, D (1998) Second language teaching and learning Boston: Heinle & Heinle O‟Malley, J.M., Chamot, A.U & Kupper (1989), Listening Comprihension Stratergies in Second Language Acquisition Oxford University Press Penny Ur (1984), Teaching Listening Comprehension Cambridge University Press Peterson, P W (1991), A Synthesis of Methods for Interactive Listening Boston: Heinle and Heinle Richards, J.C (1983), Listening Comprehension: Approach, Design, Procedure TESOL Quarterly v17 n2 p219-40 Jun 1983 Rixon, S (1986), and Hubbard, R and others (1984), Developing listening skills, London: Macmillan Rost, M (1994), Academic Listening Cambridge University Press Thao, Duong Thi (2012), A Study on Using Bottom-up Techniques in Teaching Listening Skill to the First-Year Students at Thai Nguyen University of Technology University of Language and International Atudies, National University (unpublished document) Underwood, M (1989), Teaching Listening Longman Press 45 APPENDIX SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE The survey questionnaire is designed for my thesis “The Application of Top-down Techniques in Teaching Listening Skills for English non-major 10th grade students at Tam Duong high school” It is highly appreciated if you could spend your little time completing truthfully the question All the information provided by you is solely for the study purpose, and you can be confident that you will not be identified in any discussion of the data Please respond to each statement or question and complete all of them as frankly and accurately as you can Which activities did teacher before listening to the tape recording? a Learning new words b Introducing new grammar structures c Activate the back ground information by using word associate tasks or using pictures which relate to the topic d Brainstorming, discussing the topic in pairs or in groups e Answering relevant questions Which activities that teacher asked you to in the while-listening stage? a Use the key words to construct the schema of a discourse b Anticipate questions related to the topic or situation c Infer the setting for a text d Infer causes or effects e Infer the role of the participants and their goals f Infer unstated details of a situation After you listen, which activities is the most useful and effective to you? a Retelling the main ideas b Discussing in groups or pairs about a quotation or problem which relates to the topic c Playing roles based on listening content I d Summarize the text e Other idea (Please specify) How you think of the listening tasks that teacher has designed in class? a Interesting b Effective c Difficult d Boring e Stressful f Other idea (Please specify) How you think of the ways that teacher has organized listening activities in class? a Motivating students b Interesting c Tense/ stressful d Demotivating students e Boring f Other idea (please specify) Do you like learning listening with top-down process? Yes No 7.What you think of your listening skill after a term with top-down listening process? a A lot of improvement b Better c Worse d No improvement e Other idea (please specify) Thank for your cooperation! II APPENDIX III IV V Exercise 2: Listen and complete the gaps with a word from the box pilottt dentist tour guide nurse Speaker A works as a _ Speaker B works as a _ 10 Speaker C works as a _ 11 Speaker D works as a _ 12 Speaker E works as a _ shop assistant Exercise 2: Listen and decide whether the statements are True or False 13 Rolf will find a job immediately after he leaves college 14 Maria would like to travel a lot as part of her job 15 Maria is confident she will be able to work for an airline 16 Rolf thinks that Maria is be able to get the job because of her appearance 17 Rolf intends to a job concerned with his degree 18 Maria and Rolf agree it is important to have a good salary 19 Maria hopes to work for several different employers 20 Rolf‟s ambition is to manage his own company one day VI APPENDIX VII VIII IX Exercise 2: Listen and complete the gaps with a word from the box pilottt dentist tour guide nurse Speaker A works as a _ Speaker B works as a _ 10 Speaker C works as a _ 11 Speaker D works as a _ 12 Speaker E works as a _ shop assistant Exercise 2: Listen and decide whether the statements are True or False 13 Rolf will find a job immediately after he leaves college 14 Maria would like to travel a lot as part of her job 15 Maria is confident she will be able to work for an airline 16 Rolf thinks that Maria is be able to get the job because of her appearance 17 Rolf intends to a job concerned with his degree 18 Maria and Rolf agree it is important to have a good salary 19 Maria hopes to work for several different employers 20 Rolf‟s ambition is to manage his own company one day X ... certify the thesis entitled ? ?A study on the application of top- down techniques in teaching listening skills to English non- major 10th grade students at Tam Duong high school? ?? is the result of my own... for English non- major 10th grade class? What are the learner´s perceptions regarding listening activities using topdown techniques in an English non- major 10th grade class? Scope of the study In. .. in teaching listening to English non- major students at Tam Duong high school To find the answer for the research question 2, a survey questionnaire was conducted after the intervention The data