Techniques for improving listening skills FOR gifted students at Foreign Language Specializing School - College of Foreign Languages - VIETNAM National University, HANOI

Techniques for improving listening skills FOR gifted students at Foreign Language Specializing School - College of Foreign Languages - VIETNAM National University, HANOI

PART ONE : INTRODUCTION

1 RATIONALE OF THE STUDY

It can not be denied that English is the international medium in the fields ofscience, technology, culture ,education , economy and so on It is also considered a meansto promote mutual understanding and cooperation between Vietnam and other countries Itis widely seen as the key language toll in the integrating process in the world With therapid development and expansion of informational technologies , there needs to be acommon language for people of all countries to exchange information with each other andit is English that is used as a means of international communication Therefore, there hasbeen an explosion in the need of teaching and learning English all over the world.

In Vietnam in recent years the number of people who wish to know and masterEnglish has become more and more increasing, especially since Vietnam adopted an open-door policy , teaching and learning English have been paid much attention to English hasbeen part of the general education It becomes a compulsory subject at high schools inmost towns and cities through out the country Moreover , each city or province there is aspecializing school for gifted students at several subjects such as maths , literature ,physics, chemistry and foreign languages especially English Among these schools is theForeign Language Specializing School, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam NationalUniversity However, the teaching and learning process in FLSS seems to still focus toomuch on grammar, structures and vocabularies Our students are very good at doingexercises of written forms, these forms of exercises mostly concern grammar , reading orwriting comprehension The consequence is that students have much difficulty in listening Listening skill seems to be the most difficult to our students We all know that inorder to learn a foreign language successfully, students should be helped to develop fourskills : listening , speaking , reading and writing These four skills are closely interrelatedto one another and they all necessary Of the four skills, listening is regarded as aprerequisite to understand what is being said and to pick up the general idea of what isbeing discussed In our professional and personal life there will be situations where we willhear and have to absorb a lot of details, facts and figures and then extract some points from

them In our private life we may wish to listen to talks in English about subjects we areinterested in and wish to consolidate what we have learnt in order to progress to other andmore difficult areas Thus , it is possible to give students the chance to practise what theyhave learnt in the way listening to spoken English To listen successfully to spoken Englishlanguage need be able to work out what speakers mean when they use particular words inparticular ways on particular occasion and not to simply understand the words themselves As I am one of the teachers of English of this school I would like to do somethingwith the hope of improving listening skill for our students and as a result, the thesis titlegoes as :

“Techniques for improving listening skills of gifted students of Foreign LanguageSpecializing School, College of Foreign Languages, Hanoi National University.”

2 AIMS OF THE STUDY

The purpose of this study is to investigate the difficulties in listening which thestudents at FLSS encounter so that some effective techniques can be given to help themimprove this skill.

These are the specific aims :

- investigating the students’ attitudes at FLSS towards listening - finding out the difficulties encountered by the students

- suggesting techniques with the hope of helping the students improve the ability of listening

3 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This study may provide insights into the process of learning listeningcomprehension skill for the students It may play a crucial role in enhancing listening skillto the students at FLSS, CFL, HNU.

4 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

Though the study focuses on techniques to improve listening skill for gifted studentsat FLSS, CFL, HNU, due to the limitation of page numbers of the minor thesis, theresearcher can only conduct a survey on the students of 10th and 11th form to identify

listening problems experienced by the students, after that suggest some techniques to helpthem better in learning listening.

5 METHOD OF THE STUDY

In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, quantitative method is used and thefollowing tasks have to be done:

- doing a survey on the learning listening to English from 200 students of 10th and11th form at FLSS ( except for students of 12th form as there are no listening lessons for 12th

form students )

- collecting data for the analysis - assessing the difficulties

- evaluating the best techniques that are most suitable

6 DESIGN OF THE SDTUDY

This minor thesis consists of three parts:

Part one, “INTRODUCTION”, presents the rationale, the aims , the method, subject and

design of the study It expresses the reason why the author decided to choose this study andthe methods for the fulfillment of the study

Part two, “DEVELOPMENT”, is divided into three chapters :

- Chapter one presents the concepts relevant to the research topic such as differentpoint of views of listening comprehension skill, the importance, classification of listening,difficulties in learning listening and three stages of listening session

- Chapter two deals with analyses on general learning situation at FLSS, learningrequirements, teachers and teaching methods, materials as well as material assessments.Also in this chapter there is a focus on data collection, findings and discussion.

- Chapter three emphasizes the implication of the study in which certain techniquesfor improving listening skills to the students at FLSS are suggested.

Part three, “CONCLUSION”, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the

limitations and provides some suggestions for the further study

PART TWO : DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW1.1 INTRODUCTION

To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to thereexamination of concepts most relevant to the thesis’s topic Firstly come the differentpoints of view about listening comprehension Secondly the importance and classificationof listening comprehension are discussed Thirdly the potential problems in learninglistening are also referred to Finally there is a discussion of three stages of the listeningsession.

1.2 LISTENING COMPREHENSION

1.2.1 Traditional point of view.

There are some traditional views that listening is considered a passive language skillalong side the reading skill It means that learners are almost passive in practising listeningactivities in the classroom Learners just hear what they are to listen without payingsufficient attention in the discourse such as the background knowledge of the speakers aswell as their intentions, attitude , implication and other shades of meaning etc The learnersmainly hear the message, they only try to elicit the meaning from the individual syntacticand semantic components of the utterance and the manner in which it is spoken This leadsto the result that it is hard for the learners to communicate Having this attitude, the teacheroften conducts the lesson as “tested” listening comprehension rather than teaching it Themethod of testing the comprehension of the learners is based on the ability to remember theutterance, which they have just heard Obviously, this method is not effective as the abilityto remember the utterance does not mean that the listener can understand the message Justlike a child who is good at remembering songs and poems, but he does not know what theyare about In fact the learners are not provided enough information about what they aregoing to hear before the tape plays and they cope with a wide range of problems while theyare listening and the result is that they can not get any listening experience from theteacher.

1.2.2 Present point of view.

For the past few years some present studies on listening comprehension have tocome to another view in which the role of the listeners is thought to be active, but notpassive any more Listening is really a receptive skill along side reading skill

According to Littlewood (1981), listening demands active involvement from the hearer Inorder to construct the message that the speaker intends , the hearer must actively contributeknowledge from both linguistic and nonlinguistic sources Only by applying the knowledgeof the language , can the hearer divide the continuous stream of sound into meaningfulunits and only by comparing these units with the shared knowledge between himself andthe speaker , can the hearer interpret their meaning The nature of listening comprehensionmeans that the hearer should be encouraged to engage in an active process of listening formeanings, using not only the linguistic cues but also has nonlinguistic knowledge.

From the point of view of Broughton (1978) Listening is divided into intensive andextensive listening Extensive listening is related to the freer, more general listening tonatural English, not necessarily under the direct guidance of the teacher whereas intensivelistening is much more concerned with just one or two specific points.

Mary Underwood (1989) divides the aural process into 3 stages and Clark (1977)divides it into 4 stages but generally they have the same idea There are two levelsactivities of the aural process The two levels of this activity are recognition and selection.The first level is that the structure and the relationship between syntax and phonology ofthe language are recognized At the first stage , the sounds go into a sensory store calledthe “ echoic memory” “ Echoic memory” is just the short term memory because there iscontinuous arrival of new information before the listener has opportunity to deal with it.That is why there is the following stage which is called “selection” In this stage, thelistener selects what he finds most interesting or important or comprehensible in theutterance At this point, words or groups of words are checked and compared withinformation already held in the long term memory and the meaning is extracted from them(Mary Underwood, Teaching Listening, p.2) When the meaning is grasped , the actualwords of the spoken discourse are generally forgotten and only the meaning is retained.Therefore, the listener usually remember the meaning rather than the exact words spokenwhen he has to recall what have been heard The basis of listening comprehension is theability to recognize and select the specific details in the discourse It, of course, needs a

certain time for the learners to become used to listening and process some familiarutterances more automatically.

Aderson and Lynch ( Listening ,1995, Oxford University Press) have another pointof view They consider the listener as active model builder They say that in order to listensuccessfully we have to construct our own “coherent interpretation” of any spokenmessage Both parts of this term are important First , it needs to be coherent both withwhat we believe has just been said and with what we already know about the speaker, thecontext, and the word in general Second, it is an interpretation, in the sense that it is ourversion of what the speaker meant, as far as we are able to assess that meaning The twoauthors use the term “ mental modal” to refer to the listener’s “ coherent interpretation” This emphasizes the active and personal nature of successful listening The mental modelthat we build as a representation of a spoken message is the result of our combining thenew information in what we just heard with our previous knowledge and experience.In short, in order to be successful in listening, we should remember that : “ Listeningcomprehension is not a skill which can be mastered once and for all and then ignored whileother skills are developed There must be regular practice with increasingly difficultmaterial."(Rivers Wilga , M.(1986) Teaching Foreign Language Skill., The University ofChicago Press, p 157).

It is now widely accepted that oral communication can not take place withoutlistening and listening plays a central and possibly predominant part in the whole processof language learning Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four skills of parts ofthat “indivisible range called communication” They are interrelated and interdependent According to Pearson Ian (1981), The Functional Notional Approach in LanguageTeaching, p 80 , listening is tied to the essential cognitive elements of comprehension andunderstanding In order to take part in oral communication, clearly, the first thing anyonemust have is the ability to absorb the pieces of information from the speaker by listening.When nobody listens to a speaker or when a listener fails to understand the message,communication is considered unsuccessful Moreover , listening is an important way of

acquiring the language , a good way of picking up vocabulary and structures Teachinglistening to spoken language is ,therefore, of primary importance

“ Teaching the comprehension of spoken language is therefore of primary importance ifthe communication aim is to be achieved.” ( Wilga.M.Rivers, Teaching Foreign LanguageSkills, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1968, p 135.)

1.3.1 Mother – tongue listening

It is assumed that people can listen in their mother-tongue with little or no effort.From very young, we can understand at least the gist of what is heard This is resulted by anumber of factors including our exposure to the large amount of language and to the greatnumber of different speakers over the years and our acquired knowledge of the context, thespeakers, the topic and so on However , there are a lot of problems that sometimes wemeet when listening in our mother tongue Particular accents can cause problems Forinstance, in Vietnam the accents of the three zones (the North, the Middle and the South)are quite different Someone from the North may find it difficult to understand a speakerfrom the Middle or the North Further more , sometimes bad conditions created by badsituations also hinder our comprehension For example, it may be hard for listener tofollow and understand what a quiet speaker is conveying when everything around him isnoisy In spite of these minor problems, we can not deny that we generally listen andcomprehend the speech in our native language with ease.

1.3.2 Listening as the final goal of learning a language

According to Donoghue (1975), listening occupies the basic portion in the contextof the language arts and progress in reading, speaking and writing is directly governed bylistening ability It is the most important of the four arts since nearly half of the adultworking day and more than half of the child’s classroom activity time is spent in listening.Apart from communication interaction, much of the enjoyment in second or foreignlanguage use comes from listening activities like watching films and plays or watching T.Vor listening to the radio, songs or talks by the speakers In class the students learn a lotfrom their teacher, to tape or records or to each other Moreover , the students can gain alot of experiences of listening to a wide variety of samples of spoken English It also helpsthe students know different varieties of language such as standard or regional, formal or

informal language, and different text types like conversation, narrative or informativetypes The result is that there is an increase in the amount of language contact throughcommunication Further more , students ,day by day ,can train their listening skill and theycan flexibly listen to everything Students are trained to listen for the main ideas , forspecific information or to react to instruction Therefore , listening is regarded to be amongthe most important educational goals It has a great influence on value formation and itincreases an individual’s level of vocational skills and it results in great emotional responsechanges in attitude and it provides students a stimulus for other activities such asdiscussion, reading and writing, which are the main language skills.

1.3.3 Listening as a means of acquiring a language

“ Listening to spoken English is an important way of acquiring the language of “picking up” structures and vocabularies” (Adrian Doff, 1995 P :199 ) It is obvious thatdeveloping the ability to understand the spoken foreign language is a long continuousprocess and listening is a skill that must be taught and that does not happen automatically.If students learn to listen effectively, they are able to understand, to interpret, to evaluateand to response to what they hear So it is very important for students to develop the abilityto understand spoken English In daily life they can watch English programs on T.V, listento the radio or have direct conversations with native speakers Thus the more frequent weare exposed to the language, the faster and easier we can acquire it.

1.4 CLASSIFICATION OF LISTENING

1.4.1 Real - life listening

1.4.1.1 Kinds of real - life listening

Many learners of English will ,sooner or later, find themselves in a variety ofsituation where they need or want to listen to English being used in real – life for a rangeof purposes However, they feel a big gap between listening activities in the classroom andactual situations This is because in listening materials learners listen to dialogues ,conversations which are very grammatical and controlled in many ways The speakersoften speak at perfectly controlled speed, with perfect voice tone , accent and correctgrammar Whereas, in real – life conversations learners encounter various people speakingwith different accent, speed and voice tone without paying attention to grammar.

According to Adrian (1995), there are two ways which people often listen in real – life.They are “ casual” listening and “ focused” listening

- “ Casual” listening : In daily life we sometimes listen with no particular purpose and

often without much concentration This kind of listening is called ‘casual” listening Forexample, a lot of students have the habit of listening to the radio while studying or thetelevision set is on while we are doing something else The typical feature is that we do notlisten closely and intentionally, therefore we may not remember much of what we hear orthere may be nothing in our mind.

- “Focused” listening : When we listen for a particular purpose to get the information we

need, it is called “focus” listening In this case we often listen with much attention, but wedo not listen to everything we hear with equal concentration For instance, we want toknow the answer to a question, we will ask and expect to hear a relevant response Thisleads to our “listening out” for certain key phrases or words When we ask a question like:“ Where are you going to be?”, we then listen out for the expectation of the place If theanswer is, for example; “I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet, it depends on what job I get,but I expect I shall end up in Boston.” – then we shall wait for and note the last two words.If, however, the same answer is the response to the question: “Are you definitely going toBoston?” – then the last two words of the answer are virtually redundant, and will paymore attention to the first part If we listen to the news, it is from a desire to know what ishappening in the world, and we shall expect to hear about certain subjects of currentinterest in a certain kind of language Even when listening to entertainment such as plays,jokes or songs ,we have a definite purpose (enjoyment), we want to know what is comingnext, and we expect it to cohere with what went before There is an association betweenlistener expectation and purpose and his comprehension If the listener expects and needsare intentional ,his listening is likely accurately perceived and understood than that whichis unexpected, irrelevant or helpful.

1.4.1.2 Characteristics of real - life listening

According to Penny Ur , there is a distinct difference between the auditory effect ofa piece of spoken prose and that of informal conversation The former is characterized by afairly even pace, volume and pitch Spontaneous conversation, on the other hand, is jerky,

has frequent pauses and overlaps, goes intermittently faster and slower, louder and softer,higher and lower Hesitation, interruptions, exclamations, emotional reactions of surprise,irritation or amusement, which are all liable to occur in natural dialogue, are bound tocause an uneven and constantly changing rhythm of speech Even if only one person isspeaking for a relatively long period, the fact that he has not thought out carefully what hehas to say beforehand, and has not necessarily chosen the best words, means that he has torely heavily on vocal emphasis to make his meaning clear And vocal emphasis does notjust mean saying a particular word or phrase louder It means also gabbling quicklythrough what is less important and slowing down over the main point, or pausing for effectbefore or after a vital phrase, or raising the pitch of voice to stress one thing and thenlowering it to play something else The overall effect of all this is perhaps more dramaticand interesting than that of formal speech, but this does not mean that it is ,all in all, morecomprehensible or easier to listen to.

To summarize, we may say that most of our real-life listening activity is characterized bythe following features:

- We listen for a purpose and with certain expectations.- We made an immediate response to what we hear.- We see the person we are listening to.

- There are some visual or environmental clues as to the meaning of what is heard.- Stretches of heard discourse come in short chunks.

- Most heard discourse is spontaneous and therefore differs from formal spoken prose inthe amount of redundancy, noise and colloquialisms, and in its auditory character.Sometimes particular situations may lack one or more of these characteristics for example,when watching television we are not normally expected to respond, when listening to alecture we may have to hear uninterrupted speech for a very long time indeed- but it is veryrare that none of them is present at all We seldom listen to stretches of “ disembodied”discourse of any length.

1.4.2 Class-room listening

According to Rixon (1986) and Hubbard, R and others (1984), there are threekinds of listening in classroom, they are: intensive listening and extensive listening

1.4.2.1.Intensive listening

Intensive listening is the careful, focused listening to a short passage for detailedinformation or for full comprehension For example, listening to the announcement ,listening to the instructions or listening to the weather forecast There may be muchconcrete information for this kind of listening and learners often find it difficult to get fullcomprehension in the first listening This helps learners develop their listening skill orknowledge of the language in their effort to do exercises or other activities The passageshould be short so that learners have chances to get to grip with the content, , have severaltries at difficult parts and to be fitted within the time allowed of a lesson Learners also feelit easy, interesting and encouraging when they listen to a short passage Therefore, theyoften listen with a great concentration and stretching effort.

1.4.2.2 Extensive listening

Extensive listening is free and general listening to natural language for generalideas, not for particular details The listening passages for extensive listening can be long(stories) or short ( jokes, poems) The language that is used in this type of listening is oftenwithin the students’ current ability so that students find it pleasing and interesting whenthey are listening Students feel satisfied as they can understand the passage well They arenot asked to do any language work and they can do their listening freely without anypressure Moreover the topics are various and entertaining, it ,therefore, motivates studentsto develop their listening skill as well as exposes them to valuable extra contact withspoken language.

1.5 POTENTIAL PROBLEMS IN LEARNING LISTENING

It is undeniable that listening is considered to be the most difficult among the fourskills Numerous learners have difficulties with different aspects of listeningcomprehension Some have trouble with factual or literal comprehension Others havetrouble with interpretation Others have trouble with critical listening Still others haveproblems with evaluational listening The followings are some potential problems thatshould be paid attention to in order to help listeners feel self-confident to overcome them.

1.5.1 Inability to control over the speed of the speaker

In learning English, the greatest difficulty in listening comprehension is thatlearners are not able to control the speed of the speaker Learners often feel that theutterances disappear before they can sort them out or they can get the message.

“They are so busy working out the meaning of one part of what they hear that theymiss the next part Or they simply ignore a whole chunk because they fail to sort it all outquickly enough.”( Mary Underwood, Teaching Listening, Longman, 1989, p.16) One ofthe reasons for this is that learners can not keep up with the speed and they often try tounderstand everything they hear When they fail in sorting out the meaning of one part, thefollowing will be missed This can lead to the ignorance of the whole chunk of discourse.Obviously they fail to listen.

1.5.2 Inability to get things repeated

Another problem is that the listener is not always in the position to ask the speakerto repeat his utterance This is the case when learners join in conversation outside theclassroom Repetition can not be asked for when listening to the radio or watchingtelevision Even in classroom, when listening to lectures, learners can not frequently orderthe lecturers to repeat the utterance as many times as they wish When doing listening workin listening lessons, it is the teacher, not the learners, who decides to stop or to replay therecord and in many situations, the teacher does not replay the exact parts that the listenerswish to listen again Therefore, the teacher can not judge if the learners can fullyunderstand what they have heard This problem can be solved only when learners are giventhe opportunity to control their own machines and proceed in whatever way they wish.

1.5.3 Inability to concentrate

It is a major problem if learners lack concentration in listening work This can becaused by a number of things such as : the bad quality of machines, the poor quality oflistening materials Other reason for loss of concentration is that the topic is not interestingor not familiar and learners find it difficult to understand Sometimes, listeners easily losetheir concentration, as they feel tired of making a great effort to hear word by word Thebreak in attention, even very short, can seriously impair the comprehension of the whole

process of listening Concentration of the listener is considered vitally important in asuccessful listening lesson.

1.5.4 Problems in hearing the sounds

“ As a young teacher it took me some time to realize that my students actually did notperceive certain English sounds with any accuracy because these did not exist in their ownlanguage.” (Penny Ur , Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge University Press,P.11) The fact is that there are a lot of sound that do not exist in Vietnamese such as : thesound / / as in “ think” A native Vietnamese speaker may very often therefore not noticeas the first that it occurs in English Even more difficulties is caused when the new sound

does not exist in the native language For example: / I / (as in “pit” ) and / I: / (as in

“peep”) or “ship” and “sheep” or “fit” and “feet” Thus learners have difficulty inperceiving this difference as significant to meaning in English and it takes a considerableamount of practice before they get used to distinguishing between them Sometimeslearners find consonant-clusters particularly difficult to cope with They may get theconsonants in the wrong order (hearing “part” for “past”), or omit one of the sounds(“crips” for “crisps”) , or hear a vowel that is not in fact pronounced (“littel” for “little”).Another reason why sounds may be misheard is that the learner is not used to the stress andintonation patterns of English and the way these influence both the realization of certainphonemes and the meaning of the utterance The number of homophones and homonyms inEnglish is small, while the number of words which can be confused or misunderstood byaccurate perception is relatively large It is ,therefore, essential for the learner to achievefamiliarity with the common phonemes of the target language as soon as possible if he isan efficient listener If he learns to pronounce the sounds accurately himself, it will bemuch easier for him to hear them correctly when said by someone else.

1.5.5 Problems in understanding different accents

Many foreign-language learners who are used to the accent of their own teacher aresurprised and dismayed when they find they have difficulty understanding someone else.Some of them try to get over this at first by claiming that the second speaker’s accent issomehow inferior or wrong But strictly speaking there is rarely such a thing as a “wrong”accent, there are simply accent that are more or less difficult to understand- that is, broadly

speaking, ones that are more or less removed from the original variety learned What wecan do is to try to give learners a reasonable familiarity with the two most useful Englishaccents - that is to say the British and American standard varieties- and then perhaps letthem have a taste of some others simply to open their eyes to the possibilities and givethem some practice in coping with them Learners who have some experience in listeningto and understand a number of different accents are more likely to be able to copesuccessfully with further than those who have only heard one or two and learners shouldtry their best to get used to different accent by listening to authentic material as much aspossible.

1.5.6 Problems in vocabulary limitation

When listening, there are words or phrases that are not known to the listeners Thiscauses the listeners a lot in getting the message of the passage and this may interrupt thelisteners’ concentration or thinking The listeners have to try to follow the speaker andsometimes they have to guess the meaning of a word or phrase depending the context Thelisteners have to pay attention to the new words, as a result they miss chances of listeningto the following part of the speech Teachers, therefore, should help the learners to knowthat there is not equal importance for every word and there is no need for learners tounderstand all the new words when listening Sometimes listeners understand only a part ofwhat a speaker means but they are generally able to continue with the interaction and torespond to it.

1.6 THREE STAGES OF THE LISTENING SESSION

There are often three main stages in the teaching of a listening text They are : listening stage , while-listening stage and post-listening stage Each stage has its own aimsand activities.

pre-1.6.1 Pre-listening stage

1.6.1.1 The definition and purposes of pre-listening stage

It is true that learners will find it extremely difficult to do a listening lesson whenthey have no idea of what they are going to hear Even if the sounds or the words which

they hear are familiar, they may still be unable to understand because they lack certainkinds of knowledge of the topic, setting or the relationship between the speakers Thus thelisteners’expectation and purposes should be taken into account These make listeners feelas in real-life listening situation in their native language Teachers can help their studentsto arouse their expectations and see the purpose before a listening lesson This kind ofwork is described as “pre-listening activities”.

“ It would seem a good idea when presenting a listening passage in class to give studentssome information about the content, situation and speakers before they actually startlistening.”(Penny Ur, 1992, P.4)

Another idea about pre-listening stage is said as following:

“ Pre-listening work can be done in a variety of ways and often occurs quite naturally whenlistening forms part of an integrated skills course When planning lessons, time must beallocated for pre-listening activities and these activities should not be rushed.” ( MaryUnderwood, Teaching Listening, Longman 1989, P.31).

1.6.1.2 Types of pre-listening activities

Pre-listening work can be done in various ways and consists of several types ofactivities Therefore, teachers should select the most effective activities for each situationand teachers need to find the most suitable way to provide considerable pre-listeningsupport for their students in order to help them to get the purposes that a listening lessonrequires.

- The teacher introducing the listening topic, giving background information.

- The students reading something relevant

- The students looking at pictures ,reading through the questions if asked

- The students discussing the topic situation

- The students following the instruction for the while-listening activity

- The students considering how the while-listening activity will be done

Each of the above activities will help the students focus on the main points of the listeningpassage But it is very important to remember that the amount of pre-listening activitiesmay vary according to each class, the level of difficulty of the material and the students’language ability.

1.6.1.3 Factors affecting the choice of pre-listening activities

The choice of pre-listening activities depends on a number of factors :- The time available

- The material available- The interest of the class- The interest of the teacher

- The place where the work is being carried out- The nature and the content of the listening text itself

It is very necessary for the teacher to consider all the factors which are mentioned abovewhen choosing an activity as each factor contributes an important part to the result of alistening lesson However, the last item on the list, the nature of the listening text, is veryimportant when choosing pre-listening activities

1.6.2.While-listening stage

1.6.2.1 the purpose of while-listening activities

The While- listening stage involves activities that students are asked to do during thetime that they are listening to the text The purpose of while-listening activities is to helplearners develop the skill of eliciting messages from spoken language.

There are ,of course, other reasons why students need to listen to the language they arestudying The main thing is that to learn to recognize how it sounds ( the pronunciation of

words, the stress, the rhythm, the intonation that they can use what they hear as a model fortheir own speech).

When developing the skills of listening for comprehension, while-listening activitiesmust be chosen carefully They must vary at different levels and in different cases We donot test whether or not the listener has understood and producing “right/ wrong” answerwill soon discourage the enthusiasm of the learners To help non-native listeners toimprove their listening, teacher must have listening activities which give practice inprediction, matching and interpretation.

“Good while-listening activities help learners find their way through the listening text andbuild upon the expectations raised by pre-listening activities.” ( Underwwood, TeachingListening, 1990, P 46)

1.6.2.2 Characteristics of while-listening activities 1.6.2.2.1 Interest

While-listening activities should be interesting, so that students feel they want tolisten and carry out the activities Part of interest can stem from the topic and the content ofwhat is said and the listening text should be chosen with the interest of the students inmind.

Many learners enjoy material with a “local” flavor rather more than texts setting in someremote context For this reason, even quite mundane topics should be given some localrelevance when possible in order to make them more familiar and motivating.

Another kind of interest is generated by activities which are in themselves interesting andsatisfying to do Most learners enjoy trying to complete puzzle or solve problems and thisfact can be exploited in the design of the activities It is important, however, that this kindof activity is not too long and laborious and does not involve doing the same kind of thingover and over again For example, for most learners, three small crossword puzzles ondifferent occasions are far more satisfying to do than one every large one which occupies alot of time on just one occasion.

1.6.2.2.2 Levels of difficulty

While-listening activities should be things most people can do Failure here veryrapidly leads to demotivation, and activities with potential “sticking point” , where studentsare likely to get into difficulties, should be used very sparingly in the early stages In time,of course, it will be necessary to include activities which present potential “ stickingpoint”, so that students learn not to be put off and persevere in spite of the problems.According to Mary Underwood, the level of difficulty of a while-listening activity can beadjusted by giving support Some while-listening activities are successful with groups ofvarying levels of ability and provide a challenge for the more advanced students but notdiscouraging those who only gain little success.

1.6.2.2.3 Factors affecting the choice of while-listening activities

In addition to the factors which apply equally to while-listening activities, otherpoints need to be considered when selecting while-listening activities They include:- The possibilities for varying the level of difficulty if required.

- The inconvenience of carrying out activities which require individuals to give theirresponses orally in the classroom This kind of work is best done in a languagelaboratory Classroom while-listening activities generally have to be limited to thosewhich can be done without the need for each student to respond by speaking.

- Whether the work is to be done by the students with the teacher present or whether it isto be done as private study, either in the classroom or at home This will influence theteacher’s choice of activity as he may want to give his students different workaccording to their levels of ability, to provide additional instructions , or to selectactivities which generate little or no marking.

1.6.3 Post-listening stage

1.6.3.1 Definition and purpose of post-listening activities

Post-listening activities are the activities which are done after the listening iscompleted Some post-listening activities are extensions of the work done at the pre-listening and while-listening stages and some relate only loosely to the listening text itself.The purposes of post-listening activities are :

- to check whether the learners have understood what they need to or not.

- to see why some students have missed parts of the message or fail to understand themessage.

- to give the students the opportunity to consider the attitude and manner of the speakersof the listening text.

- to expand on the topic or language of the message and to transfer learned things toanother context.

- to make introduction for the planned work

1.6.3.2 Factors affecting the choice of post-listening activities

Mary Underwood says that the attention should be given to the following factors inselecting post-listening activities:

- the amount of language work the teacher wish to do in relation to the particularlistening text.

- The time which is allowed to do post-listening work.

- The speaking, reading or writing skills should be included in the post-listening work.- The students should work in pair or in groups.

- The chosen activity should be made motivating.

1.7 SUMMARY

In short , this chapter focuses on the concepts useful for the accomplishment of thestudy First comes an overview on the different views of listening comprehension Thenthe importance and classification of listening are stated What is more in this chapter is thepotential problems in learning listening Last comes in the chapter is three stages of thelistening session.

CHAPTER TWO :

PRACTICAL SITUATION OF TEACHING AND LEARING LISTENING TOENGLISH AT THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE SPECIALIZING SCHOOL,COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES, HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY2.1 INTRODUCTION

To realize the objective of this study, it first starts with an overview on F.l.S.S,C.F.L, H.N.U, in which background, facility, trend of development of the school is mainlypresented Then, for a better understanding about the school, some information about thestudents and leaning requirements are addressed In addition, an analysis on teachers,teaching methods, materials and material assessments will be very important for therealization of the study, without it, the researcher will find it impossible to sort outreasonable techniques to improve listening skill for the students.

2.2 AN OVERVIEW ON F.L.S.S

F.L.S.S is a school for gifted students of foreign languages Among these languagesare English, French, Chinese, Russian, Japanese and German, the majority are students ofEnglish This school is one of the members of College of Foreign Languages, HanoiNational University It was established in 1968 and it has become a reliable address for thestudents all over the north of the country and for those who are interested to major inforeign languages Currently there are 27 English classes with nearly 700 students theyare 10th, 11th and 12th form students who are aged from 15 to 18 In order to become one ofthe students of this school, the students who have finished 9th year classes with goodresults have to take part in a very hard examination of 3 subjects : maths, literature andEnglish If their results are good enough ,they become 10th form students of the school Atthis high school, the students have to try their best to study social and natural subjects, butEnglish is considered the main one There are 7 periods per week, it means that thestudents of our school have 4 more periods per week than those at other high schools.Normally, there are 50 students in classes of social and natural subjects, when they haveEnglish lessons, the class is divided into two groups with about 25 students in each one andtwo teachers of English are in charge.

As far as the materials are concerned “ English 10, 11 and 12” , workbooks 10, 11, 12written by the teachers of our school and two listening books : “Listening And Speaking”

by Tran Ngoc Oanh and Vu Quynh Nhung (10th form), by Kieu Hong Van and Vu PhuongAnh (11th form) The students are equally taught the four language skills Among them,listening seems to be the toughest one for the students Besides reading, listening serves asan indispensable skill in learning English as it provides students with necessary input Inspite of the importance of listening, the students’ and teachers’ effort, listening skillremains the greatest obstacle in their way for success

2.3 STUDENTS AND LEARNING REQUIREMENTS

Most of the students have been learning English since they were 6th form students Itmeans that they have had four years of English in junior secondary schools The objectiveof the junior secondary school curriculum is that after four years of English, the studentsshould have general knowledge of grammar and an active vocabulary which they can usemostly in written form They hardly say a couple of sentences intelligibly in the targetlanguage and their listening skill is almost not paid any attention to, their listening ability ishardly developed during that long period of time So when they become the gifted studentsof English of FLSS, they have to deal with a lot of difficulties in learning to listen toEnglish However, the majority of the students have strong and clear motivation and as aresult of the awareness of the importance of learning how to listen in a foreign language ingeneral and English in particular, the rest of the students have positive attitude towardslearning listening They all realized that learning listening is not just to get good results butit is also a good way to develop their communication Moreover, they need English fortheir further study or for their future use, so they are always trying to work on listening asmuch and effectively as they can to master this skill They are , step by step, used tolistening to the teachers’ explanation in English and listening and understanding thefamiliar topics which their teachers or classmates talk about They are used to listening tothe tape-recorder and doing the listening exercises such as : filling the missing words,choosing the correct answers or answering the questions etc In a short time at this school,the students can meet requirements of learning listening.

2.4 TEACHERS AND TEACHING METHODS

In FLSS, there are totally 14 teachers of English aged 25 to 51 All of the teacherswere trained in English department, CFL, HNU Eight of them finished MA course in Post

Graduate Department, CFL, HNU and two of them got MA degree in Australia The oldestteachers have nearly 30 years of teaching experience, and the youngest just have threeyears FLSS has a good relationship with Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC) in Sydney,so every year there is an exchanging visit between these two schools in order to exchangeexperience in teaching and studying, the teachers and students, turn by turn , are allowed tospend four or six weeks in PLC, Sydney During the time staying there the teachers andstudents have a good chance to talk to or listen to native speakers of English and they havetime to live , work and study in a native English environment Most of the teachers ofFLSS are well aware of the important role of the ability to listen to English and theteachers play a very important part in forming students’ ability of listening Therefore, theteachers have done much to improve the method of teaching listening and help the studentsto overcome the difficulties As a result, the students’ ability to listen to English is muchbetter in comparison with this of the students in other high schools.

The fact is that not all the teachers use the same techniques and activities to teachlistening skill Some of the teachers choose to use “ getting the students to predict” as themost effective techniques or “giving feed back after each time of listening “ others maytake some other techniques into consideration such as : “ using authentic and suitablelistening texts”, “ directing students’ listening activities” etc The teachers have tried tochoose the activities that are suitable to their students It is good for the students to get usedto as many types of activities as possible In order to find out the effective way ofimplementing the activities, the teachers have to spend a lot of time and have to work hardto choose and design the listening activities that the students can do properly Thefollowing activities are often used : true or false exercises, answering the questions, fillingin the blanks, choosing the correct answer, etc

The method of teaching listening skill and the listening activities are considered tobe the effective way to test and to improve the students’ ability of listening and the qualityof teaching and learning listening of the school is improved day by day.

2.5 MATERIALS AND ASSESSMENTS

Teaching language skills is not the focus of language study for high school students The textbooks, thus, do not include materials for listening comprehension For many years the

teachers have had a lot of difficulties to find out the suitable listening materials for the studentsof FLSS In the past, it took the teachers much time to choose and design a listening lesson forthe students from any source of material available as materials for listening comprehension,from such books as : Streamline, Listen Carefully, Interchange 1, 2, 3 etc In fact, some of thelistening lessons met the demands of the students, but the others still did not Franklyspeaking , The teachers of FLSS coped with a lot of difficulties in teaching listening Recentlythings have changed for both teachers and students in teaching and studying listening skill.Due to the fact that the English textbooks have changed from time to time to catch up with theup-to date information, which is seen as a greatest motivation for the students A group of theteachers consisting of four made an effort to write two listening books : “Listening andSpeaking, English 10 and 11”, the listening lessons in the two books were taken from differentsources like Active Listening, Tactics For Listening, New Headway (Intermediate ,Upper-Intermediate) , True To Life, Landmark, Lifelines, etc from Cambridge and Oxford UniversityPresses There are 15 units in book 10, and 10 units in book 11, the students have two periodsof listening per week The topic of each listening lesson is related to the topic of the text in thebooks : “English 10, English 11”, for example : the text of unit one in book “English 11” is “Motion Pictures”, the listening lesson of unit one in “Listening And Speaking English 11” is“Films” There are often four parts in a listening lesson : Getting ready, Let’s listen 1, Let’slisten 2 and Songs In general, the listening books provide different kinds of activities as wellas interesting and useful contents The listening lessons are well-organized, the topics areinteresting and similar , so the students can catch and understand the ideas in details Thestudents feel pleasing , entertaining whenever they have listening lessons and they can improvenot only their listening skill but they can also widen their social knowledge

2.6 DATA COLLECTION, FIDINGS AND DISCUSSION

2.6.1 Data collection

2.6.1.1 The subject

The survey was carried out with the participation of 200 students of 10th and 11th formsat FLSS, including 8 classes The questionnaire was prepared in order to get information tofulfill the aims of the study Measurement instrument was designed for data collection:responded questionnaire The questionnaire consists of both multiple-choice and open-