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 RATIONALE OF THE STUDY It can not be denied that English is the international medium in the fields of science, technology, culture ,education , economy and so on It is also considered a means to promote mutual understanding and cooperation between Vietnam and other countries It is widely seen as the key language toll in the integrating process in the world With the rapid development and expansion of informational technologies , there needs to be a common language for people of all countries to exchange information with each other and it is English that is used as a means of international communication Therefore, there has been 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 master English has become more and more increasing, especially since Vietnam adopted an opendoor policy , teaching and learning English have been paid much attention to English has been part of the general education It becomes a compulsory subject at high schools in most towns and cities through out the country Moreover , each city or province there is a specializing school for gifted students at several subjects such as maths , literature , physics, chemistry and foreign languages especially English Among these schools is the Foreign Language Specializing School, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University However, the teaching and learning process in FLSS seems to still focus too much on grammar, structures and vocabularies Our students are very good at doing exercises of written forms, these forms of exercises mostly concern grammar , reading or writing 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 in order to learn a foreign language successfully, students should be helped to develop four skills : listening , speaking , reading and writing These four skills are closely interrelated to one another and they all necessary Of the four skills, listening is regarded as a prerequisite to understand what is being said and to pick up the general idea of what is being discussed In our professional and personal life there will be situations where we will hear 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 are interested in and wish to consolidate what we have learnt in order to progress to other and more difficult areas Thus , it is possible to give students the chance to practise what they have learnt in the way listening to spoken English To listen successfully to spoken English language need be able to work out what speakers mean when they use particular words in particular 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 something with the hope of improving listening skill for our students and as a result, the thesis title goes as : “Techniques for improving listening skills of gifted students of Foreign Language Specializing School, College of Foreign Languages, Hanoi National University.” AIMS OF THE STUDY The purpose of this study is to investigate the difficulties in listening which the students at FLSS encounter so that some effective techniques can be given to help them improve 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 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY This study may provide insights into the process of learning listening comprehension skill for the students It may play a crucial role in enhancing listening skill to the students at FLSS, CFL, HNU SCOPE OF THE STUDY Though the study focuses on techniques to improve listening skill for gifted students at FLSS, CFL, HNU, due to the limitation of page numbers of the minor thesis, the researcher 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 help them better in learning listening METHOD OF THE STUDY In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, quantitative method is used and the following tasks have to be done: - doing a survey on the learning listening to English from 200 students of 10 th and 11th 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 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 and the 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 different point 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, learning requirements, 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 techniques for 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 REVIEW 1.1 INTRODUCTION To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to the reexamination of concepts most relevant to the thesis’s topic Firstly come the different points of view about listening comprehension Secondly the importance and classification of listening comprehension are discussed Thirdly the potential problems in learning listening are also referred to Finally there is a discussion of three stages of the listening session 1.2 LISTENING COMPREHENSION 1.2.1 Traditional point of view There are some traditional views that listening is considered a passive language skill along side the reading skill It means that learners are almost passive in practising listening activities in the classroom Learners just hear what they are to listen without paying sufficient attention in the discourse such as the background knowledge of the speakers as well as their intentions, attitude , implication and other shades of meaning etc The learners mainly hear the message, they only try to elicit the meaning from the individual syntactic and semantic components of the utterance and the manner in which it is spoken This leads to the result that it is hard for the learners to communicate Having this attitude, the teacher often conducts the lesson as “tested” listening comprehension rather than teaching it The method of testing the comprehension of the learners is based on the ability to remember the utterance, which they have just heard Obviously, this method is not effective as the ability to remember the utterance does not mean that the listener can understand the message Just like a child who is good at remembering songs and poems, but he does not know what they are about 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 can not get any listening experience from the teacher 1.2.2 Present point of view For the past few years some present studies on listening comprehension have to come to another view in which the role of the listeners is thought to be active, but not passive any more Listening is really a receptive skill along side reading skill 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 continuous stream of sound into meaningful units and only by comparing these units with the shared knowledge between himself and the speaker , can the hearer interpret their meaning The nature of listening comprehension means that the hearer should be encouraged to engage in an active process of listening for meanings, using not only the linguistic cues but also has nonlinguistic knowledge From the point of view of Broughton (1978) Listening is divided into intensive and extensive listening Extensive listening is related to the freer, more general listening to natural English, not necessarily under the direct guidance of the teacher whereas intensive listening is much more concerned with just one or two specific points Mary Underwood (1989) divides the aural process into stages and Clark (1977) divides it into stages but generally they have the same idea There are two levels activities 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 of the language are recognized At the first stage , the sounds go into a sensory store called the “ echoic memory” “ Echoic memory” is just the short term memory because there is continuous 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, the listener selects what he finds most interesting or important or comprehensible in the utterance At this point, words or groups of words are checked and compared with information 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 actual words 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 spoken when he has to recall what have been heard The basis of listening comprehension is the ability 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 familiar utterances more automatically Aderson and Lynch ( Listening ,1995, Oxford University Press) have another point of view They consider the listener as active model builder They say that in order to listen successfully we have to construct our own “coherent interpretation” of any spoken message Both parts of this term are important First , it needs to be coherent both with what we believe has just been said and with what we already know about the speaker, the context, and the word in general Second, it is an interpretation, in the sense that it is our version of what the speaker meant, as far as we are able to assess that meaning The two authors 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 model that we build as a representation of a spoken message is the result of our combining the new 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 : “ Listening comprehension is not a skill which can be mastered once and for all and then ignored while other skills are developed There must be regular practice with increasingly difficult material."(Rivers Wilga , M.(1986) Teaching Foreign Language Skill., The University of Chicago Press, p 157) 1.3 THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING It is now widely accepted that oral communication can not take place without listening and listening plays a central and possibly predominant part in the whole process of language learning Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four skills of parts of that “indivisible range called communication” They are interrelated and interdependent According to Pearson Ian (1981), The Functional Notional Approach in Language Teaching, p 80 , listening is tied to the essential cognitive elements of comprehension and understanding In order to take part in oral communication, clearly, the first thing anyone must 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 Teaching listening to spoken language is ,therefore, of primary importance “ Teaching the comprehension of spoken language is therefore of primary importance if the communication aim is to be achieved.” ( Wilga.M.Rivers, Teaching Foreign Language Skills, 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 a number of factors including our exposure to the large amount of language and to the great number of different speakers over the years and our acquired knowledge of the context, the speakers, the topic and so on However , there are a lot of problems that sometimes we meet when listening in our mother tongue Particular accents can cause problems For instance, 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 speaker from the Middle or the North Further more , sometimes bad conditions created by bad situations also hinder our comprehension For example, it may be hard for listener to follow and understand what a quiet speaker is conveying when everything around him is noisy In spite of these minor problems, we can not deny that we generally listen and comprehend 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 context of the language arts and progress in reading, speaking and writing is directly governed by listening ability It is the most important of the four arts since nearly half of the adult working 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 foreign language use comes from listening activities like watching films and plays or watching T.V or listening to the radio, songs or talks by the speakers In class the students learn a lot from their teacher, to tape or records or to each other Moreover , the students can gain a lot of experiences of listening to a wide variety of samples of spoken English It also helps the students know different varieties of language such as standard or regional, formal or informal language, and different text types like conversation, narrative or informative types The result is that there is an increase in the amount of language contact through communication Further more , students ,day by day ,can train their listening skill and they can flexibly listen to everything Students are trained to listen for the main ideas , for specific information or to react to instruction Therefore , listening is regarded to be among the most important educational goals It has a great influence on value formation and it increases an individual’s level of vocational skills and it results in great emotional response changes in attitude and it provides students a stimulus for other activities such as discussion, 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 that developing the ability to understand the spoken foreign language is a long continuous process 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 evaluate and to response to what they hear So it is very important for students to develop the ability to understand spoken English In daily life they can watch English programs on T.V, listen to the radio or have direct conversations with native speakers Thus the more frequent we are 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 of situation where they need or want to listen to English being used in real – life for a range of purposes However, they feel a big gap between listening activities in the classroom and actual situations This is because in listening materials learners listen to dialogues , conversations which are very grammatical and controlled in many ways The speakers often speak at perfectly controlled speed, with perfect voice tone , accent and correct grammar Whereas, in real – life conversations learners encounter various people speaking with 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 For example, a lot of students have the habit of listening to the radio while studying or the television set is on while we are doing something else The typical feature is that we not listen closely and intentionally, therefore we may not remember much of what we hear or there 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 we not listen to everything we hear with equal concentration For instance, we want to know the answer to a question, we will ask and expect to hear a relevant response This leads 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 the answer 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 to Boston?” – then the last two words of the answer are virtually redundant, and will pay more attention to the first part If we listen to the news, it is from a desire to know what is happening in the world, and we shall expect to hear about certain subjects of current interest 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 coming next, and we expect it to cohere with what went before There is an association between listener expectation and purpose and his comprehension If the listener expects and needs are intentional ,his listening is likely accurately perceived and understood than that which is 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 of a piece of spoken prose and that of informal conversation The former is characterized by a fairly 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 to cause an uneven and constantly changing rhythm of speech Even if only one person is speaking for a relatively long period, the fact that he has not thought out carefully what he has to say beforehand, and has not necessarily chosen the best words, means that he has to rely heavily on vocal emphasis to make his meaning clear And vocal emphasis does not just mean saying a particular word or phrase louder It means also gabbling quickly through what is less important and slowing down over the main point, or pausing for effect before or after a vital phrase, or raising the pitch of voice to stress one thing and then lowering it to play something else The overall effect of all this is perhaps more dramatic and interesting than that of formal speech, but this does not mean that it is ,all in all, more comprehensible or easier to listen to To summarize, we may say that most of our real-life listening activity is characterized by the 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 in the 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 a lecture we may have to hear uninterrupted speech for a very long time indeed- but it is very rare 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 10 use of communicative approach in teaching listening in order to increase interest for the students in listening section Also in chapter two, findings from the survey show that most of the students are active and well-aware of what they need to every listening lesson However, what they have done seem not efficient enough to improve their listening skill To solve and overcome all the problems and difficulties is not easy, this is a matter of time and effort of both the teachers and students in the process of teaching and learning listening In the next chapter I am going to suggest some possible techniques based on my knowledge, experience as well as what I have found in the survey with the hope that they would be of some help to improve the quality of teaching and learning listening skill for the teachers and the students of FLSS 33 CHAPTER THREE: SUGGESTED TECHNIQUES TO IMPROVE LISTENING SKILL TO STUDENTS AT FLSS 3.1 INTRODUCTION What have been discussed and analyzed in chapter two show that the students at FLSS more or less know something about listening skill and that they utilize it in dealing with the listening tasks However, the number of the students being effective listeners is modest while the rest of the students seem to be ineffective ones Based on the findings in the preceding chapter about the students’ employment of listening skill as well as their difficulties, this chapter will aim at giving some suggestions and some practical solutions to overcome the difficulties in order to improve the quality of teaching and learning listening The suggestions consist of : building up listening interest and motivation for the students, training students to become efficient listeners, improving three stages of listening skill and developing the listening materials 3.2 AROUSING STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION AND INTEREST There is no doubt that motivation and interest play an important role in doing anything Obviously when we are highly motivated to anything, the chance of touching success is more secure The latest research findings suggest that there is a circular cause and effect relationship between motivation and success in second language learning, the greater motivation the students build up, the more effort they try to reach success and this is also true in learning listening Only when the students themselves feel eager and anxious to listening comprehension, they actively take part in the listening lessons This can be done by getting students to think, to discuss the topic, the content of the lesson They are called lead-in activities Lead-in activities are those that help involving students in the topic of the listening text For example , if there is a listening text about “film”, one of the lead-in activities is asking students to discuss : kinds of film, actors and actresses, directors etc If the students know something about what they are going to listen, they will definitely pay more attention to it 34 Varying lead-in activities is certainly a remedy for forming interest and motivation Different activities should be given every listening lesson so that the students feel happy and eager to involve in Teachers should avoid making students become bored by asking them to the same activities every lesson In short, lead-in activities are really essential and useful It is a good way to create motivation and interest before listening, thus the students can be successful at the following stage : while-listening 3.3 TRAINING STUDENTS TO BECOME EFICIENT LISTENERS 3.3.1 Making students aware of the nature of listening process It is the teachers who should help their students to realize the nature of listening There are two points: first, listening is an active rather than a passive process which involves using a large number of skills and strategies at the same time, and second, there is both a top-down and a bottom-up process in listening comprehension Listening is active as there is a great difference between what is said or what the listeners hear This is sometimes described as an interact process Language units include intonation, tress, words , grammar, sentences or other types which listeners use in understanding language These units of meaning are the propositions which an utterance or speech expresses Listeners make use of two kinds of knowledge to identify propositions: knowledge of the syntax of the target language and real world knowledge, or systemic (linguistic and schematic (non-linguistic) knowledge Syntactic knowledge enables the students to segment the incoming discourse into chunks or constituents Whereas , knowledge of the structure of noun phrases, verb phrases and grammatical devices enable us to segment discourse into appropriate chunks and thus identifying the propositions underlying what is actually uttered Listening also contains bottom-up and top-down processes Bottom-up processing is the listener’s grammatical and lexical knowledge which is used to extract the meaning of the text Top-down process focuses on the overall meaning of a passage, and the application of schemata Thus, central to the top-down processing is the importance of background knowledge If a listener can not make use of background knowledge, the incoming message may be incomprehensible Therefore , teachers need to show students how to make use of 35 schemata properly to increase their comprehension In general, bottom-up exercises are more useful for beginners, and top-down exercises are more necessary for intermediate and advanced students, however, both types should be used for all levels, and it is a good way to improve listening skill 3.3.2 Promoting students to be fully aware of their purpose of listening One approach to develop listening skill is to help students to understand their purpose of listening Gavin (1985) identifies four categories of listening , with typical corresponding purposes: transactional (learning new information); interactions (recognizing personal component of message); critical (evaluating reasoning and evidence); recreational (appreciating an event) Gavin proposes that in any listening situation students need to select an appropriate role and purpose to guide them as they listen The role helps them to understand what their desired degree of involvement with the speaker should be The purpose helps them select appropriate strategies for seeking specific clarification, for noting down certain details and for trying to understand the intent of the speaker Effective listening instruction will define listening activities that place the students in different roles so that they learn expected types of responses, and not become passive as listeners Effective listening instructions will also help students to focus on their purpose for listening and provide a task that will check if they have achieved their listening purpose To improve the students’ listening skill, teachers must be sure that their students are provided with a range of listening purposes such as: expressing agreement or disagreement, taking notes, making a picture or diagram according to instructions, answering questions If the student knows in advance that he is going to have to make a certain kind of response, he is immediately provided with a purpose in listening, and he knows what sort of information to expect and how to react to it 3.3.3 Activating students to work in different stages of listening We know that to have a successful listening lesson, students should willingly join in three stages of listening When doing listening work in the current context of the teaching and listening English at FLSS, CFL, the teachers should bear in mind the following things to help the students develop their confidence and skills Firstly, the teachers are required to 36 make sure that the students clearly understand what they are expected to before starting to listen so that they can go on the journey confidently and reach the finishing line successfully Therefore, techniques should be varied to get the students happily involved in the first listening stage, it means that the students are to plenty of pre-listening work of an appropriate type so that they will succeed in what ever listening tasks they are asked to It is clear that this stage is aimed at getting their mind around the topic of the listening passage So to help them to be active in this stage, the teachers should: - give the students clear instructions - warm them up with some related questions or relevant topics - allow the students to predict what they might hear and make connections with what they already know, increasing the relevance of the information - provide them with key concepts and vocabulary to aid their comprehension Secondly, in the while-listening stage, the teacher should not a lot of teaching as students will the “while” listening tasks by themselves, in pairs or in groups It is time for students to construct clear, accurate meaning and they interpret the speaker’s verbal message and non-verbal cues During this process students verify and revise their predictions One thing to keep in mind is that listening skill lesson is task-based, students make interpretations and judgments based on what they know, and assess what they need to know, thus teacher should less up-front teaching To activate the students in while-listening stage , the teachers should: - set up and vary listening tasks at different levels and different cases - encourage the students to work independently to comprehend the speaker’s language and ideas and the topic - give students help whenever it is needed, but not inflicting help on those who not need it - encourage the students to help each other, so that the emphasis is on the successful completion of the tasks rather than on who got it “right” or “wrong” - not treat the activities as tests to be marked and scored 37 - encourage students to alter their answers if they wish to, perhaps after listening for a second time - help students know when to request clarification of what they not understand - encourage students’ critical reactions and personal responses to the speaker’s ideas and use of language The last stage is post-listening, it is important for teachers to encourage students to reflect, and to clarify and extend their thinking about what they have heard by making concrete responses which may be written, spoken, visual ,or dramatic Many of the same means used to help students extend and clarify their reading experience can be used to extend and clarify their listening experience 3.3.4 Encouraging students to have extensive listening habit Familiarizing the students with extensive listening is a way to encourage them to learn English Extensive listening is the general listening to natural language for greneral ideas, not for particular details The level of language is propriate to the students’ current ability so that the students feel like listening to get pleasure or interest The listening passage for extensive listening can be long (stories) or short (songs, poems ,jokes) Students are, in general, not asked to any language work when they extensive listening However, it helps enrich their vocabulary, strengthen their understanding of language Nuttal (1982) states that “ The best way to improve your knowledge of a foreign language is to go and live among its speakers.” To motivate the students to have extensive listening habit , maybe the following principles should be kept in mind: - listening materials are easy to understand, with few unfamiliar items of vocabulary -listening materials are various, with a wide range of topics - students can choose what they actually enjoy listening - extensive listening can be assigned as homework and their doing must be checked the following period 38 In short, there are various inputs which offer students with an aim of becoming proficient at using a language Extensive listening is one of the selected approaches as it create pleasure, key factor to a successful lesson 3.4 IMPROVING THREE STAGES OF LISTENING SKIL 3.4.1 Techniques for pre-listening When students sit in classroom and the teacher says: “Listen to this!” and then switches on the cassette recorder or begins to read aloud, the students may have no idea of what to expect Even if the sounds and words they hear are familiar, they may still unable to understand because they lack certain kinds of knowledge necessary for them to comprehend So , before listening , students should be “turn-in” so that they know what to expect, both in general and for particular tasks For teachers , when planning lessons, time must be allocated for pre-listening activities and these activities should not be rushed The techniques of offering support or instruction before listening are varied and depend on a number of factors: time, material, the ability of the class, the interest of the class, the nature and content of the listening text itself etc The followings are some suggestive pre-listening techniques drawn from the knowledge of theories and the reality of teaching and learning listening at FLSS 3.4.1.1 Introducing the topic This is a very common form of pre-listening activity, particularly when students are about to hear a recorded text Teachers generally give their students some background information, begin to talk about the topic and indicate what the students should expect to hear However, it does require preparation as teacher need to know in advance what must be included in this talk, otherwise it is easy to go off at a tangent and fail to clarify or establish significant points The teacher’s saying about this is not too short or too long as the shortage may cause difficulties to the students understanding and the redundancy may lead to the students’ boredom and no longer want to listen by the time the actual listening text is played On the other hand, teacher can use this time to motivate the students by making them feel that the actual listening text is real interesting , exciting or amazing Introducing the listening topic often comes well from the teacher, who, in any case, is able to adjust the nature and level of the talk discussion to suit the students 39 3.4.1.2 Giving listening tasks It is unfair to plunge students straight into the listening text, even when testing rather than teaching listening comprehension, as this makes it extremely difficult for them to use the natural listening skills of matching what they hear with what they expect to hear So before listening , students should be ‘turn in” so that they know what to expect, both in general and for particular tasks 3.4.1.3 Asking students to look at a list of items/thoughts This type of activity is particularly helpful for practicing newly learned vocabulary with early students (10th students) The teacher presents a list of words , phrases that he thinks it causes the students’ “blockage” in listening work , or , then asks the students to look at the list for a few minutes before listening They can discuss or ask the teacher for the meaning of some words/ phrases or the message of some ideas/ thoughts 3.4.1.4 Asking students to look at pictures The students are asked to have a look at or describe a picture (or pictures) and the teacher checks that the students can name the items which will feature in the listening text This can be done by questions and answers or by general or group discussion Actually, prelistening “looking and describing or talking about” is an effective way of reminding students of lexis which may have been forgotten and of focusing attention on the topic to be listened to 3.4.1.5 Using visual aids Visual materials are really useful in developing listening comprehension, especially for high school students Using visual aids really attracts students’ concentration , and it is believed that the more striking and stimulating visual aids are, the greater motivation and concentration are likely to be Teacher can ask students to look at the picture(s), graphs, or maps and predict something relating to the content of the listening text or the students can realize the situation due to some environment clues 3.4.2 Techniques for while-listening From the findings of the survey, there are series of things that should be done to aid students in the phase of while-listening Teachers should select or combine different 40 activities to assist their students as using one preferred technique all the time can not be advantageous for it is impossible to have “one dish that suits all taste.” In order to help students to well in while-listening-stage, teachers must have listening activities which give practice in prediction, matching and interpretation Prediction occurs at the whilelistening-stage (students decide what words or ideas will follow immediately), and matching is related to prediction in that the students make a series or predictions, then match them again what is actually said The two activities seem to go on concurrently as one part is being matched while other micro predictions are being made At the same time, interpretation has to be carried out, as the interpretation of one part of a message can affect the prediction of what the next part will be The fact is that most of the teacher’s work related to a listening lesson has been done in pre-listening stage During the lesson, the teacher should exceed his role of supervising, and only give help to the students when really necessary The teacher’s mission is to create and maintain an encouraging atmosphere in class During the stage of while-listening, the teacher should: - be willing to help students whenever necessary - be sure that the aim of the work is to teach rather than to test - encourage the students to take note of necessary things for later use - ask students to leave out less necessary parts of the work rather than rushing - pause the tape and ask students if they can follow , understand and get the necessary information of the passage - encourage co-operation among the students by asking them to work in pairs or in groups - ask students to check their work - ask students to give feedback when every-thing is still fresh in students’ mind - play back parts of the text if there is something that is not clear 3.4.2.1 First listening This is the continuance of the last step in pre-listening stage, and it is time for students to listen for main ideas The teacher will play the tape for the first time while students listen to the passage and try to find out the answers for guiding questions or decide true or false for the given statements 41 After the first time listening , teachers should check through all the students’ answers If their answer is inexact, the teacher should provide them with some suggestions relating to the right answer This helps all the students to grasp the overall meaning of the listening text before continuing with the second time listening Thereby, students will gain more confidence and find it easier to deal with other more challenging tasks As a result, the tasks will be finished successfully In general, this step is very important and cannot be excluded from listening process Teachers should not ask students to go straight into listening for detailed information as it will cause difficulties for students and lower the process of listening The further consequence is that students will be demotivated and discouraged from learning and practicing listening 3.4.2.2 Second listening If in the first time listening, students have to grasp the overall meaning of the listening text, in the second time, they have to deal with more complicated work – listening for specific details Before allowing students to listen for the second time, one thing the teacher should bear in mind is that students have to be given specific task, and the teacher should set the purpose for them to listen If there is no task for students to do, the teacher can not ensure that their students will concentrate on listening As a result, the listening work will become inefficient Tasks for students to in the second time are various They can be: filling the missing word, completing form/chart, labeling, arranging items in patterns etc More simulating are tasks supported by visual aids such as matching the descriptions with pictures, putting pictures in order and so on The students should be given the handouts, so that all of them can know what the tasks are Teachers should also make sure that students really understand what they are required to do, what information they need to grasp while listening to the tape by asking them to underline the requirement, the key words as well as to discuss and anticipate the answers One thing should be noted here is that a listening lesson is not a test, but a training session The teacher, therefore, should not ask the students to find out all the answers immediately, but give them time to reconsider The teacher should allow students to listen 42 again (listen for the third time), so that they can check the answers as well as finish the parts they have not done yet It is also very useful for the students to compare their answers with each other without commenting on what or who is right or wrong before listening again By setting up doubt and discontent among students with regard to their own answers, this can motivate more careful and closer listening in the following listening 3.4.2.3 Third listening Giving feedback is the next essential step in while-listening stage Whatever listening activities the teacher choose for students to carry out, giving feedback is very important, it is time for the teacher to see how well his students have done the tasks This will help students to assess their ability, recognize their strong points and weak points and to find out the reason why they have not perform the tasks so that they will make an effort and get better results in the next listening lessons When giving feedback, there are two points that teachers should bear in mind: - First, feedback should be given right after the students have finished their work It is extremely difficult to provide useful feedback at a later lesson as it is generally necessary to replay the listening text in order to refer to the points which students have not been very clear The more important thing is that much of the value of discussing why students have missed things or made errors is forgotten if the discussion is not held immediately when relevant thoughts are still fresh and uppermost in students’ mind - Second, the teacher’s feedback should be positive as it is given immediately after the students have finished their tasks, it can greatly affect them Positive feedback, therefore, is specially important If students performed the tasks successfully, the teacher should compliment them on their good work It helps generate more confidence, motivation and interest It encourages them to make greater effort in dealing with other listening tasks and overcome any difficulties In case the students’answer is inexact, giving them such feedback as “Good, but…” Positive feedback will save the students from being hurt and encourage them to try so that they can better in the next time 3.4.3 Techniques for post- listening 43 Apart from the techniques for pre and while listening stages, techniques for post – listening is very necessary and important The purpose is to see whether the students have understood what they have just listened, or to give the students the opportunity to expand the topic These are the suggested techniques which I think they are suitable to the students of FLSS: 3.4.3.1 Discussion Although the students can identify the relationships between speakers while they are listening to them, it is sometimes useful, at post-listening stage, to consider what features of the listening text made the relationships clear By discussion of these features, the students' awareness of how language is used in social settings will be improved and they will gradually appreciate how far, and in what ways, English differs from Vietnamese in this respects In order to ask the students to a post -listening discussion , the teacher can give the students notice by giving a question or two before listening so that they will focus on this while they are listening 3.4.3.2 Role-play Role-play or simulation can be carried out after the students listen to a conversation or some other types of listening text that involve more than one speaker The attraction of this activity is that it can provide the students with a selection of language appropriate to the role and the situations Even if the situation in the listening text is different from the one to be used in role-play, the students can use relevant language functions and forms when their turn comes to speak To this activity, the teacher asks the students to work in pairs or groups according to the numbers of roles in the situation After the work is finished, if there is enough time, the teacher can tell one or two pairs or groups to perform their play in front of the class 3.4.3.3 Summary After finishing while-listening stage, students have already got the main ideas and a certain amount of the information of the listening text So the teacher can ask students to summarize the listening text by extending notes at the while-listening stage or simply depending on memory students can either oral or written summary work This activity should be done in groups so that the students who have not been very clear about the passage 44 can have a chance to understand it After that the teacher asks the group leader to present their summary In short, to have an effective listening lesson, the teachers need to vary their activities to make full use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses 3.5 DEVELOPING LISTENING MATERIALS As shown in table 2, except for listening the texts in the two books (listening And Speaking, English 10 and 11), the students of FLSS have chances to listen to the extra listening texts which are selected by their own teachers and which are taken from different sources It is important to have criteria for teachers to make decisions to choose recorded texts , when selecting supplementary materials, teachers should care for the following criteria: 3.5.1 Language Using listening texts of the right level will not only develop listening skills but also contribute to students’ overall language learning Stephen Kraskhen has identified listening as a valuable source of what he calls “comprehensive input” and he maintains that students need both to acquire a language and to learn a language, so it is good for students to be faced with language which they should be capable of understanding although it is slightly above their current level of use 3.5.2 Length The length of the listening text should be taken into consideration There is no doubt that it is difficult for high school students to listen attentively for a too long text, whereas, teachers will not motivate students if the text is too short If there is a text which teachers want to use but find rather too long, teachers should plan to stop the tape from time to time, and use it in more manageable sections and introduce pauses to give the students time to think 3.5.3 Content The content of the listening text is not less important as all students need material which will involve them and make them want to listen It is ,therefore necessary for teachers to identify appropriate material which does interest their students Ordinarily, texts which deal 45 with up-to-the-minute news and the very latest ideas are of consideration interest, funny stories and amusing pictures can be exploited to great effect in language teaching, but they should not be the sole type of material used , teachers should vary the topics and style to avoid making boredom to the students In conclusion, to ensure the success of the teacher in activating his students and improving their listening skill, teachers have to note the importance of finding well-recorded material of the right length, with interesting content, and with suitable level 3.6 SUMMARY In this chapter, I have presented some suggestive techniques to improve listening skill to the students at FLSS Listening interest and motivation are the first factors to help the teachers to improve their students’ listening skill The second is that the teachers, with their active role, need to train their students to become efficient listeners It is essential for the teachers to help their students be aware of the nature of listening process, promote their students to know the purpose of listening Activating their students to work in different stages of listening, and encouraging their students to have extensive listening habits are also the techniques that can train efficient listeners The following technique is to improve activities in three stages of a listening lesson The teachers have to adjust the time and efforts to manage the class and make their students involve in the listening lesson Moreover they need to vary strategies to aid the students in three phases of a listening lesson Finally, supplementary listening materials should be carefully selected and provided, in addition, the two books: “Listening And Speaking, book 10, 11” must be made full use of PART THREE: CONCLUSION SUMMARY OF THE STUDY Being one of the teachers at FLSS,CFL,HNU, I can clearly see the current situation of teaching and learning English Listening skill is by both the teachers and the students considered the most difficulty to achieve among the four skills This ,therefore, drove me to 46 conduct this study This study is done in the hope of contributing some suggestive techniques and activities for teaching and learning listening and it is carried out with the purpose of finding the answers to the two research questions: - What are the factors that cause the difficulties to the students? - Which techniques should be applied by the teachers to help the students to overcome their difficulties in listening lessons? In order to answer these two questions, the study is based on the existing of listening skills (the work of other writers ) and the status of teaching and learning English at FLSS in general and teaching and learning listening to English in particular By reading, analyzing and summarizing materials and books relating to the thesis in combination with doing the survey questionnaire, the solutions to the thesis questions are found LIMITATION AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY In any research papers, limitations are unavoidable The study presented in this minor thesis is of no exception Firstly, the study has already dealt with the difficulties of learning listening skill of the students of 10th and 11th form, but there should be a research conducted to confirm what difficulties the teachers at FLSS have met in teaching listening skill Secondly, the techniques and activities suggested though prove to be useful and effective, they are likely to be subjective and incomplete There should be some more techniques and activities to help high school students in general and gifted students in particular make good advance in listening skill Thirdly, listening is only one of the four basic skills in teaching and learning English, but up till now there has been only this study on improving listening skill for the students of FLSS It is ,therefore, important that studies on reading, speaking and writing for better English teaching and learning at FLSS should be carried out 47 ... for improving listening skills of gifted students of Foreign Language Specializing School, College of Foreign Languages, Hanoi National University.” AIMS OF THE STUDY The purpose of this study... stages of the listening session CHAPTER TWO : PRACTICAL SITUATION OF TEACHING AND LEARING LISTENING TO ENGLISH AT THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE SPECIALIZING SCHOOL, COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES, HANOI NATIONAL. .. data above that a lot of students at FLSS are not aware of the self-study of listening at home Only a few of them spend some time listening to it every-day, most of them have no habit of self-listening