(Sáng kiến kinh nghiệm) problems in learning english listening skill at nguyen xuan nguyen high school and suggested solution

THANH HOA PROVICIAL DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN HIGH SCHOOL EXPERIENCE INNOVATION TOPIC: PROBLEMS IN LEARNING ENGLISH LISTENING SKILL AT NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN HIGH SCHOOL AND SUGGESTED SOLUTION Writer : Pham Thi Tuan position: Teacher Subject : English THANH HOA – JUNE 2017 INDEX TABLE OF CONTENT page LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………….2 PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Reasons for Choosing the Topic……………………………………… 1.2 Research’s objectives 1.3.Research’s objects 1.4 Research’s methods 1.5 New points of innovation experience PART 2: CONTENT 2.1 Literature Review 2.2 The problems before applying the innovative experience 2.3 The experience innovative experience or suggestions used to solve problems 2.4 The effectiveness of innovative experience in teaching activities at NGUYE XUAN NGUYEN high school PART : Suggested Activities to Improve Learning Listening Skill at High School 3.1 Suggested Solutions … 14 3.2 Some Suggested Kinds of Listening Exercises to Motivate Students into Listening … 16 CONCLUSION 16 1.Recapitulation………………………………………………………… 17 REFERENCES 17 Part 1: INTRODUCTION Reasons for Choosing the Topic English Teaching Methodology is a very important subject for everyone who wants to become teachers of English In this subject, students of English who are being trained to become teachers will be provided with necessary information about techniques and methods of teaching four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing Of all these four skills, listening skill is considered to be one of the most difficult skills to teach and to learn As students of English, the author herself and others have met a lot of difficulties in learning this skill She has chosen the topic about “Problems in Learning English Listening Skill at NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN High School and Suggested Solutions” for several reasons Firstly, listening skill is thought to be the most difficult in teaching and learning a language in general and English in particular A lot of teachers and students meet many problems and difficulties in teaching and learning this skill Secondly, listening skill plays a very important role in teaching and learning a language so it should be paid much more attention to However, it seems that this skill is not really focused on in many high schools in Vietnam and the qualities of teaching and learning this skill are not very good Thus, this topic is chosen to study in order to find out some suggested solutions to partly improve this matter Research’s objectives The study is conducted with the following aims: because teaching listening skill is one of the most difficult tasks for any ESL teacher, the first aim is to find out the problems and difficulties in learning and teaching English listening skill at high school Additionally, the study is carried out so as to get more information about the qualities of teaching and learning English listening skill at Vietnamese high schools Research’s objects The topic about “Problems in Learning English Listening Skill at High School and Suggested Solutions” is a broad topic and it cannot be exploited in the study due to the limitation of a B.A thesis Therefore, the study only focuses on the main problems which cause difficulties for both teachers and students and the real situations of teaching and learning English listening skill according to a survey done in three grades of a high school Besides, from this survey, some suggestions and solutions are given in order to partly improve the quality of teaching and learning English listening skill at high school Research’s methods Due to the scope and the characteristics of the study, the author follows the procedures:  Collecting and analyzing the materials  Synthesizing the information First, some materials referring to the issue are collected and analyzed Then, basing on the theoretical background described and analyzed, the survey will be carried out Next, the information from the survey will be analyzed in detail and the results will be categorized to synthesize New points of innovative experience The thesis consists of three main parts: the first part is Introduction This part provides the information about the reasons for choosing the topic, the aims of the topic, the scope of the study, the method of the study and the design of the study In the second part – Development, there are three chapters Chapter 1- Theoretical background discusses some main points relating to the topic: definition of listening skill and its importance, CLT with teachers’ roles and students’ roles, the main principles of teaching listening and the main kinds of listening activities This chapter focuses on the theory about the main types of listening activities and teaching it in CLT Chapter The real situation of learning English listening skill at Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school describes the whole picture about the real situation of learning English listening skill of the students in this school three grades In chapter Suggested activities to improve learning listening skill at high school, some solutions to the problems students have when learning listening are suggested and some listening activities are recommended to be applied in teaching and learning this skill with the aim to motivating students into learning this skill The last part is Conclusion Part 2: content Chapter 1: Theoretical Background 2.1 Literature Review Listening skill can be defined in different ways According to MC Milan Dictionary, listening is to pay attention to a sound or to try to hear a sound or to pay attention to what someone tells you and what they suggest Babylon Dictionary views listening as an attempt to hear something, an act of paying careful attention to one who is speaking Similarly, in the New Era EnglishEnglish-Vietnamese Dictionary, listening is to make an effort to hear somebody or something Thus, listening is the language modality that is used most frequently Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, and television), a message, and a receiver (the listener), [ ] 2.2 The problems before applying the innovative experience In daily life, people spend a lot of time listening: officers listen to their boss’ talks, students listen to their teachers, old people listen to news on TV and radio It has been estimated that adults spend almost half of their communication time listening In real life, there are two main kinds of listening The first kind is casual listening: we listen to something without any particular purposes in our mind and we often not concentrate on it much to get the information Usually, we hear it by chance Therefore, we rarely can remember much of its content This way is often used in entertaining activities For example, we listen to a song while doing the house work or talking to someone The second kind is focused listening which is quite different from the first one: we listen to something with some particular purpose in mind and pay much attention to it so as to get as much information as possible In language teaching and learning, teachers play a predominant role because of students’ ages, character, psychology and lack of English knowledge According to Breen and Candlin, the teacher has two main roles: the first is to facilitate the communication process between all participants in the classroom and between these participants, the various activities and texts The second role is to act as an independent participant within the teachinglearning group [2] Students play a role as the main body in language teaching and learning Furthermore, the emphasis in CLT on the processes of communication rather than mastery of language forms - these lead to different roles for learners from those found in more traditional second language classrooms 2.3 The experience innovative or suggestion used to solve problems To teach any skill of a language, it is important for teachers to follow the principles for teaching that skill so as to teach it more effectively and methodically First, the teacher should use authentic texts and present them as naturally and realistically as possible Authentic texts can be taken from various radio broadcasts or interviews such as VOA and BBC These texts are very useful and necessary because they allow background noise or interruptions and contain different types of voices and accents and natural conversations Second, it is better to include different kinds of texts: conversations, dialogues, jokes, lectures, news broadcasts… Third, the teacher should use primarily meaning- based tasks for students to This is an example of a meaning- based task: Circle the definition for the word you hear: a It is a pet that likes eating mice (cat) b It is an animal that can fly (bat) [3] Students will have to listen very carefully and pay attention to their meanings to distinguish two words correctly because they are a minimal pair so they may confuse hearers Lastly, the teacher should let students listen to the text more than once Moreover, after each time of listening, students should be allowed some time to check their answers Like the other skills, listening includes a number of different sub-skills (Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong, 2007): learners have to recognize differences between phonological sounds - the difference in a single sound makes a new word with a different meaning For example, the minimal pair bull and pull contain two sounds /p/ and /b/ which make these two words different in terms of meanings when listening to a text, it is not necessary to understand the meanings of all the words Therefore, for some unimportant words, students can guess their meanings or even ignore them This helps them concentrate on catching the key words of the text [12] 2.3.1 Types of Listening Activities There are four main types of listening activities mentioned in Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong (2007) Students have to nothing in response to the listening but teachers can check their understanding by their body language and expressions For this type, teachers can use some different activities For example, teachers may tell a story or play a recording of the story and students will be motivated to attend and understand in order to enjoy it or teachers let students listen to songs: teachers may sing a song themselves or play a recording of the song [13] 2.3.2 Short Responses For this kind, students have to various listening activities For example, they are asked to perform actions or draw shapes or pictures in response to the teacher’s instructions, tick off words while hearing them from the text within a list of items given beforehand, or a number of statements are given after listening and students are asked to point out which ones are true and which ones are false,the teacher gives students some definitions of something and students have to point out what it is, skimming and scanning: a listening text is given and students are asked to look for the main content of the text or its specific information 2.3.3 Longer Responses The listening activities for longer responses are often much more difficult than the short ones Students have to the tasks such as answering questions, taking notes-this is a quite difficult response- students are asked to write down the main points of a listening text, paraphrasing a listening text after listening with their own words or translating it into another language 1.4 Summary In short, this chapter deals with some main points relating to the topic about listening skill In the first place, it presents some definitions of listening skill according to some dictionaries, its importance and two main types of listening-casual listening and focused listening The next main point presented in the chapter is a popular approach for language teaching called Communicative Language Teaching ( CLT ) with its characteristics, teachers’ roles and learners’ roles This part includes seven principles of teaching English listening skill [ 15] 2.4 THE EFFECTIVENESS OF INNOVATIVE IN TEACHING ACTIVITIES AT NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN HIGH SCHOOL Three textbooks of three grades in high school contain many different types of listening exercises and the followings are the main kinds of listening exercises selected from those textbooks: The first kind is T/F statements This is one of the most frequently-used kinds of listening exercises in the textbooks of three forms The number of T/F statements is often from to ones The requirement in most of these exercises is not too difficult: students only have to decide whether the statement is true or false and they not have to correct the false information For this kind of listening exercises, students can the exercise more easily but sometimes their answers cannot show their understanding as they can guess the answers without understanding the listening text The next type is comprehension questions: like T/F exercises, comprehension question exercises are also used in many listening lessons in these textbooks It also can check students’ understanding more exactly Multiple-choice exercises are much used in many lessons of different language skills especially in reading comprehension skill They are also often used in many listening lessons of these textbooks particularly in 11 th and 12th form textbooks [4,5,6] 2.1 Difficulties in Teaching and Learning English Listening It cannot be denied that listening equipments such as listening tapes, cassette players play a very important role in learning listening skill Therefore, good and modern listening equipments are vital for teaching and learning listening However, there are not many high schools in VietNam which can meet this requirement: even some schools not have normal listening equipments such as cassette players and the teachers have to read the text themselves Additionally, using cassette players is not a good way of teaching listening and this can make the listening text more difficult to hear to students because the volume of the cassette players may not be loud or good enough for students to hear or the noise outside classroom may affect their listening But most of Vietnamese high schools use cassette players as main listening equipments.[7] 2.2 Real Situation of Learning and Teaching English Listening at Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school is a rather famous school in Thanh Hoa province It is well-equipped with a lot of modern equipments: four labs with projectors, one lab for studying biology, one lab for studying physics and many cassette players for learning English In addition, it has a room with a lot of computers for teaching and learning informatics This school is really a good teaching and learning environment for teachers and students During two months of teaching practice in this school, it was realized that the teachers and students have made much effort to enhance the quality of teaching and learning English However, there are still some problems such as: the modern teaching and learning equipments have not been used very effectively, some teachers not have really creative methods of teaching so they cannot attract their students to learning Moreover, the number of students in this school who are good at English is not high Many of them not pay much attention to learning English There are only a few of them in some classes such as 12B2, 10C10, 11C10 who can learn English well while a lot of other students have difficulty in learning this subject Therefore, they meet many difficulties in learning the skills especially listening skill 2.3 Main Reasons for the Difficulties in Learning Listening Skill 2.4 Subjective Reason We cannot blame bad listening equipments for the low quality of teaching and learning listening because most of those difficulties are caused by teachers and students themselves Firstly, it is undeniable that not many students really pay attention to listening skill They only focus on learning grammar, vocabulary and ignore this skill Without spending time practicing, how can their ability of listening improve? “Practice makes perfect”, they cannot distinguish linking sounds or follow fast speaking speed of native speakers if they not often practice hearing them Bad methods of teaching listening of some teachers are another important reason They not spend much time teaching this skill to students: they may pass some part that students cannot hear and move to another one or the way they teach listening lessons is not effective Lastly, repeatedly used activities contribute boredom to learning listening of students As it can be seen from three high school English textbooks, some kinds of activities are used again and again such as T/F statements or gapfilling exercises This may reduce students’ interest in the lessons and cause the boredom of doing the same exercises many times 2.5 Objective Reasons As it was mentioned above, the quality of listening equipments in most of Vietnamese high schools is not good and this has bad affect on the quality of teaching and learning listening Noticeably, the importance of listening skill has not been appreciated in many schools so it does not receive enough attention so that the necessary equipments which are used for teaching and learning this skill are not improved Survey on Learning English Listening Skill at Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school 3.1.Objects of the Survey To learning listening skill well is really a big problem for many students Naturally, because they cannot learn this skill well, they often get bored or even ignore it This situation is very popular in most of high schools in Vietnam In fact, not only teachers have difficulties in teaching listening skill but students also meet a lot of trouble when learning it Thus, the first aim of doing this survey is to check the ability of learning listening skill of students and find out the main problems or difficulties they have when learning this skill The second aim is to know what can motivate them into listening lessons: interesting listening activities, new listening topics or good method of teaching The third but the most important reason of doing this survey is to give some suggestions to motivate students into listening lessons better based on its results 3.2 Description of the Survey The survey is conducted with a questionnaire which consists of 16 questions including both open and closed questions so as to check students’ listening ability and their interests in this skill better It was given to 135 students of three classes from three grades: 10C10, 11C10 and 12B All of the students in the survey learned English when they were in grade They are the best students of English who are chosen to learn in the classes of English of the whole school Especially, the students of class 12B are the best ones of three classes: they study the advanced text book The aim of question is to know the number of the years these students learn English, question checks their interest in English and question reveals their opinions about listening skill The information about the factors affecting students’ listening is given in question Besides this, we will get information about how much time they spend on practicing listening per day in order to know if they are interested in improving their listening skill or not thanks to question Questions 6, 7, and show us students’ habits, their ways and their ability of listening Question 10 helps us know whether listening equipments can affect students’ learning or not In addition, thanks to the answers of questions 11 and 12, we will collect their ideas of listening exercises and listening topics in the text books The aim of question 13 is to find out what kind of listening exercises in the textbooks students like most Questions 14,15 give us the information about the extra listening activities given by the teacher and students’ attitudes towards those activities The last question is used to analyze students’ ideas about some main factors which can motivate them into the lesson 3.3 Results of the Survey The following pie chart presents the percentages of students who are interested in learning English 30% yes 70% no Figure 1; Students’ interest in learning English According to the chart, although these students are from the classes of English of the school, only 70% of them are interested in learning English while the rest not like learning English at all (30%) 50 40 linking sounds 30 fast speaking speed 20 background noise 10 all Figure Factors affecting students’ listening As shown in the chart above, noticeably, a large number of students (45.2%) are affected by all of those factors This can partly explain why so many of them have difficulty in listening Amazingly, the factors which make the least percentages are background noise and linking sounds with 12.6% and 14.8% The result in the following figure will answer this question: Q Question Answers Number of students Percentage (%) a hour 37 27.4 Figure Students’ amount of time for practicing listening skill Unexpectedly, although listening skill is very difficult to them, only 22.2% spend more than one hour and 27.4% of them spend one hour on practicing it By contrast, more than a half of these students not care about improving their listening ability with 50.4% This is an important reason explaining why they meet a lot of trouble with listening and they cannot get better at learning Question Answers Number of students % a.always 13 9.6 b.often 44 32.6 c.sometimes 67 49.6 d never 7.6 Figure 2.5 Students’ frequency of the guessing habit It is surprising that the number of students who not have the guessing habit make the highest percentage with 49.6% and some of them even never guess the content of the lesson (7.6%) Besides these, quite many students are in the habit of guessing the lesson (32.6%) However, the percentage of students who always this is not high (just 9.6%) Guessing the content of the lesson is a good habit for learning any language skill because it helps learners focus more on the lesson so students had better take up this habit to get more concentration on the lessons 10 20% 36% every word of the whole text the key words Figure Students’ meanings of ways of sentences 44% listening According to the chart, there are 20% of students paying attention to every word of the whole text In fact, this is not a good way of listening as the important information may be missed easily if they try to listen to all the words in the text Therefore, many students of three classes cannot catch the main message of the listening lesson: they not know how to take notes or focus on the main ideas, they just focus on writing down any word the hear It is good that many other students concentrate on the key words This is a very good way of listening and a good listener should follow this way since the key words always contain the main message of the text Question Answers Number of students % a.always 3.7 b.often 29 21.5 c.sometimes 89 65.9 d.never 12 8.9 Figure Students’ frequency of distraction From the table we can see a lot of students (65.9%) are sometimes distracted from the lessons and 12% of them never meet this problem Nothing outside the lesson can affect their listening This is really necessary for any listener who wants to understand what the speaker is saying On the contrary, the rest of these students are often or always affected by the factors outside the lesson with 21.5% and 3.7% respectively This problem is caused by many reasons.Thus, another question is “how many times of listening they need to understand an English text?” The answers to this question will reveal some information about the real situation of the listening classes in this school: Question Answers Number of students % a.once 5.2 b.twice 36 26.7 c.three times 45 33.3 d.more than three times 47 34.8 Students’ times of listening per lesson 11 It is not surprising that only a few students need one time to listen so as to understand and the listening tasks and 26.7% of them need two times of listening The number of students who need three times and more than three times make very high percentages with 33.3% and 34.8% respectively In practice, it is not easy to understand a speech spoken by native speakers after just one time of listening Influence of listening equipments on students’ listening As it is shown in the chart, the number of students who are much affected by listening equipments make the highest percentage of all with 42.2% Besides, there are 6% of the others who are very much affected Question s 11 12 Answers Number of students % a.all of them are interesting b.some of them are interesting c.all of them are boring a.too difficult b.difficult c.rather difficult d.not difficult at all 27 90 18 60 50 12 20 66.7 13.3 6.7 44.4 37.1 11.8 Figure Students’ opinions about listening topics and exercises The table shows that according to 66.7% of students, only some listening topics in the text books are interesting and 20% think all of them are good However, 13.3% of the rest consider all of the topics to be boring What causes these different ideas? T/ F statements 15% 36% Gap filling Multiple choice 27% 22% Comprehension questions Figure 6: Students’ types of listening exercises As can be seen from the chart, the number of students who like doing T/F statement exercises make the highest percentage with 36.3% The second highest choice of students is gap-filling exercises with 26.7% 22.2% of the rest choose 12 multiple choices and the percentage of students who choose comprehension questions is the lowest with 14.8% According to many of them, T/F statement exercises are the most interesting ones of all Questions Answers Number of students % a.always 21 15.6 14 b.often 13 9.6 c.sometimes 48 36.5 d.never 53 39.3 a.difficult 37 27.4 15 b.easy 5.2 c.interesting 60 44.4 d.boring 31 23 Figure7: Students’ opinions about extra listening activities The table indicates that many teachers often not give their students extra exercises after a lesson Only 15.6% and 9.6 % of the teachers always or often this whereas 36.5 % sometimes and 39.3% never have any extra tasks for students Why the teachers of English in this school rarely ask their students to extra tasks? The reality shows that it is because the ability of learning listening of students is too bad According to 44.4% of students, the extra listening activities given by the teacher are interesting This is a good point 27.4% of the others think they are difficult and 23% find these exercises boring A few of them comment that they are easy There are different ideas among students because of their different learning abilities 3.4 Summary In brief, this chapter provides some information about the real situation of learning listening skill of the students at a Vietnamese high school through a survey Before doing the survey, some comments on listening exercises in the English high school textbooks are given Additionally, the chapter gives some main difficulties in learning listening skill and the reasons for those problems Then, it describes the survey about teaching and learning English listening skill at Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school The survey consists of sixteen questions which investigate the actual situation of learning listening skill of the students from three classes of English at this school III CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION PART3: Suggested activities to improve learning listening skill at high school 13 3.1 Introduction How to teach and to learn listening skill effectively in most of high schools in Vietnam is really a big problem for both teachers and students They meet so many difficulties in teaching and learning this skill well Consequently, the quality of teaching and learning it is not very good Many students cannot understand much of a listening text As a result, they get bored with learning this skill and ignore it The question is: how can those problems and difficulties be solved and how can the quality of teaching and learning listening be improved? Furthermore, it is crucial to increase students’ motivation into learning in order to attract their attention to this skill more This part will partly answer this question It suggests some solutions and activities for learning listening skill.[ 11] 3.2 Suggested Solutions ; In the first place, to improve the quality of teaching and learning listening, listening equipments must be improved However, many schools in Vietnam have not been well-equipped to help teaching and learning better Some schools even not have any cassette players for teaching listening We know that learning foreign languages has been becoming more and more important, so there should be much attention to this matter Teachers should make sure that the quality of listening tapes is good enough for students to hear so that it will not affect their listening ability Furthermore, students’ listening will be affected if the listening environment is not good: it may be too noisy outside the classroom or even in the class so teachers should create a good listening environment for students There should be more extra different listening topics and activities As it was mentioned above, many listening activities in the textbooks cannot check students’ understanding of the listening texts exactly because for such exercises, students sometimes guess the answers without understanding the text Thus, teachers had better give more kinds of exercises which can make students focus more on their listening The survey shows that many students like doing T/F statement exercises so the teacher can give more exercises of this kind, for example Although this seems very difficult to for both teachers and students since it takes students a lot of time to finish a lesson in the textbook per period, teachers should try to teach extra listening lessons or give students more extra listening tasks 3.3 Some Suggested Kinds of Listening Exercises to Motivate Students into Listening A lot of listening games for teaching and learning this skill have been applied so far and the followings are some suggested games for teachers and students to consider: Students are divided into small groups (5 – members per group, for example) The first member of each group will be allowed to listen to one or two sentences of a short funny story Then, he or she has to tell the second 14 member of the group the whole sentence without letting the other members hear This member must remember that sentence and has to listen to the next sentence of the story After listening, he will inform to the third member of the group the previous sentence and the one he has just heard The game will continue like that until the last member of the group The duty of this member is to remember all the sentences and retell the whole story he has heard from his group members The group who retells the story exactly will be the winner The teacher divides students into small groups (each group may have five or six members) and gives them the instructions of playing the game: Students are given the list of the questions of the cross-word beforehand and they have to answer those questions while listening The answers for those questions are the words in the cross-word This activity is rather similar to lucky number game However, instead of using numbers, teachers will provide different topics such as family, friendship, hobbies for students to choose to listen This activity is for pre- listening Some key words of the listening text are given before listening Students are asked to guess the content of the text and create a new text according to what they guess 3.4 Rearranging the Order of the Conversation The teacher gives students handouts of a conversation which is in the wrong order and ask them to listen to this conversation again in the right order After listening, they have to rearrange the order of the conversation according to their understanding This exercise can be used for students at any level Example: Look at this conversation which is in the wrong order: Tom: - Oh where are you from in Brazil? Paulo: - My parents are here from Brazil They are on vacation Tom: - Pleased to meet you, Mr and Mrs Tavares Mrs Tavares: - Nice to meet you, Tom For this exercise, the teacher gives students a list of some topics and lets them listen to some texts or some conversations about those topics [14] 3.5 Making T/F Statements Students are allowed to listen to a text for some times and take notes After listening, each of them has to make some T/F statements relating to the text and use them to ask their partners The partners have to base on the information they get from the listening text to answer the questions of their friends 3.6 Summary To conclude, this chapter suggests some solutions to solve the problems and difficulties in learning listening skill and then recommends several activities used to motivate students and increase their interest in learning this skill such as retelling a funny story, rearranging the order of a conversation, choosing the right topics, making T/F statements Those activities can be used 15 for students at different levels and they depend on the purposes of teachers as well as the teaching and learning conditions.[15] PART 4: CONCLUSION 4.1 Recapitulation Clearly, teaching and learning English listening skill in particular and a language listening skill in general are not easy at all It requires much effort from both teachers and students The thesis discusses some main points about listening skill: several different definitions according to some dictionaries, importance and types of listening Moreover, it comes up a language teaching approach called CLT with the main roles of teachers and students It also presents seven principles of teaching listening skill, its types of activities and sub-skills as well In addition, the study investigates the real situations of teaching and learning listening skill in a high school (Nguyen Xuan Nguyen) by doing a survey about this school The survey questionnaire which consists of 16 questions is given to 135 students from three grades of the school to search for necessary information From the survey, a lot of useful information has been collected to come to a conclusion for many matters of teaching and learning this skill which need solving The topic about listening skill has a large scope for study because the problems and the solutions for teaching and learning such a difficult skill are nearly limitless Moreover, the study about teaching and learning this skill is very necessary as the quality of teaching and learning it in many Vietnamese high schools is not high However, because of the limitations of the author’s knowledge and experience, the study cannot cover all the matters relating to the topic There are still many more problems and solutions such as new interesting activities to change the boring and stressful atmosphere in many listening classes Therefore, the author hopes that someone who is interested in this matter will continue to develop this topic so as to find more useful and realistic solutions and activities for teaching and learning this skill better 16 Evaluation of the scientific council: Quang Xuong, May , 2017 I swear this is my study,do not copy other people’s contents Writer Pham Thi Tuan REFERENCES [1] Ann Galloway Communicative Language Teaching: an Introduction and Sample Activities Retrieved May 5th 2009 from www.cal.org/resources/digest/gallow01.htm/ [2] Brown, H.D (1994) Teaching by Principles New Jersey: Prentice Hall Regents [3] Carol Van Dozer Improving ESL Learners’ Listening Skills: at the Workplace and Beyond Retrieved May 5th 2009 from www.improving – ESL-lms.list.vanduzerdoc [4] Hoang Van Van, Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, Dao Ngoc Loc, Vu Thi Loi, Do Tuan Minh, Nguyen Quoc Tuan (2007).Tenth Form English Textbook Education Publisher [5] Hoang Van Van, Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, Dao Ngoc Loc, Vu Thi Loi, Do Tuan Minh, Nguyen Quoc Tuan (2007) Eleventh Form English Textbook Education Publisher [6] Hoang Van Van, Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, Dao Ngoc Loc, Vu Thi Loi, Do Tuan Minh, Nguyen Quoc Tuan (2007) Twelth Form English Textbook Education Publisher [7] Kenneth Beare The Challenge of Teaching Listening Skill Retrieved April 4th 2009 from www.about.com/ [8] Leo Jones Progress to First Certificate I Cambridge University Press [9] Leo Jones Progress to First Certificate II Cambridge University Press [10] L.A.HILL (1996) English Funny Stories The World Publisher [11] Melissa Kelly Active Language for the Classroom Retrieved March 4th 2009 from www.about.com [12] Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong (2006) Language Teaching Theory Vinh University [13] Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong (2007) English Teaching Methodology Vinh University [14] Richards, J.C and Rodgers, T.S (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [15] Robert Wyss, M.A Bringing Learners up-to-date on CLT classroom approaches Retrieved on May 2nd 2009 from www.eltnewsletter.com/ 17 18 ... learning this skill She has chosen the topic about ? ?Problems in Learning English Listening Skill at NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN High School and Suggested Solutions” for several reasons Firstly, listening skill. .. listening But most of Vietnamese high schools use cassette players as main listening equipments.[7] 2.2 Real Situation of Learning and Teaching English Listening at Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school. .. activities and sub-skills as well In addition, the study investigates the real situations of teaching and learning listening skill in a high school (Nguyen Xuan Nguyen) by doing a survey about this school