Using compensation strategies in listening for 10th form students a case study at the high school for gifted students of vinh university

Ministry of education and training VINH UNIVERSITY - - LÊ THỊ HIỀN ANH USING COMPENSATION STRATEGIES IN LISTENING FOR 10 TH FORM STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY AT THE HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIFTED STUDENTS OF VINH UNIVERSITY (Sử dụng chiến lược bù kĩ nghe cho học sinh lớp 10: Một trường hợp trường THPT Chuyên - Đại học Vinh) Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching Vinh, 2011 Ministry of education and training VINH UNIVERSITY - - LÊ THỊ HIỀN ANH USING COMPENSATION STRATEGIES IN LISTENING FOR 10 TH FORM STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY AT THE HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIFTED STUDENTS OF VINH UNIVERSITY (Sử dụng chiến lược bù kĩ nghe cho học sinh lớp 10: Một trường hợp trường THPT Chuyên - Đại học Vinh) Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching Code: 60.14.10 Master thesis in Education Supervisor: Assoc.Prof.Dr NGƠ ĐÌNH PHƯƠNG Vinh, 2011 DECLARATION I certificate that the thesis entitled “Using compensation strategies in listening for 10th form students: A case study at the high school for gifted students of Vinh University” is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts is the result of my own work This thesis or any part of this one has not been submitted for a higher degree to any other university or institution Vinh, December 2011 Le Thi Hien Anh ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am greatly indebted to the members of my thesis committee whose contributions and guidance without them this research could not have been carried out successfully First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr Ngo Dinh Phuong for his valuable and enormously support and comments, guidance and timely, encouragement while I was doing this research Without his guidance, comment, and suggestions during all phases of the work, my thesis would still be far from completed I would like to express my gratitude to all my lecturers at Faculty of PostGraduate Studies, Vinh University for their valuable lectures and guidance from which I have benefited greatly in the writing of this report I am also indebted to my friends, colleagues and students at the high school for gifted students of Vinh University for their kindness and assistance to me in data collection, for their support and encouragement they provided during the course Finally, I wish to give my special thanks to all my family members for their warm support and encouragement during the time I conducted this thesis ABSTRACT It is the fact that listening is an important language skill It seems that listening is the most difficult skill for students to master However, in the reality, the teaching and learning English listening are still far from satisfactory The study focuses on the teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards using compensation strategies in listening as well as the analysis of the challenges of using compensation strategies of 10th form student at the high school for gifted students of Vinh University Once, problems have been identified, suggestions for teachers and students to improve the situation of teaching and learning listening English to 10 th form students at the high school for gifted students of Vinh University would be made The thesis consists of five chapters Chapter 1, the introduction - gives rationale for the study and sets up the aims, scopes, research questions, significance and organization of the study Chapter provides theoretical background about the nature of listening comprehension, language learning strategies and compensation strategies in listening And this part will also provide a review in key concepts relating to the research topic as well as the literature in the field Chapter is about methodology, the current situation of teaching and learning listening The research methods which cover interviews (for teachers), survey questionnaires (for students) and class observations, the setting of the study, participants, instruments, and procedures of the research are presented in this chapter Chapter deals with the data results The results obtained are also analyzed and interpreted in this part, so that major findings are revealed and discussed The last chapter, chapter presents a summary of the study, gives recommendations based on the results to make the more effectiveness in using compensation strategies in listening at this case and provides limitations and suggestions for further studies TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS .1 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale 1.2 Aim of the study 1.3 Research questions .7 1.4 Scope of the study 1.5 Significance of the study 1.6 Organization of the study CHAPTER LITERATURE REVIEW 10 2.1 The nature of listening comprehension 10 2.1.1 The concept of listening comprehension .10 2.1.2 The process of listening comprehension 12 2.1.3 Potential listening comprehension problems 14 2.1.4 The importance of listening comprehension 16 2.1.5 Principle for teaching listening skill .17 2.2 Language learning strategies 18 2.2.1 The concept of language learning strategies 19 2.2.2 Oxford's (1990) Classification of Language Learning Strategies 20 2.2.3 The importance of strategies in learning process 23 2.3 Compensation strategies in listening 25 2.3.1 Definition of compensation strategies 25 2.3.2 The Classification of Compensation Strategies 26 2.3.3 Compensation strategies in listening .28 2.3.4 Related studies of using compensation strategies 29 2.4 Summary 30 CHAPTER RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .32 3.1 Participants .32 3.1.1 Students 32 3.1.2 Teachers 33 3.2 Setting of the study 34 3.3 Research methods 35 3.3.1 Research questions 35 3.3.2 Data collection instrument .35 3.3.2.1 Questionnaires 35 3.3.2.2 Interviews 36 3.3.2.3 Class observations 37 3.3.3 Data analysis method 37 CHAPTER FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 39 4.1 The attitudes of teachers and students toward using compensation strategies in listening .39 4.1.1 Teachers’ attitudes toward using compensation strategies in listening 39 4.1.2 Students’ attitudes toward using compensation strategies in listening 41 4.1.2.1 Students’ attitudes of compensation strategies 41 4.1.2.2 Students' attitudes toward class-compensation strategies practice 43 4.2 Students’ challenges in using compensation strategies in listening 50 4.3 The expectations of the students towards teachers in using compensation strategies in listening .54 CHAPTER CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 59 5.1 Conclusions 59 5.2 Recommendations for improvement of the efficiency of using compensation strategies in listening for teaching and learning at the gifted high school of Vinh University .61 5.2.1 Raising awareness of compensation strategies in listening 61 5.2.2 Raising awereness of top-down and bottom-up strategies 63 5.2.3 Activating or building students’ background knowledge 63 5.2.4 Teaching basic grammatical rules 65 5.2.5 Teaching phonological rules 66 5.2.6 Providing many visual aids and contextual clues 67 5.2.7 Providing certain key words and ideas related to the listening .68 5.2.8 Raising confidence and interest by giving encouragement 69 5.2.9 Encouraging cooperative listening 69 5.2.10 Providing a variety of listening tasks 70 5.2.11 Providing discourse markers and cohesive devices .71 5.2.12 Helping students to make inference from speakers’ attitude or intention 72 5.3 Limitations and suggestions for further study 73 REFERENCES .75 APPENDICES CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale Nowadays, English is widely used as an international language in most countries around the world in different fields of life such as economics, politics, tourism, electronics, telecommunication, culture, science and technology, etc… With the trend of development of life, Vietnamese people use English as a tool to integrate with other countries all over the world A large number of students are being required to learn it through compulsory programs in schools and universities English, therefore, is considered to play a crucial role on the path of industrialization and modernization of the country as well as in the process of integration and globalization in the world In order to meet the demands of modern society, English teachers need to pay attention to help their students find and apply appropriate learning strategies to learn better According to Cohen (1998), O’Malley and Chamot (1990) and Oxford (1990), learning strategies are among the factors that can help students how to learn well a second or foreign language As a result, an important duty of the language teachers is teaching students learning strategies because learning strategies can help students monitor and take charge of their own learning The appreciated characteristics of a good language teacher can be considered as helping students understand language learning strategies and training them to develop and use good learning strategies (Lessard-Clouston, 1997) Recently, English subject has become compulsory for high school students It has also been an obligatory subject in the final exam, along with Mathematics and Literature We 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 related to one another and they all are 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 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 We may wish to listen to talks 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 understand what speakers mean when they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasion and not to simply understand the words themselves In the acknowledgement of the importance of this subject, specialists in language teaching have paid much attention to discovering and applying new methods for teaching English as a foreign language with the hope of helping learners acquire and learn English more effectively The new series of English textbooks, which cover all four skills namely reading, speaking, listening and writing, have been used in schools in Vietnam for some recent years At the high school for gifted students of Vinh University, listening is treated equally as other skills in terms of time allocation In fact, it has not drawn much attention of both teachers and learners, they are generally less aware of its importance And teaching and learning listening is a really new challenging job It seems that listening is the most difficult skill for students to master For teachers, listening is also the skill that makes a lot of difficulties to prepare and carry out the lessons Finding suitable ways to teach their students to listen effectively is not easy Because the old textbooks are not divided into different skills in each lesson Most of the teachers have been inexperienced in teaching listening methodology and approaches They often take time to prepare a listening period for their students Besides, another problem is students’ low level of proficiency in term of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, skills and so forth The students using the new kind of English textbooks find that it’s difficult to catch up with the information from the listening texts and they fail to understand what is spoken They are not confident enough to listening task successfully Moreover, learning habits not help much to improve their listening in classroom They not have suitable methods to learn listening Throughout years of teaching English in the period of 10 ... and students? ?? attitudes towards using compensation strategies in listening as well as the analysis of the challenges of using compensation strategies of 10th form student at the high school for. ..Ministry of education and training VINH UNIVERSITY - - LÊ THỊ HIỀN ANH USING COMPENSATION STRATEGIES IN LISTENING FOR 10 TH FORM STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY AT THE HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIFTED STUDENTS. .. of Vinh University? What are the challenges that 10th form students at the high school for gifted students of Vinh University encounter when using compensation strategies in listening? What are