USING SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS TO IMPROVE EFL STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILLS

VINH UNIVERSITYLUU THI KHANH VINH USING SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS TO IMPROVE EFL STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILLS Major: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages TESOL Code: 60.14.01.11 M

VINH UNIVERSITY

LUU THI KHANH VINH

USING SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS TO IMPROVE EFL

STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILLS

Major: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)

Code: 60.14.01.11 MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION

Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr NGO DINH PHUONG

Nghe An, 2017

First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr Ngo Dinh Phuong, who directly supported and encouraged me during the preparation of this study I am truly grateful to him for his professional advice, invaluable support and guidance he offered to help me carry out the study.

I wish to express my sincere thanks to the students of the two classes I worked with in order to gather data for my study.

I would also like to thank my friends for their friendship and proofreading

in the preparation of my thesis.

Last but not least, I owe special heartfelt appreciation to my parents without whose unceasing support, patience and understanding I could not have been able to complete my study.

The main goal in this study is to investigate the current situation teachingand learning listening skill to find out the effects of supplementary materials inimproving listening comprehension skill

In order to achieve the mentioned goal, the study was carried out among

80 students at Go Cong Polytechnic School The participants have studied thesame textbook and 80 students were divided into two groups: control group andtreatment group Both groups were asked to complete a pre-test at the beginning

of the second semester to test their level of listening Then, both groups wereasked to take a post-test at the end of the semester which aimed to see somedifferent results between two groups (treatment group was taught withsupplementary materials) The collected data were analyzed according to points

of each test, four levels (good, pretty good, average and weak) The researchfindings indicated that using supplementary materials in listening tasks helpedstudents improve listening comprehension skill in some ways

The thesis consists of five chapters Chapter 1, the introduction - givesrationale for the study and sets up the aims, scopes, research questions,significance and organization of the study Chapter 2 provides theoreticalbackground about the important of listening comprehension, definition ofsupplementary materials and how to develop listening skill And this part willalso provide a review in key concepts relating to the research topic as well as theliterature in the field Chapter 3 is about methodology, the current situation ofteaching and learning listening The research methods which cover interviews(for teachers), survey questionnaires (for students) and class observations, thesetting of the study, participants, instruments, and procedures of the research arepresented in this chapter Chapter 4 deals with the data results The results

obtained are also analyzed and interpreted in this part, so that major findings arerevealed and discussed The last chapter, chapter 5 presents a summary of thestudy, gives recommendations based on the results to make the moreeffectiveness in using supplementary materials in listening at this case andprovides limitations and suggestions for further research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i

ABSTRACT ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Aim of the study 3

1.3 Scope of the study 3

1.4 Methods of the study 4

1.5 Design of the thesis 4

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

2.1 Listening comprehension 5

2.1.1 Definitions of listening comprehension 5

2.1.2 Characteristics of listening comprehension 7

2.1.3 The process of listening comprehension 8

2.1.4 Types of listening comprehension 11

2.1.5 Potential listening comprehension problems 13

2.1.6 Principle for teaching listening skill 15

2.2 Supplementary materials: 17

2.2.1 Definition of supplementary materials 17

2.2.2 Kinds of supplementary materials 18

2.2.3 How supplementary materials have been used in language teaching .20

2.2.4 Reasons for using supplementary materials in teaching listening

skills 21

2.3 How to develop listening skill 22

2.3.1 Common methods of teaching listening 22

2.3.2 Listening strategies 23

2.3.3 Stages of a listening lesson 24

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 28

3.1 Research questions 28

3.2 Participants 28

3.2.1 Students 28

3.2.2 Teachers 29

3.3 Setting of the study 30

3.4 Procedures 30

3.5 Research methods 34

3.5.1 Data collection instrument 35

3.5.2 Procedures of data collection 37

CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 38

4.1 The attitudes of teachers and students toward using supplementary materials in listening lessons: 38

4.2 Analysis of the questionnaire results 38

4.2.1 Students’ attitude of listening skills 38

4.2.2 Students’ interest in listening tasks from supplementary materials .39

4.2.3 How often students have listening lessons in classroom 40

4.2.4 The number of listening tasks in the textbook 41

4.2.5 Students’ difficulties in listening lessons 41

4.2.6 The content between supplementary materials and the textbook43 4.2.7 Some essential characteristics of supplementary materials 43

4.2.8 How to develop listening skills 44

4.3 Tests’ result analysis 45

4.3.1 The pre-test 46

4.3.2 The post-test 48

4.4 Discussion of the main findings 50

4.5 Summary 51

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 53

5.1 Conclusions 54

5.2 Recommendations in teaching and learning listening skills with supplementary materials 55

5.2.1 Raising awareness of using supplementary materials in listening 56 5.2.2 Raising awareness of top-down and bottom-up strategies 56

REFERENCES 59

APPENDIX A 63

APPENDIX B 65

APPENDIX C 67

APPENDIX D 69

APPENDIX E 71

APPENDIX F 73

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale

In today’s global world, nobody can deny the importance of English as well

as its existence in our daily life since it has become an international language.With the help of technology development, English has been playing a key role inmany fields such as: medicine, science, tourism, engineering and education,which is the most important area where English is needed In Vietnam, it hasbecome one of the major and compulsory subjects at school and colleges

In the light of communicative approach, “communicative competence” isthe ultimate aim of foreign language teaching and learning or in other words, it

is the “goal” of the teaching and learning process (Richards & Rodgers,1995:67) In order to obtain the communicative competence, foreign languagelearners are supposed to focus on all the four skills, namely listening, speaking,reading, and writing Among these four skills, listening is often considered to bethe most important skill to be acquired as “in the foreign language environment,the ability to make sense of these messages is often crucial for survival” (Hood,1994:65) As a result, listening has been paid much attention to by languageresearchers and teachers

According to Saricoban (1991), listening is the ability to identify andunderstand a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, the grammatical and vocabularyitem used and also in grasping the meaning of what the speaker is saying.Bulletin (1952) as cited in Saricoban (ibid) stated that listening is one of the

“fundamental language skill” and that it is of vital importance that listening be

taught for the students in order for them to listen effectively and critically

However, listening is often described as the “neglected” (Fauziah, 2000)

or “taken for granted” (Anderson and Lynch, 1988) skill as other language

skills such as Speaking Reading and Writing are given more emphasizedespecially in the EFL classroom In the teaching of listening skill, teachers

should be able to expose students to be “real-life situations” as they need to

teach students to listen with a purpose Besides that, teachers should be able tointroduce the students with the processes involved in the listening skills.According to Rost (1994), there are two types of processes involved in listeningskill; top-down and bottom-up processing

Listening is the first prerequisite skill in language learning and learnerslisten before they are able to speak, read or write a particular language (Bulletin

1952 as cited in Saricoban, 1991) The reason is that a learner has to be familiarwith the language before he / she can speak, read or write in the languageconcerned Listening to a particular language serves as a platform for anylearners in mastering any languages It is undoubtedly that in acquiring alanguage, listening is one that is very significant and crucial skill which a learnerhas to processes in order to successfully learn the language at hand Rivers &

Temperley (1978) believes that listening is “ used nearly twice as much as speaking and four or five times more than reading and writing ”.

According to Rost (1994), listening “ serves as a basis for the development of other language skills ” In a language classroom this would

mean listening skills provide the learner with the grounds to comprehend

language learned Rost (ibid) also pointed that “ listening skill is deemed vital

in the language classroom as it provides input for the learners ” Through

listening, the learners will be able to successfully speak, read and write in thelanguage that they are learning in the classroom

Communicative approach to teaching and learning English has been asignificant development; at present, it is used worldwide in teaching andlearning English, especially, in EFL and ESL situations The aim of

communicative approach is to develop four skills : listening, speaking, readingand writing However, teachers often focus on reading and writing skills becausestudents seem to master them more easily than listening and speaking Actually,students at Go Cong Polytechnic school are not good at listening skill, they seem

to be passive in listening lessons because they lack of vocabulary or they are notable to understand what they are hearing or the listening tasks are not attractiveenough or not suitable for their abilities These things can affect their attitudestowards listening skill lessons as well as the quality of teaching and learning

To develop an effective listener among the students, it is essential forteachers to design their own supplementary materials for the betterment of theirstudents and their teaching-learning process Teachers should take the initative

to design their own supplementary materials for listening lessons and thus, theyshould refer the textbook as an “aid” to vary the activities and tasks to be used inthe classroom

For all of these reasons, it would be necessary to have a research titled

“Using supplementary materials to improve EFL students’ listening skills” I

hoped that this study will help teachers understand more about the role ofsupplementary materials and help students develop their listening skill whichleads to their learning successfully

1.2 Aim of the study

This study is intended to address the following issues:

- To investigate the attitudes towards the use of supplementary materials

in listening by the first year students at Go Cong Polytechnic School

- To investigate the effects of supplementary materials in improvinglistening comprehension skill for the first year students at Go Cong PolytechnicSchool

- To propose some recommendations when using supplementary materials

in listening for English teachers and students at Go Cong Polytechnic School

1.3 Scope of the study

There are a lot of English language learning strategies that teachers canemploy, and the new kind of English textbook covers four skills namely reading,speaking, listening and writing This study, however, focuses on usingsupplementary materials in listening for vocational school students Besides, theresearch will be carried out only with first year students not specializing inEnglish and the teachers Go Cong Polytechnic School due to the time limitationand some purposes

1.4 Methods of the study

First of all, intensive and extensive reading helps equip the author withsufficient background knowledge and also obtain data for the literature review.Secondly, survey, questionnaires, observation, interview as well as pre-test andpost-test would be made among the first year students and some teachers at GoCong Polytechnic School Collected data, then, would be processed andanalyzed

1.5 Design of the thesis

This research comprises five chapters as follow

Chapter 1: Introduction – This chapter provides the rationale of the problemtackling with the topic, the aims of the study, the scope of the study, methods of thestudy and design of the study

Chapter 2: Literature review - This chapter presents the previous studiesrelated to the thesis and some concepts as theoretical basis for the study

Chapter 3: Research methodology - This chapter introduces researchmethodology of the study It provides information about the materials,

participants, instrument for data collection, research procedures and dataanalysis.

Chapter 4: Findings and discussions - This chapter presents the results anddiscussions developed after the impacts analyzed

Chapter 5: Conclusion - This chapter summarizes the main issues touchedupon in the research, the limitations of the research and some suggestions forfurther studies Following the chapters are the references and appendices

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Listening comprehension

2.1.1 Definitions of listening comprehension

Language skills are often integrated with each other in language use.Listening is not merely hearing words In learning English as a foreign language,students cannot develop speaking skills unless they develop listening skills Tohave a successful conversation, they must understand what is said to them So,the ability to understand or comprehension is considered to be the first- ordergoal of listening and the highest priority of the listener

The importance of listening skills in foreign language teaching andlearning has been reflected in a 30-year shift towards interaction-basedacquisition (Krashen, 1981; Pica et al , 1987; Swain, 1985), rather than learningthrough the translation of written texts and through formal grammar learning.Though regarded as a receptive skill, listening actually requires an activeprocess in which listeners have to activate all their knowledge of different fieldssuch as phonology, vocabulary, culture and their life experience in selecting andinterpreting information (Richards, 1983; Rubin, 1995 quoted from Duzer,

http://www.cal.org)

According to O’Malley and Chamot (1989: 420), “Listeningcomprehension is an active and conscious process in which the listenerconstructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and existingknowledge, while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the taskrequirement” Relevant to this view, Emmert, (1994) considers listening as anactive process by which students receive, construct meaning from, and respond

to spoken and or nonverbal messages

From the point of view of Littlewood (1981), listening demands activeinvolvement from the listener In order to construct the message that the speakerintends, the listener must actively contribute knowledge from both linguistic andnonlinguistic sources The listener can divide the continuous stream of soundinto meaningful units by applying the knowledge of the language and bycomparing these units with the shared knowledge between himself and thespeaker, the listener can interpret the meaning The nature of listeningcomprehension means that the listener should be encouraged to take part in anactive process of listening for meanings, using not only the linguistic clues butalso nonlinguistic knowledge.

Rubin (1995: 7) emphasized the role of the listener, who is seen as anactive participant in listening He sees listening as an “active process in whichlisteners select and interpret information which comes from auditory and visualcues in order to define what is going on and what the speakers are trying toexpress”

According to Anderson and Lynch (1988), there are two influentialviews: traditional view and alternative view They thought that traditional viewwas inappropriate and inadequate because the listener was regarded as a tape-recorder and the listener took in and stored aural messages in much the sameway as a tape-recorder While the listener was considered as an active modelbuilder in alternative view Anderson and Lynch agreed with the second view

In this view, listener could combine the new information with his previousknowledge and experience to reach full comprehension of what had beenheard It emphasized the active interpretation and integration of incominginformation with prior knowledge and experience

Vandergrift (1999:168) considered listening as a complex, active process.The listener must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and

grammatical structures, interpret stress and intonation, retain what was gathered

in all of the above, and interpret it within the immediate as well as the largersocio-cultural context of the utterance

Rost (2002) defined listening as a process of receiving what the speakeractually says (receptive orientation); constructing and representing meaning(constructive orientation); negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding(collaborative orientation); and, creating meaning through involvement,imagination and empathy (transformative orientation)

Howatt and Dakin (1974) suggested that listening is the ability to identifyand understand what others are saying This involves understanding a speaker'saccent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping hismeaning An able listener is a person who is capable of doing these four thingssimultaneously

In Nunan’s point of view, listening is a fundamental and vital skill in theacquisition of languages (Nunan, 2002)

From the different views above, listening is not a passive but a complex,active process of interpretation in which listeners must construct and conveymeaning by using the linguistic knowledge such as phonology, lexis, syntax,semantics, discourse structure and using their non-linguistic knowledge as thecontext, background knowledge

2.1.2 Characteristics of listening comprehension

Most linguists and educators share the similar opinion of thecharacteristics of listening According to Winkinson, Stratta, Dudley (1974) andBrubridge (1986) and Penny Urr (1996), they all agree upon the commoncharacteristics of listening as follows:

First of all, looking at the characteristics of listening is actually looking atthose of spoken language Spoken language is normally disorganized due to the

fact that it is spontaneous The speaker talks impulsively rather than readingaloud something written beforehand As a result, the speech is full of incompletesentences, paraphrases, hesitation, repetition and interruptions This is also theexplanation to the fact that the students who are good at listening tasks withartificial dialogues are not necessarily good at real - life listening situations.

The understanding of spoken language could be facilitated a great deal bynon-verbal clues It is said that people listen more effectively when they can seethe speaker’s facial expression, gestures or especially be directly involved in thecontext in which the speech is happening In turn speakers may rely on suchhints to interpret listeners’ implication so that they can adapt their speechaccordingly to attain a successful communication These non-verbal cues couldreveal what the speaker means better than just listening to the speech alonebecause both listeners and speakers are put in a certain context

In real-life listening, listeners often know in advance some information toaid their understanding such as to whom they are listening, what they are going

to listen and why they are listening Therefore, teachers of listening shouldalways bear in mind this characteristic so that they can have suitable pre-listening activities to prepare students for what they are to listen Penny Urradditionally thinks that listening is an interactive process Listeners do notpassively just listen to what speakers say They take turns to speak Both sidesactively involve in the communication because they do it for a purpose

Brown (2000) states that: “Teaching beginners is considered by many to

be the most challenging level of language instruction Since students at this level have little or no prior knowledge of English on which to build, the teacher and accompanying techniques and materials become a central determiner in whether or not students accomplish their goals”.

Therefore, it is essential for teachers to find out some ways to helpstudents overcome their difficulties, and make them feel more comfortable whenpracticing listening to English so as to assist them in approving their skills aswell.

It is also essential to note that listening, as an efficient channel to providecomprehensible input for learners, its teachers should be paid due attention tofrom the very beginning

2.1.3 The process of listening comprehension

Listening is considered as an active skill that involves many processes.According to Brown (2000), listening comprehension is not only theprocess of sending and receiving sounds but also the conscious process to sendand transmit the message to the brain which will influence the process ofcommunication

Anderson (1983, cited in Fang, 2008) elaborated that listeningcomprehension process consisted of three stages: the perceptual, parsing, andutilization In the perceptional process, listeners focused their attention on theoral text and stored the sound in echoic memory Unfortunately, the soundsremain in the echoic memory for a very short time Listeners do not have verylong in which to sort out what is heard and might make errors They transferredquickly the selective information in echoic memory to short-term memory toprocess the sounds for meaning In the parsing process, listeners used words andmessages to construct meaningful mental representations They reorganized theinformation into a meaningful unit that could be preserved in short-termmemory In the final process, listeners used long-term memory to link theincoming message to their original knowledge Comprehension occurred whenthe new information could link with existing knowledge

Fischer and Farris (1995) viewed listening comprehension as a process bywhich students actively form a mental representation of an aural text according

to prior knowledge of the topic and information found within

There has been much debate about the listening comprehension processthough, the two most important views that are widely agreed by manyresearchers such as Rumelhart (1977), Brown (1994), Nunan (2001), Flowerderand Miller (2005), etc are bottom-up and top-down processing

Bottom-up processing considers listening comprehension as a process ofacquiring the meaning of the message based on the incoming language datafrom sounds, to words, to grammatical relationships, and ultimately to themeaning Schemata are hierarchically formed This acknowledges listening isthe process of decoding the sounds, from the smallest meaningful units(phonemes) to complete texts In other words, listeners use their linguisticknowledge (sound, words, intonation, grammatical relationships, lexicalmeaning) to form final message However, this processing has its weak points.Bottom-up processing fails to see that understanding a text is an interactiveprocess between the listener’s previous knowledge and the text And efficientcomprehension does not only depend on one’s linguistic knowledge

Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to utilizing schematawhich listeners use their background knowledge and global understanding tocomprehend the meaning of a message As Nauman (2002: 25) sees that top-down process “focus on the overall meaning of a passage and the application ofschemata Schemata are metal frameworks based on past experiences which can

be applied to and help us interpret the current situation.” Inferring ideas,guessing words’ meaning and identify topics are all examples of top-downprocessing However, if listeners are unfamiliar to the incoming information,top-down processing cannot evoke listener’s schemata and they can only depend

on their linguistic knowledge in listening comprehension Moreover, thoughlisteners can trigger a schema, they might not have appropriate schema expected

by the speaker Thus, if listeners only depend on top-down process, they may getthe failure of comprehension

Both bottom-up and top-down processing are insufficient forcomprehension The first view bases on linguistic knowledge whereas thesecond focuses on background knowledge From previous remarks one generalpoint becomes very clear: listening is an interactive and interpretive processbecause listeners do not just passively receive the information but clarify themessages, identify the input and organize the meanings The accurate listeningcomprehension is possibly gained with the interactive model

From these ideas, it is helpful for listeners to recognize the importance ofboth these types of processing to enhance listening comprehension and forteacher to arrange opportunities to work on both aspects

Combining bottom-up and top-down listening in a listening lesson

In real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processinggenerally occur together The extent to which one or the other dominatesdepends on the listener’s familiarity with the topic and content of a text, thedensity of information in a text, the text type, and the listener’s purpose inlistening For example, an experienced cook might listen to a radio chefdescribing a recipe for cooking chicken to compare the chef’s recipe with herown She has a precise schema to apply to the task and listens to registersimilarities and differences She makes more use of top-down processing.However, a novice cook listening to the same program might listen with muchgreater attention trying to identify each step in order to write down the recipe.Here, far more bottom-up processing is needed

A typical lesson in current teaching materials involves a three-partsequence consisting of pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening andcontains activities that link bottom-up and top-down listening (Field, 1998) Thepre-listening phase prepares students for both top-down and bottom-upprocessing through activities involving activating prior knowledge, making pre-dictions, and reviewing key vocabulary The while-listening phase focuses oncomprehension through exercises that require selective listening, gist listening,sequencing, etc The post-listening phase typically involves a response tocomprehension and may require students to give opinions about a topic.However, it can also include a bottom-up focus if the teacher and the listenersexamine the texts or parts of the text in detail, focusing on sections that studentscould not follow This may involve a microanalysis of sections of the text toenable students to recognize such features as blends, reduced words, ellipsis, andother features of spoken discourse that they were unable to process or recognize.

2.1.4 Types of listening comprehension

Additionally, listening can be realized according to the space where itoccurs In general, listening may be divided into real-life listening andclassroom listening:

Real-life listening

This is what we have to do in our daily life We hear music, radio, thenoise and people talking, etc Sometimes, people just listen without paying muchattention to People may listen and do something else at the same time This kind

of listening is called Casual listening (cited in Bang Nguyen, Ngoc Nguyen,

2002) On the other hand, people listen with a certain purpose in mind, hence,they really concentrate on getting the content of what is said, which constitutes

another type if real-life listening, called Focused listening (cited in Bang

Nguyen, Ngoc Nguyen, 2002)

Classroom listening

Penny Urr argues that classroom listening should be addressed accurately

as real-life listening in the classroom Though a paradox can be sensed in thisway of addressing, it is not only true that classroom listening is not real-lifelistening; but a clear envision of the notion “classroom listening” is also created.All the listening activities in the classroom aim at equipping students with skills

to deal with real-life listening Even in classroom listening, it can be subdividedinto intensive and extensive listening as collected and classified by BangNguyen, Ngoc Nguyen (2002)

According to Broughton et al (1987) extensive listening is concerned withthe more general listening to natural English It serves the function of letting thestudents hear the vocabulary items and structures which are unfamiliar to them.Rixon (1986) added that extensive listening is listening for pleasure and interestwithout having to pay a lot of attention to content and language

Extensive listening keeps students’ motivation and interest high, as well

as gives valuable contact with English in its spoken form

In contrast, intensive listening is much more controlled, with one or twospecific points Intensive listening can be primarily for language items as part ofthe language teaching program or it can be for general comprehension andunderstanding (Broughton et al 1978) Rixon (1986) also stated that intensivelistening is the more widely used form in the classroom In intensive listening,students have to collect or organize information The listening passages usedusually contain more concrete information and may be quite densely packed

On Allen’s stand, listening is categorized as follows (1976):

 Simple listening – hearing sounds without any particular meaning to thesounds

 Discriminative listening - listening to hear and identify the likenesses anddifferences in sounds

 Listening for specific information

 Listening for organizing ideas

 Listening for main points

 Listening for varied points of view

 Critical listening

 Creative listening

Meanwhile, Burn and Lowe (1966) categorized listening into three types:

 Appreciational listening (enjoying the development of s story; listeningfor pleasing rhythm; reacting to the mood set by the author)

 Informational listening (listening for the answer to a specific question;listening to follow directions; following sequence; listening for mainideas)

 Critical listening (discriminating between fact and opinion; detectingprejudice and bias; sensing the speaker’s purpose)

According to Burn and Lowe (1966) some authors have also suggestedlevels of listening such as little conscious listening, half listening, listeningpassively, listening and expressing some reaction and listening with a realmeeting of the minds However, Burn and Lowe (1966) pointed out that there is

no research evidence to indicate such levels

2.1.5 Potential listening comprehension problems

It can be seen that second language learners regard listening skill as themost difficult one to master in second language acquisition From the point ofview of listeners, there are some difficulties with different aspects

Underwood (1989) points out the seven listening problems as follows:

First, listeners cannot control the speed at which speakers speak Shemakes it clear that “they are so busy working out the meaning of one part ofwhat they hear that they miss the next part Or they simply ignore a whole chunkbecause they fail to sort it all out quickly enough.”(1989:16)

Second, they are not able to get thing repeated When student practicelistening in the class they may ask the teacher to repeat the recording.Unfortunately, in many cases it is in the teacher’s hands and on his decision andnot in hands of the learner whether or not to play the recording again Despitethe fact that it is almost impossible for the teacher to judge whether or not thestudents have understood any particular section of what they have heard

The next problem is the listeners’ limited vocabulary The unknown word

in listening comprehension might be a barrier causing students of foreignlanguage to stop and think about the meaning of the word and thus making themmiss the next part of the speech This often happens when listeners focus onaccuracy than fluency

Another problem is about listeners’ interpretation Students who areunfamiliar with the context may get difficulty in interpreting the words even ifthey can understand the surface meaning

Underwood also indicates listeners’ inability to concentrate whenlistening This can be caused by a number of things Students may find thelistening work uninteresting, tiring or too demanding In addition, the poorquality of recording and a bad acoustics of the classroom may as well cause theconcentration to drop

And listeners’ established learning habit is the last problem Teachers aim

to teach their students to understand everything in the lesson This can makestudents become worried if they fail to understand a particular word while

listening

In addition, Rubin (1994) attributes five factors which affect listeningcomprehension: text characteristics such as speech rate, pause phenomena andhesitation, level of perception, stress and rhythmic patterning perception, nativelanguage/second language difference, syntactic modifications, redundancy,morphological complexity, word order, discourse markers, and visual support fortexts; interlocutor characteristics such as gender and language proficiency; taskcharacteristics such as task type; listener characteristics such as languageproficiency level, memory, attention, affect, age, gender, learning disability innative language, and background knowledge; and process characteristics such

as top-down, bottom-up, and parallel processing, listening strategies, andnegotiation of comprehensible input

A number of other potential difficulties are also identified by differentauthors Yagang (1994) states that the difficulties of listening comprehensionwere accompanied with the four factors: the message, the speaker, the listenerand the physical setting As for Higgins (1995), the speech rate, vocabulary andpronunciation caused major problems in listening Similarly, Flowerdew &Miller (1996) also assumed that the problems of the students were for the speed

of delivery, new terminology and concept, difficulty in focusing and the physicalenvironment

It is a common fact that research available on second language listeningcomprehension is insufficient although problems in listening comprehension arevarious Comparing with other skills, Goh (1997:161) said that “there are fewerinsights about the process of listening and the way it is learnt” Richards(1985:189) also stated that: “there is little direct research on second languagelistening comprehension” As for that, I am doing this research not only to helpstudents in our school to find out appropriate language learning strategies with

better listening but also to contribute a small part to enrich the listening researchwhich has been done so far.

2.1.6 Principle for teaching listening skill

Listening to English is more difficult for students who are not Englishmajors Many students think that listening lessons are boring and often complainthat they benefit little from listening lessons Therefore, it is necessary forEnglish teachers to find out the basic principles with specific strategies forteaching listening skill in order to motivate students and help them to developtheir listening ability That is also the writers’ purpose in this paper to makesome recommendations for teaching listening skill when using supplementarymaterials

- Using authentic texts and present them as naturally and realistically aspossible Authentic texts might be texts from radio broad casts or interview such

as the VOA or the BBC Real language texts are important because they allowbackground noise or interruptions, which are normal, using different voice typesand accents and avoiding out-of-context words

- Using various types of texts such as conversations, dialogues, jokes,lectures, news broadcasts, song, narratives, etc Each type has its owncharacteristics to transfer information to listeners dissimilarly Based on this,listeners have opportunity to discriminate voices and accents, since then theycan improve their listening ability

- Using primarily meaning-based tasks In the practice phase of a lesson,especially at the lower levels, some tasks may not be meaning-based but thelonger-term goal is to use language for communication as it relates to meaning.The teacher should make students remember to emphasize understanding aboverepetition and meaning over form

- Stating a specific purpose for the listening task The task should be

designed to practice one more of the different sub skills If the students areskimming for the main idea, they may miss some specific information.Alternatively, if they are listening for total comprehension, they may miss themain idea Before a task begins, the teacher should tell the students what thepurpose is, when they have a specific purpose in listening, they will be able tolisten more carefully.

- Introducing the listening task It is necessary for teacher to prepare whathis/her students will hear This can be done by asking questions, introducing one

or two important words, having a brief discussion about the topic or asking thestudents to talk about their experiences Whenever presenting a listening text,teacher needs to inform the students of the topics or the setting of the text All ofthis will help the students to focus their attention

- Generally, it is best to avoid pre-teaching vocabulary if unnecessary.This will help the students to guess the meaning from the context Previewinglists of words does not happen in real life Students should have practice inunderstanding the meaning of a text without knowing the meaning of all thewords The only words that should be pre-taught are the ones necessary forunderstanding the main idea of the text

- Letting students listen to the text more than once Often the listeners willnot catch the full meaning the first time However, if the text is repeated, eachtime with a different focus, this will help the students to understand more fully

2.2 Supplementary materials:

2.2.1 Definition of supplementary materials

Materials:

According to McGrath (2002:7), materials that include “realia” and

“representations” of an object can be exploited effectively for long learning Hefurther noted that text materials include those that have been either specifically

designed for long learning and teaching (textbooks, worksheets, computersoftware); authentic materials (off - air, recordings, newspaper articles) that havebeen specially selected and exploited for teaching purposes by the classroomteacher; teacher – writer materials and learner – generated materials.

Supplementary materials:

According to McGrath (2002: 80), supplementary materials refer tomaterials taken from another source or any other material that is designed forlearning purposes It also means addiry something new in an attempt to order tosupplement the coursebook/ textbook For the purpose of this study,supplementary material is designed when teachers find that there are no suitable

or relevant materials that can be found in the textbook

Supplementary materials designed to complement the coursebook used inthe classroom to arouse the interest of the students Supplementary materialsdesigned are in the form of printed material and also audio – visual material

Every day teachers face the fact that the coursebooks they use are just notenough for achieving the aims we set for that class That is why we needsupplementary materials Supplementary materials – what’s that?

Teachers usually use classic ones : story books for primary learners,alternative coursebooks, board games created by teachers, crossword puzzles,songs, hand – outs summarizing grammar information, information gapworksheet,books of conversation topics, graded readers, practice tests, etc

Modern times have brought us some new and exciting resources ofsupplementary materials Most of them can be easily found on the Internet.They are: websites for practice activities on grammar, vocabulary andpronunciation practice, websites for games, puzzles and quizzes to provide extrafun activities Also very popular are newspapers and magazines, and articles onthe Internet, for authentic reading texts

2.2.2 Kinds of supplementary materials

Hands-on manipulatives:

These can include anything from tangrams for math to microscopes forscience to interactive maps for social studies Manipulating objects physicallycan reduce the language load of an activity; beginning students in particular canstill participate and demonstrate their understanding

Realia

These are real-life objects that enable students to make connections totheir own lives Examples include bank deposit slips and check registers for aunit on banking or historical realia such as photos,recordings and clothing fromthe 1920’s Jazz Age

Pictures

Photographs and illustrations depict nearly any object, process or setting,and magazines, commercial photos and hand drawings can provide visualsupport for a wide variety of content and vocabulary concepts and can buildbackground knowledge

Visuals

These can include overhead transparencies, models, graphs, charts,timelines, maps, props, and bulletin board displays Students with diverseabilities often have difficulty processing an inordinate amount of auditoryinformation and are aided with visual clues

Multimedia

A wide variety of multimedia materials are available to enhance teachingand learning These range from simple tape recordings to videos, DVDs,interactive CD-ROMs, and an increasing number of resources available on theWWW Brief video clips at united streaming.com are effective tools For somestudents and tasks, media in the students’ native language may be a valuable

source of information It is important to preview websites for appropriatenessand readability, especially when using them with beginning and intermediatelevel students.

Demonstrations

Demonstrations provide visual support and modeling for Englishlanguage learners If you have a lesson task that includes supplementarymaterials, them you can scaffold information by carefully planningdemonstrations that model how to use the materials and follow directions.Students can then practice these steps in groups or alone, with you or otherexperienced individuals nearby to assist as needed

Related literature

A wide variety of fiction and non-fiction can be included to supportcontent teaching Many content teachers create classroom libraries with tradebooks on key topics Students can read these as supplements to the textbook.They offer a more relaxing way to look at a topic in more depth

Hi-lo readers

Some publishers are now offering classic literature as well as fiction andnon-fiction selections in a hi-lo format The stories are of high interest but lowerreadability levels and tend to include many visuals Some books are groupedthematically and can accompany different content areas and language artscourses Some have different reading levels within a thematic set They areuseful for students at lower English proficiency levels

Adapted text

A type of supplementary reading material that can be very effective forEnglish learners, as well as struggling readers, is adapted text Withoutsignificantly diminishing the content concepts, a piece of text (usually from agrade level textbook) is adapted to reduce readability demands Complicated

lengthy sentences with specialized terminology are rewritten in smaller chunks.Definitions are given for difficult vocabulary, if possible, in context Majorconcepts should be retained and just the readability level of the textreducedHaving investigated into the characteristics of listening as well as thetypes of listening, I now move on to review different listening tasks thatreputable educators have suggested in order to develop students’ listening skills.These listening tasks are various, though sorted respective to the way listening isviewed from different perspectives, they consist of a rather fixed set of tasks Asheld by Penny Ur, the kinds of the listening tasks are classified by the natures ofstudents’ response

2.2.3 How supplementary materials have been used in language teaching

The use of supplementary materials in EFL classroom is what teachers areinvolved in foreign language teaching, which has discussed in recent years

While some hold the view that supplementary materials are only foradvanced learners (Ls), most teachers (Ts) agree that listening supplementarymaterials can and should be used for all learners from elementary to advancedlevels Moreover, teachers should exploit more supplementary materials withnative accents and intonation in order to involve students in activities that reflectreal-life listening

Studies show that Ls working with supplementary materials will gainvaluable practice in the specific skill of making sense of natural speech withoutnecessarily understanding every word in the text; then, an increase in listeningcomprehension is a natural consequence of this practice The challenge for Ts,therefore, is to identify supplementary materials of potential interest to Ls and toprepare Ls for dealing with these texts in a meaningful way

In general, there has been a trend towards bringing classroom listeningpractice as close to real world listening as possible However, the question of

when and how supplementary materials should be introduced to an EFLclassroom is still in conflict and will be discussed later in this study.

2.2.4 Reasons for using supplementary materials in teaching listening skills

The textbook which is being taught in Go Cong Polytechnic School isSmart Choice 1 ( compiled by Ken Wilson ) This textbook is used for non-English major students with the time of 120 periods divided into two semesters.Students have 60 periods for each term, including 16 periods for listening

Students has four periods of English every week Each period lasts for 45minutes The students’ ability of English is not the same, some students are goodbut the others are average or weak Most of them are afraid of listening lessonsbecause they think that listening skill is difficult, some students lack ofvocabulary so they cannot understand what they are hearing

Facilities for listening are CDs, CD player, computer, LCD screen.Students are not equipped the lab room for listening lessons This also affectsthe quality of listening because of the surrounding noise Moreover, students areable to listen better if they are equipped with headphones

The number of students is 40 for each class It is rather crowded forlistening lessons because teacher hardly pays attention to each student to helphim/her as possible

The need for and the usefulness of authentic materials have beenincreasingly acknowledged Martinez (2002) suggests a list of advantages ofsupplementary materials used in language teaching in general and listening skills

we are educators working within the school system, so education and generaldevelopment are part of our responsibilities.

- Supplementary materials provide students with a wide selection ofeveryday vocabulary which textbooks do not often include

- The same piece of material can be used under different circumstances ifthe task is different

- Language change is reflected in the materials so that students andteachers can keep abreast of such changes

- Reading texts are ideal to teach/practice mini-skills such as scanning, eg.students are given a new article and asked to look for specific information(amounts, percentages, etc) Students listen to news reports and they are asked toidentify the names of countries, famous people, etc (ability to detect key words)

- Books, articles, newspapers, and so on contain a wide variety of texttypes, language styles not easily found in conventional teaching materials

- They can encourage reading or listening for pleasure because they arelikely to contain topics of interest to students, especially if students are given thechance to have a talk about the topics or kinds of supplementary materials to beused in class

2.3 How to develop listening skill

2.3.1 Common methods of teaching listening

In the article about teaching listening, Underwood (1989, p90-109) pointedout that there are at least four common methods of teaching second or foreignlanguage listening: grammar-translation, grammar-method, audio-lingualmethod and task-based method

Grammar- translation method: By this method, students listen to a

description of the rules of the second language in the first language As a result,

when the second language is used, the focus of any listening is on translation oflexical items or grammar structures.

Grammar method: to follow this method, the teacher requires students to

look at a written text while they listen to a recording This forces them to doseveral things: identify words by their position in the sentence, work out therelationship between words and phrases, use forward and backward inferencingcues, and make intelligent guesses based on textual cues

Audio-lingual method: Audio-lingual method of listening emphasizes first

listening to pronunciation and grammar forms and then imitating those forms byway of drills and exercises Dialogues and drill are the basis of classroompractice with this method Students are encouraged to listen carefully either tothe taped recording, or a teacher reading out, a dialogue, or a drill They thenrecord their own version or respond to cues from the teachers to repeat parts ofthe dialogue or drill Basically, the more the students repeat a correct phrase orsentence, the stronger of their memory of the structure will be

Task-based method: this method places stress on activities or tasks that

learners do in class in order to develop their communicative competence A based syllabus should be constructed according to the difficulty of the tasksrequired of the learners at different stages in a course

task-In short, the four methods of the teaching listening are not mutuallyexclusive and in reality, they may be mixed in any particular course or class.However, nowadays, with the appearance of Communicative LanguageTeaching, teaching listening seems to be more of meaningful to students due tothe fact that they have chance to develop their listening skills and other languageskills as well

2.3.2 Listening strategies

There is some debate (Ridgway, 2000a and b; Field, 2000) about whetherstrategy training is useful for listening, although Rubin (1994) claims thatlistening strategies can be taught and do improve comprehension To a largedegree this debate is about the definition of “strategy”, but it does have directteaching implications If the here-and-now nature of listening makes strategy useunrealistic then there is little point in training learners in strategies that cannot

be applied Goh (2000) proposes that the first step in strategy training involvesfinding out the particular problems that learners face in listening comprehension.Learners may have problems with recognising word forms and keeping up withwhat is coming in They may also not have enough time to turn perceived forminto an appropriate message While they struggle over one part they may misswhat follows Goh suggests that problems can occur at the levels of perception,parsing and utilisation

Learners can benefit from training in listening strategies Two types of

useful strategies are:

- Communication strategies—strategies to assist comprehension, for

example making predictions before listening, listening selectively, knowing how

to interrupt politely, etc

- Learning strategies—strategies for noticing language forms in the input in

their independent listening, for example negotiating (seeking clarification),listening for patterns, focused listening

2.3.3 Stages of a listening lesson

The teaching of a listening text can be divided in to 3 main stages: listening, while-listening, post-listening Each stage has its own aims andactivities

Pre-listening stage is of great paramount importance as it leads students tothe listening passage they are going to listen, arouses students’ interest andprovides students with the purposes of listening

Underwood (1989, p.30) defined pre-listening stage as follows: “Beforelistening, students should be "turn in" so that they know what to expect, both ingeneral and particular tasks This kind of preparatory work is generallydescribed as “Pre-listening work” or just “Pre- listening” ”

As for her, pre-listening work can consist of a whole range of activities,including: the teacher giving background information, the students readingsomething relevant, the students looking at pictures, discussion of thetopic/situation, a question and answer session, written exercises, following theinstructions for the while listening activity and consideration of how the while-listening will be done

These activities may provide an opportunity for students to gain someknowledge which help them to follow the listening text Moreover, each of theseactivities help students focus their mind on the topic by narrowing down thethings that students expect to hear However, the teacher when choosing anactivity should consider the factors which Underwood (1989) mentions: Thetime, the material is available or not, the interest of the class and the teacher, theplace in which the work is being carried out, the nature and the content of thelistening text itself If one of these is forgotten, the whole process of activity can

be failed She especially emphasizes on the importance of the nature of thelistening text, because each listening text itself has an especially appropriatetype of activities When the teacher pays attention to this factor properly, theactivity chosen for students will be more specific and effective

The while-listening stage involves of activities that students are asked to

do during the time they are listening to the text The purpose of while listeningactivities is to help students develop their skills of eliciting messages fromspoken language Rixon (1986) pointed out the purposes of while-listening stage

is to challenge and guide students to handle the information and the messagefrom the listening text Activities of this stage must be interesting and carefullychosen They must vary at different levels and in different cases

At the early stage, students need to learn how the language sounds, how todistinguish or be aware of the relationship between written words and theirspoken forms

As students listen, they usually apply the skills, the same uses in listening intheir mother tongue, predict what they will hear and try to match them with thethings they actually hear Therefore, in teaching listening, the teacher should try

to give practice in interpreting, matching and predicting to help students fulfilltheir listening task less complicatedly

The topic and the content of the listening text plus the students' interestdecide the success of the while-listening activities Students may get bored ifthey have to do the same kind of work over and over again Thus, for eachpurpose and on different occasions, various activities are needed Moreover, it isadvisable to have activities which are locally relevant, of the common interestand not too long or laborious

Activities of this stage should be suitable with students' ability Thismeans that while-listening activities can be done by most students, from theweak students to the best ones Because failure can quickly discourage students

to listen, in the early stage, activities which are tricky should be used sparingly,but sometimes it is necessary to give students some challenges

Post-listening activities in post-listening stage are done after the listening

is completed Some post-listening activities are extensions of the work done atthe pre- listening and while-listening stage and some relate only loosely to thelistening text itself

According to Underwood (1989), the first purpose of post-listeningactivities is to check how well the students understood and whether they havecompleted the listening task The teacher may give an answer orally, showingthe answer on the board or on the over-head projector or ask students to checkagain the answer in the book Students can work in pairs to check each other’sanswer or work in group to discuss any problem related to the listening text Thesecond purpose of the post-listening work is to reflect on why some studentshave failed to understand or miss parts of the passage

Another purpose of post listening activities is to expand the topic or thelanguage of the listening text Students are asked to deal with activities whichare more or less general language learning activities Sometimes, this does notmean that they should not be done, but it should be recognized they do not givepractice in listening skill, although the additional language learning can wellenable students to listen more successfully in the future

The fourth purpose is to give students opportunity to consider the mannerand attitude of the speaker in the listening text This is also important becausethe listeners can see the aims of the speakers based on his/her attitude

Additionally, the general factors listed in pre-listening and while-listening,Underwood (1989) indicates that the attention should be given to the followingfactors in selecting post-listening activities:

- the amount of language work the teacher wish to do in relation to theparticular listening text

- the time which is allowed to do post-listening

- the speaking, reading or writing skills should be included in the listening work

post the students should work in pairs or in groups

- the chosen activity should be make motivating

It can be seen that the learning language programme consists four skills:listening, speaking, reading, and writing In fact, speaking, writing and readingcan arise from listening, especially from post-listening work The order andorganization of a language lesson are usually not decided at the same timeintegrating these into other language skill work For instance, the students listenand respond in writing, the teacher ask students to answer orally Therefore,listening exercises always involve in the rest three skills

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

The previous chapter has presented a literature review on the theory oflistening comprehension, potential listening comprehension problems, languagelearning strategies, and provided a necessary theoretical background aboutsupplementary materials in listening for the present study This chapter presentsthe research methods used for data collection and analysis in the study It startswith a description of the participants, then describes the setting of the study andresearch methods

3.1 Research questions

This study attempts to investigate attitudes and challenges of usingsupplementary materials in listening by teachers and students at Go CongPolytechnic School To achieve this aim, the following research questions areproposed:

1/ What are the students’ attitudes toward the use of supplementarymaterials?

2/ To what extent do supplementary materials improve Listeningcomprehension?

3.2 Participants

3.2.1 Students

Aiming at the first year students of Go Cong Polytechnic School, theresearcher chose randomly 120 students to carry out the research in the schoolyear 2016 - 2017 Their ages ranged from 16-18 They are all non-English majorstudents They are studying Information Technology, Electronics and BusinessAcounting Most of the students come from Go Cong town; however, they aregrown up from different family circumstances It means that some of them may

be good at English but some may be not In Vietnam, the curriculum of textbook