(SKKN 2022) applying ITC knowledge and using webtools to help teachers and students at thanh hoa ethnic boarding high school practice listening to news

1 THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRANING THANH HOA ETHNIC BOARDING HIGH SCHOOL EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE “APPLYING ICT KNOWLEDGE AND USING WEBTOOLS TO HELP TEACHERS AND STUDENTS AT TH

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THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRANING

THANH HOA ETHNIC BOARDING HIGH SCHOOL

EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE

“APPLYING ICT KNOWLEDGE AND USING WEBTOOLS

TO HELP TEACHERS AND STUDENTS AT THANH HOA ETHNIC BOARDING HIGH SCHOOL PRACTICE LISTENING TO NEWS”

The author: Phạm Thị Giang Job position: Teacher

Experience initiative about: English

THANH HOA - 2022

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page s

3 Measures for implementing solution of topic 5

3.1 Instruction to install and use iSpring suite 9 software 5

3.2 Instruction to use iSpring suite 9’s functions 6

I INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Why learning English is a piece of cake to someone but hardship to another one is aquestion that faces teachers and learners for a long time Among 4 skills of Englishlanguage learners, Listening comprehension is essential to L2 learning Pupils whoare able to demonstrate L2 listening skills are able to demonstrate proficiency inother language skills Listening, as far as we know, is an important and pivotalcomponent of a language; thus, teaching listening is also important The students tend

to think grammar is more important Listening is the act of hearing attentively.Researchers have demonstrated that adult spend 40-50% with listening, 25-30% withspeaking, 11-16% reading and 9% with reading (Vandergrift, 2004)We listen morethan we speak If this listening skill is used in a proper way we can master the tools

of communicative skills For students who major in English, listening skill especiallylistening to news is extremely important because News is important for a number ofreasons within a society Mainly to inform the public about events that are aroundthem and may affect them Often news is for entertainment purposes too; to provide adistraction of information about other places people are unable to get to or have littleinfluence over News can make people feel connected too News is important as asocial gathering space too, hence newspapers either online or physical place anemphasis on news In order to help students to be aware of their learning problems,

to gain some techniques and ICT skills when practicing listening skill through news;the teachers will also benefit from the findings of the research in working out aneffective way to assist their students in teaching listening skill for students major inEnglish, I decide to to the topic: “APPLYING ICT KNOWLEDGE AND USING WEBTOOLS TO HELP TEACHERS AND STUDENTS AT THANH HOA ETHNIC BOARDING HIGH SCHOOL PRACTICE LISTENING TO NEWS”

2 Aims of the study

The study aims at providing students with some techniques and tips to practicelistening skill especially listening to news through CNN breaking news or VOAbreaking news, additionally, This small action research wants to suggest teachers ofEnglish applying “Task-based learning” method in terms of teaching listening tonews, too

3 Scope of the study

Due to the limited time and small scale of the research, it is only conducted inthe context of Thanh Hoa Ethnic Boarding high school with the participation of only

4 teachers and 35 students of grade 12

4 Research methods

35 students were divided into 7 Groups (5 students per group) All groupswere taught techniques and ICT skills applied in listening to news through CNNbreaking news or VOA breaking news, and they were well equipped withinstructions related to “task-based learning” when practice listening to news

II DEVELOPMENT

1 LITERATURE REVIEW

1 1 The importance of listening to news with students.

As far as we know, human beings in every country in the world need to stayinformed because they need to be updated and to be given information about allaspects of daily life Undoubtedly, reading/listening/watching the news is theeffective way to be well-updated because of the following reasons:

- Some people still don’t get clearly about detail in country and foreign country, yet.Especially all of this news we can get a lot of useful things and development of eachregion over the world Include every crisis which happening through the region Soadvantages of listening there is a lot of knowledge to all students that always listenand watch English news through television and radio on BBC

- News is network for spreading every event and action happen, such as developmentand another in society nowadays The information we got from radio, television,internet and another network, share good experiences to people which that is a usefulpoint Made people understand to know, like listening news more

- Some programs through listening with relax news, general knowledge which offers

a lot of experiences to consider and practice idea

1.2 Websites and channels should teachers and students access to practice listening to news?

In fact, there are quite a lot of websites or channels that students can access topractice listening to news such as: CNN, VOA, BBC, FOX News, TED, RFR……,However, from my viewpoint, below are the most suitable for students:

1.3 Task-based learning in practicing listening to news.

1.3.1 What is Task-based learning?

Task-based language learning has its origins in communicative languageteaching, and is a subcategory of it According to Wikipedia, Task-based learning orTask-based language teaching (TBLT), also known as task-based instruction (TBI),focuses on the use of authentic language and on asking students to do meaningfultasks using the target language

1.3.2 Why should we use “Task-based learning” technique when teaching listening to news?

Assessment is primarily based on task outcome (in other words the appropriatecompletion of real world tasks) rather than on accuracy of prescribed language forms.This makes TBLT especially popular for developing target language fluency and

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student confidence As a demanding language skill, listening has frequently beenunderestimated by students and educators in the field of second language acquisitionbecause effective listening skills are developed over time with lots of practice butlistening practices seem limited and the activities are most of the timedecontextualized or inappropriate for students Generally speaking, listening hasattracted the least attention among the four language skills because it was regarded as

a passive skill Many listening classes still heavily rely on decontextualized listeningactivities which are not meaningful enough to motivate students and enhance theirlistening abilities The emergence of communicative language teaching (CLT) andthe shift in language teaching from developing the linguistic competence tocommunicative competence was the starting point where listening skill has beenconsidered as an active skill Stemming from CLT, task-based language teachingfocuses on communicative purpose of language and the final outcome of the tasks asthey are used in everyday life (Najmeh Maghsoudi, 2017)

2 SOLUTIONS

2.1 Necessary ICT skills for English learners.

With the boom of Internet, English learners must master some ICT skills tolearn English in digital era Particularly, when practice listening skills, both teachersand students of English need to be provided the following tools:

2.1.1 From text to speech http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/

This tool is used to convert any English text into MP3 audio file and play it on your

PC or smartphones

2.1.2 Speech to text: https://speech-to-text-demo.ng.bluemix.net/

This tool is used to convert MP3 audio file into English text to create transcription

2.1.3 YouTube to Mp3: https://ytmp3.cc/

This tool is often used to convert a video on youtube into mp3 file There are 3 steps

to convert a video file on youtube into mp3 file:

Step 1: Open a video file on Youtube and copy the link.

Step 2: Open YouTube to Mp3 and paste link and click convert to Mp3

Step 3: Wait for converting process and click “download” button

2.1.4 Create English subtitles for videos on Youtube

- Case 1: For Videos with available subtitles

Open video news on Youtube, click the button and choose Phu de – Tieng Anh

- Case 2: For Videos with unavailable subtitl

Step 1: Open the video news on Youtube and copy link

Step 2: Use the tool “Youtube to MP3” to create the MP3 file of the video

Step 3: Use the tool “Speech to text” to create the transcription

2.2 Exploitation of online materials with a view to teaching and practicing listening to news.

2.2.1 Use available websites to practice listening to news.

a http://edition.cnn.com/studentnews/:

This site is not divided by level but has very rich content with many topics Besides,listen and feel the typical American accent if students have a need to study in the US

In addition, this website gives you a lot of audio content suitable for sessions insessions from 1 to 3, even some session matching articles 4 There are both short andlong songs for us to select.

b http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/news_levels.html

This Breaking News English website helps students experience all 6 listening levels.Each level is an increasing difficulty with vocabulary, speaking speed and contentinterfering techniques that make it harder to hear Below each lesson, there areexercises about filling in - gap filling and True False - very good for Multiple Choice

A great tip to take advantage of this page is: Students have a good listening ability,take the song at level 5 then read the True False section at level 6 and then do thetest Or vice versa, They will see the level of doing Multiple Choice at Session 3.4very fast because you are exposed to listening and understanding information verywell, and you are accustomed to being fooled by linguistic elements The advice forstudents is to listen to a song, listen to all 5 levels, they will see how well they fit tocontinue listening from there In addition, this page has a good reading speed or helpsspeed up reading

For teachers, this Website is really a helpful source of pedagogical materials to teachlistening skill because it provides them all exercises aiming at testing listening skill

of students at all levels This useful resource has hundreds of ideas, activitytemplates, reproducible activities for Teachers needn’t spend time designingexercises and preparing lessons plan because in each unit there are full steps:

 warm-ups

 pre-reading and listening

 while-reading and listening

 post-reading and listening

 using headlines

 working with words

 moving from text to speech

 role plays,

 task-based activities

 discussions and debates

Here is a Sample:

Warm – ups

1 THE ARCTIC: Students walk around the class and talk to other students about

the Arctic Change partners often and share your findings

2 CHAT: In pairs/ group, talk about these topic or words from the article What will

the article say about them? What can you say about these words and your life?

wildfires / Arctic Circle / planet / smoke / space / meteorologists / Alaska / Siberia / globla warming / temperatures / average / lightning / ice / methane / atmosphere

Have a chat about the topic you like Change topics and partners frequently

3 WILDFIRES: Students A strongly believe all countries should send resources to

put out the Arctic Circle wildfires; Students B strongly believe that’s not necessary Change partners again and talk about your conversations

4 CLIMATE CHANGE: How serious are these problems? How can we deal with

this? Comlete this table with your partner(s) ? Change partners often and share what you wrote

How Serious? What We Can Do

5 PLANET: Spend one minute writing down all of the different words you associate

with the word "planet" Share your words with your partner(s) and talk about them Together, put the words into different categories

6 GLOBAL WARMING: Rank these with your partner Put the biggest causes of

global warming at the top Change partners often and share your rankings

Before reading / listening

1 TRUE / FALSE: Read the headline Guess if 1-8 below are true (T) or false (F).

1 The article said there are thousands of fires burning in the Arctic Circle T / F

2 The Arctic Circle is warming at half the speed as the rest of the planet T / F

3 This wildfire season is the worst ever for the Arctic Circle T / F

4 The Greenland ice sheet started melting a month later than usual T / F

Gap fill: Put these words into the spaces in the paragraph below.

Hundreds of (1) wildfires have broken out all across the Arctic Circle Areas in the Arctic are warming (2) as fast as anywhere else on the planet.There are so many fires and they are (3) big that the smoke from them can beseen from space Meteorologists report that the Arctic is having its hottest June (4) _and is suffering its worst wildfire season on (5) There are hugeblazes (6) large areas of Greenland, Siberia, Scandinavia and Alaska InAlaska, there are as many as 400 fires burning out of (7) In Greenland,melting on the vast Greenland ice sheet has started a month earlier than (8) .The World Meteorological Organization has said the Arctic fires are

"unprecedented"

Listening — Guess the answers Listen to check.

1) Hundreds of huge wildfires have broken out Arctic Circle

a all a cross the b all a crossed the

c all axis the d all across the

2) the Arctic is having its hottest June ever and is suffering its worst wildfire

a seasonal on record b season on record

c seasoned on record d seasons on record

3) In Alaska, there are as many as 400 fires burning

a out of control b out off control c outer control d out a control

4) melting on the vast Greenland ice sheet has started a month

a earlier that usual b earlier then usual

c earlier than usual d earlier that's usual

5) he World Meteorological Organization has said the Arctic fires

a are "un-presented" b are "a presented"

c are "unprecedented" d are "up press indented"

Listening — Listen and fill in the gaps

Hundreds of huge wildfires have broken (1) _ the Arctic Circle Areas inthe Arctic are warming twice as (2) else on the planet There are so manyfires and they are so big that the smoke from them can be (3) _.Meteorologists report that the Arctic is having its hottest June ever and is suffering itsworst wildfire season on record There are (4) _ large areas of Greenland,Siberia, Scandinavia and Alaska In Alaska, there are as many as 400 fires burning(5) _ In Greenland, melting on the vast Greenland ice sheet has started amonth (6) The World Meteorological Organization has said the Arcticfires are "unprecedented"

Comprehension questions

1 What has started melting a month earlier than usual?

2 What did scientists say could have an effect on global warming?

3 What has been increasing at a much faster rate than the global average?

4 What is burning methane releasing into the atmosphere?

5 How many animals have the fires killed?