How an understanding of modifications in connected speech helps improve listening comprehension skill in ielts preparation classes at the hcmc university of industry m a 5 07 02

With the intention of bearing out that imparting suprasegmental features in general and sentence stress in particular is of paramount importance and, thus paves the way for an enhancemen

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Candidate: Chau Thi Bich Van

HOW AN UNDERSTANDING OF SUPRASEGMENTAL FEATURES

HELPS IMPROVE LISTENING COMPREHENSION SKILLS

IN IELTS PREPARATION CLASSES

AT THE HCMC UNIVERSITY OF INDUSTRY

Submitted In Partial Fulfilment Of The Requirements For The Degree Of Master

Of TESOL Supervisor: Ivon Katz

HCMC October 2007



Months of diligent work and effort having gone into my research, I herein assure you that the research is done by the very author, me myself More importantly, at no time it has been taken advantage of to secure any other certificates, nor turned into any academic account

HCMC, October 5th, 2007 Chau Thi Bich Van

This thesis is accomplished with the assistance and support of many people

to whom I feel very deep gratitude

First of all, I would like to send my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor – Mr Ivon Katz With a strong sense of responsibility, a single-minded devotion, and a wide knowledge of the professional field, he has continuously given me encouragement and invaluable ideas towards the completion of the thesis

Then my appreciation goes to my colleagues for sharing with me their teaching experience and my students for being disposed to be in on my work as the participants

And finally, I feel indebted to Mr Pham Tri Dai – my husband as well as my colleague – for his support and encouragement during the course of completing the thesis

The research was assiduously conducted with an eye to drawing the attention from those who are taking charge of listening skill teaching in IELTS preparation classes in Vietnam With the intention of bearing out that imparting suprasegmental features in general and sentence stress in particular is of paramount importance and, thus paves the way for an enhancement of listening skills for students in IELTS classes, the research described in this paper quantitative approach That is, the author carried out herself an experiment to testify that teaching sentence stress does help L2 learners to develop their listening comprehension skill With this end

in view, the subjects were chosen of sixty-six freshmen majoring in Business Administration in the HCMC University of Industry (HUI), who were required to attend IELTS preparation classes over the course of two years They were split into two separate classes: DBA9A1 – the control group (CG) and DBA9A2 – the experimental group (EG) The groups are both obliged to sit for a pre-test and a post-test The results of the two tests, to be precise, are processed by SPSS – the Statistical Package Software System Between the two tests is a special treatment given only to the EG, not the CG Whereas the pre-test shows similar listening capacities in both groups before the special treatment, the post-test differentiates between the CG and the EG in regarding listening proficiency After the treatment, the EG outperforms the CG remarkably

CG: the control group

DBA: the Diploma of Business Administration

EG: the experimental group

HUI: the HCMC University of Industry

IELTS: the International English Language Testing System

L2: second language

SPSS: the Statistical Package Software System

TafeSA: the Technological And Further Education, South Australia

TOEFL iBT: the Test of English as a Foreign Language (Internet-Based Test) TOEIC: the Test of English for International Communication

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS iv

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1-8 1.1 Background to the study 1-2 1.2 Definitions of terms 3-4 1.3 Statement of purpose 4-7 1.4 Importance of the Study 7

1.5 An overview of the organization of this study 8

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 8-14 2.1 The effect of linguistic knowledge on listening competence 9

2.2 The effect of sufrasegmental features on listening competence 10

2.3 Remedies for listening barriers 11-13 2.2.1 What a listening teacher should do before the listening session 12

2.3.2 What a listening teacher should do during the listening 12-13 2.4 A critical look at the literature review 13-14 CHAPTER 3: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 15-18 3.1 Participants 15-17 3.2 Procedure 17

3.3 Instrumentation 18 CHAPTER 4: RESULT AND DISCUSSION 19-36 4.1 Result of the pre-test 19-22 4.2 Result of the post-test 22-24 4.3 Discussion 25-34

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 37-39 5.1 Conclusion 37-38 5.2 Recomendations for further research 38-39 REFERENCES 40 APPENDIX A: List of tables 41-44 APPENDIX B: List of figures 45-46 APPENDIX C: The pre-test paper 47-50 APPENDIX D: The listening transcript for the pre-test paper 51-55 APPENDIX E: The post-test paper 56-59 APPENDIX F: The listening transcript for the post-test paper 60-64 APPENDIX G: The lesson plan for the experimental treatment 65-75

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Qua a teacher, and like many other counterparts , upon teaching listening

in an IELTS preparation class, I the author used to give it a simple thought that teaching listening was as easy a task as anything, and then started off without delay Having provided a few items of vocabulary and a little background knowledge apropos of the forthcoming tape recording, the author set about playing the recording, in the normal course of things let them listen again and again, up to several times, and then proceeded to examine their understanding to make comprehension questions Some gave wrong answers; some others are right; the majority produced no feedback at all, far from uttering anything and looking more than confused Finally, the listening session seemed to turn out less than expected, to turn out no intended results at all And that was the usual way it came to an end

The outcome did not, as things stood, live up to expectations The answers having been catered for, there still lay the rub, which came as a surprise to me And it was all too easy to notice that there was a shade of disappointment and grimaces on the students’ faces A moment of silence wore on and they brought the problem to my notice “Teacher, we fail to understand anything in the recording”, they said “They speak so fast that we can hardly get the meaning”

Those pressing words of complaint set the author thinking It turned out that the author, as well as most of the other listening teachers, had not really done anything except for controlling the tape during the listening process to help with the listening improvement for the students; in this regard, the author followed the lead of most of her colleagues teaching listening in IELTS

preparation classes Academically, to deal successfully with IELTS listening tests

is in want of many factors put together: the calibre of the teacher, the intellectual faculties of the learner, the listening materials, the teaching facilities, and so forth And it is the high calibre on the part of the teacher that is first and foremost

an ingredient It is time for listening teachers to stop teaching listening as a series

of tests and embark on teaching listening strategies instead What most teachers

of this time call “teaching listening” in fact is not authentic “teaching listening” Brown (1977) maintains that “many courses which purport to ‘teach’ listening comprehension in fact consist of exercises which expose the students to a chunk

of spoken material on a tape and then ask ‘comprehension questions’ to try to find out whether or not the student has understood the language of the text” (p 8) Therefore, teachers should begin to restore the true meaning of teaching listening by getting down to teaching Many a thing is quite expected to be passed down in the listening classes such as suprasegmental features in general, and sentence stress in particular That is, suprasegmental features should methodologically be put in the forefront Evidently suprasegmental features comprise many components such as sentence stress, intonation, rhythm, etc, however, relating to the problem stated above, sentence stress shoud be the most highlighted The reason is simple Whereas Vietnamese, the students’ native language, is syllabic, English is stress-timed Because this nature of the target language is completely strange to the students, the notion of sentence stress should be taken into consideration Once it conveyed, the learner can to a much greater extent listen to the recorded utterances with comfort and then take a good grasp of their meaning Therefore, it is a great disservice to ignore teaching sentence stress to Vietnamese students

1.2 DEFINITION OF TERMS

To begin with, the notion of suprasegmental features (which are also known as prosodic features) should be defined According to Richard (1993), a suprasegmental is “a unit which extends over more than one sound in an utterance, e.g STRESS and tone” (p 366) Also, Miller (2006) refers to suprasegmental features as stress, intonation, and speech rhythm They play a very important role in conveying the meaning of spoken language since “it is the suprasegmentals

With the above definition, it is clear that stress is the most prominent features “Stress” in suprasegmental phonology refers to sentence stress, not word stress as in segmental phonology With the presence of sentence stress, English has stress-timed rhythm Richard (1993) suggests that stress-timed rhythm is “a speech rhythm in which the stressed syllables are said to recur at equal intervals of time” (p 356)

As said above, the “stress-timed nature” of English is difficult to comprehend for Vietnamese learners According to Avery (1992), “In a stressed-timed language, there is a tendency for stressed syllables to occur at regular intervals” (p 73) In contrast, Vietnamese has syllable-timed rhythm Avery ( ) defines it as “the amount of time required to say a sentence depends on the number of syllables, not on the number of stresses” (p 73) Also, Richard (1993) refers to this notion as “a speech rhythm in which all syllables are said to recur at equal intervals” (p 367)

Finally, since “listening comprehension” is the very terminology for the research, it behoves us to know what it really is According to Underwood (1989), the definition of listening in a foreign language is presented in comparison with listening in the first language by stating that “it is a skill which seems to develop

easily for mother-tongue listening, but requires a considerable effort where listening in a foreign language is concerned” (p.1)

In contrast, Buck (2001) defines listening comprehension in a more direct way According to him, “listening comprehension is the result of an interaction between a number of information sources, which include the acoustic input, different types of linguistic knowledge, details of the context, and general world knowledge, and so forth” (p 3) What is more, he maintains that “listening comprehension is an active process of constructing meaning, and that this is done

by applying knowledge to the incoming sound” (p 31) However, how is the process? Previously, he describes the process as “the listener takes the incoming data, the acoustic signal, and interprets that, using a wide variety of information and knowledge, for a particular communicative purpose; it is an inferential process” (p 29)

1.3 STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Phonetically, a good grasp supreasegmental featues such as sentence stress, is a sine qua non for success in an IELTS listening subtest, but aware of this is regrettably a small number of learners A good few Vietnamese high school graduates are stuffed with items of English vocabulary and grammar, so to speak, in order to work on reading and writing sections, while the source of input

of listening section is not printed words at all but sounds and sounds and sounds! Understandably, that the majority of these IELTS test takers do a bad job actually stems from the lack of phonological knowledge, peculiarly of the acquaintance with suprasegmental features in general, and sentence stress in particular

There are at least three reasons why teachers do not take seriously the

class with the mistaken belief that their students have already mastered sentence

stress from the previous courses whereas actually the latter have not at all

Second, they downplay the introduction of sentence stress to a listening class,

claiming that these features should be taught in a pronunciation or speaking class

And finally, aware though they may be of the importance of teaching this

phonological feature, they could possibly fail to teach them in the context of

listening classes

Whatever the reason, the failure to teach suprasegmental features in

general, and sentence stress in particular, could be a major hindrance to

Vietnamese students to understand the stress-timed character of English as

Avery (1992) claims that “This may give their speech a staccato-like rhythm that

can adversely affect the comprehensibility of their English” (p 74) Therefore, in

term of the IELTS listening subtest, they cannot obtain a high band score without

an understanding of suprasegmental features in general and sentence stress in

particular

Given that teaching sentence stress is applied in IELTS preparation

classes, there are three resultant benefits as follows In the first place, it allows of

L2 listeners’ perceiving the oral input automatically, so to say, as do native

speakers Like other proficiency tests, an IELTS listening subtest requires the

listeners to obtain that ability, or else they would be lost in the rushing streams of

sounds which are pronounced in a way that they are not familiar with Regarding

this matter, Buck (2001) claims that “the words are flying past very quickly, and

in order to understand speakers at this speed, the listening processes must be

almost entirely automatic” (p 6) The second benefit of teaching sentence stress

lies in the fact that the mastery of suprasegmental features in general, and of

sentence stress in particular, facilitates the listener’s utilizing the bottom-up

processing needed at all during the listening process With a good command of this knowledge, they are now in a possible position to get hold of the techniques

of listening for particulars that make all the difference in dealing with a typical IELTS listening subtest Finally, teaching sentence stress exerts a positive effect, psychologically speaking, on the listeners’ part With the teacher’s dynamic teaching techniques, the listeners feel interested in sentence stress and are therefore free from the feelings of boredom and tiredness which, as often as not, has thus far happened in the listening classes before Therefore, with the three benefits mentioned above, it is high time for teachers to introduce sentence stress to their IELTS preparation classes in order to possibly make for an enhancement in the students’ listening ability

In brief, with an eye to enabling students to get the best results in an IELTS listening subtest, this paper is to build an awareness peculiarly for teachers of the significance of teaching suprasegmental features in general, and sentence stress in particular, in IELTS preparation classes, and suggest some practical ways to this end

1.4 STATEMENT OF HYPOTHESES

Evidenly depending on the characteristics of the learners, the availability

of the teaching and learning equipment, etc…, there are corresponding solutions

so as to raise the listening score for IELTS takers Nevertheless, regarding the subjects of the study who just graduated from high schools and have very limited knowledge of English phonology, inserting lessons on sentence stress into listening sessions should be encouraged Therefore, the study in this thesis raises the hypothesis that whether the listening comprehension skill of the students in

HUI will be improved if the teaching of suprasegmental features in general, and sentence stress in particular, is imparted to them

1.4 IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY

The research reported in this paper puts forward a line of active teaching for lecturers in charge of teaching listening, especially IELTS listening The conventional fashion of teaching listening as a series of tests should, I think, give way to teaching listening authentically – an innovated methodology by which the students are taught, not tested, the essential knowledge and strategies to process the oral input successfully With teaching listening as a series of tests, as has so far been utilised, teachers are involved in a set of four actions: provide some items of vocabulary relating to the content of the recording, set the cassette player in operation, ask comprehension questions, and then provide answers Teaching of this kind is not actually without use; it brings practice and checks listening improvement to the learners who have high English proficiency

Regarding the subjects in this research, who are Vietnamese high school graduates, this sort of teaching listening as a series of tests is little more than a uselessness Their knowledge of sounds, especially the sounds of English in the stream of speech, is within a very limited, not to say empty, scope With them it

is “teaching listening strategies”, not “teaching listening as a series of tests”, that really lends itself to their level of English It is a good idea for the teachers to supply learners with the knowledge essential for dealing with the listenings successfully It amounts to their entering into teaching rather than testing Once again, the acquaintance of sentence stress is fundamental in the extreme

1.5 AN OVERVIEW OF THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS STUDY

The study is organized into the six following chapters:

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Literature Review

Chapter 3: Methodology

Chapter 4: Results and Discussion

Chapter 5: Conclusion and Recommendations

Chapter one is the Introduction Through it readers are offered a

background to the study, the definition of terms, the statement of purpose, the statement of hypotheses, and the importance of the study With this introductory part, readers can picture the situation leading to the study Then comes chapter

two, the Literature Review, in which materials by different authors be briefly

seen, whose contents bear on the issue to be set out in this research Therefore,

by comparison, readers can visualize in an easy way the content that this

research intends to convey Chapter three examines the Methodology that the

author employs to conduct the study Then comes chapter four, which has to do

with the Results and Discussion this paper has tracked down Also, pedagogical implications are what follow in the Discussion They serve as guidelines assisting teachers to do a better job in an IELTS preparation class The Conclusion and Recommendations for further research forms the core of chapter five

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 THE EFFECT OF LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE ON LISTENING COMPETENCE

In terms of the factors influencing the listening process, both linguistic and non-linguistic skills play a very important role, however, in the scope of this study, let us take a look at the effect of linguistic knowledge on listening competence According to Anderson and Lynch (1988), listening effectively involves a great number of skills among which a good grasp of linguistic knowledge is crucially important (p 4)

In addition, Underwood (1989) highlights the crucial role of linguistic knowledge by claimin that “it includes sections on sounds, stress, and intonation, the organisation of speech, syntax and vocabulary, pauses and ‘fillers’, and

‘formal/informal’ language” (p 9)

In Buck’s (2001) view, there are two main factors directly affecting the listening process: linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge of which phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics and discourse structure belong to the former and the latter consists of knowledge about the topic, the context, and the world belong to (pp 1-2)

Up to now we have already seen the same viewpoint by Anderson, Lynch, and Buck They all maintain that a good grasp of linguistic knowledge must be required if one wishes to possess good listening competence

2.2 THE EFFECT OF SUPRASEGMENTAL FEATURES ON LISTENING COMPETENCE

Linguistic knowledge is a broad concept comprising many different components Above all, the mastery of suprasegmental features such as stress and intonation in equipping listeners during their listening process is emphasized

In Ur’s (1984) view, stress and intonation should be mastered because they “can interfere with the foreign learner’s proper understanding of spoken English” (p.13) To explain this, he maintains that stress and intonation are of vital importance because they “play an important part in supplying ground for certain kinds of expectations” (p 16)

In addition to Ur, Underwood (1989) highlights the necessity of mastering stress by asserting that “the purpose of stress is to highlight words which carry the main information the speaker wishes to convey, and changing the stress can alter the meaning of an utterance even where the words remain the same”(p 10)

After that, like Ur and Underwood, Buck (2001) puts a high emphasis on stress and intonation According to him, “one of the most important aspects of listening comprehension is paying attention to stress and intonation patterns” (p 5) He explains this by saying that “the prosodic features, stress and intonation, also carry a great deal of communicative information” (p 35)

Also, Avery (1992) agrees that “All students will need practice in English stress, rhythm, and intonation These are key elements of English pronunciation and, if mastered, can greatly increase the comprehensibility of learners’ speech” (p.106) And then, he adds that “ suprasegmental features ‘have the greatest impact on the comprehensibility of learners’ English We have found that giving priority to the suprasegmental aspects of English not only improves learners’

can be effected in a short time” (p 186) In addition, he maintains that “Stress,

rhythm, and intonation, for example, appear to be far more critical to successful

communication than individual sounds” (p 173)

In addtion, Avery (1992)) confirms that “suprasegmental features such as stress

and intonation are often treated by ESL teachers as ‘peripheral frills’ and not as

central to the conveying of meaning The truth, however, is that they are far

more important and central to communication than accurate production of the

individual sounds” (Avery, 1992, p 185)

2.3 REMEDIES FOR LISTENING BARRIERS

After presenting the impact of suprasegmental features in general and

sentence stress in particular in conveying the meaning of a certain utterance, the

researchers point out the tasks that the listening teachers should do in helping

learners to acquire a good listening skill Specifically, Underwood (1989) claim

that “it is important for teachers to be aware of the special features of spoken

English which make it different from the written language” (p 9) And more

clearly, she maintains that teachers should do the following things:

 Exposing students to a range of listening experiences

 Making listening purposeful for the students

 Helping students understand what listening entails and how they might

approach listening tasks

 Building up students’ confidence in their own listening

(Underwood, 1989, pp 21-22)

Besides that, Underwood (1989) takes seriously what a listening teacher is

supposed to do before and during a listening session The detail is as follows:

2.3.1 WHAT A LISTENING TEACHER SHOULD DO BEFORE THE LISTENING SESSION

 Choose the listening text

 Check that the activities are suitable

 Adjust the level of difficulty of the activities if you need to

 Consider whether the listening work you are planning will fill the time available

 Think about visual aids

 Decide whether any special equipment will be needed

 Make up your mind what procedures you will adopt for the listening session

 If you are planning to present the listening text “live”, practise reading it aloud

 Being available to give help whenever it is needed, but not inflicting help

on those who do not need it This may be at any stage during the lesson

 Encouraging the students to help each other, so that the emphasis is on the successful completion of the task(s) rather than on who got it “right” or

“wrong”

 Not treating the activities as tests to be marked and scored

 Encouraging the students to alter their answers if they wish to, perhaps after listening for a second time

 Encouraging students to jot down odd words, ideas and thoughts as they are doing their listening work

 Suggesting that the students use dictionaries when it would prove helpful

 Including lots of pair-and groupwork

 Making listening work enjoyable

 Leaving out part of work rather than rushing

 Giving immediate feedback

(Underwood, 1989, pp 26-28)

2.4 A CRITICAL LOOK AT THE LITERATURE REVIEW

Understanding the key role of suprasegmental features in general and sentence stress in particular in listening proficiency and then finding out the corresponding solution is the focus of the previous studies With an insightful perspective, the researchers of those materials present readers with a thorough view about the related matter and facilitate the latter to have a chance to look back to their present teaching method However, the above researchers just generally mention the impact of sentence stress on listening competence and fail

to put them in the context of the IELTS test Second, what teachers should do to cultivate listening ability for their students should not be treated so superfically

It will be better if there is more information as to how to impart sentence stress to

the students Therefore, there should be a variety of detailed teaching procedures that teachers can base on and which they can apply flexibly into their teaching With the increasing need for having high IELTS band scores among young Vietnamese people, this study explores the importance of teaching sentence stress in an IELTS preparation class as well as introduces pedagogical guidelines

to listening teachers so that they can benefit their learners as much as possible

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

3.1 PARTICIPANTS

The choice of the subjects for this study was carried out based on their availability They were the sixty-six first-year students aged from eighteen to twenty There were twenty-six males and forty females All participants have the same educational background: at the time of the study they had just graduated from high schools in Vietnam and had spent at least seven years learning English under the influence of Grammar-Translation Method At present, they are attending an international collaborative college programme between HUI and TafeSA ( Technological and Further Education, South Australia) Institution The subjects all major in Business Administration; after three years, they will receive

a diploma if they can get IELTS 5.0 band score Therefore, to help the students, HUI organizes IELTS preparation classes and their attendance is required Their

textbook is IELTS Practice Tests written by Peter May (2004) and they are

obliged to study the four English skills – listening, speaking, reading, and writing – with this textbook

Since success in an IELTS listening subtest involves a good command of linguistic knowledge that learners accumulate over time, it is helpful to have a look at the kind of English that stays with them during their high school time After spending at least seven years sitting in English classes, they are considered

to have intermediate English proficiency according to Vietnamese educators Nevertheless, to be more exact, they can be seen to be reasonably proficient with grammatical structures and vocabulary but relatively weak in listening comprehension skill The reasons are plentiful The first reason is that they are

bound to learn English with inappropriate textbooks While reading texts bristling with vocabulary and grammatical exercises which students can perform mechanically without considering the meaning are scattered everywhere in the textbooks, sections for pronunciation drills and listening tasks cannot be found What is more, the testing format of semester-final exams which evaluates student’s proficiency is almost based on the students’ memory for items of vocabulary and grammatical structures rather than their listening proficiency That exerts a negative impact on students’ motivation for learning listening skill They feel that it is no use trying to master the kind of skill that is never assessed and appreciated And as such, there is no wonder why students’ listening skill remains so hopeless over time Third, the lack of well-qualified teachers is also

a factor that contributes to the learners’ listening deficiency Frankly speaking, the number of teachers who are trained to have a good command of phonology is far and few between It is understandable because they themselves are the products of the traditional Grammar-Translation Method And it is because of this that they do not take the teaching of listening skill into consideration A day in the English class is a day students are to plough through long-wound lists of vocabulary items and grammar exercises after being presented with a certain reading text There is little room for listening and speaking drills, not to say anything but Besides, the oversized classrooms, the lack of modern teaching and learning equipments, the limited chance of language practice with native speakers should be taken into account Suppose that the teachers know for sure what to teach and how to teach them in listening classes, the students’ progress in listening capability is still hindered by the lack of good-quality learning and teaching facilities All of the above reasons lead to an evident outcome that after

seven years of learning English in high schools, listening acquisition is something that seems to be beyond the students’ reach

Surprisingly, however, at the present time, when the Communicative Approach is appreciated by teachers, the testing format of a large number of university entrance examinations spares no room for listening skill And as such,

at present, the sixty-six high school graduates in this study become first –year students of an international collaborative program between HUI and TafeSA Institution, Australia In spite of being considered to have an intermediate level

in English on the resultant basis of the placement test which once again consists just of multiple-choice questions checking the learners’ memory for vocabulary items and grammatical structures, they meet an abundance of problems due to the listening deficiency formed in their high school time

The students are randomly split into two separate classes: DBA9A1 (which plays the role of the CG in this study) and DBA9A2 (which plays the role

of the EG in this study)

3.2 PROCEDURE

The research employs quantitative approach by administering the two tests for the two groups and score them Between the two tests – the pre-test and the post-test is a two-week training session which is solely for the EG , not the CG

The two-week training session deals with a dominant feature of suprasegmental features – sentence stress During this teaching period, those in the EG are introduced theories of sentence stress together with a lot of examples which are extracted from IELTS Practice Tests materials to serve as illustrations

3.3 INSTRUMENTATION

The pre-test is conducted to measure and compare the listening competence

of the two groups before the treatment Together with the pre-test, the post-test is carried out as well Both of them comprise two sections rather than four as in an authentic IELTS listening subtest Therefore, there are twenty items in each test Each item is scored one, so the maximum score is twenty There are two reasons accounting for the size of these two tests reduced by a half The first one is that with twenty items, the students are free from stress and tiredness caused by long hours The second reason is that it suits the subjects’ listening proficiency In other words, the two first sections in an IELTS subtest – Section 1 and Section 2 – are assessed to bear a lower level of difficulty than the two last sections; therefore, they should be seen as more appropriate for the subjects of this study

The pre-test is extracted from IELTS Practice Test Plus by Vanessa Jakeman and Clare McDowell, and the post-test from Cambridge IELTS 2 by Cambridge

University Press The testees of both groups listen to the recording only once and the duration for each test is 30 minutes They sit for the two tests in two different rooms under the strict supervision of two invigilators The results of the two tests are also processed by SPSS The central tendency and dispersion of the two histograms corresponding to the results of the two tests are presented

CHAPTER 4: RESULT AND DISCUSSION

4.1 RESULT OF THE PRE-TEST

 Frequency and Frequency Distribution

The score frequency of the pre-test of the EG and the CG is demonstrated

in Table 2

Table 1

Score Frequency of the Pre-Test

CG is 5 and that of the EG is 4 Also, whereas the highest score of the CG is 11,

10 is the highest score of the EG

 Central Tendency and Dispersion

The central tendency and dispersion are shown in the histograms of

Figures 1A, 1B and Table 2

Figure 1a Score Frequency Of The CG

Figure 1b Score Frequency of the EG

Table 2

Central Tendency and Dispersion Analysis of the Pre-Test

As regards the statistics in Table 2, the means of the two groups are almost the same with 7.6 for the CG and 7.4 for the EG To be more exact, listening ability of the CG a little bit surpasses that of the EG However, in general, both groups have the same listening ability

Concerning the standard deviation statistics with 1.5 for both groups, the students of both groups perform the pre-test homogeneously

To sum up, from the frequency, central tendency and dispersion analysis, one can claim that before the training session, the listening performance of the

CG and the EG is almost the same

4.2 RESULT OF THE POST-TEST

 Frequency and Frequency Distribution

After the training session for the EG, both groups perform the post-test with the result as demonstrated in Table 5

15, the EG’s result from 10 to 17 The difference is due to the experimental effect

The central tendency and dispersion distribution of the post-test are demonstrated in the two histograms in Figures 2A, 2B and Table 4

Figure 2a Post Test Score of the CG

Figure 2b Post-Test Score of the EG

Table 4

The Central Tendency and Dispersion Distribution of the Post-Test

Concerning the mean, median and mode, the EG strikingly overrides that

of the CG 13.67 and 11.18 are the mean scores of the EG and the CG respectively Once again, the training session leads to the difference

In addition, what is noteworthy in the frequency distribution is the standard deviation With the standard deviation of 1.8 of the EG compared to 2.0 of the

CG, the EG’s listening performance is more homogeneous than that of the CG

Post-test score of DBA9A1

Post-test score of DBA9A2

4.3 DISCUSSION

The results of the pre-test and the post-test present the fact that listening failure in an IELTS listening subtest is due to the students’ poor knowledge of suprasegmental feature in general, and that of sentence stress in particular, and the onus is then on the teachers to teach them this The post-test results of the two groups speak for themselves: they demonstrate the efficacy of the teaching sentence stress in IELTS preparation classes Having the same listening ability

at first, however, the EG then does better than the CG Why is that? The answer

is the special treatment Accordingly, listening teachers ought to take into consideration the effectiveness of teaching sentence stress

The finding implies that it is high time to get rid of the kind of teaching listening as a series of tests With the dominance of the traditional Grammar-Translation Method, the lack of well-qualified teachers, teaching facilities, and appropriate materials, the teaching of listening is practically overlooked and receives very little, not to say no, concern Some hold the view that the need for listening proficiency is not pressing; others take it for granted that listening competence naturally is with listeners during the course of language learning without any effort And ironically, it is the students who are the ones to pay a heavy price for those myths They most end up evaluating themselves to be very weak in listening proficiency

At present, teachers and learners alike have witnessed a large number of educational advances Old-fashioned and bad-quality teaching equipments give way to modern and good-quality ones The time of the lack of professional materials went away and the market is now home to a large number of books written by famous scholars and researches from all over the world Also, more language teachers are trained overseas and are seen to bring back home with a

handful of innovative ideas benefitting the learners More importantly, the traditional Grammar-Translation Method which has no place for listening teaching is downplayed and the Communicative Approach which emphasizes the importance of listening teaching is dominating the language teaching and learning situation In a word, many educational changes happen and teachers and learners alike can benefit from them

As discussed above, those advances are worthwhile in the process of teaching and learning listening skill Unfortunately, however, for all the above favorable advances, the teaching of listening is still problematic and students cannot obtain satisfying results so far A question is then posed: whereas most of listening barriers such as the lack of appropriate materials and teaching equipment have almost been solved, what other barrier is standing in the way of learners’ listening acquisition? Definitely the teachers’ misguiding methodology

in the listening teaching is the one Teachers together with their misguilding methodology in listening teaching are the very cause, that is Simply put, even though Communicative Approach is now appreciated much more than the traditional Grammar-Translation Method, they are still deeply influenced by the latter and therefore teach listening ineffectively That is to say, in light of their methodology, the teacher plays the dominant, authoritative role in conducting the listening activities in the classroom and learners are just passive listeners A widespread application of teaching listening as a series of tests is ubiquitous, so

to speak The teaching procedure is simple: (1) The teacher provides some items

of vocabulary relating to the context of the listening; (2) He controls the recorder playing it three times and pausing it at difficult parts of the text ; (3) The students listen to the recording in silence and then are required to answer some

tape-comprehension questions relating to the content of the text; (4) The teacher provides the answer key for those questions

To be honest, that kind of teaching listening is by nature not useless at all

It brings a chance of practice to listeners to approach the native speakers’ speech and therefore can be seen as very appropriate in listening classes for learners of advanced level of English proficiency Nevertheless, in the context of teaching English to the students whose phonological know-how is so poor, it brings back more harm than good In the first place, teaching listening this way is an unscientific method Instead of equipping students with knowledge, guidelines and instructions before exposing them to practice exercises, the teachers do the opposite It makes no difference to put the cart before the horse Effective teaching and learning of listening does not accept this and ironically, listeners are sufferers They cannot have effective listening skill no matter how many years they have sat in the classrooms where comprehensive listening is imparted like that Additionally, teaching listening as a series of tests lessens the listeners’ motivation in the learning process Taking the affective feelings and psychological state of the listeners into consideration is what the teachers should

do, but in contrast, they do not Instead of giving students feelings of comfort, they usually drive their students worried, tense and discouraged by difficult questions that the latter can hardly make out Indeed, failing to answer a comprehension question correctly after the recording finishes gives students feelings of failure And once those negative feelings happen consecutively, the motivation for learning listening is destroyed Finally, teaching listening this way

is teacher-centered, not student-centered, approach by the fact that it lacks the learners’ contribution which constitutes the primary part in any modern language learning process In fact, in these listening classes, students do not have a chance

to voice their specific listening problems or do pair work or group work With the three reasons above, it can be concluded that teaching listening as a series of tests should be eradicated and replaced by authentic listening teaching

Regarding the results of the pre-test and the post-test, it is noticeable to realize that the EG is different from the CG by the only fact that between the pre-test and the post-test, only the EG goes through the training session And that difference leads to another difference in the listening competence: the EG outperforms the CG Therefore the treatment is proved to be effective in bringing about success in listening development Definitely there are a handful of things

to teach during that period However, lessons on sentence stress should be given the top priority due to their frequency in spoken texts And the students will benefit more if those lessons are illustrated by examples extracted from IELTS Practice Tests materials

What is more, Vietnamese students of low calibre of phonological proficiency in IELTS preparation classes, teaching sentence stress does make a difference Confronting the stress-timed nature of English, they are bound to suffer from tension and fatigue, which arises from the fact that the students find it hard to get the meaning of the utterance Then, if they are used to this stress-timed nature , they will be confident enough to deal with the difficult IELTS listening subtest

And in the light of the characteristics of the IELTS listening subtest as, helping learners to have a good performance is a complicated matter Simply put, besides the intellectual ability of the listeners themselves, there must be a good collaboration among coursebook writers, syllabus designers, and teachers And since teachers are those who have the greatest influence on learners, their roles

test, but there is one important thing they can change and if that change is successfully made, there will be a significant improvement in the test-takers’ listening performance So, what does it mean? Frankly speaking, they need to change their methodology in terms of listening teaching That is to say, it is high time for the teachers to get rid of the teaching listening like a series of tests as before and embark on doing the following things

To begin with, as discussed above, the lack of well-qualified teachers is one of the main factors accounting for the listening deficiency among learners, therefore their first duty should be trying every effort to equip themselves with a good command of all kinds of knowledge needed for the success of IELTS listening subtest That is to say, they are bound to take a good grasp of linguistic knowledge, background knowledge and methodological knowledge To be more specific, they should constantly foster their English proficiency and hone their teaching skills by updating their knowledge with innovative ideas from a large body of well-known professional materials published worldwide For example, with the current teachers trained from domestic educational institutions under the influence of Grammar-Translation Method, they should find it urgent to be well versed in phonology to enable themselves to help their students better perceive the rushing streams of sounds in a typical IELTS listening subtest

Second, as teachers in general and teachers of listening in particular are always adored and considered by their students as proficient in the professional field, they should do their utmost to eradicate some myths relating to the learning

of listening These myths result in negative influence on the learners’ proficiency development, but unfortunately, they exist in their students’ mind for a long time They can be listed as follows

 The First Myth: Listening Competence Requires Only the Students’ Knowledge of Vocabulary and Grammar

Listening competence is easy to achieve as it would naturally come when one has already accumulated a great deal of vocabulary items and grammatical structures In point of fact, success in listening comprehension requires much more than that such as a good command of phonology, cultural knowledge, strategic knowledge, a good memory, the familiarity with a variety of accents, and so on This is what they should tell their students before getting down to the teaching process It is of crucial importance in that it helps to prevent students from having possible moments of disappointment due to the demanding nature of the IELTS listening subtest

 The Second Myth: Listening is a Passive Act

Most Vietnamese students are shy and do not have to do anything in a listening class save for letting the oral input pass through the ears and then answering several comprehension questions, so the classrooms are usually pervaded with a sense of boredom which in its turn discourages the students in the learning process The teachers should, therefore, explain that listening competence calls for active, not passive listeners by the fact that they are likely

to be set for a mental participation in listening Frankly speaking, students should

be encouraged to take their problems up with their teachers, require the latter to pause the tape at any problematic part of the listening task that they find difficult

to comprehend, ask them to play the recording as many times as they want, and

so on and so forth Only so can students become comfortable, confident, and motivated in learning listening

 The Third Myth: Listening Uses the Same Subskills as Reading Does

Maintaining this myth in mind is so dangerous since it makes the learners mistakenly believe equal the difficulty level of a listening test and that of a reading test They should learn that listening is different from reading by the only fact that the input of the former is sounds and the latter scripts As such, what teachers should do is to explain to the students that a listening test bears its specific characteristics and is prone to more problems such as no chance for another reference to the input, the background noise, the environmental noise, the bad-quality tape-recorders, etc

Third, in addition to eradicating those myths, teachers should prepare their students for a good performance on the IELTS listening subtest by providing them with instructions, guidelines, and knowledge, truly in the name of the course “IELTS preparation class” To achieve this aim, they should take into consideration the close relationship among the three factors – whom to teach, what to teach, and how to teach – in conducting an IELTS listening class Knowing what an IELTS listening subtest demands, they will base on the students’ proficiency level to decide on the content of the lesson as well as the suitable methodology In other words, teachers should provide the students with what the latter need, not what the former like Clearly speaking, each of the learners’ listening barriers should be carefully analysed and the corresponding remedy is presented as the main focus on each listening lesson And teachers should be sensitive enough to see what barrier is more serious in order to decide

on what kind of knowledge the learners should learn first For example, so far as

is concerned the input of the IELTS listening subtest, which is of course all spoken, phonological lessons should come to the students first Also, since English is a stress-timed language which is different from Vietnamese which is syllabic, lessons on sentence stress should constitute the main part of a listening

syllabus What is more, those lessons must be satisfying enough in terms of both quality and quantity perspectives Creating a high-quality lesson amounts to conveying learning motivation and interests to the learners This aim equals a great shot from the teachers who are not at all supposed to apply the teaching techniques they got so accustomed to which is, say, Grammar-Translation Method; otherwise, the learners will lose interests in the lesson Instead, they should turn the Communicative Approach to good account to make the classroom student-centred In addition, the quantitative factor should also be taken into consideration That is to say, the amount of knowledge on phonological features should come to the learners thoroughly, not superficially as some teachers in many listening classes do at present

Now it is time to mention how to impart the lessons of sentence stress to the students To conduct these lessons in a classroom, it is important for the

teacher to follow the following steps: Lead-in, Presentation, and Controlled Practice In this Lead-in phase, theories of these phonological features will be

introduced to the learners It is noteworthy that teachers should make these teaching hours student-centered so that they can arouse learning interest in the students Also, pair-work and group work activities should be encouraged In doing so, learners play the role as discoverers and the teacher as the facilitator Only so can knowledge come to the learners naturally and last long in their

memory Then comes the Presentation phase This is the time when teachers

officially present the focus of the lesson To bring about a comfortable state of mind for the learners, teachers’ presentation should be clear and condensed The

most important stage, nevertheless, is the last one: Controlled Practice Teachers

conduct this stage by exposing them to taped recordings extracted from IELTS

exercises for the learners For learners of low proficiency in phonology, having them practice these ear-training exercises will help them better perceive the sounds And good sound perception ability is a stepping stone for the success in

an IELTS listening subtest

Fourth, teachers in IELTS preparation classes should be flexible in using listening materials This is important because with the application of a certain material into an IELTS preparation class, students’ listening progress can be either enhanced or hindered No teacher intends to hinder their students’ listening development; therefore their choice on materials should be based on the different language levels of the students and the nature of the coursebook Bringing students a chance for practising listening to English is what these IELTS Practice Tests books aim at, therefore they are just appropriate for learners with high English proficiency As such, it is of no service to learners of low ability in English The reason is quite straightforward How can they become effective listeners whereas their knowledge is so poor to process those practice exercises? For this reason, it is then suggested that teachers should perfect the lessons by exploiting to the maximum a variety of materials to supplement the IELTS Practice Tests books The kinds of outside materials made use of to the full are comprised to a large extent of listening stumbling blocks that the students have to come up against For example, in this study, the very aim is to help improve listening comprehension for the sixty-six subjects, knowledge of sentence stress should be imparted Definitely, knowledge of this field has been so far little mentioned in IELTS Practice Tests materials available on the market, therefore

employing other pronunciation training books such as Targeting Pronunciation by Sue F Miller, Well Said by Linda Grant, etc is a suggestion at all Additionally,