Teaching listening comprehension at food industry college of ho chi minh city problems and solutions

Due to the limitation of the research, I only focus on the teaching of listening comprehension skill which plays a central role in communication and is considered a frustrating skill to

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY - HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

ĐỖ THỊ MINH CHÂU

TEACHING LISTENING COMPREHENSION

AT FOOD INDUSTRY COLLEGE OF HO CHI MINH

CITY:

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

M.A THESIS IN TESOL

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF TESOL

Supervisor : NGUYỄN TIẾN HÙNG, Ph.D

HO CHI MINH CITY – March, 2007

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:

TEACHING LISTENING COMPREHENSION

AT FOOD INDUSTRY COLLEGE OF HO CHI MINH CITY:

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

in terms of the statements of requirements for Theses in Master’s Programs

issued by the Higher Degree Committee

Ho Chi Minh city, March 2007

ĐỖ THỊ MINH CHÂU

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS

I hereby state that I, ĐỖ THỊ MINH CHÂU, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library

In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited

in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses

Ho Chi Minh city, March 2007

ĐỖ THỊ MINH CHÂU

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor,

Dr NGUYỄN TIẾN HÙNG, who not only assisted me with all his heart in my preparation for the thesis draft and accomplishment of the final work but also provided valuable comments on the individual chapters as well as the whole thesis

I also wish to thank the whole teaching staff of the 2003- 2006 TESOL course at

Ho Chi Minh University of Social Sciences and Humanities, who have made

me well-qualified with the background knowledge to fulfill this thesis

Next, my profound thanks are expressed to the Directorate of Food Industry College of Ho Chi Minh City for permission and encouragement to my carrying out this project I also thank my colleagues for their enthusiastic cooperation and appreciated suggestions as well as the students here who took part in the survey for my research

Finally, I am grateful to my family, especially my husband Lưu Hoàng, who have always been supportive during my studies, especially the time when I made this thesis

ABSTRACT

Listening in language teaching has undergone several important influences,

as the result of developments in linguistics and even global politics Since

1980, listening has been viewed as a primary channel for language learning (Richards 1985; Richards and Rodgers 1986; Rost 1990) Furthermore, nowadays, in the age of globalization, communicative competence gains more and more attention in comparison with language competence However, the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Vietnam cannot catch up with the current theory and methodology in the world (Appendices D, E, F, G, H) In this context, I wonder how much prominence has been given to the teaching of communicative skills, especially listening comprehension The answer is that there is a belief that listening practice in Vietnamese EFL classes, especially those at college or university, is hardly touched on, or if it is, it will be incidental

As a teacher of English at Food Industry College of Ho Chi Minh city (FICH),

I was motivated to conduct this study because students seem to acquire no listening skill, let alone to develop it, after the compulsory English course at FICH There have been much considerable research on difficulties confronted by the EFL learners while acquiring this skill (Literature Riview) But listening obstacles have not been widely researched in the field of a training program This leads to the following purposes of the study:

1 to find out the real problems of the teaching of listening comprehension

in the compulsory General English course at FICH

2 to identify the difficulties of the learning of this skill

3 to suggest some feasible solutions to them

Both qualitative and quantitative approaches including three methods, namely description, observation and questionnaire were employed to find out the answers to the research questions

The findings indicate that the amount of teaching time and the listening objective according to the curriculum, and the class size play important roles

in the efficiency of teaching listening comprehension And the problems of teaching this skill can be one of the sources resulting in difficulties for students in acquiring it These are associated with the internal factors of learners such as their affective statuses, listening habits, information processing capacities, English proficiencies, and their belief about listening activities Other barriers concerned the nature of listening strategies the listening material used and teaching methods Based on the findings, a series of pedagogical implications are provided in the hope of providing students access to communication skills in English

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Background to the study 1

1.1.1 Theoretical background 2

1.1.2 Teaching background 2

1.1.3 Context of teaching listening comprehension at FICH 3

1.2 Statement of purpose 4

1.3 Research questions 4

1.4 Overview of thesis chapters 5

CHAPTER 2 : LITERATURE REVIEW 6

2.1 Some important definitions related to the research 6

2.1.1 Definitions of “listening” 6

2.1.2 Input 8

2.1.3 Aural texts 10

2.1.4 Top-down and bottom-up processes 11

2.1.5 Schema 12

2.1 6 Task 12

2.1.7 Objective 13

2.2 The nature of listening in real- life communication 14

2.2.1 Introduction 14

2.2.2 The purposes of listening in real-life communication 15

2.2.3 The nature of listening comprehension 16

2.2.4 Characteristics of real-life listening 21

2.2.5 Listening strategies 22

2.3 The nature of listening comprehension in classroom 24

2.3.1 Introduction 24

2.3.2 The importance of listening in second language learning 26

2.3.3 The objective of listening comprehension in classroom 27

2.3.4 The purposes of a listening activity 27

2.3.5 Important features in listening to English as a foreign language 28

2.3.6 Types of classroom listening performance 28

2.3.7 Types of listening activities 30

2.3.8 Principles for designing listening techniques in classroom 31

2.3.9 The role of the learner 34

2.3.10 The role of the teacher 34

2.3.11 The format of a good listening lesson 35

2.3.12 characteristics of a good practice activity 36

2.3.13 Characteristics of effective teaching 37

2.3.14 Characteristics of an effective listener 38

2.3.15 Characteristics of an effective listening course 40

2.4 Related studies on difficulties in learning listening comprehension 40

2.4.1 Difficulties due to the process of listening or the speech processing40 2.4.2 Difficulties due to the task 42

2.4.3 Difficulties due to the learner 42

2.4.4 Difficulties due to the limitations of the present listening teaching and listening materials 43

2.4.5 Summary 44

2.5 Summary of the chapter 46

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 47

3.1 Research design 47

3.1.1 Overview of the research 47

3.1.2 Location 47

3.1.3 Population 48

3.2 Data collection method 49

3.2.1 Description 50

3.2.2 Observation 50

3.2.3 Questionnaires 51

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 55

4.1 Results from description 55

4.1.1 Description of the compulsory General English course at FICH 55

4.1.2 Description of the listening tasks in the course book 63

4.1.3 Description of the listening learning conditions at FICH 67

4.2 Results from the observation 70

4.2.1 Observation results of pre- listening stage 76

4.2.2 Observation results of while-listening stage 79

4.2.3 Observation results of post-listening stage 82

4.2.4 Summary of the observation results 84

4.3 R esults from the questionnaire 84

4.3.1 Results from the questionnaire for students 84

4.3.2 Results from the questionnaire for teachers 104

4.4 Discussion about the results 123

4.4.1 Internal difficulties 124

4.4.2 External difficulties 126

4.5 Limitation of the study 128

4.6 Summary of the chapter 128

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND SOLUTIONS 129

5.1 Conclusion 129

5.2 Solutions 130

5.2.1 To overcome difficulties from the course 130

5.2.2 To overcome difficulties from the present listening teaching style135 5.2.3 To overcome difficulties from the listening learning conditions 137

5.3 Summary of the chapter 138

APPENDICES 139

APPENDIX A 139

APPENDIX A’ 144

APPENDIX B 148

APPENDIX C 151

APPENDIX D 154

APPENDIX E 159

APPENDIX F 163

APPENDIX G 164

APPENDIX H 165

BIBLIOGRAPHY 166

LIST OF APPENDICES

Page

APPENDIX A: Questionnaire for students (Form A- English) 139 APPENDIX A’: Questionnaire for students (Form A’ - Vietnamese) 144 APPENDIX B: Questionnaire for teachers of English (Form B) 148 APPENDIX C: An extract from the general curriculum issued by

Ministry of Education and Training for Electrical Engineering Technology – Level: college 151

APPENDIX D: Article 1 – Teaching English to non-major students:

Out-of-date and Ineffective 154

APPENDIX E: Article 2 – English in Vietnamese colleges and universities159

APPENDIX F: Article 3 – Bridge the gap in teaching English between in

Vietnam and in the world 163

APPENDIX G: Article 4 – Seven years at school: Why cannot pupils speak

English? 164

APPENDIX H: Article 5 – Why cannot pupils speak English? 165

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CUP = Cambridge University Press

EFL = English as a Foreign Language

FICH = Food Industry College of Ho Chi Minh City

HCMC = Ho Chi Minh City

LC = Listening comprehension

OUP = Oxford University Press

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 39

Table 2 56

Table 3 59

Table 4 61

Table 5 65

Table 6 70

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Table 8 75

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Table 10 79

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Table 40 118

Table 41 119

Table 42 121

LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1 76

Figure 2 79

Figure 3 82

Figure 4 85

Figure 5 87

Figure 6 88

Figure 7 89

Figure 8 90

Figure 9 91

Figure 10 92

Figure 11 92

Figure 12 94

Figure 13 95

Figure 14 96

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Figure 25 111

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Figure 28 114

Figure 29 115

Figure 30 116

Figure 31 117

Figure 32 118

Figure 33 120

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

“Foreign language”, especially General English is one of the compulsory courses for non-major Vietnamese students in the first school year No one can deny the primitive purpose of this subject That is to provide learners access to communication in the global integration And communication cannot successfully take place unless what is spoken is also understood As

a result, this course is expected to be an integrated one in which listening and speaking skills play an important role But teaching and learning English, especially the above mentioned two skills, at college and university these days, in fact, are believed to be ineffective Not only those who are involved in these acts such as administrators, teachers and students but also the society find this course a waste of time, energy, and money due to

its inefficiency As a result, it is not surprising that there have been some articles in newspapers and magazines writing about this alarming state (Appendices D, E, F, G, H) It is time to find out problems and urgent,

feasible solutions to improve this situation

1.4.1 Theoretical background

In this day of mass communication (much of it oral), it is of vital importance that learners of a foreign language be taught to listen effectively and critically The reason is that, according to a lot of considerable research, listening has rightly assumed a central role in language learning For example, “Essential to all interaction is the ability to understand what others are saying.” (River, 1978) In other words, listening is one of the fundamental language skills It's a medium through which children, young people and adults gain a large portion of their education their information, their understanding of the world and of human affairs, their ideals, sense of values, and their appreciation Furthermore, Rost (1994) points out that listening is also vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner Without understanding input at the right level, any learning simply cannot begin And David Nunan also agrees that listening is assuming greater and greater importance in foreign language classrooms But in fact, most of foreign language learners find listening comprehension very difficult to acquire or develop This can be explained by the previous research on listening task difficulties (Brown and Yule (1983), Anderson and Lynch (1988), learners problems (Penny Ur) and limitations to the present listening teaching Yet there is little information available on the barriers or

difficulties to the learners’ acquirement of this skill after a language course

1.4.2 Teaching background

In the era of globalization, the teaching and learning of English have been given more and more attention in none-English-speaking countries because English is considered an international language in all social interactions Vietnam is also a point in case But here, foreign language teaching is often viewed from a very narrow perspective – that of the teaching act If students are not learning, it is assumed to be the fault of the teaching method, the materials or the teachers However, the success of a language program

involves far more than the mere act of teaching The same as any successful educational program, other factors are also involved They are the learner, the planning, development and implementation including the management and assessment of the teaching and learning That’s why goals and objectives of the program have also to be developed as well as syllabuses and instructional materials in the language curriculum development On the contrary, the reality shows that these factors have not gained adequate attention yet in Vietnamese context of teaching English This leads to the alarming state that students seem to have no ability to communicate in English even basically although they were supposed to spend much time and energy on learning English at secondary and high school, and then at college or university, let alone in foreign language centers Generally speaking, the compulsory teaching of English at school in Vietnam lags behind current theory and tendency of foreign language teaching, particularly in the areas of input selection and strategy development It means that the teaching and learning of listening remains far behind current views of listening

1.4.3 Context of teaching listening comprehension at Food

Industry

College of Ho Chi Minh city

As a teacher of English at Food Industry College of Ho Chi Minh city (FICH) for four years, I find the teaching of General English at FICH not an exception to the shortcomings of the context of the teaching of this subject, especially listening comprehension, at Vietnamese college or university Luckily, both FICH’s administrators and teachers of English strongly identify

a need to facilitate FICH’s students’ access to communication skills in English Thanks to the academic prestige in vocational training, FICH often receives a lot of orders of employment for graduates from domestic and foreign enterprises with competitive salaries But few students can meet the

requirement of the employers in terms of communication skills in English What a pity! Because of this, I am motivated to undertake this particular piece of research Due to the limitation of the research, I only focus on the teaching of listening comprehension skill which plays a central role in communication and is considered a frustrating skill to acquire

1.5 STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

The above analyzed reality leads to the main concern of this study - “What prevent(s) students of Food Industry College of Ho Chi Minh city from

acquiring listening comprehension skill during the General English course”

The purpose of this study was to find out the real problems of the teaching

of listening comprehension and then identify difficulties of the learning of this skill, and to suggest some feasible solutions to them It is hoped that the results of this study will be identified as being of importance to the administrators and teachers of English at FICH in providing them the necessary background to overcome the obstacles cooperatively

1.6 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In order to achieve the above purposes, the study focuses on finding the answers to the following questions:

 How is listening comprehension being taught and learned in General

English course at Food Industry College of Ho Chi Minh city?

 What are sources of difficulties in the process of learning this skill during

the course?

 What are these difficulties?

These questions also act as a navigator throughout the rest of the thesis

1.7 OVERVIEW OF THESIS CHAPTERS

The thesis is composed of six chapters as follows:

Chapter One “Introduction” introduces the background to the study as the basis on which the purposes of the study are clearly identified and then states the research questions It also provides an outline of the whole thesis

Chapter Two “Literature Review”, in the light of the research questions, summarizes the nature of listening comprehension, especially in the classroom and cites the findings of previous research related to the difficulties of this skill

Chapter Three “Methodology” presents the designing of the research, three methods including description, observation and questionnaire to collect data

as well as the procedure of the study

Chapter Four “Results and Discussion” shows the collected data as the findings of the study, interprets the results and discuss them in relation to the above research questions and to the results of previous related research

Chapter Five “Conclusion and Solutions” provides a broad look at the problems of the teaching of listening comprehension skill at FICH which prevent the students from acquiring it Some solutions to the problems are also suggested

What are these difficulties?

First of all, some important definitions related to the research are presented

to support the mentioned aspects Then comes the review of the nature of listening in real-life communication and that of listening comprehension in a language classroom to serve as a base for the roots of difficulties in listening comprehension Finally and more specifically, the summary of the difficulties

in learning listening comprehension is made from the previous research

2.1 SOME IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS RELATED TO THE RESEARCH

An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously

 Listening is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning

from

something we hear To listen successfully to spoken language, we need to be able to work out what speakers mean when they use

particular words in particular ways on particular occasions, and not simply to understand the words themselves (Underwood, 1990)

 Listening is composed of micro-skills which Willis (1981:134) calls

enabling skills

 The listening process is often described from an information processing perspective as "an active process” in which listeners select and interpret information that comes from auditory and visual clues in order to define what

is going on and what the speakers are trying to express" (Thompson & Rubin, 1996, p 331)

 Listening is not a passive but an active process of constructing a message

from a stream of sounds with what one knows of the phonological, semantic, and syntactic potentialities of the language This active process of message construction has been labeled “reception” or “comprehension” of the message (Rivers, 1978)

The above definitions are selected out of many because they can work out the nature of listening or listening comprehension in general If a leaner finds listening difficult, he or she must have difficulties dealing with the nature of listening These definitions suggest that, in order to find out difficulties in listening comprehension, the research doer should focus on learners’ linguistic competence and competence to grasp the meaning from what they can hear as Howatt & Dakin, Underwood and Rivers emphasize Furthermore, difficulties can originate from the process of decoding the message in which, according to Thompson & Rubin, and Rivers, listeners must play an active role with the help of auditory and visual clues and use the suitable micro-skill of listening

2.1.2 Input

2.1.2.1 Definition

 Input is defined as language which a learner hears or receives and from

which he or she can learn (Longman Dictionary,p.182)

In second language acquisition, the “linguistic environment” for listening including the speakers of the target language and their speech to the second language learners provides linguistic input in the form of listening opportunities embedded in social and academic situations

So it is clear that one of the causes of difficulties in listening may be the input itself

to become “intake”, i.e language data that is assimilated and used to promote further development The ability to understand new language, Krashen maintained, is made possible by speech adjustments made to learners, in addition to the learner’s use of shared knowledge of the context Consequently, the second language teacher is in charge of adjusting the listening input and supporting the learner’s use of shared knowledge of the context in order to make the listening input comprehensible Otherwise, the listening input will cause difficulties in comprehension for the second

language learners

2.1.2.3 Authenticity

 The degree to which language teaching materials have the qualities of

natural speech or writing Texts which are taken from newspapers, magazines, etc and tapes of natural speech taken from ordinary radio

or television programs, etc are called authentic materials When a teacher prepares texts or tapes for use in the classroom, he or she often has to use simplified examples (Longman Dictionary, p.27)

Authentic material is very important because it is what students encounter or will encounter in real life if they come into contact with target-language speakers But it can be extremely de-motivating for students if it is not the comprehensible input That’s the reason why the language may be simplified, but it must not be unnatural because it is essential that listening texts should be considered as an input similar to authentic language use Furthermore, authentic material can be made easier if the tasks going with it

are well-designed and help students understand it better

In brief, the listening input is very important The second language teacher has to make sure that it is comprehensible and approximate to authentic language use in real life All factors involved in these characteristics of the listening input can lead to difficulties in listening comprehension in the

second language classroom

2.1.3 Aural texts

As mentioned above, the listening input is spoken language All forms of spoken language are important to incorporate into a language course, especially in teaching listening comprehension In the following figure, Douglas Brown presents the types of oral language ( adapted from Nunan, 1991) which should enable the second language teacher to see the big picture of what teaching aural comprehension entails

In monologues, the listener must process long stretches of speech without interruption whether or not the listener can comprehend Planned, as opposed to unplanned monologues, differ considerably in their discourse structures Douglas Brown states that unplanned monologues (impromptu speeches) are easier to understand thanks to the presence of more

redundancy and the use of more performance variables such as hesitations, false starts, pauses and corrections

In interpersonal or transactional dialogues, the familiarity of participants is very important In familiar dialogues, participants often have a good deal of shared knowledge (background information, schemata) So references and meanings, in terms of theory, are less explicit than those in unfamiliar dialogues

In fact, these categories are really not discrete, mutually exclusive domains; rather, each dichotomy, as usual, represents a continuum of possibilities The purpose of introducing these kinds of aural texts in listening learning is

to get students familiar with them, not to differentiate them Consequently, whether aural texts can cause much difficulties in learning listening or not much depends on the support of the teacher such as making pauses in long stretches of speech, clarifying discourse structures, and providing the background knowledge in the aural texts

2.1.4 Top-down and bottom-up processes

Difficulties in listening comprehension can stem from the ways in which humans analyze and process language as part of the process of comprehension and learning

A contrast is made between two different ways as follows: (Longman Dictionary, p.383)

 One way, known as a top-down process or approach, makes use of previous knowledge (“higher- level knowledge”) in analyzing and processing information which is received such as words, sentences, etc

 The other way, a bottom-up, makes use principally of information which

is already present in the data such as words, sentences, etc

2.1 5 Schema

As learners approach the process of listening, they employ their previous knowledge or “pre-existence knowledge of the world” (Cook 1989:69) Such knowledge is often referred to as schema (plural schemata)

As Harmer (2001) points out, each of us carries in our heads mental representations of typical situations that we come across When we are stimulated by particular words, discourse patterns or contexts, such schematic knowledge is activated and we are able to recognize what we see

or hear So learners of listening comprehension are also the case in point Without schematic knowledge, they can face some difficulties in listening comprehension

2.1 6 Task

In the context of teaching and learning listening comprehension, a listening task plays an important role because a task is defined as an activity which is designed to help achieve a particular learning goal A number of dimensions

of tasks influence their use in language teaching These include:

 Goals : The kind of goals teachers and learners identify for a task

 Procedures : The operations or procedures learners use to complete a task

 Order : The location of a task within a sequence of other tasks

 Pacing : The amount of time that is spent on a task

 Product : The outcome or outcomes students produce, such as a set of questions, an essay, or a summary as the outcome of a reading task

 Learning strategy : The kind of strategy a student uses when completing a task

 Assessment : How success on the task will be determined

 Participation : Whether the task is completed individually, with a partner, or with a group of other learners

 Resources : The materials and other resources used with a task

 Language : The language learners use in completing a task (e.g the mother tongue or English, or the particular vocabulary, structures

or functions the task requires the learners to use)

The teacher’s choice of tasks determines learning goals, how learning is

to take place, how the results of learning will be demonstrated

(Longman Dictionary, p.373)

The second language teacher should bear in mind these dimensions of a task in order to carry out a listening task successfully to help students achieve the listening goals in a second language course

2.1.7 Objective

This research focuses on difficulties in learning listening comprehension in a specific course That’s why the listening objective of this course must be mentioned An objective is defined as a goal of a course of instruction (Longman Dictionary, p.253)

Two different types of objectives may be distinguished

purposes of a course of instruction Aims are long-term goals, described in a very general terms

is to be achieved in a course They are more detailed descriptions of exactly what a learner is expected to be able to do at the end of a period of instruction

2.2 THE NATURE OF LISTENING IN REAL- LIFE COMMUNICATION

2.3.1 Introduction

No one knows exactly how listening works or how people learn to listen and understand It is a skill which seems to develop easily for mother-tongue listening, but requires considerable effort where listening in a foreign language is concerned It is assumed that this ability is the result of a

number of factors, including a large amount of language and the number of different speakers the native people are exposed to over the years, and their acquired knowledge of the context, the speakers, the topic and so on Even

so, they sometimes have problems when listening to their mother tongue such as particular accents, various topics (Underwood, 1989:1)

It is inevitable that difficulties in listening comprehension can happen to the speakers of the second language, especially the second language learners

In the context of a second language class, learners should be exposed to as much listening simplified but not unnatural as possible in order that they can face it in real communication On the basis of the following mentioned aspects of real-life listening, the process of teaching and learning listening comprehension can be examined to elicit specific difficulties in learning listening comprehension which specific learners are facing during a specific English course

2.3.2 The purposes of listening in real-life communication

Listening requires conscious mental effort and specific purpose But the purposes for listening are abundant and varied, depending on what listeners need and wish to do, and which situation they are in Luckily, the purposes for listening relate to "types" of listening Wolvin and Coakley (1992) identify four different types of listening as follows:

 Comprehensive (Informational and instructional)

Listening -Students listen

for the content of the message

 Critical (Evaluative) Listening -Students judge the message

 Appreciative (Aesthetic) Listening -Students listen for enjoyment

 Therapeutic (Empathetic) Listening -Students listen to support

others but not

 Listening to the news, the weather forecast

 Watching the news, the weather forecast

 Listening to the radio for entertainment

 Watching television for entertainment

 Watching a live performance of a play

 Watching a film

 Listening to records of songs

 Following a lesson

 Attending a lecture

 Listening on the telephone

 Following instructions

 Listening to someone giving an address

Therefore, students should be able to determine what their purpose should

be in any given listening situation in order to select the suitable micro-skill of listening to achieve the purpose Otherwise, they cannot actually engage in the active process of listening

2.3.3 The nature of listening comprehension

In order to find out the difficulties in the learning of listening comprehension

in a specific course, it is first necessary to understand the nature of listening The mere physiological reception of sounds constitutes hearing, but listening involves directed attention by a subject to these sounds, whether they be spoken words, musical sounds, mechanical or other noises When considered in the context of verbal communication, "listening" is often taken

to include the active process involved in attaching meanings to the sounds, namely, to the spoken words

In an effort to refine the term "listening", Brown and Caffrey (1956) have proposed that it should be used as a more comprehensive term to include not only hearing and listening to spoken language, but recognizing and interpreting or comprehending it as well Verbal communication is carried on chiefly so that others may comprehend the information transmitted, and in the context "listening" implies comprehension of the material heard That is, understanding an oral communication implies that the listener is able to comprehend the total message being conveyed by the speaker (as mentioned in the above definitions)

2.3.3.1 Two models of listening comprehension

As a goal-oriented activity, listening involves “bottom-up” processing in which listeners attend to data in the incoming speech signal and “top-down” processing in which listeners utilize prior knowledge and expectations to create meanings Both bottom-up and top-down processing are assumed to take place at various levels of cognitive organization: phonological, grammatical, lexical and propositional This complex process is often described as a “parallel processing model” of language understanding (David Nunan, Michael Rost)

An important theoretical underpinning to the top-down approach is schema theory This is based on the notion that past experiences leads to the creation of mental frameworks that help us make sense of new experiences

In the listening class, learners should make use of these two models of listening with the help from the teacher in order to reduce difficulties in listening comprehension

2.2.3 2 Processes in listening comprehension

H Douglas Brown (1994) and Dunkel (1986) suggests nine processes (adapted from Clark & Clark, 1977 and Richards, 1983) which are all involved in comprehension

 The hearer determines a purpose for listening

 The hearer processes what we call “raw speech” and holds an “image”

of it in “short-term” memory This image consists of constituents (phrases, clauses, cohesive markers, intonation and stress patterns) of a stream of

speech

 The hearer determines the type of speech event that is being processed The hearer must, for example, ascertain whether this is a conversation, a speech, a radio broadcast, etc., and then appropriately

“color” the interpretation of the “perceived” message

 The hearer infers the objectives of the speaker through consideration of the type of speech event, the context, and content So, for example, one

determines whether the speaker wishes to persuade, to request, to exchange pleasantries, to affirm, to deny, to inform, and so forth Thus the

function of the message is inferred

 The hearer recalls background information (or schemata) relevant to the particular context and subject matter A lifetime of experiences and knowledge are used to perform cognitive association in order to bring a

plausible interpretation to the message

 The hearer assigns a literal meaning to the utterance This process involves a set of semantic interpretations of the surface strings that the ear has perceived In many instances, the literal and the intended meanings

match

 The hearer assigns an intended meaning to the utterance

 The hearer determines whether information should be retained in term or long-term memory Short-term memory – a matter of a few seconds-

short-is appropriate, for example, in contexts that simply call for a quick oral response from the hearer Long-term memory is more common when the hearer is processing information in a lecture There are, of course, many

points in between

 The hearer deletes the form in which the message was originally received The words and phrases and sentences themselves are quickly

forgotten in 99 percent of speech acts

In general, we can show the whole process of listening in the form of a model (Abbott and Wingard, 1985) as follows:

 Perception of sounds, letter shapes, etc

 Initial recognition of meaning of short stretches

 Material held in short term memory

 Related to material already held in short term memory

 Related to material arriving in short-term memory

 Meaning extracted from message and retained in long-term memory

 Gist recalled later

This model does not include the preparation phase (that is purpose and expectation)

Success in listening comprehension means having a good command of this whole process of listening Lacking one of these abilities can lead to

difficulties in listening comprehension

Each of the above steps influences the techniques and activities a teacher might select to incorporate into instruction in order to assist learners in

learning to listen as well as listening to learn

2.2.3.3 Micro-skills of listening

Jack Richards (1983) provided a comprehensive taxonomy of aural skills involved in conversational discourse Such lists are very useful in helping the teacher to break down just what it is that their learners need to do as they acquire effective interactive listening strategies Through this checklist

of micro-skills (adapted from Richards and other sources), teachers can have a good idea of what their techniques need to cover in the domain of listening comprehension As the teachers plan a specific technique or listening module , such a list helps them to focus on clearly conceptualized objectives And in the evaluation of listening, these micro-skills can become testing criteria

1 Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory

2 Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English

3 Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonational contours/ patterns, and their role

in signaling information

4 Recognize the reduced forms of words

5 Distinguish word boundaries, recognizing the core of words, and interpret word order pattern patterns and their significance

6 Process speech at different rates of delivery

7 Process speech containing pauses, errors, correction, and other performance variables

8 Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms

9 Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents

10 Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms

11 Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse

12 Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals

13 Infer situations, participants, goals using real world knowledge

14 From events, ideas, etc., described, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification

15 Distinguish between literal and implied meanings

16 Use facial, kinesis (movement), “body language” and other non-verbal clues to decipher meanings

17 Develop and use a battery of listening strategies such as detecting key words, comprehension or lack thereof

In conclusion, understanding the nature of listening comprehension is very important for the teaching of the second language Teachers can encourage their learners to play an active role in listening comprehension, using knowledge from linguistic and nonlinguistic sources

2 2 4 Characteristics of real-life listening

2.2.4.1 Real-life listening situations

Many learners of English will find themselves sooner or later in a variety of situations where they will need or want to listen to English being used in real life for a range of purposes What these situations are depends on where they are and their purposes for listening (already mentioned in part 2) Underwood (1989) claims that it is worth establishing which of the above listening situations are likely to feature largely in students’ lives and to bear this in mind when planning listening work This does not, however, mean that practice of all the other listening situations should be neglected

Penny Ur (1996) suggests the following characteristics of real-life listening situations:

 Informal spoken discourse

 Listener expectation and purpose

 Looking as well as listening

 Ongoing, purposeful listener response

 Speaker attention

Students learn listening in order to cope with the real –life listening situations If the listening situations in class lack the characteristics of real- life listening situations, the students’ listening comprehension cannot be said

to be developed

2.2.4.2 Real-life listening input

The listening materials in class should have these characteristics of real-life listening input as Penny Ur summarizes (1996):

 The use of time-creating devices

 The use of facilitation devices

 The use of compensation devices

2.2.5 Listening strategies

Listening strategies are conscious plans to deal with incoming speech, particularly when the listener knows that he or she must compensate for incomplete input or partial understanding

Nunan (1999:219) suggests some of the most important listening strategies

as follows:

 Listening for gist

 Listening for purpose

 Listening for main idea

 Listening for inference

 Listening for specific information

 Listening for phonemic distinction

 Listening for tone, pitch to identify speaker’s attitude

 Listening for stress

And according to Rost (1994), the second language teacher can follow the framework for incorporating five types of listening strategies into classroom instruction:

spoken language

language, typically only 30 or 40 out of hundreds of possible phonemes

 Phonotactic rules: The sound sequences that a language allows to make up syllables, i.e variations of what sounds can start or end syllables, whether the “peak” of the syllable can be a simple or complex or lengthened vowel and whether the ending of the syllable can be a vowel or a consonant

and falling tones to indicate lexical or discourse meaning

an utterance

The above strategies are essential for listeners to decode the spoken language Learners of the second language can face difficulties in listening comprehension if they are not exposed to the practice of these strategies

CLASSROOM

2.3.7 Introduction

Listening has rightly assumed a central role in language learning The skills underlying listening have become more clearly defined Strategies contributing to effective listening are now better understood Although there have been marked advances, much work (in teaching methodology, material design, learner training,etc.) remains to be done to modernize the teaching and learning of listening For example, materials design lags behind current theory, particularly in the areas of input selection and strategy development The notion of listening, in contrast to listening for language practice, became

a standard in teaching by the mid-1980s Since then, many practitioners have proposed systems for teaching listening that have influenced the language teaching profession Rost (2001) makes a summary as follows:

 Morley (1984) offers an array of examples of selective listening materials, using authentic information and information-focused activities such as notional- informational listening practice, situation-functional

listening practice, discrimination-oriented practice, sound-spelling listening practice

 Ur (1984) emphasizes the importance of having listening instruction resemble “real-life” listening in which the listener has built a sense of purpose and expectation for listening and in which there is a necessity for a listener response

 Anderson and Lynch (1988) provides helpful means for grading input types and organizing tasks to maximize learner interaction

 Underwood (1989) describes listening activities in terms of three phases: Pre-, While-, Post-listening activities She demonstrates the utility of using “authentic” conversations

 Richards (1990) provides an accessible guide for teachers in constructing exercises promoting “top-down” or “bottom- up” processing and focusing on transactional or interactional layers of discourse

 Rost (1991) formalizes elements of listening pedagogy into four classes

of “active listening”:

Global listening to focus on meaning

Intensive listening to focus on form

Selective listening to focus on specific outcomes

Interactive listening to focus on strategy development

 Nunan (1995) provides a compendium of recipes for exercises for listening classes, organized in four parts:

Developing cognitive strategies: listening for the main idea, listening for details, predicting

Developing listening with other skills

Listening to authentic materials

Using technology

 Lynch (1996) outlines the types of negotiation tasks that can be used with recorded and “live” inputs in order to require learners to focus on

clarification processes Lynch also elaborates upon Brown’s (1994)guidelines for grading listening materials

 White (1998) presents a series of principles for activities in which learners progress through repeated listening of texts She indicates the need to focus listening instruction on “what went wrong” when learners do not understand and the value of having instructional links between listening and speaking

2.3.8 The importance of listening in second language learning

According to Rost (2001), listening is referred to as a complex process that enables us to understand spoken language (p 7) Harmer (2001) categorizes listening into receptive skills - the ways in which people extract meaning from the discourse they hear or see (p 197)

Listening is the most frequently used skill in real life (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000) Discussing the important role of listening, Rivers (1966) points out that “speaking does not itself constitute communication unless what is said is comprehended by another person” (pp 196, 204) In language classrooms, listening is very essential because “it provides input for the learner Without understanding input at the right level, learning cannot begin” (Nunan, 1999, p.200, as quoted in Rost, 1994, pp 141-142) Nonetheless, listening is often regarded as a secondary skill or, in Nunan’s (1999) term, “the Cinderella skill” in second language classrooms (p.199) It

is often considered a “means to other ends” (Nunan, 1999, p.199), for example “a means of presenting new grammar” (Richards & Renandya,

2002, p.242, as quoted in Field, 1998) It has taken several years to bring the language teaching profession around to realize the importance of listening in second language learning as well as teaching (Celce & Murcia, 2001) Thanks to Krashen’s ideas about comprehensible input, James Asher’s Total Physical Response, Gillian Brown’s work in the first language