Some common listening problems of can tho university first year english majors and some suggestions

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION ENGLISH DEPARMENT SOME COMMON LISTENING PROBLEMS OF CAN THO UNIVERSITY FIRST-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJORS AND Can Tho, June 2007 Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học

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SCHOOL OF EDUCATION ENGLISH DEPARMENT

SOME COMMON LISTENING PROBLEMS OF CAN THO

UNIVERSITY FIRST-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJORS AND

Can Tho, June 2007

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

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Some common listening problems Can Tho University first-year

English-majors often have and some suggestions

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This work would not have been possible without the assistance provided by many people

So, I would like to send my sincere thanks to Ms Tran Thi Sau, my thesis supervisor, for her

enthusiasm and vision throughout this thesis; Mr Dao Minh Trung for his many useful feedback

as second-reader; Mr Huynh Van Hien for his encouragement for fulfillment of this thesis; Mr

Trinh Quoc Lap and Mr Tran Minh Tuan for their useful help with performing descriptive

statistical analysis in SPSS and also for their support for this thesis; Mr Huynh Trung Nghia,

Ms Nguyen Thi Anh Tho, Mr Daniel James White and their classes for their fully devoted

cooperation in this thesis for data collection My family and my friends – thanks for the support,

sacrifice and putting up with me during all this Errors and omissions that remain are, of course,

mine alone

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TABLE OF CHARTS AND FIGURES v

NOMENCLATURE / LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vi

ABSTRACT 1

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 3

1.1 Rationale 3

1.1.1 Background 3

1.1.2 Personal-Experience 4

1.2 Research question and research aims 5

1.3 Thesis organization 6

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 7

2.1 Definition of listening 7

2.2 Kinds of listening 8

2.3 Definition of a problem 10

2.4 Definition of listening problem 11

2.5 Common kinds of listening problems 12

2.5.1 Study strategies 11

 Mother tongue influence 12

 Word-by-word listening and word-by-word taking note 12

 Closed-mindedness listen 13

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 Intellectual despair 14

 False attention 14

 Stress 15

2.2.3 Physiological base 15

2.2.4 Linguistic knowledge 16

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY 17

3.1 Design 17

3.2 Participants and Context 17

3.3 Data collection techniques and procedure 19

 Recorded Interviews with teachers and students 19

 Questionnaires for students 19

 Classroom observation 20

CHAPTER 4 RESULTS 21

4.1 Questionnaires analysis 22

4.1.1 The importance of solving listening problems 22

4.1.2 Common kinds of listening problems 23

4.2.3 Solutions for listening problems 26

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4.2.1 The importance of solving listening problems 27

4.2.2 Common kinds of listening problems 27

4.3 Observation analysis 28

CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS 29

5.1 Discussion 29

5.1.1 Research question 29

5.1.2 Research aim 30

5.1.3 Some suggestions for listening problems 30

5.1.3.1 Study strategies 31

 Mother tongue influence 31

 Word-by-word listening and note taking 31

 Closed-mindedness listen 31

5.1.3.2 Psychological and physiological base 32

 Intellectual despair and False attention 32

 Stress 33

5.1.3.3 Linguistic base 33

5.2 Limitation 34

5.3 Suggestions 34

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CONCLUSION 35

APPENDICES 36

Appendix A: Questionnaire (English) 36

Questionnaire (Vietnamese) 39

Appendix B: Observation Sheet 42

Appendix C: Questions For Interview 45

PROTOCOL 46

REFERENCES 50

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Figure 1: Bottom-up vs top-down processing, a brick-wall analogy 9

Figure 2: The policy cycle 10

Chart 1: The importance of solving listening problems 22

Table 1: Reliability Statistics of Questionnaires 23

Table 2: Descriptive statistics of general listening problems 23

Chart 2: The comparative of kinds of listening problems 24

Table 3: Descriptive statistics of kinds of listening problems 25

Chart 3: The comparative between kinds of listening problems solutions 26

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NOMENCLATURE / LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CTU Can Tho University

SLA Second Language Acquisition

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ABSTRACT

From the result of this descriptive research, the majority of CTU first-year English

majored students tend to have ―Study strategies‖ and ―Linguistic base‖ listening problems

Certainly, they tend to slightly reject ―Psychological base‖ and ―Physiological base‖ problems

Besides, their most favorable solutions are ―Basing on what they can listen to and guessing what

is unsaid and the speaker bias‖; ―Skipping unknown lexical terms, which makes them panic, and

try to listen to the next useful passage‖; and ―Keeping calm and take notes for the main ideas‖

Other solutions seem to get less attention The controlling idea of this paper is about ―some

common listening problems of CTU first year English-majors (course thirty two)‖, namely

―study strategies‖, ―psychological base‖, ―physiological base‖ and ―linguistic base,‖ based on

some well known listening problems research Moreover, some solutions of were also

recommended; students typically sought such solutions to their problems on their own accord

The instruments employed are questionnaires with the participation of 140 students, recoded

interviews with 4 experienced teachers and observation of 4 academic listening periods Analysis

of the data focuses on questionnaires that categorized common listening problems and some

solutions, episodes from the recorded interviews to explore the teachers‘ views and experiences

about this matter In short, the matter is to train good listeners, we should take a close look to this

matter i.e consider those most common listening problems to have the suitable solutions

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‗Nature has given us one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak!‘

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale

"Nature has given us one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as

much as we speak!" (Epictetus, n.d.) Listening is not only an essential tool in class but also an

active process to everyone‘s success in daily real-life communication Regardless of whether a person is a student, a boss, or an employee, most of us have never considered this matter

carefully

Also, Evans believed that ―Listening is an art and a gift‖ (Carol J Evans, 1999) Essentially, listening is an integral skill, but studying it is a big obstacle Almost all of English-

majored students listen poorly since they concentrate more on themselves than on what other

people are telling them In this research, student researcher have stated a lot of information about

listening problems and some solutions with the hope that my work will be useful for anyone that

would like to improve their English listening skills

1.1.1 Background

Listening is not only an essential tool for communication, but also an active process to

everyone‘s success in interaction In many circumstances, for instance at work, it is required to collaborate with each other in order to solve problems For having a successful collaboration, it

is most important to listen and understand what others say and interpret their opinions (Diana &

Simon, 1996) When listening in daily life, one usually has a general idea about someone who is

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speaking and what they are talking about In contrast, when listening to a recording in class,

integration of listening and understanding might be not always the case

In the same way, interpreting context is not often a problem for CTU English-major

freshmen in normal communication when they are usually involved in the dialogue However,

listening to recorded materials in the classroom or during exams especially requires learners to

understand the context of the listening extracts Thus, they tend to have a lot of problems when

listening to a recorded passage

Listening plays a major role in our life and study, however almost all of the students have

substantial difficulties with this kind of skill (Henry L Roediger, 2004) For improvement of

listening skills, there is a need to identifying these problems In this research, I stated a lot of

information about listening problems and some solutions in the hope that my work will be useful

for anyone that would like to improve their English listening skills

1.1.2 Personal-Experience

Listening is an integral skills, and studying English for Vietnamese native students is a big

obstacle For my personal-experience, although Can Tho University (CTU) English-majored

students are not very good at listening skills in comparison with other issues, such as reading,

writing and speaking in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), listening problems and their

solutions seem to be of less interest As an English-majored student, I especially would like to

investigate this matter for three reasons First of all, as we know, listening is an important skills

for everyone in an everyday aspect, having a deeper look at listening skills is necessary Not only

would this work help us to increase our listening ability, but it would also create a convenient

environment for self-training in listening The second reason is that, as in the case of many other

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English-majored students, I have had a lot of problems with listening, particularly listening to

recorded messages during lessons and exams I have deliberated with myself about these

ambiguous problems until I decided to consider this matter more seriously, i.e effectuating this

research Finally, I would like to carry this survey on CTU first year English majored students

with the hope that I can find out their actual listening problems and subsequent solutions From

to the results of this survey, I will find out their common listening problems and some suitable

solutions for this issue All in all, the confusion cited by various SLA researchers in the field of

listening problems and my own experiences lead me to the implementation of this thesis

1.2 Research question and research aims

My research will answer the question: ―What are common listening problems that first year English-majored students often have?‖ and my research aim is to find out some suitable

solutions for these listening problems

For this research, I read a lot of research articles and books discussing about common

listening problems those students who study English as a foreign language usually have These

problems are very similar to those that CTU English-majors have Thus, my research had two

aims:

In the short-term, my aim is to investigate the common listening problems that CTU

first-year English-majors usually experience and my suggestions for improvement on this matter

Secondly, the long-term aim is to find the most helpful ways for learners who study English as a

second language to avoid these mistakes

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1.3 Thesis organization

This thesis is organized into six chapters The first chapter is the introduction, which explains

to readers the rationale for the thesis implementation; the thesis states what the student researcher

as well as readers of different pedagogical status are assumed to achieve upon involvement with

this papers

The literature review is the content of chapter two, which brings about a variety of

viewpoints hypothesized and tested by first-class SLA experts and researchers, not only to give

the thesis a theoretical base and state some assumptions, but to make it objective as well

Chapter three is methodology, which outlines a description of how this survey was carried

out

The results are the content of chapter four, ascertaining the students‘ listening problems from the synthesis of data collected

After the results are brought up, an analysis and a discussion (Chapter five) follow to

compare and contrast the results from the points of view cited in the literature review and

obtained from some observations and interviews with the participants The chapter also includes

some implications for both teachers and students, and some limitations of this study

Finally, conclusion (chapter six) has been generalized for the whole paper and for further

research on this issue

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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Definition of listening

Listening is the process of understanding what was meant; not simply sensing what was said

When you listen, according to Webster‘s New World Dictionary, you ―make a conscious effort

to hear‖ Listening takes effort, in the contrast, hearing is simply an automatic reaction of being aware of sounds with your ears Furthermore, listening is one of the things people do most of the

time in a day; the average person spends 9% of his daily communication time writing, 16%

reading, 30% speaking and a whopping 45% listening Students spend most of their school time

listening up to 60% (Wycoff, Schaffer & McCutcheon, 1994)

Listening is not only a major skill in English study, but it also plays an important role in

everyday life aspects, such as business, daily communication, and language teaching and

learning, etc Listening is a complex process in which you can understand speaking; moreover, it

is a ―critical means of acquiring a second language‖ (Rost, 2001) Listening plays a rather major role in terms of all English study skills When a human is born and knows nothing They learn to

speak by imitating whatever their parents say to them They listen first, recording the sounds in

the brain, and then transfer it into speech (Henry L Roediger, 2004); as is an English-majors

study process Thus, how well a person speaks may depend heavily on the person‘s previous

experience on listening In short, ―Listening is thus fundamental to speaking‖ (Rost, 1994)

According to Nancy (1999), listening is an art, not a science From her research, readers can see

the importance of listening in a successful business Also, Fortune magazine rated listening as

the top management skill needed for success in business (Wycoff, Schaffer & McCutcheon,

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1994) These bases lead us to have a closer look at listening and how listening is worthwhile for

every one in every country in their daily life aspects

2.2 Kinds of listening

Understanding the major role of listening in study and daily life aspects, everyone would like

to posses this skill However, depends on which aspects, which kinds of listening, students may

have different methods for training

Depending on the type of text being listened to, Anderson and Lynch (1988) classified

listening into two kinds reciprocal and non-reciprocal Reciprocal listening refers to those

listening tasks where there is the opportunity for the listener to interact with the speaker, and to

negotiate the content of the interaction Non-reciprocal listening refers to tasks such as listening

to the cassette player, radio or a formal lecture where the transfer of information is in one

direction only, i.e from the speaker to the listener

While reciprocal listening requires the listener to take part in the interaction, non-reciprocal

listeners have to hear monologue, either live or through the media, have no opportunity of

answering back, clarifying understanding, or checking that they have comprehended correctly In

the real world, it is rare for the listener to be cast in the role of non-reciprocal on a conversation

However, in the listening classroom, this is the normal and common role (Ni Deng, 2006)

Besides, depending on ways of listening process, there are two types of listening i.e the

bottom-up processing and the top-down interpretation (Figure 1)

The bottom-up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds

that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete

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texts According to this view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words,

words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and

utterances are linked together to form complete meaningful texts In other words, the process is a

linear one, in which meaning itself is derived as the last step in the process In ―The introduction

to listening‖, Anderson and Lynch (1988) call this the "listener as tape-recorder" view of listening because it assumes that the listener takes in and stores messages sequentially, in much

the same way as a tape-recorder; one sound, word, phrase, and utterance at a time

The alternative, top-down view, suggests that the listener actively constructs (reconstructs)

the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues In this reconstruction

process, the listener uses prior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening

takes place to make sense of what he or she hears Context of situation includes such things as

knowledge of the topic at hand, the speakers, and their relationship to the situation as well as to

In general, in this research, I work on the non-reciprocal listening (tape recording) and discover

how the process of listening (bottom-up or top-down) affects students‘ listening ability

ACTIVATION TOP-DOWN

BOTTOM-UP

STRUCTURES

VOCABULARY

LIFE EXPERIENCE

Figure 1: Bottom-up vs top-down processing, a brick-wall analogy (Marc H & Steven B., 1995)

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2.3 Definition of a problem

According to Bacon (1913), a problem is a question proposed for solution or a matter

stated for examination or proof; hence, a problem is a matter difficult of solution or settlement; a

doubtful case; a question involving doubt Another researcher stated that a problem is anything

which is required to be done: as, in geometry, to bisect a line or to draw a perpendicular; or, in

algebra, to find an unknown quantity (Math, 1913) In other words, a problem is something to be

done, as to bisect a triangle, to describe a circle In another field like plane problem, Geom

definited a problem is what can be solved by the use of the rule and compass, and a problem

requires in its geometric solution the use of a conic section or higher curve

Language is any means of conveying or communicating ideas; specifically, human

speech, the expression of ideas by the voice, sounds, expressive of thought, articulated by the

organs of the throat and mouth So, in the language field, a problem means a communicating

matter difficult for solution or settlement (Webster, 1913)

Whenever problem has been occured, people

usually solve it by carrying out this policy

cycle (Figure 2)

According to this policy cycle (Carla,

2003), if there is any problem identified,

people should chronologically set the agenda,

organize stakeholders, choose tactics,

aggregate related issues, and legitimate (or

de-legitimate) issues Next, develop proposals for

preferred policy options Proponents build

Identify problem

Build support

Develop proposals

Set agenda

Figure 2: The policy cycle

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support through public education of decision makers, enacting into law or rule, implementing

policy, evaluating result and suggesting changes are those last steps for a problem solving In

short, this is one of the effective solution for any problem in any field of study

2.4 Definition of listening problem

Listening is Cinderella skill in second language learning i.e it has been overlooked by its

elder sister: speaking For most people, being able to claim knowledge of a second language

means being able to speak and write in that language Listening and reading are therefore

secondary skills; a means to other ends, rather than ends in them (Nunan, 1997)

Underwood (1989:1) believes that listening is an essential skill for successful

communication, and a skill, which seems to develop easily for native speakers but requires

considerable effort where listening in a foreign language is concerned In other words, listening

is probably the least explicit of the four macro-language skills i.e listening, speaking, reading,

writing, making it the most difficult skill to learn (Vandergrift 2004: 3) There is little

knowledge about how listening takes place Comparing it with other language skills, Goh (1997:

161) states that, ―there are fewer insights about the process of listening and the way it is learnt‖ Byrnes (1984) characterizes listening comprehension as a ―highly complex problem solving activity‖ When listeners know something about their own strategies, problems, and attitudes they will be able to improve their listening practices and become better listeners In other words,

learners‘ perceptions of their listening problems and strategies can affect their comprehension either positively or negatively Wenden (1986) cites research findings stating that unsuccessful

learners are generally less aware of effective ways of approaching the learning tasks (Hasan,

n.d.)

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2.5 Common kinds of listening problems

There are four kinds of listening problems that influences listeners‘ competence

2.5.1 Study strategies

Inferring from some practical listening research, I divided study strategies into three small

parts which Tomatis‘ in his writing about ―Advanced treatment for listening, communicating and learning‖ (2007) called listening syndromes i.e Mother tongue influence, Word-by-word listening and notes taking, closed-mindedness listening

 Mother tongue influence

First of all, the big obstacle listening problem first year English-majors make is

translating all things they hear into their native language (Kenneth, B., n.d.) There is a close

process in listeners‘ minds when they are listening, so if anyone has this habit, it will take much time for them to go through the translating step before they really listen for comprehension I can

relate to this as I remember when I was a first-year student; my classmate and I usually translated

all things into Vietnamese since we thought it is easier to answer those hard questions in our

mother tongue

 Word-by-word listening and taking notes

Students have a tendency to pay a lot of attention to details, facts, or words, rather than

meaning or the main ideas of the context (Kenneth, n.d.; Nancy, 2004) In Costas‘ survey (1998), one argument was that students have a lot of pressure from their teachers‘ questions since they

are so detailed; hence, they have to pay significant attention to bottom-up listening In "Top ten

ways to listen to a lecture" of Howard (1999), he divided listeners into two types: poor list eners

and effective ones He said that effective listeners usually look for the "big ideas", i.e the

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fundamental concepts They grab the major ideas, listen top-down way and use main ideas as

anchor points in the whole lecture while poor listeners just look for facts and the information is

usually garbled

Also, there are some certain listening learning habits that worsen your listening skill, i.e

word-by-word notes taking Taking about young children as an example, when they are asked to

listen to a cassette player, they try their best to hear everything said But it is too fast for them to

keep up with it The result is that they learn nothing Dr Nobuko (2004) proves to be right when

he said certain learning habits have bad effects on listening ability, i.e when learners were

studying in elementary or high school, some teachers told them to listen and understand

everything in order to do the exercises (Ur, 1996)

 Closed-mindedness listening

A closed mind on active listening is also a big problem (Bruhl, et al (1998); Carol, 1999;

Mort, 1995; Nancy, 2004) To understand this matter clearly, I want to clarify the term ‗active listening‘ ―People speak at 100 to 175 words per minute, but they can listen intelligently at 600

to 800 words per minute‖ (Mind Tools, n.d.) Although listeners are listening attentively, they can still think quickly regarding their major purpose And this is called active listening ―The listener is actively working while the speaker is talking‖ (The Elmhurst College Learning Center, n.d.) As a consequence, everyone who listens passively and waits for the speakers‘ ideas is a close-minded listener And, this kind of listeners may lead to many troubles in active listening

for granted

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2.5.2 Psychological base

In the same way, listening problems based on psychological aspects also included three

typical syndromes, such as intellectual despair, fall attention and stress

 Intellectual despair

Intellectual despair means giving up before listeners even get started Listening can be

hard to do sometimes In college listeners have to sit through many lectures that are hard to

understand Occasionally, they may feel the urge to give up This listening despair is a

self-defeating behavior and may lead to a negative self-fulfilling prophecy Moreover, People can get

angry, discouraged, fatigued, or dismissive when they face an unknown lexis, terms, or phrases

After that, they are easily overloaded which leads to a lack of concentration and missing the next

part (Bruhl, Prater, & Serna, 1998; Costas, 1998; Howard, 1999; Kenneth, n.d.; Nobuko, 2004;

Ur, 1996)

 False attention

When listeners are not interested in the speech, they often use a ―false attention‖ technique to fake attentiveness to the speakers (Carol, 1999) In some important communicating

situations, people cannot catch up with the speed of delivery but they should behave politely, so

their only choice is pretend to listen (nod their heads, make occasional meaningless comments

and even eye contact to the speakers) Actually, ―their minds are a million miles away‖ (Carol,

1999) Also regarding listening errors, McCutcheon, Schaffer and Wycoff stated clearly in their

―Communication matters‖ book (1994) about some bad habits listeners usually have The very first habit is called ―Tuning out dull topics‖, i.e some poor listeners decide early that the topic

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they are listening to is not interesting and it leads them to the ―MEGO syndrome‖ (My Eyes Glaze Over) Also, the research about ―poor listening skills‖ by the University of Colorado, USA (1998) shows that poor listeners tend to listen and think about other things at the same time,

especially in their conflict time However, they do not know they are worsening their listening

skills They try to interpret things to coincide with the views that they already have As a result,

they assume they know and understand what other people are saying and only vague messages

are interpreted

 Stress

Stress sometimes causes many problems to your listening competence First of all, almost

all things you have just heard, disappear (Carol, 1999) Secondly, you cannot recognize any

word, even from your familiar lexis (Costas, 1998) Last but not least, you keep thinking about it

until you miss the next part of the speech (Nobuko, 2004) As a result, you might be in this

situation, in which you can be stuck and pushed into passive listening

2.5.3 Physiological base

Knowledge about the younger years in life is extremely important in the early

identification and prevention of listening problems It can also help shed light on possible causes

of listening problems

Tomatis' (2007) concluded that the quality of the ear's response to sound would be

reflected in the quality of the individual's voice For example, if the individual's ear is incapable

of clearly hearing higher frequency sounds, the individual will be unable to reproduce these

sounds vocally This finding applies to both singing and speech and was formally recognized as

the "Tomatis Effect" by the French Academy of Science in 1957 He also listed some

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physiological listening problems affected by listeners‘ early years such as a stressful pregnancy, difficult birth, adoption, early separation from the mother, delay in motor development, delay in

language development and recurring and chronic ear infections

2.5.4 Linguistic knowledge

The last trouble is the unawareness of linguistics People who do not know much about

linguistics might be unaware of accurate pronunciation, semantics, syntax, phonetics, and so on

(Ur, 1984 & 1996) In fact, the first-year English-majors have limited knowledge of phonology,

morphology and syntax, so it is hard for them to recognize the accurate sound, intonation and

stress These listeners have the tendency to listen bottom-up i.e listen for details, for each

linguistics term As a consequence, they ask speakers to slow down the speech, to speak clearly

every word and to sound in isolation, but if the speakers do so, listeners will not cope with

everyday informal speech

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CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY 3.1 Design

My research question is ―What are common listening problems that first year

English-majored students often have?‖ and the research aim is to find out the solutions for those problems Thus, revealing the nature of listening skills in studying English, surveys were used to

gain insight into CTU first year English-majored students‘ common listening problems These

included questionnaires, interviews and observations Questionnaires containing parametric

statistics have a number of set assumptions, representing a variable, interval or a ratio scale of

measurement (Gay & Peter, 1991) In comparison to other similar kinds of research, this one has

received a rather large number of participants Furthermore, reinforcing the objective of the

survey, I – the student researcher – neither have any control over the participants‘ views nor

selection of participate into the survey, so my major role here is an instrumental instructor, data

collector and analyzer Thus, the researcher has conducted a combination of qualitative and

quantitative research

3.2 Participants and Context

Through out this research, I have cooperated with CTU first-year English-majored

students and the four English teachers who teach these classes and have much experience in

listening field Thus, first of all, I would like to clarify the term ―CTU first-year English-majored

students‖ It means CTU first-year students whose major is English It is obvious that the biggest obstacle for them is listening since almost all countryside high schools in the South of VN ignore

teaching listening Also, it is easy to understand why listening skills are not focused on since it is

not in the university entrance examination As a consequence, these students usually find

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listening an extremely difficult subject in university when they are freshmen Secondly, another

major research participants are teachers of English are those who teach listening for years and

have a lot of experience in teaching listening for freshmen students So, they have a thorough

grasp of CTU first-year English-majored students‘ level and problems

A total of 140 CTU first year English-majored students of the course 32 were involved in

this research through questionnaires and 8 of those were interviewed are among them The

students‘, aged from 18 to 22, had Vietnamese as their first language and came from various provinces (both city and country side) in the South of Vietnam Most of them have studied

English for seven years, but some of them have just studied English for three years; it depends on

the provinces they live Obviously, the four teachers of English at CTU who taught these classes

have much experience in listening fields In addition, classroom observations were conducted

with the four groups of course 32 Participants were selected on the basis that they are English

major freshman (studying second semester) whose basis knowledge of listening is rather clear to

analyze Those students have studied little or nothing regarding listening skills in high school,

but they have familiarized themselves with this skill throughout the first semester Moreover,

their level will act as a basis for their consequent study, i.e the first year for a student is very

important as it creates a foundation and should provide motivation for the latter years of study

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3.3 Data collection techniques and procedure

To implement this survey, I chronologically employed three types of data collection

techniques, i.e interview, questionnaire, and observation to explore participants‘ listening problems and describe their approaches of solving these listening problems

 Recorded interviews with teachers and students

This research procedure contains three steps mainly relating to English-majored students‘

listening problems and their solutions First of all, interviews were conducted and recorded with

four teachers of English to look for their experience about their students‘ listening problems and their solutions to help their students overcome that matter At the end of the collecting data part

(after collecting questionnaires), eight randomly academic first year English-majored students

were chosen to interview in order to check the validity of the questionnaires‘ results that those

students have done Interview questions were designed on the major theme of this research

 Questionnaires for students

To fully find English-majors‘ listening problems, this research has been design with some

quantitative aspects Not only does it include listening theory, it also has data collection and

analysis through questionnaires Adaptations of several famous studies in this field were used as

a basis for the questionnaires, including ―The Listening Checklist‖ of Canadian Tomatis practitioner, Paul Madaule In this questionnaire, students were required to state the problems

they usually face in listening and their tips when facing these matters Piloting questionnaires

was required multiple times to ensure suitability for participants to recall their way of listening in

daily life It was decided to undertake this questionnaire in the beginning or the middle of the

students‘ second semester since at that time they have become acquainted with University level

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listening for one semester However, to get a high validity in these questionnaires, students

should recall clearly their process of listening

 Classroom observation

Several periods were observed in the four English-majors classes to know the way of

teaching and learning listening; ways students interact with their teachers; and problems they

have and their attempt to solve them

Finally, the questionnaires were analyzed to determine the reliability of this research

Furthermore, a comparison has been made between the hypotheses (common listening problems

of others scientists) and these students‘ problems From this analysis, typical disadvantages participants face in listening, and their favorable ways to improve these problems were

identified

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CHAPTER 4 RESULTS

Students‘ listening problems and their solutions are synthesized through the two kinds of charts below: the pie chart and the column graphs The pie chart generally shows the percentage

of students who agree or disagree with each respective feedback type The column graphs further

explore and indicate the comparative trends among participants‘ kinds of listening problems and their solutions My research question is ―What are common listening problems that first year English-majored students often have?‖ and my research aim will answer for the question ―What

are the solutions for those listening problems?‖ so the results are presented in sub-topics as discussed in the procedure of the methodology to answer those questions

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