Some suggested strategies to encourage high school students to learn listening skill

Some may think, "Wow, this is aneasy class to teach!" or some may feel, "Boy, this is going to be boring!" Both ofthese responses are common ones, but actually they do not reveal how dif

1 INTRODUCTION……… 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Aims of the study 1

1.3 Subjects of the study 2

1.4 Research methodology 2

2 CONTENT 2.1 Theoretical background 3

2.1.1 The process of listening 3

2.1.2 The priciples for teaching listening 4

2.2 Practical background 6

2.3 Solutions to the problems 7

2.3.1.Suggested strategies 7

2.3.1.1.What Should Teachers Do ? 8

2.3.1.2 Helping Students Focus on Meanings,Not Just Words 9

2.3.1.3 Selecting Materials 10

2.3.1.4 Using Texts and Tapes or CDs 11

2.3.1.5 Arranging Engaging Activities 11

2.3.2 Applying the study in teaching 12

2.4 Effectiveness of the teaching experience 17

3 CONCLUSION……… 18

REFERENCES……… 19

1 INTRODUCTION:

1.1 Rationale:

The application of the new English textbooks at high school level in theyear 2006 has made Vietnamese teachers and students more familiar withlistening skill However, there come two trends when teachers respond to thetask of teaching listening to their students Some may think, "Wow, this is aneasy class to teach!" or some may feel, "Boy, this is going to be boring!" Both ofthese responses are common ones, but actually they do not reveal how difficult it

is for students to listen and comprehend a foreign language, nor how challenging

it can be for a teacher to help them

If you have taught listening, you may have noticed that your class isdivided between those that seem to manage to "get" a fair amount, and those thatstruggle to understand recorded materials I have observed that a class oftencontains three types of students: those who have grasped the process oflistening, those who understand certain aspects of the process, and those whoreally have no idea about how to listen in a foreign language Those in the firstgroup will continue to progress in their listening ability as they build theirknowledge of grammar and vocabulary Once they know how to listen, they can continually apply those principles Those in the second group may slowlyimprove their listening However, those in the third group may flounder withlittle progress, no matter how many listening exercises they do

What is the problem? What makes one student a successful listener whileanother does not seem to progress at all? Certainly, knowledge of grammar andvocabulary are essential to good listening, but they are not enough; somestudents who have memorized many words, and can do well in grammarexercises, still have a difficult time understanding spoken English A studentmust have a good technique for listening While all of us have learned to listen

in our native language with little training or conscious effort, only a smallnumber of students intuitively know how to listen in a second language Manystudents not only come to listening activities with little knowledge of how the listening process works, but also with serious misconceptions about what willmake them successful in listening

Our role as teachers includes planning and managing the activities of the classroom, but we also have another role, which is to coach students as theylearn The coach' s job is to watch what the player/student is doing, see where he

is going wrong, and help him find more effective ways of completing the task.Many students like to be told explicitly how to study, which means pointing outnot only the ineffective techniques they are using, but also the incorrect ideas onwhich those techniques are based In this study, I would like to focus especially

on what is needed to help those listeners who are not progressing in theirlistening skills

1.2 Aims of the study:

The study aims to:

+ Analyze the major cause to the students’ reluctance to get more involved inlearning and practicing listening

+ Suggest some strategies so as to change students’ attitude toward listeningskill and some ways to select appropriate materials to attract students’ attention

in listening lessons

1.3 Subjects of the study:

+ The students in 10th grade at Ha Van Mao high school

1.4 Research methodology:

+ Reading reference books

+ Discussing with other teachers

+ Applying in teaching

+ Observing and drawing out experiences

2 CONTENT:

2.1 Theoretical background:

2.1.1 The Process of listening

A variety of new insights into the listening process have been developed inthe past 15 years, and yet there are two points on which most researchers andteachers continue to agree: First, listening is an active rather than a passiveprocess, and second, listening is both a top-down and a bottom-up process

We can see that listening is active because there is often a great differencebetween what is said and what the listener hears It is obvious that the listener isconstructing his or her own meaning, which sometimes corresponds to thespeaker' s meaning, and sometimes does not This happens both in our nativelanguage and in a second language This is sometimes described as an

"interactive" process, where both the input and the activity of the listener' smind interact to form an understanding

Researchers also tend to agree that the listening process contains bothbottom-up and top-down elements Bottom-up processing refers to thelistening processes that start with discriminating sounds, identifying words, andcomprehending grammatical structures, and build eventually to thecomprehension of meaning This is a somewhat mechanistic or "data-driven"(Brown 1994: p67) view of processing, and has been the focus in some styles of teaching Top-down processes may be described as holistic or

"conceptually driven" (Brown 1994: p68) in that they focus on the overallmeaning of a passage, and the application of schemata Schemata are mentalframeworks based on past experiences which can be applied to and help usinterpret the current situation Inferring ideas, guessing words' meanings, andidentifying topics are all examples of top-down processing Figure 1

lists various examples of bottom-up and top-down exercises

Figure 1 Examples of bottom-up and top-down exercises (adapted from Brown 1994)

Exercises for bottom-up processing

- discriminating sounds

- listening for word ending

- discriminating intonation patterns

- word recognition

- recognizing reduced forms ( for

example, "didya"?) and linked words

- using stress to understand words and

find key ideas

- using organizational cue words

Exercises for top-down processing

- listening for emotions

- getting the gist

- recognizing the topic

- finding main ideas

- making inferences

- making and checking predictions

- using background knowledge to fill ingaps

- identifying discourse structures andspeaker's purpose

It is useful for students to recognize the importance of both of these

types of processing, and for teachers to arrange opportunities to work on both

aspects Generally, bottom-up exercises will be more useful for beginners,and top-down exercises will be more necessary for intermediate and advancedstudents, but both types should be used for all levels Recently, teachers have putmuch stress on activating students' schemata, that is, helping them anticipate asituation and what they may hear based on their previous knowledge Insome circumstances this could also involve the teacher introducing cultural background, and thus beginning to help students build a new schema

The ability to anticipate and guess may be less developed instudents from a traditional learning system; thus, teachers may need to showstudents how to make use of schemata properly to increase theircomprehension Similarly, teachers may need to help students see how to takeinformation from within a passage and make inferences from it Whilestudents may need much help in these areas, teachers need to make surenot to ignore bottom-up exercises that are also critical for improving listening

2.1.2 The principles for teaching listening.

a Expose students to different types of processing information: bottom up vs top down.

The bottom up vs top down processing of information has been proposed

by Rumelhart and Ortony (1977) and expanded upon by Chaudron and Richards(1986), Richards (1990) and others The distinction is based on the way learnersattempt to understand what they read or hear With bottom up processing,students start with the component parts: words, grammar and the like Top downprocessing is the opposite Learners start from their background knowledge,either content schema (general information based on previous learning and lifeexperience) or texual schema (awareness of the kinds of information used in agiven situation).There is also interactive processing The use of the combination

of top down and bottom up data processing is called interactive processing

b Expose students to different types of listening:

Any discussion of listening tasks has to include a consideration of types oflistening Here tasks as well as text should be considered When discussinglistening text refers to whatever the students are listening to, often a recording.The most common type of listening exercise in many textbooks is listening forspecific information This usually involves catching concrete informationincluding names, time and so on

At other times students try to understand in a more general way This isglobal or gist listening In the classroom this often involves tasks such asidentifying main ideas, noting a sequence of events and so on But these twotypes of listening do not exist in isolation Inference is another critical type oflistening This is “listening between the lines”- that is, listening for meaning that

is implied not stated directly It is a higher level skill

c Teach a variety of tasks.

Learners of listening need to work with a variety of tasks Since learners

do the task as they listen, it is important that the task itself does not demand too

much production of the learner If for example a beginning level learner hears astory and is asked to write a summary in English, it could well be that that thelearner understood the story but is not yet at the level to be able to write thesummary It may also be the case that they fail to respond even though they dounderstand It may so happen that they understood at the time but forgot by thetime they got to the exercise In this example of a summary task based on astory, it may be better to have a task such as choosing the correct summary fromtwo or three choices.

d Consider text, difficulty, and authenticity.

Spoken languages are very different from written language It is moreredundant, full of false starts, rephrasing and elaborations Incomplete sentences,pauses, and overlaps are common Learners need exposure to and practice withnatural sounding language

When learners talk about text difficulty, the first thing many mention isspeed, indeed which can be a problem But the solution is not to give themunnaturally slow, clear recordings Those can actually distort the way thelanguage sounds Speed, however, is not the only variable Brown (1995) talksabout “cognitive load” and describes six factors that increase or decrease theease of understanding

- The number of individuals or objects in a text

- How clearly the individuals or objects are distinct from one another

- Simple relationships are easier to understand than complex ones

- The order of events

- The number of inferences needed

- The information is consistent with what the listener already knows

Any discussion of listening text probably needs to deal with the issue ofauthentic texts Virtually no one should disagree that texts students work withshould be realistic However, some suggest that everything students work withshould be authentic However the issue of authenticity is not so simple as itsounds Most of the recordings that accompany textbooks are made in recordingstudios And recordings not made in the studio are often not of a usable quality.Brown and Menasche (1993) suggest looking at two aspects of authenticity.They suggest this breakdown:

- Task authenticity

- Input authenticity

e Teach listening strategies.

In considering listening, it is useful to note the items Rost (2002, p 155)identifies as strategies that are used by successful listeners

*Predicting: Effective listeners think about what they will hear

* Inferring: It is useful for the listeners to listen between the lines

* Monitoring: Good listeners notice what they do and do not understand

* Clarifying:Efficient learners ask questions and give feedback to the speaker

* Responding: Learners react to what they hear

* Evaluating: They check on how well they have understood.

2.2 Practical background:

After conducting observation, unstructured interview with several of

my own students, I found that problems are clearer than ever before Thefollowing part mentions what problems I have found listening skill at Ha VanMao High school

Why Do Students Have Trouble in Listening?

In some cases, students may lack specific bottom-up and top-downlistening skills In other cases, they do not have a vocabulary large enoughnor a sufficient grasp of the structures of English for the materials they arelistening to There are two other things that may specifically interfere withstudents' listening: their misconceptions about how to listen and their fears offailure

Since we all learned to listen in our mother language without much effort,

we may not be aware of how we learned to listen Therefore, it is easy tomake incorrect assumptions about what will lead to successful listening Onemisconception students may have is that when they listen in their nativelanguage, they pay attention to and remember every word; they thus assumethat this is what they should do in a foreign language Actually, nativespeakers can listen to and comprehend 30 phonemes per second(Chastain), but we obviously do not pay conscious attention to each of them—they seem to be instantly processed and are not stored in memory

Much research shows that for listeners, most storage in memory is thestorage of meanings rather than the exact forms that the speaker used Whether

in our native language or a foreign language, only on rare occasions do we payattention to the exact words that were used We regularly have evidence of thiswhen we discuss with a friend what a third person said Going back andreconstructing the exact wording is often a challenge because in most cases(except those we regard as critical) we almost immediately dispose of theexact words, and only retain the meanings

In a foreign language, listeners need to learn to process sounds quickly,and while they must initially pay conscious attention to this processing, theprocess needs to become automatic in order to improve their listening ability.Naturally, when listening to a complex passage, an unusual accent, or an entirelynew idea, anyone has to pay more attention to individual sounds and words,but students should be taught that they do not need to concentrate so muchattention on consciously processing each sound or word in ordinary situations Another common misconception students may hold is that theyunderstand everything they hear in their mother language They forget that thereare times when they mishear or misunderstand another' s words There are othertimes when native listeners do not understand, and simply choose to letsomething pass because they do not perceive it to be important In addition,students may not consider that they often make inferences, because the

speaker' s message was somewhat ambiguous or because the speaker only gavethe minimal information needed if they believe a listener has the necessarybackground knowledge Because everyone does this so easily in theirmother tongue, they are not always aware of it, and it is not always easy

to apply these same strategies to foreign language listening Thus it may

be useful for teachers to make students aware of these misconceptions byhelping them realize that listening in their native language requires less attention

to specific words and more guessing than they may have thought

Fear also interferes with students' ability to listen One of the mostcommon fears students have is that not understanding a word will keepthem from understanding the meaning of a sentence Actually, this mayoften be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because when students cannot understand

a word, they stop listening and, while puzzling over that one word, may missseveral phrases If instead they listened to the rest of the sentence,

rather than worry over that one word, they might well guess the word from thecontext, or at least not miss so much of the material that follows Because thisbehavior belongs to the affective or emotional region of learning, it is noteasy for teachers to change this fear response However, making studentsaware of the fact that they can understand a sentence without hearing orunderstanding one of the words should increase their confidence

Listening causes anxiety for students for another reason: Unlike inreading, listeners cannot control the rate at which information comes tothem In the case of conversation, they may be able to ask the speaker torepeat information or slow down, but in many other listening situations (such aslistening to a lecture or radio program), they will hear the information onlyonce and cannot adjust the rate Students are aware of these problems, andare often quite anxious about them To address this problem, teachers can helpstudents see how much redundancy exists in speaking, and how much they caninfer from the immediate context and more generally from the schemata Inaddition, as students see that their goal is to get main ideas and importantdetails, they realize that there is not such a great need to understand andremember every word

Exercises in the listening classroom may also increase students'performance anxiety They may feel a pressure, whether internal or external,

to get the right answer immediately In addition, lack of success can causethem to anticipate that they will not understand and lead to a spiral ofexpecting failure and then actually failing It is vital for teachers to giveappropriate tasks and training so students can frequently experience success

in their listening It is especially important for teachers to have realistic expectations for what their students will be able to hear and remember, so thatthey will not feel they are always struggling with listening activities

2.3 Solutions to the problems:

2.3.1 Suggested strategies:

2.3.1.1 What Should Teachers Do?

One of the first things a teacher may want to do is discover whatstudents understand about the listening process and help to correctmisunderstandings (Figure 2 lists various strategies to discuss) This could bedone by giving a survey, collecting written paragraphs, questioning a smallgroup, or having a class discussion which would help in finding out whatstudents expect or believe about successful listening If they havemisconceptions about the importance of listening to every word, or havenot considered the importance of applying background information, then ateacher can plan lessons to emphasize these points Having studentsanalyze miscommunications in their native language might also be useful

in helping them consider how they listen in their own language Similarly,

if students have not grasped the importance of bottom-up skills, then a teacherwould certainly want to pay attention to these skills

Figure 2 Listening strategies to share and discuss with students.

- When listening to a taped text only once, practice making a quick estimation ofthe topic from hearing just the first one or two sentences

- Listen for repeated words, related words, and concepts to find key ideas

- Be prepared to change gusses-to evaluate if you anticipation or guesses areactually correct in light of information you hear later in the passage

- Try to guess how various details may fit together into one main idea

- Think carefully about what you already know on the subject, and balance thiswith being prepared to hear new ideas about the topic ( Richard-Amato)

- Focus attention as completely as possible on what being said

- Relax and let the ideas flow into your mind

- Do not be upset if you do not understand everything

- Relate what you hear to what you already know

- Listen for key words and ideas

- look for overall meaning

- Do not be afraid to ask relevant questions about meaning when it isappropriate

- Make guesses about what is being said

- In conversation, check out your guesses by using confirmation checks, forexample, " Is this what you are saying?"

- Whenever possible, pay attention to the forms fluent speakers of targetlanguage are using and check if they match your own

- Keep a notebook to write down what you have learned: new words, meanings,concepts, structures, idioms, etc

Before the class listens to a text, a teacher will usually want to helpstudents think about a schema for what they will be listening to This includestelling them if they will hear a story, dialogue, excerpt from the radio, orlecture Knowing this information can help them be more mentally prepared

for what they will hear Introducing new, difficult, or important vocabulary canalso help them begin to anticipate what they will hear In

addition, a teacher may first want to ask students to predict from the title or apicture what they will hear Asking this question and giving students a fewminutes to think it over, and perhaps briefly letting them tell their ideas to apartner, will help them set up schemata so that they can fit what they hear intosome sort of framework Students need to be warned that sometimes they willanticipate incorrectly and that it is important for them to check theirguesses and at times correct them

One of the maxims in listening classes today is that it is the teacher' s jobnot only to prepare students for what they will hear, but also to set up a purposefor them In real life, we "tune out" when we lose a sense of purpose forlistening, which explains students falling asleep in class and friends'complaints of "Are you listening?" Thus each time students listen to apassage, teachers should give them a purpose The purpose could be broad,such as, "Listen for the general idea." However, the more specific the better

- for example, "What does the speaker want to persuade us to do?" With aneasy text, or one that students have heard several times, the purpose could be tolisten in order to retell the story In other cases, it could be to listen for specificinformation

2.3.1.2 Helping Students Focus on Meanings, Not Just Words

There are several ways to help students worry less about paying attention

to each word Exercises that require them to make a response concerningmeaning rather than to recall specific words or phrases will help with this Anexample would be giving several pictures and asking students which one isdescribed in the listening material Another type of exercise is asking students tofind the topic of a passage Similarly, two or three general comprehensionquestions that focus on summary ideas rather than details may help them tofocus on meanings rather than individual words

As mentioned above, teachers can help students see that important ideasoften come up in a text in different ways Some texts may be suitable forintroducing students to the fact that informal language often includesredundant features Stories and authentic dialogues are especially useful forthis type of activity If students listen to a text and look at a transcript, they cansee instances where ideas are repeated or elaborated and words that are usedmerely as fillers This can help them see that not all words or even all ideasare essential to understand a message In addition, teachers can present textsfrom which they have removed words, sentences, or clauses, and show studentsthat they can understand the ideas even though there are gaps

Though listeners do not need to catch every word to comprehend meaning,they do need to guess information given in some of the gaps Many studentsneed help in learning how to use context to guess words or phrases they havenot heard clearly A teacher can sometimes help by identifying a word or idea