Some suggested listening tasks designed basing on english textbook 11 to teach listening skills for weak students

Some suggested listening tasks designed basing on English textbook 11 to teach listening skills for weak students……… 8 2.5.. Results of applying suggested listening tasks designed basin

TABLE OF CONTENT

TABLE OF CONTENT……….……… i

1 INTRODUCTION……… 1

1.1 Rationale of the theme……… 1

1.2 Aims of the theme……… … 1

1.3 Scope of the theme……… …… 1

1.4 Methods of the theme……… 2

2 CONTENT ……… 3

2.1 Theoretical basis……… 3

2.1.1 Definition of listening……….… 3

2.1.2 A framework for planning a listening skills lesson………… 3

2.2 Practical basis……… 5

2.3 Some rules of desinging listening tasks for weak students……… 6

2.4 Some suggested listening tasks designed basing on English textbook 11 to teach listening skills for weak students……… 8

2.5 Results of applying suggested listening tasks designed basing on English text book 11 to teach listening skills for weak students……… 8

3 CONCLUSION ……… ……… 10

3.1 Conclusion……… … 10

3.2 Suggestions……… 10

REFERRENCES……… I

LIST OF GRADED STUDIES……… II

LIST OF ABBRIVIATION……… III

APPENDIX 1……… IV

1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale

It is common knowledge that English plays an important part in thedevelopment of Vietnam firstly because it is an international language; secondly it

is also seen as a means to promote mutual understanding and cooperation betweenVietnam and other countries Therefore, English is being taught as a compulsorysubject in all classes of schools all over our country with a view to helping studentsuse it not only as a mean of communication but also as a key to science andtechnology

Of the four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing, listening isalways considered to be the most difficult for teachers to teach and for students toimprove themselves, which leads to the fact that most listeners have low level ofproficiency in their listening skill In fact, in the process of teaching and learningEnglish, listening not only provides them with a wide range of knowledge but alsohas great influence on other skills, especially speaking skills as While, G (1998)pointed out that “being good listener involves collaborating with speakers andtaking an active role in asking for clarification when you do not understand” [5]

However there still exist many difficulties facing English teachers,especially in teaching listening skills for low level students who cannot finish thetask required in the Textbooks Gradually these pupils will lose their motivation inlearning English Eventually, it is impossible for them to catch up with the others inschool

All of the reasons have inspired the author to do the study “Some suggested listening tasks designed basing on English Textbook 11 to teach listening skills for weak students” with the purpose of helping many teachers to deal with

teaching listening skills for these leaners

1.2 Aims of the study

The study only aims at providing teachers some suggested tasks designedbasing on the Textbook “English 11” that can be applied to overcome thedifficulties arising during the process of teaching listening skills to low-levelstudents in grade 11 Thus, this study is expected to make a small contribution toimprove the quality of teaching listening skills for those who are not good atEnglish

1.3 Objectives of the study

Learning a second language as a scholar once said “is a long and complexundertaking” Therefore, teachers of a second language certainly have to apply a lot

of techniques In the scope of this study, however, the author only has ambition topropose some suggested listening tasks designed basing on the material provided inthe Textbook “English 11” with a view to improving the qualities of teachinglistening skills for low-level students

1.4 Methods of the study

To achieve the objectives of the study, several methods were used, but theauthor used mainly quantity and quality methods such as: class observations, datacollections, interviews, consultancy from colleagues, references from the internet,books, magazines…etc

2 CONTENT 2.1 Theoretical basis

2.1.1 Definition of listening

There are many different viewpoints on the definition of listening:

According to Underwood (1989, p.1): “Listening is the activity of payingattention to and trying to get meaning from something you hear” [4] As a matter offact, to succeed in listening, the duty of listeners is not only to understand of thewords given, but also to find out the real meaning hidden in words

Another notion of listening was given by Buck (2001, p.3): “Listeningcomprehension is the result of an interaction between a number of informationsources, including the acoustic input, different types of linguistic knowledge, detail

of the context, and general world knowledge, and so forth, and listeners usewhatever information they have available, or whatever information seems relevant

to help them interpret what the speaker is saying” [6] In this definition, Buck aims

at highlighting the active role of the learners who act as the negotiators andintegrators in the process of learning listening, in which learners activate bothlinguistic cues and nonlinguistic knowledge to achieve the meaning In otherwords, listening is the active combination of new input gained by what the listenersget and their prior knowledge and experience This view is valuable and worthconsidering in setting up listening syllabus in the sense in order to buildcommunicative competence to the learners in listening lessons

In conclusion, listening demands many supportive skills It is an activeprocess in which learners have to use their prior knowledge to understand themessage of the listening text

2.1.2 A framework for planning a listening skills lesson.

It is stated that a common way of dividing up a listening lesson is into threestages: pre-listening stage, while-listening stage and post-listening stage

 Pre-listening stage:

In general, it is difficult for students to have ideas of what they are going tohear if the teachers just says “listen to this” then switches on the cassette recorder

or begin to read out loud Even if the sounds and words are familiar, they may still

be unable to comprehend because of the lack of background knowledge of thetopic, setting or the relationship between the speakers Therefore, pre-listeningstage is carried out to provide them with everything necessary for listening andunderstanding the text such as the topic, related vocabulary and additionalinformation This stage also helps the teachers to arouse their interest and curiosity

- Discuss relevant experiences

- Associate ideas with the topic

- Predict information about the topic

There are some techniques that are suggested being used in this stage:

- Identifying the exact topic, or an aspect of it

- Answering the questions

- Deciding the statements are True/false

- Choosing the best answer

- Gap-filling

- Completing a table, map or picture

- Ordering picture, name or event

 Post- listening stage:

This stage is to help the learners connect what they have heard with theirown ideas and experiences, just as people often do in real life It also allow teachers

to move easily from listening to another language skill For instance, they maypractice speaking by role-playing interviews similar to one they have heard Thepurposes of post-listening activities are:

- Checking whether the students have understood what they need to ornot

- Reflecting on why some members of the class have failed tounderstand or miss parts of the message

- Giving them the opportunity to consider the attitude and manner of thespeakers of the listening text

- Expanding on the topic or language of the message and transferringlearned things to another context

- Making introduction for the planned work

Some possible post-listening activities are:

- Giving opinion

- Relating similar experiences

- Role-playing a similar interaction

- Writing a brief report

- Writing a similar text

- Debating the topic

To sum up, in order to help students to communicate in English successfully,teachers should raise their awareness of listening as a skill that requires activeengagement Moreover, they should assist them develop both the skill and theconfidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond theclassroom Only by this way, can the teachers give their leaners the foundation forcommunicative competence in the new language

2.2 Practical basis

Teaching listening as well as learning Listening skills is so complex anddifficult that both teachers and students meet many challenges The problemsdeprive not only from the listening material, the teachers themselves but also fromstudents themselves, especially weak-ability ones

Generally, English Textbook 11 Published by Education Publishing House isdesigned for all students from pre-intermediate to advanced level in grade 11.Therefore, it is quite difficult for low-level ones to meet all the demand of all thetasks in the textbook Once they cannot do the task, they will feel demotivated andeasily be distracted from the lesson Some even possibly pretend to listen to thetape when it is playing In fact, they are doing something irrelevant or thinking ofsomething outside the lesson Gradually, their decrease in the involvement in theactivities will lead to bad results

Sometimes the problem originates from the teachers themselves Manyteachers think that if they teach in a class with many weak-ability learners, theycannot spend a lot of time teaching listening They do not use all of activities theyhad designed when writing lesson plans because if they do, these ones will not keep

up Some other teachers may be aware of the causes of the problems, however theyare either too busy or not patient enough to redesign some tasks in the Textbook toteach the weak students Hence, the quality of teaching listening skills for this type

of leaners still failed up to our expectation

When it comes to the students, normally teaching listening to intermediateand advanced ones is difficult, and for the beginners, the case is more complexbecause they do not gain themselves a lot of experiences with listening, plus theirlack of linguistic and cultural knowledge of the language Therefore, it is not easy

to understand the provided input to infer the meaning of the listening text That’swhy low-level students hardly finish all the task in the textbooks

To make it more clearly, I conducted an experiment in class 11A1 and 11A2school year 2016-2017 These two classes had the same numbers of students atnearly the same level When teaching listening lesson of Unit 1, I gave them thecopy of the listening tasks then asked them doing the tasks on the photocopiedpapers At the end of the lesson I collected their works and got the result that:

The level of finishing

Taking more details into consideration, I also found out that almost allstudents could not do task 2 in the textbook, while task 1 seems to be easier to becompleted All of these things are indicated in the following table:

to use them to make sentences to answer the questions The others indicated thatthey could not infer from what they heard to the answers However, almost all thelistening lessons in the English Textbook 11 normally ask students to practicelistening for gist or inferring meaning from what they hear Obviously, these twolistening skills prove to be too difficult to be enhanced by weak students

From the above given facts, so as to teach incompetent students effectively,teachers should invest more time and effort in desinging eligible listening tasksbased on the Textbook so that they can do them then be more motivated to study,which will create more successful and effective lesson

2.3 Some rules of designing listening task for weak students.

When designing listening task it’s difficult for the teachers to decide whatshould be taught, what techniques are better or simply what words should beintroduced To deal with the problems, they should follow some rules for eachstages

* Pre-listening:

Pre-listening step is normally considered very important to a listening lesson.

It helps students to know the topic, recall the background knowledge andunderstand the related word Hence, in this stage, teachers should:

- Try to be as well-prepared as possible because once they understand whatshould be required in the lesson they will choose the best things to be taught fortheir learners

- Try to design the most simple task but gain the class’s much involvement

as possible to introduce the topic or recall the background knowledge Because this

is the first part of the lesson therefore the teacher should create a positiveatmosphere of the class so that the students will be motivated to be ready for thenext part

- Decide what are the key words in the listening text, and what are the keywords in the listening task to teach In the textbook there are some new wordsgiven in the “listen and repeat” part; nevertheless, these ones are usually notenough for incompetent students Thus, teachers should provide some more keywords in the text or in the listening tasks to make them understand the text and dothe task more easily

* While-listening:

This stage is the main part of the lesson, through which students canimprove their listening skills In this part teachers should:

- Have pre-task step to help them understand carefully what they have to do

to complete the task, and what are the key words they should pay attention to findthe answers

- Ask them to guess before they listen to the tape And do not say what theyguess is wrong or right, ask why they guess so if necessary This step will makelearners more curious and hence eager to listen and do the task

- Write a very easy question so that they can answer after the first listening.The purpose of the question is to encourage them to listen, to make them have afeeling of success

- Write more additional questions to the listening tasks to make them easy tounderstand the content of the tape scripts

- Be flexible when getting the pupils to listen to the tape Read the listeningtext if it is helpful to them When teaching weak students, sometimes the differentaccents or speed of speech pose obstacles for them to listen In this case, theteachers can support them by reading the tape scripts

- Instruct students how to make the answers while listening (short answers ormain ideas) This will help them develop note-taking skills, which are veryessential in listening

* Post-listening:

This is the last process of a listening lesson in order to help them recall andconstruct the information they get from listening and practicing new words andphrases from the listening in speaking or writing When designing this stageteachers should pay attention to these following factors:

- The time which is allowed to do post-listening work If there still are a lot

of time teachers can ask pupils to use the words or phrases learned to speak orwrite But if there is not much time left, they should only be summarized the mainpoint of the listening text

- The amount of language work which the teacher wishes to do in relation tothe particular listening text Base on this, the teachers will decide whether this workshould consist of speaking, reading or writing They also have to decide whetherthe class should work in pairs, in groups or individually

- The chosen activity should be motivating .Whatever are required, theteachers should make it as simple as possible so that the low level students can do

it For example, gap-filling is always one of the best suggestions for this step

2.4 Some suggested way to design listening task basing on English Textbook

11 to teach listening skills for weak students.

Below are some redesigned listening tasks of some units in the EnglishTextbook 11 (Appendix 1) which I personally think is rather difficult to teach forweak students

2.5 Results of applying redesigned tasks in teaching Listening skills

In order to assess the effectiveness of applying this method to teachinglistening for weak students I have compared my work with two classes 11 A1and A2 (school year 2016 -2017) At first, The level of members in these twoclass is relatively the same In class A1 I teach them all the things designed in theEnglish Textbook 11 And in class A2 I designed some listening tasks based onthe English Textbook 11 After a term I’ve got some following results:

First of all, The result of listening test in class A2 is better than in class A1,which is demonstrated by the following statistic:

LISTENING TEST RESULT

Listening lessons During the lessons, all of them were involved in trying tofinish the tasks , they worked excitingly to find out the answers to the question.After each listening lesson, they could improve their listening skills more or less.Besides, they had many chances to practice many other skills like writing andspeaking, especially speaking in pairs, in groups or in individually in front of thewhole class.

Thirdly, these listening tasks brought a more positive atmosphere to classwhich motivated each member to learn and get higher result because they givethe feeling of understanding the lesson and the sense of “I can do it” to students

To sum up, all the results indicate that to deal with low-level students,applying the listening tasks I designed basing on the English Textbook 11 makesteaching and listening skills more effectively

3 CONCLUSION 3.1 Conclusion

Listening is one the receptive skills, through which students can gainmore vocabulary, grammar structures and knowledge about the world Besides,listening helps them learn other skill Therefore, the importance of listening isundeniable In the process of teaching listening skills to weak learners teachershave to cope with a lot of problems Thus, they should be flexible to decidewhich can be used in the Textbook, and what should be redesigned Whendesinging task teachers should follow some rules so that the task they give canget highest result

In effort to give a support to teachers, this study have some suggestedlistening tasks designed basing on the English Textbook 11 in order that theteachers can save time by using them to teach low-level students

And in order to raise the quality of teaching English to low-level pupils,the author personally hope that there will be more other suggested ways todesign listening tasks by other teachers to support teaching and learningprocess Similarly, the other author can also propose other tasks for teachingother skills aiming at teaching English more effectively

3.2 Suggestion

In order to apply this method effectively, teachers should apply thesetasks flexibly basing on the level of students they are in charge of Moreover,because the tasks are not in the Textbook, teachers had better print thehandouts for students so that they can follow and do the task more easily

Teaching listening is rather difficult, hence, to make it easier, schools cangive a hand with this process by providing some useful and modern teachingaids such as computers, speakers and if possible a lab

This is my little experience in finding methods to help weak students findlearning listening skills more interesting and effectively I hope to receiveyour reading and comments as well as contribution to make this study moreperfect so that it can be applied widely

Thanks for your reading!

XÁC NHẬN CỦA THỦ TRƯỞNG ĐƠN VỊ Thanh Hóa, ngày10 tháng5 năm2017

Tôi xin cam đoan đây là SKKN củamình viết, không sao chép nội dung củangười khác

Trịnh Hồng Vân

[1] http://baigiang.violet.vn/

[2] Hoang Van Van, (2015), English 11, Education Publishing House*

[3] Nguyen Thi Minh Huong, (2007), Hoc tot Tieng Anh 11, Thanh HoaPublishing House*

[4] Underwood, M (1989) Teaching Listening London: Longman

[5] While, G (1998) Listening, Oxford University express

[6] Buck, (2001) Assessing listening Cambridge University

* These two materials are continually used to design the listening tasks

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