How to improve english listening skill of k52 english faculty students at TMU

One is able to listen means she/hecan differentiate between sounds, comprehend and understand vocabulary andgrammar, interpret intonation and meaning, consider everything in the same tim

It has been acknowledged that English has been used all over the world

It means that English is a means of communication that is used internationally bypeople to communicate with others to transfer ideas, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, ormessages Nowadays, people need to be able to use English due to globalization InEnglish, There are four skills in learning language: listening, speaking, reading andwriting Naturally, the process of learning is started from listening speaking-readingand the last is writing Human cannot speak before listen Wallace (2004:13) wrotethat listening skill is very important skill because this skill may human acquireperception, knowledge, information and success in communicating with others However, listening is not simple process One is able to listen means she/hecan differentiate between sounds, comprehend and understand vocabulary andgrammar, interpret intonation and meaning, consider everything in the same time,and also adjust to the social cultural context from utterances that are listened(Vandergrift, 2012).Therefore, the present study attempts to investigate the Englishlistening problems encountered by a group of third year English major students atThuong Mai University and suggests solutions so as to improve their Englishlanguage listening skill Survey questionnaires and interview questions are used tocollect data I administered a questionnaire to 200 third- year English major students

at Thuong Mai University

This study included 4 chapters Firstly, chapter 1 showed the overview of thestudy This chapter provided general information about rationale, previous, scope,aims, research methodology and organization of the study Secondly chapter 2 wasliterature review related to research topic Thirdly, reseach methodology waschapter 3 which included participants and instruments Next, chapter 4 was mostessential chapter of this study, named Research Findings Data is analyzedquantitatively using descriptive statistics and qualitatively using content analysis.Chapter 5 is recommendations and suggestions The results of this study may also

be useful for those who are interested in this field

I am also thankful to 200 participants in this study for their patience andcooperation This study would not have been successful without their assistance.Finally, I am also grateful to my family and English major students who haveenthusiastically helped and encouraged me during the time I conducted this work.Thank you so much!

Hanoi, 23, March, 2019

Phuong

Nguyen Thi Phuong

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iii

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES v

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vi

CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY 1

1.1 Reason of the study 1

1.2 Research questions 1

1.3 Research scope 2

1.4 Method 2

1.5 Aims of the study 2

1.6 Organization of the study 3

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 4

2.1 Overview of listening 4

2.1.1 Definition of listening and listening comprehension 4

2.1.2 The importance of listening skill 6

2.1.3 Types of listening 7

2.1.4 Stages of listening 9

2.2 Difficulties in learning the English listening skill 10

2.2.1 Problems students face when listening 10

2.2.2 Characteristics of spoken language making listening so difficult 13

2.2.3 Factors affecting to the English listening 14

CHAPTER 3: RESEACH METHODOLOGY 16

3.1 Participants 16

3.2 Instruments 16

3.3 Data collections 17

3.4 Data analysis 17

CHAPTER 4: RESEARCH FINDINGS 19

4.1 Result and discussion 19

4.1.1 Current situation of practising listening English to third - year English

major students at TMU 19

4.1.2 The attitude of students at TMU towards the position of listening skill 19

4.1.3 Students Self-assessment in English listening skills 21

4.1.4 The emphasized skill in the previous 22

4.1.5 Students’ emotion in learning English listening 22

4.2 Causes make students feel difficult in listening to English 23

4.2.1 Problems students meet in listening to English 23

4.2.2 Factors affecting to students in listening to English 28

4.3 Suggestions for student to improve English listening skill 29

4.3.1 Solution1: Consolidating language foundation 30

4.3.2 Solution 2: Listen and repeat stories or anything you like in English and practice 31

4.3.3 Solution 3: Always creating an talk environment by English anytime anywhere 31

CHAPTER 5: RECOMMENDATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS 32

5.1 Summary of the study 32

5.2 Research implications 32

5.3 Recommendation 33

5.4 Limitations of the study 33

5.5 Suggestions for future research 33

CONCLUSIONS 34

REFERENCES vii

APPENDIX ix

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

2

Attitude of students towards the position of listening skill

214.1

3

Students Self-assessment in English listening skills

224.1

4

The highlighted skill in the previous

224.2

1

Problems related the listeners

234.2

2

Problems related to the listening materials

254.2

3

Listening problems related to Linguistic feature

274.2

4

Others factors affecting to the listening process

284.3

1

Solutions for overcoming to improve English listening skill for 3rd

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY

1.1 Reason of the study

Nowadays, explosive science and technology and globalization, proficientEnglish is extremely necessary No one denies the importance of English language

in the present time as global language It is clear that English has become more andmore dominant around the world Actually, in some countries it is used as themother tongue and others countries learn it as second language in their school.There is no doubt that English is language of communication between the peoplefrom different cultures Therefore, learning English plays an important role ineducation and the development of the country

The four language skills are listening, speaking, reading and writing that alllanguage learners are supposed to acquire If learning English is like building ahouse, English listening is building a foundation for the house Listening is believed

to be the most challenging due to the complex and subtle nature of listeningcomprehension in a second or foreign language In fact, there are a variety oflearners who cannot communicate English fluently after many years of foreignlanguage studying To speak English fluently, you must listen to English well Wejust can exchange information each other when understanding what are partnersaying Consequently, bad listening will affect to the conversation

All these reason, offered the researchers a chance to conduct a study on “How

to improve English listening skill of K52 English faculty students at TMU”.

The researcher hopes that the research will provide learners a relatively view abouthow to improve listening skill

1.2 Research questions

The goal of the study is to find out actual situation of English listening forK52 students in English faculty, detect factors affecting the listening and give somepossible in order to help student improve listening skill

To reach the target, the researcher set up the following questions:

1 What difficulties do K52 students face when listening to English?

2 What are some possible solutions to improve their English listening skill?

1.3 Research scope

The study is about learning listening skill for K52 students of Englishdepartment at TMU The research shows the current situation of English Listeningskill of K52 students and dealt with the problems that students usually met inListening Besides, the study also suggested some possible solutions to improvetheir listening skill Because of the limitation of time and knowledge; the shortage

of reference materials, this study cannot cover the whole issues of listening skill.Moreover, the study cannot touch upon all students at English Department, it isconfused to the K52 students in the faculty at TMU

1.4 Method

Nowadays, both quantitative and qualitative methods are commonly used forthe researchers to report the study Consequently, this study was implemented inboth quantitative and qualitative Documents and scientific research of scholars anddomestic and foreign researchers help the researcher build theoretical frameworkfor the study The data was collected by means of questionnaires and interviews atTMU

The main method is quantitative survey questionnaire In addition, so as tofulfill the set goals, some information is collected by the researcher based on herinformal interviews qualitative method to assume the value and accuracy of thestudy

1.5 Aims of the study

This study attempts to explore of how students overcome listening difficulties English This study aims the following

Firstly, this research is to identify the students’ perception to the significance

of the English listening

Secondly, finding out kinds of listening problems encountered by Englishmajor students at TMU is one of the aims These challenges make students feeluninterested in learning English in class as well as at home

Finally, we provide the potential suggestions, to help students overcomedifficulties Meanwhile, these solutions will help student be excited in Englishlistening lesson Listening level is better and better

1.6 Organization of the study

The research is divided into 5 following chapter:

Chapter 1 (Overview): some main information about the research

Chapter 2 (Literature review): comprising relevant definitions, difficulties andmethods to improve that skill

Chapter 3(Research method): give reasons for choosing and describingresearch methods

Chapter 4 (Research findings): collecting, analyzing, processing the data andpresenting the results

Chapter 5(Recommendations and suggestions): summarizing the study,making suggestions, presenting the limitations and research future

“References” of the study which listed all the materials and sources of theinformation used in the study and the “Appendix” in which the questionnaires andinterview questions designed for students were mentioned

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Overview of listening

2.1.1 Definition of listening and listening comprehension

Listening is considered as one of the most important skill and in acquiringboth a native language and a second on foreign language It is being paid more andmore attention to So far, there have been a number of definitions of listening bydifferent linguists such as Howatt and Dalkin (1974), Wolvin and Coakley (1982),Pearson (1983), Hirsch (1986), Scarcella and Oxford (1992), Bentley and Bacon(1996), Brown (2001), Gary Buck (2001), Scott Shelton (2008) and among other.Howatt and Dalkin (1974) defined listening as the ability to identify andunderstand what others are saying This involves understanding a speaker’s accent

or pronunciation, his grammar, his vocabulary, his grasping and his meaning

Wolvin and Coakley (1982) regarded listening “the process of receiving,attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli

Pearson (1983) stated that “listening involves the simultaneous organizationand combination of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics and knowledge of thetextual structure, all of which seem to be controlled by cognitive process Thus, itcan be said that thought not fully realized the listening skill is essential in acquiringlanguage proficiency”

Hirsch (1986) gave another definition: “listening as an aspect of skillinvolving neurological response and interpretations of sounds to understand and togive meaning by reacting, selecting meaning, remembering, attending, analyzingand including previous experience”

Bentley and Bacon (1996) stated that listening , an important part of thesecond language learning process, has also been defined as an active process duringwhich the listeners constructs meaning from oral input

According to Brown (2001), listening is “not merely the process ofunidirectional receiving of audible symbols He supposed that one aspect s oflistening comprehension transmitting nerve impulses to the brain” Hence, listeningcomprises of three elements: the sender, the message, and the listener

Gary Buck (2001), for example, points out that “listening comprehension is anactive process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge tothe incomings sound” in which a number of different types of knowledge areinvolved both linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge.”

Scott Shelton (2008) thinks that listening effectively is a demanding andinvolving process One must be able to deal with different accents or pronunciation,unfamiliar lexical items and syntactic structures, competing background noise andalso make a conscious effort to not switch off or become distracted while listening.All of this must be achieved and dealt with more or less simultaneously in order toidentify and understand the meaning in any given message

According to Hasan, “listening” is one process that listeners receiveinformation This process takes place one way which completely doesn’t requireany explanation or interaction with text listening

According to Richard (1983), O’Malley and Chamot (1990), listening is anactivity and a complex process in which listeners focus on aspects selected forlistening From the listened sound, they find the meaning of information andcombine what they hear with their knowledge

In conclusion, listening is a process of identifying and understanding what thespeakers say, which includes understanding a speaker’s pronunciation, grammar andvocabulary All of definitions are given with a view to clarifying the nature of thelistening skill which is necessary in the process of acquire a native language or aforeign one

Listening comprehension

There are different definitions of the term “listening comprehension.”Listening comprehension is the different processes of understanding the spokenlanguage These include knowing speech sounds, comprehending the meaning ofindividual words, and understanding the syntax of sentences (Nadig, 2013 as cited

in Pourhosein Gilakjani &Sabouri, 2016) According to Hamouda (2013), listeningcomprehension refers to the understanding of what the listener has heard and it ishis/her ability to repeat the text despite the fact that the listener may repeat thesounds without real comprehension

According to Richard and Schmidt (2002), described listening comprehension

as the speech understanding process in the first language or second, listening in thesecond language includes both up and down process( top-down and bottom-up).Brown also shared that the “top-down” process occurs when the learners availablyuse background knowledge and vocabulary to understand to the content The

“bottom-up” process is to use the context of the listening to predict the meaning ofnew words

According to Helgesen, listening is a practive and purposeful skill In thelistening process, listeners not only understand the content they are listening butalso can communicate the content with the information they previously have known

to understand Besides, listeners both listening the words and understand theimplications

2.1.2 The importance of listening skill

Listening is one of the necessary skills on life which are defined as “skillwhich can provide you with a better perspective on life, skills which can allow you

to maintain a higher awareness of both yourself and the world around you” It is one

of the most vital ways that human beings feel the life and live Everyone in the reallife, often listens more than speaks, reads or writes For instance, at home, we listen

to the news, watch films, or talk each other At school, students listen to the lecturesteaching At meeting, the staffs listen to the new plan from the directors, etc Ofthis, research show that an average of 45% is spent listening compared to 30%speaking, 16% reading and 9% writing (Adler, R etal 2001) That is, by anytowards, a lot of time listening It is worthwhile, therefore, taking a bit of extra time

to ensure that you listen effectively

Without listening, the man becomes backward in each minute of their lives It

is quoted by Dr Rachel Naomi Remen that “the most basis and powerful connect toanother person is to listen Just listen Perhaps, the most important thing we evergive each other is our attention

It is mentioned in the different ways between “hearing” and “listening”.Hearing is a part of five senses (hearing, smelling, touching and looking) Butlistening is a choice to hear and understand Listening is not a passive process In

fact, the listeners can be at least as engaged in the process as the speaker Thephrase “active listening” is used to describe this process of being fully involved As

an integrative skill, listening plays an important role in the process of languagelearning or acquisition and facilitating the emergence of other language skill.According to Nord (1980), listening is the way of learning the language “It givesthe learners information from which to build up the necessary knowledge for usingthe language When this knowledge is built, the learners can begin to speak Thelistening-only period is a time of observation and learning, which provides the basisfor the other language skills (Natcon 1990)

Most learners will spend more time listening to the foreign language thanproducing it themselves Failing to understand spoken language, people may missimportant information presented to them or respond in a funny way Hence, training

in listening is really necessary It helps students make the transition from classroomEnglish to the real-life English more easily and effectively

2.1.3 Types of listening

According to some authors, namely Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo DinhPhuong (2006), there are two ways of listening in the real life They are casuallistening and focused listening depending on the purpose of listening

One type of listening, casual listening, mean listening without a particularpurpose When we listen, we do not pay much or even any attention to theinformation unless there is no something that interests us Therefore, we hardlyremember the content of what we hear Normally, we do this kind of listening when

we listen to music, or listen to news on radio or TV while doing some works ofchatting to a friend

Another type of listening is focused listening That is when listen for a specificpurpose to find out information we need to know It happens quite popularly in thereal life In here, we listen with much more concentration and try to get as muchinformation as possible However, we do not listen to every word We knowbeforehand what we are going to listen so we only catch the most importantinformation from the speech or the lecture In classroom, learners also use this type

of listening

There are two main types of listening (the foundations of all listening types) which draws on the work of Wolvin and Coakley (1996) and other toexamine the various types of listening They are discriminative listening andcomprehensive listening.

sub-Firstly, discriminative listening is first developed at a very early age- perhaps even before birth, in the womb This is the most basic form of listening and doesn’t involve the understanding of the meaning of words or phrases but merely the

different sounds that are produced In early childhood for example, a distinction is made between the sounds of the voices of the parents- the voice of the father soundsdifferent to that of the mother

Discriminative listening develops through childhood and into adulthood As

we grow older and develop and gain more life experience, our ability to distinguishbetween different sounds is improved Not only can we recognize different voices,but we also develop the ability to recognize subtle differences in the way thatsounds are made- this is fundamental to ultimately understanding what these soundsmean Differences include many subtleties, recognizing foreign language,distinguish between regional and dues to the emotions and feelings of the speaker.For instance, imagine yourself surrounded by people who are speaking a languagethat you cannot understand Perhaps, passing through an airport in another country,you can probably distinguish between different voices, male and female, young andold and also gain dome understanding about what is going on around you based onthe tone of voice mannerism and body language of the other people You aren’tunderstanding what is being said but using discriminative listening to gain somelevel of comprehension of your surroundings ( Lindsay Bell, 2013) and (Goh.2000)

Secondly, it is comprehensive listening This one involves understanding themessage or messages that one being communicated Like discriminative listening,comprehensive listening is fundamental to all sub-types In order to use this type,the listeners needs appropriate vocabulary and language skill Using overlycomplicated language or technical jargon, therefore, can be barrier tocomprehensive listening Comprehensive listening is further complicated by the fact

that two different people listening to the same thing may understand the message intwo different ways This problem can be multiplied in group settings, like aclassroom or business meeting where different meanings can be derived from whathas been said (Goh 2000) and (Travis Bennett, 2104)

It is complimented by sub-messages from non-verbal communication such asthe tone of the voice, gestures and other body languages These non-verbal signalscan greatly aid communication and comprehension but can also confuse andpotentially lead to misunderstanding In many listening situations, it is vital to seekclarification and use skills such as reflection aid comprehension

2.1.4 Stages of listening

Author Joselph Devito has devided into five stages: receiving, understanding,remembering, evaluating and responding (Devito, J.A 2000) The elements ofpublic speaking (7thed Newyork, NY:Longman)

STAGE 1: Receiving

It refer to the response cause by sound waves stimulating the sensory receptors

of the ear, it is physical response Receiving are the international focus on hearing aspeaker’s message which happens when we filter out other sources so that we canisolate the message and avoid the confusing mixture of incoming stimuli At thisstage, we are focus on hearing the message

STAGE 2: Understanding

It is the stage at which you learn what the speaker means- the thought andemotional tone We attempt to learn the meaning of the message, which is notalways easy At the stage, we should be on the lookout for places where ourperceptions might differ from those of the speaker

STAGE 3: Remembering

Beginning with listening; if you can’t remember something that was said, youmight not have been listening effectively If understanding has been in accurate,recollection of the message will be in accurate too

STAGE 4: Evaluating

This stage can be called by judging the value of the message We might bethinking “This make sense” or “conversely” “This is very odd” Because everyone

biases and perspectives learned from widely diverse sets of life experiences,evaluations of the same message can vary widely from one listener to another.People are more speakers speak clearly, present ideas logically and give reasons tosupport the points made.

 Summative feedback

This feedback is given at the end of the communication, when you attend apolitical rally, a presentation given by a speaker you admire, there are verbal andnon-verbal ways of indicating your appreciations for or your disagreement with themessage

2.2 Difficulties in learning the English listening skill

2.2.1 Problems students face when listening

According to Underwood, English learners often face the following potentialdifficulties:

Uncontrollable speed of the speaker

Limited vocabulary of the listener

Don’t recognize suggestive signals

Don’t understand the information

Cannot concentrate

Do not have a habit of studying

According to Hasan, learners aren’t sometimes aware of their mistakes inidentifying the causes of problems they encounter They usually use inefficientlistening strategies and try to listen and understand every word That activity iswrong because even native speaker do not listen this way Good listeners often

listen only to the key words to understand the main idea of the message and alwaystry to guess the meaning of the new word in the context of the listening He alsoindicated that unfamiliar words, difficult grammatical structures, and the length

of the spoken passages are the most important factors that cause problems forlearners’ listening comprehension He continued that clarity, lack of interest,and the demand for complete answers to listening comprehension questions arethe serious difficulties of students’ listening comprehension

Nguyen Bang and Nguyen Ba Ngoc present a number of difficulties such asEnglish sounds, English vocabulary and speed of speaking Hoang Van Van,Nguyen Thi Chi and Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa pointed out the difficultied of thelearners:

Difficulty in listening to English sounds

Trying to understand all the words to grasp the idea said

Do not understand native speaker when they speak naturally quicly

Need to listen again and again

Difficulty in catching all the information

Do not concentrate when listening

Teng (2002) identified four listening factors, which were similar toBoyle’s (1984) classification; they were listener factors, speaker factors, stimulusfactors, and context factors She indicated that “EFL proficiency” was the mostimportant listener factor for EFL listening problems It implies that students’difficulties may directly result from their deficient linguistic knowledge However,Goh (2000) indicated that the most common problem was “quickly forgetwhat is heard (parsing).” Similarly, in Sun’s study (2002), the most difficulty inlistening for Taiwan’s students was “forget the meaning of the word(perception).” Theoretical explanations of listening comprehension provide uswith clues about the problems which learners face when they listen to aspoken text These insights cannot, however, account for exhaustive explanationofthese problems As Vogely (1995: 41) states, ‘We still need research thatdocuments empirically the relationship between what theory says and whatlearners actually know and more importantly do’ To locate the sources of

listening comprehension, we need to consider the discourse itself in the context ofthe classroom.

Culture differences

It plays an important role, not only in the perception of learner in general, butalso in learning foreign languages in particular It can be said that students who donot have knowledge of the British and American culture of other countries may notfully understand the ways of thinking of native speakers expressed through English.Learners should be familiar with the cultural knowledge of language that has asignificant effect on the learners’ understanding If the listening task involvescompletely different cultural materials then the learners may have criticalproblems in their comprehension It is the responsibility of teachers to givebackground knowledge about the listening activities in advance (Azmi, Celik,Yidliz, & Tugrul, 2014)

Identify structure, verb when listening

What influences your listening skills is the ability to identify sentencestructures and verbs in sentences The structure is very important in sentence, theverb is an extremely important factor If you recognize the sentence structure andthe verb of the sentence in just a few seconds, you can fully understand thesentence You should remember that when a sentence is spoken it includes one ormore sentence structures The characteristics of learning English are sentencestructure and verbs

If you cannot recognize the structure of the sentence or at least the verb in thesentence, listening comprehension is almost zero If so, you're just guessing whatthe paragraph means when you've heard the whole paragraph For example: Thesentence structure "have been doing something" means how long it has been doing

Shortage of vocabulary

Word is the basic in learning a language If students have a good command oflarge numbers of vocabularies, could they achieve to break through in theirlistening Small knowledge of vocabulary directly weakens their listening ability Intheir daily learning, students pay less attention to words recitations which definitelyhas a negative effect on their listening (John and Shane, 2004, p4), (Rivers 1983,p125) and (Nunan, 1999, p117)

Mental barrier

It refers to the negative mentality while listening In general, while doinglistening exercise, student would keep intensive concentration Once they cannotcatch up with the speed, they would be nervous and thus cannot concentrate asmuch as they could have Because they have been thinking about the words theyhave failed to recognize According to an empirical research, tension and anxietyare very common in listening class However, they are negatively correlated withthe understanding effect of listening content (Sun J, 2011)

Weak listening skill

Student quit often ignore the purpose of listening For some materials,intensive listening is a must while for some others extensive listening can beaccepted According to research a percentages of 31.2% students would choose tounderstand every word and every sentence while listening (Sun H, 2015) Whatkind of method they should use depending on what relevant listening questions theyare required to answer But the truth is students seldom pay attention to theconnection between sentences and their logical relationship, so it hard for them tograsp the whole topic and content of listening materials In addition, while listening,some students would firstly translate what they hear to Vietnamese and then try tounderstand the content This habit would greatly waste time and badly influencelistening

2.2.2 Characteristics of spoken language making listening so difficult

There are some characteristics of spoken language which makes listeningdifficult (Brown 2001):

 In spoken language, due to memory limitations we break down speechinto smaller group of words They are clustering such as “a lot of”, “a number of”and among other Therefore, when listening, learners have to learn to pick outmanageable clusters of words, avoiding try to listen to every word of the speech It

is not necessary and makes learners become distracted

 Moreover, spoken language has a great number of redundancies They areresult of rephrasing, repetitions, elaborations, and some insertions such as “as I havesaid” and so on

 On the other hand, spoken language has many reduced forms It may bephonological, morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic like “you’re” instead of “youare”, won’t-will not, etc these reductions are really significant difficulties to thelearners

 The next characteristic is performance variables As a result of unplannedaction, spoken language consists of a lot of hesitions (er, uhm), false starts, pausesand corrections They make listeners confused

 Colloquial language is another problem that can be interfere listeners inreal life because they are familiar with written language In monologues anddialogues, the appearance of idioms, slang, reduced forms and shared culturallanguage are common

 English is a stress-timed language so it is very important for learners tounderstand its prosodic features By stress, rhythm and intonation, listeners caninterpret more subtle messages like sarcasm, endearment, insult, solicitation, pause, etc

 The last but not least, interaction is also an element that plays a large role

in listening Language learners should be taught the instruction in the two-waynature of listening They have to learn to continute the process of comprehending.Some rules of interaction are negotiations, maintenance and termination

2.2.3 Factors affecting to the English listening

If teachers want to help learners overcome their difficulties in learning speakingskill, they should identify some factors that influence their listening performance.Learners’ speaking performance is influenced by factors like accent, the classatmosphere, quality of recorded material, student’s motivation and among other

The class atmosphere

Sometime the size of the classroom causes difficulty for both teachers andstudents in lessons For instance, if the class is very large, students (sitting on theback rows) may not hear the recordings clearly and observe the board as ones sit infront There are challengeable for teacher to control the students or to get responsefrom students In addition, it will be necessary to create a funny atmosphere in theclassroom Because these make students feel more comfortable and the lessons ismore effective Perhaps, we will work more effectively provided that we feelcomfortable and happy (Phung Thi Thao, 2017)

Students’ motivation

Maybe say that motivation is important to notice in that it can affect students’reluctance to listen in English Motivation is a key consideration in determining thepreparedness of learners to communicate It has been proven in many studies thatstudents with a strong motivation to succeed can persist in learning and gain betterscores than those who have weaker motivation of success showing that buildingstudents’ motivation to learn is urgent for every teacher With respect to the causes

of lack of motivation, Gardner in Nunan (1999) elaborates the causes of the students

‘lack of motivation e.g uninspired teaching, boredom, lack of perceived relevance

of materials and lack of knowledge about the goals of the instructional program

Noise, Awkward seating positions and temperature

Ecological factors, for example, noise, temperature and awkward seatingpositions can make us concentrate our attention on other factors alongside what thespeaker is saying Attempt to control environmental factors at whatever pointsconceivable Take a stab at finding a calm at another seat or move to a quiet place toproceed with the discussion It is really hard to center concentration when we are

always occupied by outside powers (Fadojutimi Temitayo 2018).

Quality of the recorded material

The equipment is poor quality that affects to the learning process of students.The unclear sound system causes the interruption in listening and impact to theinformation reception in listening text (Dr Araphat Hamouda, 2013)

CHAPTER 3: RESEACH METHODOLOGY

This study investigates the factors on English listening problems of studentsfrom English department at TMU This chapter discusses the participants of thestudy, instruments, procedures of collecting data and data analysis

3.1 Participants

The participants of this study will be 200 third-year students from Englishfaculty at TMU They are 21 years old and include both male and female All ofthem are volunteers as they are asked to do all parts comprising questionnaire andinterview Some of them had learnt English for 7 years and the others for 3 years orfewer

3.2 Instruments

To fulfill the above aims, the study was carried out with quantitative andqualitative methods of data collection According to Kyta Darhohomei (as quoted inwww.answerlog.com 2010:1) quaitative approach means number evaluation,information measurement In quantitative measurement, researching or analysingraw data such as number, value, statistic, fact, and picture Quantitative approach isused to analyze the value of data Based on Creswel (as quoted in www.Penelitianstudi kasus.blogspot.com.2003:18), qualitative approach is one unity whereresearcher often makes knowledge claim based on construtive view (like more thanone meaning in individual experience social and historical construction, the purpose

is to develop theory or pattern) Qualitative approach is used to describecharacteristics of data

The instruments used in this study were: (1) a questionnaire, (2) a

semi-structured interview with the subjects The first instrument was questionnaire It was

the main instrument used to gather specific information’s for this study Thequestions were formulated based on the research questions and hypothesis of thisstudy Besides, a questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series ofquestions (or other types of prompts) for the purpose of gathering information fromrespondents

Survey questionnaire is one of the most effective instruments for collectingdata in social science Advantages of using questionnaires that Gillham (2000)highlights are; less pressure on respondents, not under pressure of bias, and analysis

of answers is straight forward Like questionnaire, interviews can allow researchers

to investigate cognitive processes such as awareness or constructs such asperceptions or attitudes that are not directly observable

The second data gathering instrument which was employed in this study wasinterview The purpose of the interview was to triangulate the information that wasobtained through the questionnaire; to obtain data on how the listening difficultieswhich had been identified through the questionnaire affected the learners’ listeningcomprehension; to obtain information about the reasons behind the learners’difficulties of listening comprehension; and to find out if there are any otherlistening difficulties that affect the learners’ listening skill and look for solutions toimprove their listening skill Moreover, by providing opportunities for learners toreport in their own words, we might gain some insights into their understanding ofand attitude towards some of these difficulties

3.3 Data collections

There were two kinds of instrument used to collect the data;questionnaire and interview The questionnaire consisted of three Section onecontained 3 questions to evaluate the importance of English skill Section twoconsists of 14 questions about difficulties in listening to English devided into fourcategories: listening material (6items), linguistic aspects (5 items), speaker (4items), psychological category (3 items)

3.4 Data analysis

The data obtained through the questionnaire and the interview were organizedand analyzed While the data obtained from the questionnaire were analyzedquantitatively and qualitatively, the data obtained from the interview were analyzedqualitatively And the results of the instruments identified the listening problemsthat affected the EFL learners of TMU and solutions to improve listening skillAccording to Sudaryanto (1993), data analysis can be presented throughformal and informal method In formal method, analysis is based on special