The Impacts of Listening Strategy Training on 10-Grade Students’ Listening Performance at Mỹ Đức C High School: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Sharing the same concern, this research aims at exploring Mỹ Đức C high school 10-grade students’ awareness of top-down and bottom-up listening strategies, from which the researcher woul

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

*************************

LÊ THỊ BÍCH HẠNH

THE IMPACTS OF LISTENING STRATEGY TRAINING ON GRADE STUDENTS’ LISTENING PERFORMANCE AT MỸ ĐỨC C

10-HIGH SCHOOL: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Nghiên cứu ngụy thực nghiệm về tác động của việc rèn luyện chiến lược nghe đối với năng lực thực hành nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10 trường

THPT Mỹ Đức C

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 60.140.111

Hanoi – 2014

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

*************************

LÊ THỊ BÍCH HẠNH

THE IMPACTS OF LISTENING STRATEGY TRAINING ON GRADE STUDENTS’ LISTENING PERFORMANCE AT MỸ ĐỨC C

10-HIGH SCHOOL: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Nghiên cứu ngụy thực nghiệm về tác động của việc rèn luyện chiến lược nghe đối với năng lực thực hành nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10 trường

THPT Mỹ Đức C

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 60.140.111

Supervisor: Dr Đỗ Thị Thanh Hà

Hanoi – 2014

DECLARATION

I, hereby, certify the thesis entitled “The impacts of listening strategy training

on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C high school: a experimental study” is the result of my own research for the Minor Degree of Master

quasi-of Arts at the University quasi-of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, and this thesis has not, wholly or partially, been submitted for any degree at any other universities or institutions

Lê Thị Bích Hạnh

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to all those who have supported

me in doing this independent study

Firstly, I would like to express my greatest appreciation to my supervisor, Dr

Đỗ Thị Thanh Hà for her enthusiastic encouragement, valuable guidance, wise suggestions and useful critiques towards the completion of this study

Secondly, I am extremely grateful to the staff members of the Faculty of Post - graduate studies for their helpful lectures

My special thanks are also sent to my lecturers, my friends, my classmates, as well as my colleagues for their invaluable comments and criticism and also for their continued interest and encouragements

Thirdly, I appreciate the assistance and cooperation given to me by teachers and students at Mỹ Đức C high school Without their sincere participation, this paper would not have been possible

Last but not least, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved people,

my parents, my husband and my children for their love, care, tolerance and encouragement

ABSTRACT

In recent years more and more studies have focused on language learning strategies and their importance, especially learning strategies in listening skill Sharing the same concern, this research aims at exploring Mỹ Đức C high school 10-grade students’ awareness of top-down and bottom-up listening strategies, from which the researcher would like to study the impacts of listening strategy training on their listening performance 70 students in grade 10 and 11 were divided into two groups: control and experimental with two research instruments – questionnaires and pretest, posttest After receiving 6 listening strategy training sessions, participants showed a statistically significant improvement in listening performance The experimental group obtained higher mean scores in post-test in comparison with those of control group The study result also indicated that the students in experimental group became more aware of when and how to apply both strategies, especially bottom-up ones, in doing listening tasks This study suggests that explicit listening strategy instruction should be part of the ESL curriculum

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 1: Teaching plan during implementation period

Table 2: Bottom-up strategy use of the control group

Table 3: Bottom-up strategy use of the experimental group

Table 4: Top-down strategy use of the control group

Table 5: Top-down strategy use of the experimental group

Table 6: Bottom-up strategy use of both groups

Table 7: Top-down strategy use of both groups

Table 8: Descriptive statistics for the pre-test and post-test of control group and experimental group (Max score = 10)

Table 9: The relationship between experimental and control group’s test scores

Table 10: Pretest and posttest scores of control and experimental groups

Figure 1: The difference in gain values obtained by both groups after experiment

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Declaration i

Acknowledgement ii

Abstract iii

List of tables and figures iv

Table of content v

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale 1

2 Research Questions 2

3 Objectives of the study 2

4 Scope of the study 3

5 Methodology 3

6 Significance of the study 3

7 Outline of the study 3

PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

I Theoretical background 5

1 Definitions of listening 5

2 Learning strategies 6

2.1 Learning strategies – definition 6

2.2 Bottom up learning strategy 7

2.3 Top-down learning strategies 8

3 Strategy training 11

4.Listening strategy models 12

II Related studies: 15

CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 17

2.1 Settings 17

2.2 Participants 17

2.3 Research methods 17

2.4 Data collection method 18

2.3.1 Pre-test 19

2.3.2 Post-test 19

2.3.3 Questionnaire for students 19

2.5 Training procedure 20

2.6 Data analysis methods 25

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 26

3.1 Research question 1: How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school been aware of the listening strategies? 26

3.1.1 Bottom-up strategies 26

3.1.2 Top-down strategies 28

3.1.3 Cross-comparison between the two groups 30

3.2 Research question 2: How did the training of listening strategies have impact on the students’ listening performance? 32

3.3 Discussions on the study results 35

3.4 Summary 36

PART C: CONCLUSIONS 37

1 Review of the study 37

2 Implications 37

3 Limitations of the study 40

4 Recommendations for further studies 41

REFERENCES 42 APPENDICES I 1.Questionnaire I

2 Pretest II

3 Posttest IX

4 Test results XV

5 Lesson plans XVIII

PART A INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale:

The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has launched Vietnam’s National Foreign Language 2020 Project (NFL2020) to build national foreign language capacity This project aims at establishing a proficiency framework compatible with the CEFR (The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), implementing compulsory English programs beginning in grade 3 with benchmarks

of A1 for primary, A2 for lower secondary, and B1 for upper secondary, college and university graduates This means that by the year 2020, students are not only able to master reading, writing skills but also speaking and listening ones Among these skills, listening is generally considered as the most difficult skill by language learners According to Nguyễn Văn Phú (2013) on Tuoitreonline, only 2-3% of secondary teachers throughout Vietnam passed the CEFR exam, especially, the number of teachers passing the listening skill was even smaller British Council and Apollo did a research on learners’ English competence in 20 countries and found out

listening and speaking skills Listening skill is also considered a source of anxiety for learners of English (Graham, 2006: 165) This anxiety become more serious if the listeners are under the false impression that they must understand every word they hear resulting in low self-confidence in listening Many of English learners attribute their problems in listening to what they perceive as their low listening ability or difficult listening texts or tasks Such attributions indicate a sense of passivity and helplessness in language learners, thus easily resulting in their becoming demotivated and fed up with listening It is, therefore, difficult for learners to have a clear understanding of how to go about listening in a second language and to find ways to improve their performance Flowerdew and Miller (2005) argued that students should be taught how to listen by equipping them with effective listening strategies (p.69) Chamot and O‟Malley (1989) suggested that the description of learning strategies can hinge on the distinction between declarative

and procedural knowledge Learners can have declarative knowledge about learning strategies through formal instruction This will encourage the learners to be aware of their existing strategies and the choices of strategies they can use with new materials Through verbalizing the strategies, “application and repeated applications of the strategies with various learning materials, the learners can gradually proceduralize the learning strategies.” (p.420)

Not much research, however, has been carried out on the effects of strategy training

on listening comprehension Furthermore, the few studies that have been completed

in this area have produced mixed results Some studies indicated no improvement in students’ listening comprehension skills after strategy training (Ozeki, 2000) while others showed slight improvement such as in the research by Flowerdew at al (2005) Since this is still a controversial issue, it is necessary to do more research on strategy training With a wide range of learning strategies to be chosen, it is difficult to cover many strategies just in a small thesis experiment Therefore, this study only focuses

on the training of bottom-up and top-down learning strategies for students during the

listening comprehension tasks, namely, “The impacts of listening strategy training

on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C High School: A experimemtal study”

quasi-2 Research questions:

The aims are specified in two research questions:

the listening strategies?

2 How did the training of listening strategies have impacts on the students’ listening performance?

3 Objectives of the study

In order to answer the above questions, the study aims at:

top-down listening strategies

training on the 10-grade students’ listening performance at My Duc C high school

- Formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of the listening skills at My Duc C high school

4 Scope of the study

In this study, the investigator intended to train bottom-up and top-down

strategies was experimented over a period of 6 weeks and applied in the three stages of a listening lesson: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening The sample population is 70 students from two classes: 10A3 and 10A9, who are at the same age and have the same total years of learning English – 9 years with the same curriculum

5 Methodology

To fulfill the above objectives, quantitative method has been chosen for the study Comments, remarks, comparison, suggestions and conclusions are based on factual research Data for analysis in this study are gained through the following sources:

- Pre-test and post-test

- Survey questionnaire

6 Significance of the study

It is hoped that this study will be a good source of reference for both teachers and learners of English It is conducted to provide an insight into the current perception of the students’ listening strategies and offer a period of strategy training in order to improve the students’ listening performance Therefore, it is believed that this study will raise the teachers’ awareness of the advantages of strategy training so that they can adjust their teaching properly in order to develop students’ listening skill

7 Outline of the study:

This minor thesis consists of 3 parts:

Part A: Introduction, presents the rationale, research questions, objectives, scope, methodology, significance and design of the study

Part B: Development, which is divided into 3 chapters:

relevant to the purpose of the study

the methods, the way to collect data, the training procedure of listening strategies, Data analysis methods

detailed presentation of the major findings of the study achieved through the questionnaires and the experiment on the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school The implications of the study in which suggestions for improving listening skill to the students at My Duc C high school are proposed at the end of this chapter

Part C: Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the limitations and provides some suggestions for further study

PART B DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

1 Definitions of listening:

Traditionally, listening is considered a passive language skill alongside the reading skill It means that learners are almost passive in practising listening activities in the classroom However, research has shown that listening is not a passive process, and it requires full participation and undivided attention of the learners Vandergrift (1999) rejected the treatment of listening comprehension as a passive skill and defines listening comprehension as an active process in which learners must distinguish the differences between sounds, vocabulary, grammar intonation, stress and context in order to interpret and respond to messages immediately (p 168)

According to Nunan, for language learners, listening is the basic skill that helps learners to communicate effectively He also stated that students spend over 50% of their time listening (p.9)

Underwood (1989:1) believed that “listening is the activity of paying attention and trying to get meaning for something we hear”; which is a complex process that enables the brain to construct meaning from the sounds heard and understand spoken language

To listen successfully, the listener must be responsible for decoding the message and supplying information that enriches what is said in a number of ways based on his/her knowledge of pragmatics, context, semantics or inference (Geranpayeh and Taylor, 2013:100) Or as O’Malley & Chamot (1989:3) said the listener must construct meaning from passages by relating what they hear to existing knowledge

Buck (2001:5) indicated that listening is an active process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound in which

“number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge” In another word, he concluded “comprehension is

affected by a wide range of variables, and that potentially characteristic of the speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message”

In short, to promote listening comprehension, teaching and learning practice should, therefore, place more emphasis on learners by providing them with environments or opportunities to confront with texts in their own ways and construct their own meanings They should be trained how to listen effectively by teaching them some effective listening strategies

2 Learning strategies:

2.1 Learning strategies – definition:

There are a lot of definitions proposed for learning strategies, with much disagreement of precisely what learning strategies are or, indeed, if they really exist In the Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics (1999), Oxford offers this definition: Learning strategies for second or foreign language learners are “specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that students use to improve their own progress

in developing skills in a second or foreign language These strategies can facilitate the internalization, storage, retrieval, or use of the new language.” (p 518)

Many researchers have attempted more simplified definitions such as the following “Strategies are the conscious actions that learners take to improve their language learning” (Anderson, 2005: 757) In their study, Weinstein and Mayer (1986) defined learning strategies (LS) as "behaviors and thoughts that a learner engages in during learning" which are "intended to influence the learner's encoding process" (p 315) Oxford (1990:9) uses the term learning strategies to mention techniques, behaviors, actions, thought process, problem solving, or study skills taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to a new situation These early definitions from the educational literature reflect the roots of learning strategies in cognitive science, with its essential assumptions that human beings process information and that learning involves such information processing Clearly, learning strategies are involved in all learning, regardless of the content and context

Learner strategies have learning facilitation as a goal and are intentional

on the part of the learner The goal of strategy use is to “affect the learner’s

motivational or affective state, or the way in which the learner selects, acquires, organizes, or integrates new knowledge” (Weinstein and Mayer 1986:315) In the process of listening comprehension, there are three different types of strategies: (a) meta-cognitive strategies, (b) cognitive strategies, and (c) socioaffective strategies(O´Malley and Chamot, 1990:43-51) Meta-cognitive strategies, involve planning, monitoring and evaluating comprehension It refers to situations such as paying attention to the main points of a lecture, for example Cognitive strategies are used to manipulate information, which include repetition, organising new language, summarising meaning, guessing meaning from context, using imagery for memorisation All of these strategies involve deliberate manipulation of language to improve learning Socio- affective strategies are related to the ways that L2 learners decide to interact with others including cooperation and self-encouragement The present study will focus on the cognitive strategies - bottom–up and top-down during the listening comprehension task as Nunan (1998) suggests, we should design activities that teach both bottom-up and top-down processing skills and teach students strategies to control their own listening

2.2 Bottom up learning strategies:

According to Jack and Willy (2002), “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 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 form together to form complete meaningful texts (p 239)

Bottom-up processes describe the ways in which the linguistic competence of a listener works to 'build' toward comprehension of a message According to Peterson (2001), these are the lower level processes that work to construct meaning from recognition of sounds and words, which, when identified, are fit into larger phrasal units and then matched with related ideas stored in long term memory He suggested three successive stages of Bottom-Up processing: perceptual processing, parsing, and utilization (p 88) Brown (2007) states that Bottom-Up processing "focuses on sounds,

words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other components of spoken language” (p 312) At lower levels of language proficiency, the activation of Bottom-Up processing is thought to impose a great strain on conscious attention and therefore, working memory

The listener uses this process to assemble the message piece-by-piece from the speech stream, going from the parts to the whole Bottom-up processing involves perceiving and parsing the speech stream at increasingly larger levels beginning with auditory-phonetic, phonemic, syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, propositional, pragmatic and interpretive (Field, 2003:326) Richard (2008:4) stated that bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message Comprehension begins with the data that has been received which is analysed as successive levels of organization – sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts – until meaning is arrived at Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding, to find the meaning of something

Many traditional classroom listening activities focus primarily on bottom-up processing For examples, exercises such as dictation, cloze listening, the use of multiple choice questions after a text and similar activities which require close and detailed recognition and processing of the input and which assume that everything the listener needs to understand is contained in the input

To sum up, in bottom up the listener is supposed to pay attention to every detail

of the spoken text In the bottom up process the listener reaches understanding following a sequence that goes from sounds to words to grammatical relations to lexical meaning to finally arrive at the message

2.3 Top-down learning strategies

Jack and Willy (2002) stated that in top-down process, “the listener uses previous knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening takes place

to make sense of what he or she hears Context and situation includes such things as knowledge of the topic at hand, the speaker or speakers and the relationship to the situation, as well as to each other and prior events.” (p 239)

According to Peterson (2001:94), top-down processes work in the opposite direction of bottom-up strategy, drawing on the listener's own prior knowledge and expectations to help decode the message The listener's repository of background information (sometimes called schemata) can relate to the context, the topic, the type

of text, conventions of rhetoric and discourse organization This knowledge becomes useful in decoding a message, even when a message hasn't been heard in its entirety Knowledge of facts, propositions and expectations allow prediction and differencing that enable the listener or reader to bypass some aspects of bottom-up processing This allows listeners to "fill in the gaps" which are often present in spontaneous unrehearsed speech, helping them arrive at global meanings and interpretation that don't rely on comprehension of every subsection of the message Without paying attention to grammatical form, listeners can often assemble a meaning just from the context and their knowledge of key words (Newton, 2009) Top-down requires the ability of bringing prior information that is used to understand the topic the speaker is talking about In top-down the listener is able to make predictions about what is going

to be said by the speaker, it means that the listener can deduce or anticipate the final message The listener can do it by using his prior knowledge and global expectations about the language and the world

Meanwhile, Richards (2008:6) suggested that top-down process refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message While bottom-up processing goes from language to meaning, top-down processing goes from meaning to language It may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, it may be situational or contextual knowledge, or it may be knowledge in the form of

“schemata” or “scripts” – plans about the overall structure of events and the relationships between them The following activities develop top-down listening skills

- Students read one speaker’s part in a conversation, predict the other speaker’s part, then listen and compare

- Students read a list of key points to be covered in a talk, then listen to see which ones were mentioned

- Students listen to part of a story, complete the rest of it, then listen and compare endings

- Students read news headlines, guess what happened, then listen to the news items and compare

Peterson (2001:93-94) presented a quantity of activities illustrating the difference between bottom-up and top-down processes

Exercises for beginning level listeners

Bottom-Up

Top-down

1 Recognizing fast speech forms

Top-down

In conclusion, strategies are necessary for raising students' awareness on listening as a skill that requires active engagement, by explicitly teaching listening strategies, learners are provided with tools needed to cope with listening comprehension tasks and to develop the skills, abilities and the confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom In this way, learning strategies are giving the students the foundation for communicative

competence in the new language

3 Strategy training:

Traditionally, language curricula have tended to concentrate on teaching knowledge and skills, and have neglected to teach learners how to learn Learner training in second or foreign language teaching is a new way of teaching learners explicitly the techniques of learning, and an awareness of how and when to use strategies to enable them to become self-directed (Williams and Burden 1997) Learner training integrated in second or foreign language teaching subsumes explicit or implicit strategies training, and language teaching

According to social interactionist theory, learner’s knowledge of strategies can

be developed through the process of scaffolding (Chamot and O‟Malley 1994:153) Through scaffolding, the teacher avoids giving direct instruction but facilitates learners

to choose the strategies in learning and using a second language Oxford (1990) suggested that even in ordinary language classrooms, it is possible for teachers to help

their students learn strategies that will make learning more effective and often more fun In response to the criticisms about the effectiveness of the strategies training, Chamot and Rubin (1994, cited Cohen 2003) pointed out that it is not a particular strategy that leads to improved performance, but rather the effective management of a repertoire of strategies

Strategy training aims to provide learners with the tools to do the following:

efficiently

Therefore, the strategies training should provide the learners with a repertoire of strategies which they can choose the strategies that they feel comfortable to use with a specific task The training program should also train the learners how to select strategies that match their needs and goals, and the nature of the task

4 Listening strategy models:

A number of models for teaching learning strategies in both first and second language contexts have been developed (see, for example, Chamot et al., 1999; Cohen, 2003;; O’ Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990) These instructional models share many features All agree on the importance of developing students’ metacognitive understanding of the value of learning strategies and suggest that this is facilitated through teacher demonstration and modeling All emphasize the importance of providing multiple practice opportunities with the strategies so that students can use them autonomously All suggest that students should evaluate how well a strategy has worked, choose strategies for a task, and actively transfer strategies to new tasks Although no empirical evidence has yet been provided to determine a single best method for conducting strategy training, at least three different instructional models have been identified Each has been designed to raise student awareness of the

purpose and rationale of strategy use, give students opportunities to practice the strategies they are being taught, and help them use the strategies in new learning contexts

One model, proposed by Cohen (2003) with reference to first language learning but applicable to the study of a second language as well, targets isolated strategies by including explicit modeling and explanation of the benefits of applying a specific strategy, extensive functional practice with the strategy, and an opportunity to transfer the strategy to new learning contexts The sequence includes the following steps:

1 Teacher as diagnostician: Helps students identify current strategies and learning styles

2 Teacher as language learner: Shares own learning experiences and thinking processes

3 Teacher as learner trainer: Trains students how to use learning strategies

4 Teacher as coordinator: Supervises students’ study plans and monitors difficulties

5 Teacher as coach: Provides ongoing guidance on students’ progress

In the second model , Oxford et al (1990) outlines a useful sequence for the introduction of strategies that emphasizes

1 Explicit strategy awareness;

2 Discussion of the benefits of strategy use;

3 Functional and contextualized practice with the strategies;

4 Self-evaluation and monitoring of language performance;

5 Suggestions for or demonstrations of the transferability of the strategies to new tasks

This sequence is not prescriptive of strategies that the learners are supposed to use, but rather descriptive of the various strategies that they could use for a broad range of learning tasks

The third model, developed by Chamot and O’Malley (1990) called CALLA (Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach), is especially useful after students have already had practice in applying a broad range of strategies in a variety of contexts This model has five instruction phases as explained below (Chamot and O’Malley, 1990, 201 - 203):

1 Preparation: Students prepare for strategies instruction by identifying their prior knowledge about and the use of specific strategies

2 Presentation: The teacher demonstrates the new learning strategy and explains how and when to use it

3 Practice: Students practice using the strategy with regular class activities

4 Evaluation: Students self-evaluate their use of the learning strategy and how well the strategy is working for them

5 Expansion: Students extend the usefulness of the learning strategy by applying it to new situations or leaning for them

All three models begin by identifying students’ current learning strategies through activities such as completing questionnaires, engaging in discussions about familiar tasks, and reflecting on strategies used immediately after performing a task These models all suggest that the teacher should model the new strategy, thus making the instruction explicit The CALLA model is recursive rather than linear so that teachers and students always have the option of revisiting prior instructional phases as needed (Chamot, 2005) The Oxford (1999) model, on the other hand, has students work through a cycle of five steps, then begin a new cycle The Cohen (2003) model has the teacher take on a variety of roles in order to help students learn to use learning strategies appropriate to their own learning styles The Oxford model provides initial familiarization with the new strategies, then has students make personal action plans to improve their own learning, whereas the CALLA model builds in a self-evaluation phase for students to reflect on their use of strategies before going on to transfer the strategies to new tasks

Strategies-based instruction (SBI) seems to have an advantage over the others, since it is the model that integrates strategies training into foreign language

classrooms SBI was introduced by Andrew Cohen (Cohen, 2003) It is a centered approach to teaching that extends strategies training to include both explicit and implicit integration of language learning and language use strategies into a foreign language classroom (Cohen 2003) suggested that in a typical SBI classroom, teachers

learner-do the following:

Describe, model, and give examples of potential useful strategies Elicit additional examples from students, based on students ‟own learning experiences”

Lead small-group and whole-class discussions about strategies

Encourage students to experiment with a broad range of strategies Integrate strategies into everyday class materials, explicitly and implicitly embedding them into the language tasks to provide for contextualized strategy practice (page 4)

In summary, current models of language learning strategy instruction are solidly based on developing students’ knowledge about their own thinking and strategic processes and encouraging them to adopt strategies that will improve their language learning and proficiency

There have been a number of studies that look into listening strategies in general and the training of listening strategies in particular Until recently, most research focused on discovering and categorizing the types of learning strategies used in language learning or the differences between strategy uses in successful language learners as compared to those of less successful learners (Oxford,1990; Vandergrift, 1997; Goh ,2002; Carrier, 2003; Vandergrift, 2003; Chamot, 2005; Graham and Macaro , 2008; Coşkun A., 2010; Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari, 2010; Eftekhary & Gharib, 2013) The focus has shifted to finding ways to teach effective strategy use Researchers disagree on whether or not listening strategies should be actively taught to

L2 learners The study by Thomson & Rubin (1996) did not show a positive correlation between strategy instruction and learner performance Ozeki (2000) found out no improvement in students’ listening comprehension skills after strategy training However, other studies have shown that intervention, the training of strategies, has been beneficial for L2 learners (Mc Gruddy, 1998; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Ross & Rost, 1991; Thompson & Rubin, 1996; Cohen, 2003; Flowerdew and Miller, 2005; Eftekhary & Gharib, 2013) Even among those researchers who believe strategies should be taught, there is disagreement about in what context that should occur Is it better to teach strategies as part of the ESL or foreign language curriculum, or might it

be better to provide a course of strategy instruction in isolation? Chamot (2004) proposed that “teachers should opt for explicit instruction and should probably integrate the instruction into their regular course work, rather than providing a separate learning strategies course” (p.19)

In Vietnam, many studies about listening focus on the difficulties learners encounter in listening comprehension and the solutions for them like the ones by Phùng Nguyễn Quỳnh Nga (2009); Phùng Thị Hoài Thu (2008); Phạm Thành Vinh (2002); Lê Thị Xuân Anh (2001);

However, very few researchers have tried explicit training on listening strategies for students, especially on both top-down and bottom-up strategies The study by Duong Thi Thao (2012) only focuses on investigating the effects of bottom-

up techniques in teaching and learning listening skill to the first-year non-major students of English at Thai Nguyen University of Technology The researcher concluded that bottom-up techniques brought certain positive effects in teaching listening to first year students at TNUT However, the study only focused on bottom-

up techniques and the overall effects of listening strategies were not covered

It is necessary that the training of listening strategies should be further looked into Therefore, this small thesis tries to explore “The impact of listening strategy training on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C High School”

CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2.1 Settings:

This quasi-experimental study was conducted at Mỹ Đức C high school in the southern suburb of Hanoi, which was founded 34 years ago It is a public school with

30 classes from grade 10 to grade 12, 35 to 40 students each The students here have three English lessons a week The textbook used for teaching is the new Tieng Anh 10,

11, 12 at basic level

The students come from Mỹ Đức district, which is 60 kilometers from the

with the score of around 24, which is considered the lowest in comparison with other schools in Hanoi Therefore, most of the students are not good at and uninterested in learning, especially learning English, one of the most difficult subjects as they consider

There are 9 teachers of English at the school ranging from 30 to 52 years old Most of the teachers are enthusiastic and very responsible in teaching They all complain about the difficult current curricula at school, which is inappropriate for the students’ level, especially with listening skill So they all try to find the way to improve the students’ skills and knowledge

2.2 Participants:

This quasi-experimental study was carried on 70 students from 2 classes 10A3 and 10A9 within 6 weeks of the summer extra course of the school year 2013-2014 They are all at the age of 16 and all have studied English since they were at grade 6 36 students in class 10A3 are chosen as the control group and the others in class 10A9 the experimental one

2.3 Research method:

The quasi-experimental research method was chosen for this study for some reasons

First, it could “explore the strength of the relationships between variables” and

it is “an appropriate way of gathering data” (Nunan, 1992:25) Second, the study was

suitable to the characteristics of the experimental research There are three designs in the experimental research: pre-experimental, quasi-experimental and true-experimental The differences are the designs of control group According to Nunan (1992:14), the pre-experiment “may have pre- and post- treatment tests, but lacks a control group The quasi-experiment “has both pre- and posttests and experimental and control groups, but no random assignment of subjects” The true-experiment “has both pre- and posttests, experimental and control groups, and random assignment of subjects.” Meanwhile, the subjects of the study had already been designed before the treatment; the number of students in two classes was not changed or moved, so it contributed to the increase in the external validity Finally, all participants were Vietnamese of the same age, living all over the areas around My Duc C high school, so they were said to be at the same level of social and cultural background Moreover, their English proficiency was the same according to their scores in the pretest they had done Therefore, with all above-mentioned rationale, the quasi-experimental research was suitable and feasible to be chosen with the independent variable (top-down and bottom-up strategies) and dependent variable (the students’ listening performance) 2.4 Data collection methods:

In an attempt to achieve the goals of the research, a quasi-experimental research was conducted as an appropriate approach to establish the cause-effect relationship between the bottom-up and top-down strategy training with the students’ listening comprehension In this experiment, the training in bottom-up and top-down listening strategies (the treatment) was the independent variable and the scores from the listening test (pretest and posttest scores) were the dependent variables The experimental group received strategy training while the control group went through the normal procedures in class without any strategy training Both groups were given two sets of pretests before the strategy training and two sets of posttests after the training These consisted of a listening comprehension test and a listening strategy questionnaire Both pretest and posttest scores were compared at the end of the training to find out if there was any significant difference in their listening test scores and strategy use

The study employed pre-test, post-test along with the questionnaires as instruments to collect data

2.3.1 Pre-test:

The pre-test was designed to identify the language proficiency level of the two groups: control and experimental group The pre-test aimed at defining whether there was statistically significant difference between the language performance of the experimental group and the control group before the treatment There were two tasks

in the pre-test The first task, which was designed to test the students’ bottom-up strategies, included 10 detailed items that students had to fill in the information The second task tested the students’ top-down strategies with five question items The question types used in the pre-test were familiar to the students (See appendix) 2.3.2 Post-test:

The post-test was designed similarly to the pre-test with the aim of determining the students’ improvement in listening performance of the two groups after six weeks

of treatment

2.3.3 Questionnaire:

This questionnaire was translated into Vietnamese and delivered to the students after they had completed each task in the pretest and posttest to see what strategies they had applied and to what degree they had been aware of these strategies The questionnaire sheet included 7 question items:

1 I find listening passage too difficult for me to find out the information for the questions so I often choose anything I like

2 I just read the questions briefly then fill in the blanks/answer the questions with what I can listen to

3 I understand the sentence/ passage meaning by putting the meaning of all the words I can listen together

4 I read the questions then based on the question/sentence structures, I find out what information the questions ask to find (numbers, adv., adj., …) and try to listen to catch the answers

5 When I find out the topic, I make a list of questions in my mind based on my background knowledge about the topic, then listen for details

6 I read the questions first, guessing the listening topic and the answers for the questions based on my previous knowledge Then I will check and correct the answer while listening

7 Based on the speakers’ intonation, I can infer the speakers’ attitude and their relationship

The students were asked to select between agreeing and disagreeing with the question items Questions 1 was for the students who were unable to listen to almost anything in the listening passage Question 2 tested the students who just listened to find out the information needed without using any strategies Question items 3, 4, 5

their top-down strategies If the students agreed with question items 1 and 2, it meant that they applied no strategies in listening, items 3, 4, 5 the bottom-up and numbers 6 and 7 the top-down ones (See appendix 1.)

2.5 Training procedure:

training was to make students aware of the importance of using strategies to deal with common problems when listening, and provide them with strategies which might help them to effectively understand English The procedures were based on Strategies-based instruction (SBI) introduced by Andrew Cohen (Cohen, 2003) since it seems to have an advantage over the others, and it is the model that integrates strategy training into foreign language classrooms In the experimental classroom, the teacher does as follow:

During the implementation of this study, the participants were selected based on

a pre-test designed by the researcher The questionnaire was delivered to the students after they had completed each task in the pretest to see what strategy they had applied and to what degree they had been aware of these strategies so that the researcher was able to find out what need to be trained Then, the researcher started teaching listening

for both control group and experimental group applying different methods The control group was taught listening without explicit instruction of listening strategies The experimental one was treated with top-down and bottom-up strategy instructions Table 1 represents the teaching plan during the implementation period

TEACHING PLAN S

ession

Strategies

- Practice with listening task questions

- Peterson

(2001:88,94)

- Richard

Aims: students can answer some

information

knowledge about some jobs and some famous places in Britain

Bin (2011:98)

question types and identify what strategy is appropriate for these types

of questions; what information needs to

be listened to find out

- Have students listen twice then check

- Feedback and evaluate the strategy use

- Activate ss’ knowledge about some famous places in Paris

- Teach some vocabulary

- Ask ss to guess the content of the listening passage based on some words and knowledge they have learnt

- Deliver the task questions sheet and ask them to get the answer before listening

- Ask them what strategy should

be used in these kinds of task

- Have ss listen and check

- Evaluate the effect of strategy use

Xuân Bá (2007:36)

- Deliver task question sheet to

ss and ask them to guess the main idea

Xuan Ba (2007:14)

and the answer to each question

- Ask ss what strategy should be used in this case

- Have ss listen and check the answers

- Evaluate the effect of strategy use

om-up and

top-down

practice

Aim: help ss practice both

bottom-up and top-down strategies with the listening tasks in the current textbook at school

- Activate ss’ prior knowledge about football and some famous football players on the world and provide some new words related to the topic

- Ask ss to guess the topic of the listening passage based on what have been provided

- Ask ss to read the question types and ask them what strategy should be used for these kinds of questions

- Ask them to guess the answers before listening and ask them what kind of strategy they are using when they do the guessing and when they fill

Table 1: Teaching plan during implementation period

With session 1, the students were taught to be able to distinguish between bottom-up and top-down strategies; with lesson 2 and 3, the students were trained how

to apply bottom-up strategies; and with session 4 and 5, the top-down ones Session 6 was sourced from the English 10 textbook in the high school current curriculum in which both top-down and bottom-up exercises were included The teacher helped students deal with these tasks by guiding them how to apply the appropriate strategies while listening

The pre-listening phrase activities involved activating prior knowledge, explaining new vocabulary and making predictions During this stage, the participants became familiar with the topic by activating previous knowledge through questions such as “do you know that place?”, “do you like this place?” Their prior knowledge was also activated by asking personal questions such as “have you ever been there?”,

“do you know which one is more expensive…”, “which place do you think is best for going out”?; and by explaining key vocabulary by showing pictures In this way, the participants became familiar with the context; hence, they were able to infer about the topic when the facilitator asks “What could the topic for the audio be about?”

Before the participants were exposed to the audio, the facilitator handed out a worksheet of what they had to listen to during the while listening stage, and she gave instructions regarding what they had to do with the information The facilitator explained that they were going to listen to the audio twice, and she explained that in the first time of listening they only needed to hear the audio in order to get a general gist about it; they would have to get general information by answering questions such

as “how many people are involved in the conversation?”, “are they British or American?”, “where did the conversation take place?” Afterwards, the facilitator gave the participants a worksheet that they had to answer during the while listening stage, The second time of listening, the participants centered on comprehension through exercises that required selective listening, sequencing, listening for main ideas, inferring, contextualizing, putting pictures in order, define emotional actions With exercises that required specific detail or filling information, the participants

would be instructed how to listen and what to focus on when they listened in order to answer the questions properly

After this stage the whole group checked the listening tasks If some questions were misunderstood, the facilitator would expose the participants to that part of the audio so that they could understand the audio and gave answers to the question and this way they could improve their listening comprehension In the post listening stage activities such as role play simulation based on the audio, summarizing, and recreating the text were implemented

After 6 training sessions, the questionnaire was delivered to students one more time to see how they had applied the trained strategies and whether there was any improvement

2.6 Data analysis methods

When the data collection was accomplished, the data analysis was initiated The pre-tests, post-tests were scored by another teacher to ensure the objectivity and then analyzed by using Excel application The results were demonstrated in tables with detailed explanation The questionnaires were collected and analysed by means of descriptive statistics – the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) T-test were used to compare mean scores of listening comprehension between the two groups at the beginning and end of the study The questionnaires were to test the students’ bottom-up and top-down strategies so they would be divided into two themes respectively for a clearer look into the reality of the students’ strategy use before and after the treatment After that, they were processed in Excel application and then presented in the forms of tables and figures

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

In oder to answer this question, the data collected from the questionnaire given to the students of both groups after each task of the pretest and posttest were analysed

The researcher used the descriptive analysis and Excel application to process the data and presented the findings in tables, and figures

high school been aware of the listening strategies?

Table 2: Bottom-up strategy use of the control group

As can be seen from the table, 9 out of 36 students (25%) in the pretest said that they found the listening passage difficult so they could not find the information to answer the questions and just chose anything they thought appropriate This number in the posttest was eight or 22% This number remained nearly the same because those students knew almost nothing about English and, as a result, they could not improve after a period of listening practice Among 25 students who could listen for something,

15 (42%) claimed that they just read through the questions briefly and filled in the blank with what they could listen for Only 10% of the listeners comprehended the passage by putting the meaning of all the words they could listen together and 17% of them read through the questions carefully and found out what needed listening to fill in the blank Meanwhile in the posttest, these number were 50% and 28% respectively This means that after a period of teaching listening, despite without integrating

listening strategies into the curriculum, more students could improve their listening comprehension

Almost no students use top-down strategy to guess the answers in this specific listening task

Table 3: Bottom-up strategy use of the experimental group

The questionnaire for task 1 in the pretest in experimental group shows the similar result to that in the control group However, these numbers are quite different in the posttest

In the pretest, 32% of the students claimed that they could not listen for anything However, this number decreased to only 15% in the posttest These 15% listeners remained unchanged due to the fact that they had very low input knowledge Up to 62%

in the pretest claimed that they just read the questions briefly before listening while 65%

of the listeners in the posttest knew how to read through the questions carefully to find out what information needed listening, and 62% could comprehend the passage by putting all the words they heard together Clearly, most of the students knew how to apply the bottom-up strategy in the posttest after a period of listening strategy training

3.1.2 Top-down strategies:

3.1.2.1 Control group:

Table 4: Top-down strategy use of the control group

As shown by the table, in the control group, still around one fourth of the students were unable to listen for the information to answer the questions, both in the pretest and the posttest Many students (32%) in the posttest still analysed the question structures to find out what needed to listen and 41% of them tried to understand the listening passage by the help of the individual words they could listen to However, all the listeners (100%) could not make the questions based on their knowledge about the topic to pave the wave for listening and only 2 students in the pretest and 3 students in the posttest could guess the answers before listening Meanwhile, more students (25%)

in the posttest could infer the speakers’ relationship than in the pretest with 16%, which might be the result of the task characteristics similar to some real life conversations These statistical numbers show that the students in the control group were unaware of top-down strategy and unable to employ it in their listening comprehension process, both in the pretest and the posttest

Table 5: Top-down strategy use of the experimental group

In contrary to the control group, the experimental group shows some clear change between the posttest and the pretest in the employment of top-down strategies in listening comprehension process While the number of the students in the experimental group who were unaware of top-down strategies in the pretest was nearly the same to those in the control group, it changed dramatically in the posttest with 32% making questions based on their knowledge about the topic before listening; 59% guessing the answers before listening; and 79% inferring the speakers’ relationship The numbers of the students who made questions before listening was quite small because this is a difficult top-down strategy, which needs a longer duration of training to master Although this task was to test students’ top-down strategies, about two thirds of the students still employed bottom-up process in comprehending the listening passage This would make the listening comprehension more efficient thanks to the combination of the two strategies as Nunan (1998) proposed

3.1.3 The cross-comparison of control and experimental groups:

Table 6: Bottom-up strategy use of both groups

As can be seen from the table, the bottom-up strategy application in the pretest is

nearly the same in both groups The number of the students who could understand the

listening passage by putting all the meanings of the words they heard together in the

posttest in both group was much higher than that of the pretest (50% with the control

and 62% with the experimental group) It means that the students of both group all

made progress after a period of learning lisening skill However, it is different with the

fact that 42% of the students in the control group still employed no strategies in

comparison with only 18% of the students in the experimental group And with

bottom-up strategy employment of analyzing questions before listening, only 28% of

the students in the control group knew how to do it while this number in the

experimental group was up to 65%

Comment [h1]: Put a clue here so reader know which question refers to what without looking back

3.1.3.2 Top-down strategies:

same in both groups But this was different in the posttest when still no students in the

control group could make a list of questions prior to listening while this number was

32% in the experimental group Up to 59% of the listeners in the experimental group

could do the guessing, one essential strategy in listening comprehension, but only 9%

in the control group could do this It was surprising that 79% of the students in the

experimental group could infer the speakers’ relationship in comparison with only 25%

in the control group This is clearly the result of strategy intervention

Comment [h2]: Put a clue here so reader know which question refers to what without looking back

3.2 Research question 2: How did the training of listening strategies

have impacts on the students’ listening performance?

Based on the pre-test and post-test score of the two groups, the researcher used a t-test

to compare the two groups to see if the treatment actually brought about any difference

in students’ listening performance

Table 8: The relationship between experimental and control group’s test scores

The table shows that the probability value (p) before the experiment was 0.821559,

much higher than the critical point of 0.05 It showed that there was no significant

difference in language performance between the two groups before the experiment As

a result, these two groups are comparable

In contrast, after six-week experimental period, the probability value (p) was 0.036146,

much lower than the alpha level of 0.05, which was set for the t-test It proved that the

difference in the mean score between experimental and control group was not due to

the chance alone In other words, the higher mean made by the experimental group

must be resulted from the experimental treatment

Comment [h3]: move the table up to the last page