An exploratory study on 10th form students’ listening anxiety at thuong cat high school

LIST OF ABBRIVIATIONELT: English Language Teaching FLA: Foreign language anxiety FLLA: Foreign language listening anxiety FLLAS: Foreign language listening anxiety scale SPSS: Statistica

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGESAND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST –

GRADUTAE STUDIES

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

NGUYỄN MINH NGUYỆT

LISTENING ANXIETY AT THUONG CAT HIGH SCHOOL

(MỘT NGHIÊN CỨU THĂM DÒ VỀ SỰ LO LẮNG TRONG VIỆC HỌC

KỸ NĂNG NGHE CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 10 TRƯỜNG THPT THƯỢNG CÁT)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field : English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111

HANOI – 2017

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGESAND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST –

GRADUTAE STUDIES

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

NGUYỄN MINH NGUYỆT

LISTENING ANXIETY AT THUONG CAT HIGH SCHOOL

(MỘT NGHIÊN CỨU THĂM DÒ VỀ SỰ LO LẮNG TRONG VIỆC HỌC

KỸ NĂNG NGHE CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 10 TRƯỜNG THPT THƯỢNG CÁT)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field : English Teaching Methodology Code: 60140111

Supervisor: Dr Vũ Thị Thanh Nha

HANOI – 2017

Secondly, I would like to express my sincere thanks to my respectful professors

of the Faculty of Post-Graduated Department at University of Languages andInternational Studies for their devotion and their interesting lectures

I also want to give my big thanks to students from three classes 10D1, 10D2,10D6 who participate in this research

Last but not least, special thanks go to my family who are always by my sideand support me during the time I carry out this study

Anxiety is a common feeling that learners have to face when learning a foreignlanguage, especially with a difficult skill like listening This study aims at exploringthe listening anxiety of grade 10 students at Thuong Cat High school There are 130students from three classes participated in this survey The researcher used bothquantitative and qualitative The survey questionnaire was used to examine theexistence of listening anxiety and factors causing students’ anxiety The informalinterview further looked at the sources of students listening anxiety and found outsome suggested solutions The findings showed that the majority of participantsexperienced high listening anxiety Factors causing listening anxiety were dividedinto three categories: factors related to listening process, factors related to listeningtext and factors related to students’ learning habits From the students’ suggestions

in the interview, some solutions were proposed for both teachers and students.Onthe part of teachers, they should pay more attention to choose appropriate listeningmaterials, help students raise their language proficiency and teach them listeningstrategies Students also need to build their self-confidence and have more practice

to reduce listening anxiety and improve their listening comprehension

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii

ABSTRACT iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF ABBRIVIATION vi

LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS vii

LIST OF APPENDICES viii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationales of the study 1

1 2 Purpose of the study 2

1 3 Research questions 2

1 4 Significance of the study 2

1 5 Scope of the study 3

1 6 Structure of the study 3

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 4

2.1 Overview of listening comprehension 4

2.1.1 Definition of listening comprehension 4

2.1.2 The listening comprehension process 5

2.2 Overview of anxiety 6

2.2.1 Definition and types of anxiety 6

2.2.2 Foreign language anxiety 7

2.2 3 Listening anxiety 9

2.2.4 The previous studies of listening anxiety 10

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 13

3.1 Overview of current teaching and learning listening at Thuong Cat High School 13

3.2 Participants 15

3.3 Research method 15

3.4 Data collection instruments 16

3.5 Procedure 17

3.6 Data analysis method 17

CHAPTER 4: THE FINDINGS 19

4.1 Students’ background information 19

4 2 Reliability of the FLLA 22

4 3 Descriptive analysis 22

4 4 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) 23

4.5 Participants’ suggested solutions for reducing listening anxiety 34

CHAPTER5: CONCLUSION 38

5.1 Summary of the main findings 38

5.2 Implication 40

5.2.1 Recommendation for teachers 40

5.2.2 Recommendations for learners 46

5.3 Limitations and suggestions for further study 47

REFERENCES 48 APPENDICES I

LIST OF ABBRIVIATION

ELT: English Language Teaching

FLA: Foreign language anxiety

FLLA: Foreign language listening anxiety

FLLAS: Foreign language listening anxiety scale

SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences

LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS

Chart 1: Students’ time of starting learning English……….17

Chart 2: Students’ judgment about listening skill in comparison with other skills…… 18

Chart 3: Student’s level of interest in listening skill………18

Chart 4: Student’s practice outside class……… 19

Table 1: Listening anxiety related to Listening process………22

Table 2: Listening anxiety related to Listening text……….25

Table 3: Listening anxiety related to Student’s learning habits ……….29

LIST OF APPENDICES

APPENDIX 1: ROTATED COMPONENT MATRIX………48APPENDIX 2: DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS OF FLLAS……….50APPENDIX 3: THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE LISTENING ANXIETY SCALE 52APPENDIX 4: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE (Vietnamese version)………54APPENDIX 5: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE (English version)……… 56APPENDIX 6: INFORMAL INTERVIEW……….58APPENDIX 7: TABLE CONTENTS OF TEXTBOOK TIENG ANH 10……….59APPENDIX 8: UNIT 1- TIENG ANH 10………60

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides the overview of the research The researcher presents thereasons for choosing the topic, research questions, the purpose, scopes, significanceand the structure of the study

1.1 Rationales of the study.

English has become the international language and it is used in many countries

It is undeniable that the number of people who learns English as a second language

is increasing because of its importance In Vietnam, English is getting more andmore popular and it is one of the compulsory subjects in most high schools Inrecent years, teaching English has changed remarkably from the traditional teachingmethods to Communicative Language Teaching Accordingly, learners’ ability tocommunicate is the first priority When learning English, learners have to masterfour skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing Listening is one of the mostimportant skills for a student to communicate effectively However, it seems thatmany Vietnamese learners have difficulty in listening to English One of the mostmajor factors that influence on students’ listening comprehension is the anxiety.MacIntyre and Gardner (1991) asserted that “anxiety poses several problems for thestudents of a foreign language because it can interfere with the acquisition,retention, and production of the new language” (p 86) Every learner experiencesanxiety in different degrees Feeling anxious in the classroom makes learners shownegative reactions, emotions and behaviors and they are not able to develop theirfull ability in language learning From the reality in Thuong Cat High School, manystudents perform poorly and they feel stressful when they learn listening lessons.Some of them are very nervous when they are faced with a difficult task Someothers have the feeling of tension when they cannot understand the words they hear.Students seem afraid of listening to foreign language and unwilling to listen to therecords Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to be aware of the factors that causestudents’ anxiety in listening lessons and have more appropriate teaching

methods to help students improve their listening ability In fact, learners’ anxiety hasbeen great concern of the researchers and teachers because reducing anxiety is a key

to success in foreign or second language learning A lot of research about listeninganxiety has been conducted; however most of them are conducted with universitystudents There are few studies about anxiety of high school students That is

motivation for researcher to do the study “An exploratory study on 10 th

form students’ listening anxiety at Thuong Cat High

School.” 1 2 Purpose of the study

The purpose of the research is to find out factors causing students’ anxiety inlistening English at Thuong Cat High School These factors originate from thelistening process, listening texts and students’ learning habits Another aim of thisstudy is to suggest some solutions for teachers and students to help students reducelistening anxiety and improve their listening competence

1 3 Research questions

The study aims at finding out the answers to the following questions:

- What factors cause students‟ listening anxiety at Thuong Cat High

School?

- What are possible solutions to reduce students‟ listening anxiety?

1 4 Significance of the study

Awareness of the anxiety that students encounter in listening skills benefitsboth students and teachers This study will provide teachers’ knowledge of theforeign language anxiety, especially the causes of listening anxiety and give someguidelines for teachers to help their students overcome their anxiety

This research will also help students identify their anxiety in learning listeningand from this they can find some ways to manage their anxiety level not only inlistening skill but also in other skills when learning a foreign language Hopefully,the findings of this study will be of some help to the improvement of the teachingand learning listening skills of teachers and students in high schools in general and

at Thuong Cat High School in particular

1 5 Scope of the study

In this study, the researcher only focuses on the causes of listening anxiety of

10thform students at Thuong Cat High School and gives some solutions for teachersand students to help students reduce anxiety

1 6 Structure of the study

The study is divided into five chapters

- Chapter 1: Introduction This chapter presents the rationale, the purpose, scope, significance and the structure of the study

-Chapter 2: Literature review This chapter provides the literature review of foreignlanguage anxiety in general and listening anxiety in particular It also gives thetheories of listening comprehension

- Chapter 3: Methodology This chapter discusses the participants, method of the study, data collection instruments and data analysis

-Chapter 4: The findings This chapter presents the information about participants,the findings from questionnaires and interview

-Chapter 5: Conclusion This chapter makes a brief summary of the major findings, the implications, limitations and suggestions for further research

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter reviews the literature on anxiety, listening anxiety and listeningcomprehension The factors causing listening anxiety in previous studies are alsomentioned This knowledge, therefore, serves as a basis for further work in the latterchapters

2.1 Overview of listening comprehension

2.1.1 Definition of listening comprehension

Listening has been defined in different ways by many researchers and fromdifferent perspectives

In the past years, listening has not received much attention compared withother skills Buck (2001, p 32) notes that “listening is an important skill but due tothe practical complexities of providing spoken texts, it is neglected in manylanguage learning situations” (p.32) Field (cited in Richard, 2012) points out that

“In the early days of English language teaching, listening was a way of presentingnew grammar through model dialogues” (p.13) According to Richard (2008),listening as comprehension is the traditional way of thinking about the nature oflistening and the main function of listening in second language learning is tofacilitate understanding of spoken discourse It means that the first appearance oflistening was just to interpret and facilitate the message in order to speak However,the view of teaching listening has already changed Listening has changed its rolefrom a passive activity which deserved less class time to an active process throughwhich language acquisition takes place Listeners actively involve themselves in theinterpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge andlinguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text

According to Anderson and Lynch (1988), successful listening is not onlyunderstanding something that happens because of what a speaker says but thelistener also has a crucial part to play in the process, by activating various types of

knowledge, and by applying what he knows to what he hears and trying tounderstand what the speaker means.

Buck (2001) in his definition says that “listening comprehension is an activeprocess of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to theincoming sound” (p.31) This means that listening is the ability to recognize andrealize the meaning of what the speaker is saying, by grasping the meaning andunderstanding the way of pronouncing the words and language that shows, accent,pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary

Richards and Schmidt (2002) describe listening comprehension as “the process

of understanding speech in a first or second language The study of listeningcomprehension processes in second language learning focuses on the role ofindividual linguistic units (e.g phonemes, words, grammatical structures) as well asthe role of the listener’s expectations, the situation and context, backgroundknowledge and the topic”(p.313) In other words, listening is a process ofunderstanding a text by activating various kinds of phonology, grammar,background knowledge and experience

In short, listening comprehension is not a passive but an active process inwhich the listeners construct meaning from what they hear with intended meaning.Listeners need to get involve actively in the interpretation of what they hear, bringtheir own background knowledge and linguistic competence to reach fullcomprehension of what they hear

2.1.2 The listening comprehension process

The processing of listening is viewed as interactive process including twolevels: bottom-up processing and top-down processing

The bottom-up processing involves constructing meaning from the smallest unit

of the spoken language to the largest one in a linear mode (Nunan, 1998) It is

absolutely “text based” process where learners rely on the sounds, words andgrammar in the message in order to create meaning (Richard, 2008).

Top- down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of backgroundknowledge in understanding the meaning of a message This background knowledgeactivates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard andanticipate what will come next (Richards, 2008) In other words, listener employsprior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening occurs tomake sense of the information understand he/she hears

2.2 Overview of anxiety

2.2.1 Definition and types of anxiety

Anxiety has been considered one of the most important effective factors thatinfluence second language acquisition It is defined differently by differentresearchers Hansen (1977) called anxiety as an experience of general uneasiness, asense of foreboding, a feeling of tension Scovel (1978) defined that anxiety wasassociated with the feelings of uneasiness, frustration, sefl-doubt, apprehension orworry Spieberger (1983) gave another definition of anxiety as “the subjectivefeeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness and worry associated with an arousal

of the automatic nervous systems” (p.482)

Anxiety is usually classified into three types: trait anxiety, state anxiety andsituation-specific anxiety

- Trait anxiety is defined as an individual’s likelihood of becoming anxious

in any situation (Spielberger, 1983) It is usally viewed as an aspect ofpersonality and “a more permanent predisposition to be anxious” (Scovel,

1978, p.137)

- State anxiety occurs within specific, temporary situations and fades whenthe threat (or situation) disappears (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991) It is thetype of anxiety that that a person experiences at a particular moment in time

as a response to a definite situation

- The situation-specific anxiety is the specific forms of anxiety that occurconsistently over time within a given situation (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991).

It is related to a particular type of situation or event such as public speaking,examinations or class participation

In short, anxiety is a psychological concept which is associated with negativefeelings such as uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension and tension.Anxiety can be experienced at three perspectives: trait anxiety, state anxiety andsituation-specific anxiety

2.2.2 Foreign language anxiety

Foreign language anxiety is a situation specific anxiety that is related to foreignlanguage learning Many researchers have considered anxiety as one of the mostimportant factors that influence second language learning

Foreign language anxiety is defined as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions,beliefs, feelings and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising fromthe uniqueness of the language learning process” ( Horwitz and Cope ,1986, p.128)According to Gardner and MacIntyre (1993), language anxiety is “theapprehension experienced when a situation requires the use of a second languagewith which the individual is not fully proficient It is, therefore, seen as a stablepersonality trait referring to the propensity for an individual to react in a nervousmanner when speaking, listening, reading, or writing in the second language”.(Gardner & Maclntyre, 1993.p.5) Another definition proposed by MacIntyre (1999)confirmed that language anxiety “as the worry and negative emotional reactionaroused when learning or using a second language” (p 27)

Oh (1990) defined that foreign language anxiety is a situation –specific anxietywhich students experience in the classroom which is characterized by self-centeredthought, feelings of inadequacy, fear of failure, and emotional reactions in thelanguage classroom

Furthermore, Spielberger and his colleagues (2005) state that foreign languageanxiety is the panic that a learner feels when he has to routine a second or a foreignlanguage in which he is not totally skillful.

Horwitz et al (1986) found that foreign language anxiety included threecomponents: communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negativeevaluation

- Firstly, Communication apprehension is a type of shynesscharacterized by fear of anxiety about communicating with people Itmeans that communicatively apprehensive people tend to avoidcommunicating and interacting with other people or they are reluctant toget involved in conversations

- Secondly, Test anxiety refers to performance anxiety which stemsfrom a fear of failure in an academic setting It is the fear of exams,quizzes, and other assignments used to evaluate students’ performance.Many students experience a high level of anxiety when taking tests Theunfamiliar test items, the format of the test, different materials andquestions types with which leaners are not familiar are generally believed

to create anxiety When test anxiety occurs, even students with a great deal

of knowledge in a foreign language may perform at a considerably lowerlevel than their true ability

- Finally, the last component of foreign language anxiety is fear ofnegative evaluation Fear of negative evaluation is defined as

“apprehension about other’s evaluations, distress over their negativeevaluations, and the expectation that others would evaluate oneselfnegatively” (Horwitz, 1986, p.128) Fear of negative negation is broader inscope than the test anxiety because it may occur in any social, evaluativesituation such as interviewing for a job or speaking in foreign languageclasses People who fear negative evaluation rarely initiate conversationand interact with other

people Students who experience this anxiety tend to sit passively in the classes and do not participate in learning activities actively.

In short, anxiety is a kind of troubled feeling in mind that may cause negativeeffects for language learners It is a feeling of tension, apprehension andnervousness associated with the situation of learning a foreign language Anxietyhas an important role in determining the success or failure of the learners Horwitz(2001) found a significant association between anxiety and poor performance inlanguage learning Learners who have language anxiety may underrate their ownabilities, avoid taking part in learning activities and have worse performance thannon-anxious studentsand this may lead to poor performance Knowing aboutlanguage anxiety helps educators understand how students learn language and helpstudents manage the stress that accompanies language anxiety

2.2 3 Listening anxiety

A particular aspect of language anxiety is listening anxiety which refers to thefeeling of anxiety of language learners when they are required to listen to English.Bekleyen (2009) defined that “foreign language listening anxiety (FLLA) is thetype of anxiety experienced by language learners in situations that require listening”(p.665).In another definition, Scarcella and Oxford (1992) pointed out that listeninganxiety occurs when students feel they are faced with a task that is too difficult orunfamiliar to them It means that anxiety appears when students have to listen to thetasks which do not match their levels of proficiency Moreover, foreign languagelistening anxiety can be defined as “the fear of misinterpreting, inadequatelyprocessing or not being able to adjust psychologically to message sent by others”(Wheel, 1975, p.263) In other words, students become anxious while listeningEnglish because they are afraid that they cannot understand the message andinterpret it correctly

Listening anxiety is caused by many factors According to MacIntyre (1995),the cause of anxiety is that learners often worry about misunderstanding what they

listen to and the fear of being embarrassed by interpreting the message wrongly.Young (1992) explained that listening anxiety is caused by many factors, such asinsufficient emphasis on listening, immature teaching methodologies, ineffectivelistening strategies, and students’ lack of vocabulary Vogely (1998) also found thatcharacteristics of input such as the speed or unfamiliarity with the listening inputand instructional and personal factors easily produced listening anxiety Moreover,Kim (2000) in her study indicated that characteristics of the text, personalcharacteristics and process-related characteristics were main factors causing anxiety.Hang (2006) divided listening anxiety sources into characteristics of listeningcomprehension, listening materials and listening tasks, social and instructionalfactors, foreign language proficiency and listening level In addition, Chang andRead (2008) concluded that low confidence in comprehending spoken English,taking English listening courses as a requirement, and worrying about test difficultywere the three major factors which contributed to listening anxiety Beside, factorssuch as authenticity of the listening text, incomprehensibility of the listeningmaterial and other external environmental factors such as noise and inaudibility cancreate anxiety among language learners.

2.2.4 The previous studies of listening anxiety

Anxiety in listening comprehension is a problem that has received a lot ofconcerns from many researchers There have been a number of studies aboutlistening anxiety Vogely (1998) carried out a descriptive study with 140 universitystudents of Spanish to investigate the foreign language listening comprehensionanxiety in students and offer solutions that might alleviate students’ listeninganxiety She found four main sources of listening comprehension (LC) anxiety: (a)

LC anxiety associated with characteristics of foreign language input; (b) LC anxietyassociated with processing-related aspects of foreign language: (c) LC anxietyassociated with instructional factors; and (d) LC anxiety associated with attributes

of the teacher or learner As to level of input, the speed of delivery was the mostfrequently reported cause of LC anxiety, followed by bad diction, variety of accents,

and teachers who spoke too quietly As to level of difficulty, exercises that were toocomplex, unknown vocabulary, difficult syntax and unfamiliar topics were othersources of LC anxiety Students were anxious if they did not know what wasrequired of them in the listening activity or why Some students claimed that theyneeded the help of some visual aid to help with listening task Students reportedfeeling anxious if they could only listen to texts twice before having to respond.Kim (2000) conducted a study to explore the relationship between listeningcomprehension and anxiety in 238 Korean university students of English Shedesigned an instrument for measuring foreign language listening anxiety, theForeign Language Listening Axiety Scale (FLLAS), consisting of 33 items, eachwith five Likert-type responses (from 1 “strongly disagree” to 5 “strongly agree”).She found that a majority of Korean learners experienced foreign language listeninganxiety and listening anxiety contained two factors: Tension and Worry over EnglishListening and Lack of Self-Confidence in Listening Responses to open-endedquestions and in interviews in the same study revealed that learners were nervousabout the following: (a) the listening text (speed, pronunciation, intonation, length

of a listening text, level of vocabulary), (b) the interlocutors (gender or number ofspeakers, previous knowledge, learning style of the listener), and (c) the process oflistening (the effectiveness or choice of listening strategies)

Elkhafaifi (2005) in an investigation about listening anxiety involving 233North American university learners of Arabic used a 20-item listening anxiety scalewhich based on Saito et al.’s Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale to ascertainwhether listening anxiety was distinct from general anxiety, whether learninganxiety and listening anxiety were related to general language performance, and tolistening achievement in the foreign language He found that foreign languagelistening anxiety and general foreign language anxiety were separated but relatedphenomenon, and that both anxiety measures were significantly correlated withachievement, with the listening anxiety scale more strongly related to listeninggrade than the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale

In the study by Chang (2008), she found from the self-created ListeningAnxiety Questionnaire that the college business major students had high levels oflistening test anxiety compared to their general listening anxiety, which implied thatthe learners were more anxious when their language proficiency was beingevaluated Three sources of listening anxiety were reported: low confidence incomprehending spoken English, taking a listening course and feeling worried aboutthe difficult of the test.

From what has been discussed in this chapter, it is concluded that anxiety is thefeeling of uneasiness, apprehension, tension and frustration Anxiety is divided intothree types: trait anxiety, state anxiety and situation-specific anxiety Trait anxiety isrelatively stable personality characteristic while state anxiety is a social type ofanxiety that occurs under certain conditions Situation-specific anxiety is caused byspecific situation or event such as public speaking, examinations, or classparticipation Foreign language anxiety is a situation specific anxiety that is related

to foreign language learning It means the learner feels anxious whenever he learns

a foreign language Three components of language anxiety are identified:communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation.Communication apprehension is characterized by fear and anxiety incommunicating with people Test anxiety is a type of performance anxiety which iscaused by fear of failing a test Fear of negative evaluation is the apprehensionabout other people’s evaluations Foreign language anxiety has different aspects likereading, writing, speaking, and listening anxiety This study only focuses onlistening anxiety Listening anxiety refers to the feeling of nervousness whenlearners are required to listen to English Some previous studies mentioned factorsthat caused listening anxiety such as poor listening ability, students’ lack oflanguage competence, lack of vocabulary or ineffective listening strategies Besides,characteristics of listening texts, listening tasks and personal characteristics alsoincrease students’ listening anxiety

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

This chapter presents information about the overview of current teaching andlearning listening at Thuong Cat High school, the participant, research method, datacollection instrument, the procedure and the data analysis

3.1 Overview of current teaching and learning listening at Thuong Cat High School

The study was conducted at Thuong Cat High School, Bac Tu Liem District,

Ha Noi The participants for the study consist of 130 students from three classes10D1, 10D2 and 10D6 Most of the students have been learning English since theywere at grade 3 However, with the personal teaching experiences, the researcherrealized that at the secondary school, students often learned in a passive way Theylearnt English structure rules, did grammar exercises and translated reading text.Speaking and Listening skills was not paid much attention Moreover, in the lastyear at secondary school, students mainly focused on preparing for Entrance Exam

to High school, they did not spend much time on studying English Therefore, whenthey entered High school, they had some difficulties with English at first and manystudents even did not have basic knowledge about English They have limitedvocabulary and poor background knowledge Another problem is that students donot have the habit of learning by themselves, they only learn in class do not spendtime studying at home Moreover, like most other students in suburban schools theyrarely have opportunities to communicate with English speaking people in bothclassroom and outside classroom Consequently, their speaking and listening skillsare not really good

At the moment, the 10th form students are using the new textbooks “TiengAnh 10” published in 2006 by Hoang Van Van, Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, Do TuanMinh, Nguyen Thu Phuong and Nguyen Quoc Tuan “Tieng Anh 10” is developedbased on the new national curriculum The book is claimed to adopt a theme-basedsyllabus Lessons are arranged according to topics which are true to life, and

familiar with upper-secondary students The book consists of sixteen units; eachunit presents a theme which is updated and relevant to many aspects of the dailylife: school talks, people’s background, technology, mass media, community,national parks, music, films and cinema, the world cup … This is an importantadvantage of the textbook as it is relevant to the students’ needs, interests andexperience of life; therefore, it motivates students The methodology used in thebook is the learner-centered approach and the communicative approach with task-based teaching being the central teaching method .Each unit is structured in 5sections: Reading, Speaking, Listening, Writing and Language Focus with thepurpose of developing students’ communicative language skills After every threeunits, there is a Test Yourself, which provides some exercises for the students to do

in order to test how good they are at English Each section is supposed to be taught

in one period of 45 minutes In this textbook, listening lessons make up 20% of thesyllabus Listening section is divided into three stages: Before you listen, While youlisten and After you listen Before you listen aims to motivate students, activatetheir background knowledge and provide vocabulary While you listen activitiesdevelop micro-skills such as listening for general understanding, listening forspecific or detailed information In this part, students do listening tasks includingmatching exercise, T-F statements, multiple choice questions and open-endedquestions After you listen often includes activities such as text summary,reproduction in oral or written forms and further discussion of the topic

According to the syllabus, students have four English classes a week, so thetime for listening skill is one period (45 minutes) about every two weeks As aresult, students do not have much time for further practice with other listeningmaterials In addition, students do not have good condition to learn listeningbecause there are no language labs in the school These factors can affect learninglistening comprehension and cause anxiety for students at Thuong Cat High School

3.2 Participants

The participants in this study are 130 students chosen from three classes 10D1,10D2, and 10D6 They were chosen by cluster sampling form ten classes at ThuongCat High school This means that instead of randomly selecting the individuals, theinvestigator randomly selected the groups or classes for investigation Althoughstudents studied English at secondary school, many of them had low level ofEnglish in general and listening skills in particular Through observation and withthe experience of teaching 10th form students, I saw that many studentsperformedpoorly and some of them seemed uninterested in listening lessons and felt tired oranxious when they had to listen to the recordings When I talked with 10th formstudents, many of them shared that they had never learned Listening skill before sotheir listening anxiety level seemed higher than grade 11 and grade 12 students

a broad, generalizable set of findings presented succinctly and parsimoniously.However, as O’Malley and Chamot (1995) state, quantitative methods likequestionnaires “fail to provide the depth of information yielded in interviews”(p.94) On the other hand, qualitative methods produce a wealth of detailedinformation about a much smaller number of people and cases This increase thedepth of understanding of the cases and situations studied but reducesgeneralizability (Paton, 2002)

Therefore, in this research study, both quantitative and qualitative methods wereused to help researcher get some insights into the issue of students’ listening

anxiety With the multiple data collection procedures, the researcher hoped that theresearch findings would be more valid and reliable.

3.4 Data collection instruments

This study used two instruments to gather data They are survey questionnaireand informal interview

Instrument 1: Survey questionnaire

Survey questionnaire seems to be very popular among educational researchers ingeneral and ELT research in particular (Cohen & Manion, 1989) Dornyei (2010)believes that questionnaires are especially valuable because they are efficient interms of “researcher time”, “researcher effort”, and “financial resources”(p.9).Moreover, written questionnaires reduce interviewer bias because there isuniform question presentation (Jahoda, et al., 1962) Unlike in-person interviewing,there are no verbal or visual clues to influence a respondent to answer in a particularway

The questionnaire used in this study consists of two parts Part one aims atgathering personal information about participants such as gender, time of startlearning English and their attitudes toward listening skill In part two, researcherused Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS) designed by Kim (2000)

to measure the level of anxiety while listening to the foreign language The originalscale contains 33 five-point Likert-scale items ranging from “strongly disagree” (1point) to “strongly agree” (5 points) It means that scale 1 indicates the lowest level

of anxiety while scale 5 indicates the highest level of anxiety Students’ scores onthis scale can range from 33 to 165, the higher score, the higher the level oflistening comprehension anxiety In the study of listening anxiety of grade 10thstudents at Thuong Cat High School, the researcher used Kim’s FLLAS; however,some items were adapted, added and removed so the original scale was reduced to

25 items for her own research purposes Based on the results from thequestionnaires, 10 students were selected to interview

Instrument 2: Interview

While questionnaires can provide evidence of patterns among largepopulations, qualitative interview data often gather more in-depth insights onparticipant attitudes, thoughts, and actions (Kendall, 2008) To get a comprehensiveview of anxiety in listening, 10 students were invited for an informal interview Thedata obtained from the informal interviews was transcribed and analyzed so that theauthor of this study could gain a deep understanding of the problems of students andgive possible solutions to help them reduce anxiety

3.5 Procedure

The questionnaires were designed in both English and Vietnamese anddelivered to 130 students of 3 classes at the end of the second semesters At the time

of data gathering, students already finished all the listening sections in textbook

“Tieng Anh 10”, therefore, they were possibly aware of the problems they faced inlearning listening skill

Teacher came to each class in three chosen classes and gave the surveyquestionnaires to students Before students did the questionnaires, teacher hadintroduced briefly about the purpose of the study and explained how to finish thequestionnaires After that, students spent 30 minutes completing the questionnairesand handed in to teacher Students were also required to give their names andclasses so that researchers can invite them to participate in the interviews

After analyzing data collected from questionnaire, 10 students were chosenrandomly for an interview arranged by researcher

3.6 Data analysis method

Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the participants’ backgroundinformation and responses to the questionnaire as well as the overall levels ofanxiety The research used SPSS to analyze means, standard deviations of all the

items in the questionnaire The participants’ low, moderate and high levels ofanxiety were measured through their choices in response to the Likert-scale typequestions The questionnaire for this study consists of 25 items ranging from

“strongly disagree” (1 point) to “strongly agree” (5 points) When studentsresponded with 1)“Strongly disagree”, they received 1 point, 2)“disagree” was twopoints; 3) “neither agree nor disagree” was three points ; 4) “agree” was four points

;and 5) “strongly agree” was five points The higher the total points were, the more anxious students were

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used in this study to group the factors thatcause students’ listening anxiety The purpose of exploratory factor analysis is toidentify the factor structure or model for a set of variables This often involvesdetermining how many factors exist, as well as the pattern of the factor loadings(Stevens, 1996) The researcher carried out Exploratory Factor Analysis to reduce alarger set of initial variables to a smaller and more compatible number of underlyingfactors

The data from the interview were transcribed and analyzed qualitatively to helpthe researcher have a deep understanding of the major factors that causes students’listening anxiety and give some suggested solutions to help students reduce anxiety

In this chapter, the overview of the current teaching and learning at ThuongCat High School has been given as the setting of the study In addition, theparticipants, research methods, data collection instruments, procedure, data analysismethod are also presented

CHAPTER 4: THE FINDINGS

This chapter presents the data findings It includes information about

the participants, the findings from questionnaires and interview

4.1 Students’ background information.

There are 130 students who participate in this research, including 72 male(55.4%) and 58 female (44.6%) Most of the participants started learning Englishwhen they were in grade 3 (93.1%), 5,4 % students stared from grade 1 and only 2

%students from grade 6 It means that the majority of students have learned

English for nearly 8 years when they take part in this survey

When did you start learning English?

1.5 5.4

grade 1 grade 3 grade 6

92.3

Chart 1: Students’ time of starting learning English.

When being asked about their opinion to listening skill, 55.4 % of the studentsrespond that listening is the most difficult skill It is followed by those considerlistening as difficult as other skills (36.2%) There are 6.9% of participants reportingthat it is the easiest skill and only 1.5 % think it’s as easy as other skills Thesestatistics show that many students have troubles in learning English and listeningskill is really a challenge to most of them

In your opinion, listening skill is .

Chart 2: Students’ judgment about listening skill in comparison

with other skills.

For the questions “How do you enjoy listening to English?”, among 130participants, 17 students (13.1%) say that that they enjoy listening English verymuch and 45 students report that (34.6%) enjoy quite much The number of studentswho do not like listening English is 57 students (43.8%) enjoy little and 11 students(8.5%) answer that they do not enjoy at all It can be referred that more than half ofstudents are not interested in listening to English

How do you enjoy listening to English?

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Chart 3: Student’s level of interest in listening skill.

For the last question which asks about the frequency of listening outside class

of students, the largest proportion is the students who sometimes listen to Englishoutside classroom (63,8%) It is followed by the number of the students who neverlisten outside classroom (20.8%) 14,6 % participants report that they often listen toEnglish and there is only 1 person (1%) who say that he/she always listen outsideclassroom Through the interview with students, the researcher finds out whenlistening outside classroom they often listen to music for relax, they rarely listenwith a view to improving listening skill It can be said that the proportion of studentwho often practice listening English is quite low

How often do you listen to English outside?

0.8

Always Often Sometimes Never

63.8

Chart 4: Student’s practice outside class.

From the result above, it can be seen that the majority of participants in this studystarted learning English quite early, from grade 3 They have learned English fornearly 8 years However, they have difficulty in learning English, especially inlistening skill More than half of them think that listening is the most difficult skilland they don’t enjoy listening to English Therefore, they don’t practice listening toEnglish regularly Most of them sometimes listen to English songs or watch videos

in order to relax, not to improve their listening skill

4 2 Reliability of the FLLA

Nunnally (1978, cited in Linh, 2011, p.65) claimed that a Cronbach alphavalue of 0,70 or above is considered acceptable Besides, Geoge and Mallerry(2003, cited in Linh, 2011, p.65) aslo presented a standard as follows:

Cronbach α value range

The FLLA version used in this study has Cronbach alpha value of 0.975 whichmeans that the FLLA scale is reliable

Reliability Statistics

4 3 Descriptive analysis

The FLLAS used in this study is comprised of 25 items scored on a five-pointscale with a theoretical range of 25 to 125 A higher score indicates a higher level oflistening anxiety and a lower score indicates a lower level of listening anxiety Inthis study, the total scores ranges from 46 to 123 with a mean of 93.65 and astandard deviation of 18.111 A mean scale score is also computed On the basis of a5-point format, the mean score is 3.75 indicates that students experience slightlyhigh level of listening anxiety

4 4 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Exploratory Factor Analysis is used to group items into common factors, interpreteach factors according to the items having a high loading on it Loading refers to themeasure of association between an item and a factor A factor is a list of items thatbelong together Related items define the part of the construct that can be groupedtogether Unrelated items, those that do not belong together, do not define theconstruct and should be deleted (Munro 2005)

Before EFA was performed, the KMO and Barlett’s tests were computed to checkthe appropriateness of the data matrix for factor analysis The KMO test showed avalue of 0.937 (>0.5) and the Bartlett’s test of Sphericity indicated a significancelevel of 000 These results suggested that the items were sufficiently correlated andEFA was appropriate

KMO and Bartlett's Test

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of SamplingAdequacy

Bartlett's Test ofSphericity

Exploratory factor analysis was run to examine the underlying structure of FLLAS.According to Hair et al (1998), factor loadings of 0.5 or greater are consideredpractically significant In this study, all of the items are acceptable because theyhave factor loadings above 0.5 No items are removed

After the rotation, three factors were extracted Factor 1 included 10 items (1, 5, 7,

10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19), Factor 2 included 9 items (3, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,25) and Factor 3 included 6 items (2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 17)

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characteristic of listening materials and the 6 items for Factor 3 referred to the

anxiety related to the learning habits of listeners

TABLE 1 Listening anxiety associated to Listening process

Items

15 I keep thinking that everyone else except me understands

very well what an English speaker is saying

14 When I’m listening to English, I usually end up translating

word by word without understanding the contents

7 When I’m listening to English, I am worried when I can’t

watch the lips or facial expression of a person who isspeaking

16 When listening to English, I often understand the words

but still can’t quite understand what the speaker means

10 When I’m listening to English, I often get so confused that

I can’t remember what I have heard

19 English stress and intonation seem unfamiliar to me

5 I am nervous when I am listening to English if I am not

familiar with the topic

11 I fear I have inadequate background knowledge of some

topics when listening in English

1 I feel unconfident when I am listening in English

12 My thoughts become jumbled and confused when listening

to important information in English

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I‟m listening to English, I usually end up translating word by word without understanding the contents” These items indicated that most items in this factor

focused on the anxiety caused by student’s worry about their low listening abilityand their inappropriate listening strategies Items 5, 10, 11, 19 describe the anxiety

of students related to their language proficiency Item 1, 7, 12, 15 shows the worry

of students about their lack of confidence in listening ability Items 14, 16 indicatethe anxiety caused by failure in applying listening strategies in listening process.Means of Factor 1 items showed that a majority of participants suffered fromanxiety related to listening process Of all the items, items 11, 1, 19 and 12 have thehighest mean values of 3.95, 3.77 and 3.65 respectively

Item 1(I feel unconfident when I am listening in English) with mean value of 3.77 and item 12 (My thoughts become jumbled and confused when listening to

important information in English) with mean value of 3.65indicates that most of the

participants in this study were unconfident in their listening competence andworried about their poor listening ability Some students explained clearly in theinterview:

“My listening skill is really bad so I am very afraid of listening part in English tests I don‟t often get scores in this part.”(Student 1)

“When I listen to the tape scripts, I often wonder what the speakers are saying I totally do not catch any words So, I hate listening classes.” (Student 2)

“I find my listening skill terrible I cannot understand what people say in English.” (Student 3)

Item 11 (I fear I have inadequate background knowledge of some topics when

listening in English) with mean value of 3.95 and item 19 (English stress and intonation seem unfamiliar to me) with mean value of 3.65 show that the

participants in this study suffer relatively high listening anxiety because of theirinadequate background knowledge and lack of phonological knowledge Lack of