A survey of listening comprehension problems of first year efl students at nguyen tat thanh college submitted to the faculty of english linguistics literature in partial fulfillment of the master

The relationship between length of English study and difficulties that students encounter when taking the TOEIC listening test .... 61 Table 4.12 The result of One-sample T-test of probl

VIET NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HOCHIMINH CITY UNIVERISTY OF SOCIAL SIENCES AND HUMANITIES

FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE

A SURVEY OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS OF FIRST-YEAR EFL STUDENTS AT

NGUYEN TAT THANH COLLEGE

Submitted to the Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature

in partial fulfillment of the Master‟s degree in TESOL

By

VO THI MINH HANH

Supervised by NGUYEN THU HUONG, PhD

HO CHI MINH CITY, DECEMBER 2013

i

VIET NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HOCHIMINH CITY UNIVERISTY OF SOCIAL SIENCES AND HUMANITIES

FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE

A SURVEY OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS

OF FIRST-YEAR EFL STUDENTS AT NGUYEN TAT THANH

COLLEGE

Submitted to the Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature

in partial fulfillment of the Master‟s degree in TESOL

By

VO THI MINH HANH

Supervised by NGUYEN THU HUONG, PhD

HO CHI MINH CITY, DECEMBER 2013

My thousands thanks also go to all teachers who taught me in the 2008- TESOL course

I am indebted to the teachers and students at Nguyen Tat Thanh College for their cooperation and assistance in the process of data collection

I am very happy to acknowledge my debt to my classmates such as Nguyen Thi Nhu An, Tran Quoc Thao, Roan Dinh Dong, Mai Thai Son, Tran Ngoc Minh for their support and encouragement during my study

Finally I am deeply grateful to my parents who always encouraged and helped

me during this study They are the strongest motivation for me to pursue my degree Without the supports from my family members, I would not have finished my study at University of Social Sciences and Humanities

iii

STATEMENT OF ORGINIALITY

I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:

A SURVEY OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS OF FIRST-YEAR EFL STUDENTS AT NGUYEN TAT THANH COLLEGE

in terms of the statement of the Requirements for the Theses in Master‟s program issued by the Higher Degree Committee The thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other institutions

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2013

VO THI MINH HANH

iv

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS

I hereby state that I, Vo Thi Minh Hanh, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Mater‟s Theses deposited in the Library

In terms of conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2013

VO THI MINH HANH

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

STATEMENT OF ORGINIALITY iii

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS v

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ix

LIST OF TABLES x

LIST OF CHARTS xi

ABSTRACT xii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Background to the study 1

1.2 The statement of the problem 3

1.3 Aims of the study 4

1.4 Research questions 4

1.5 The significance of the study 5

1.6 The organization of the thesis 5

CHAPTER 2 : LITERATURE REVIEW 6

2.1 Definition of listening comprehension 6

2.2 The nature of listening comprehension 7

2.2.1 Bottom-up process 8

2.2.2 Top-down process 9

2.3 Stages of listening instruction 9

2.3.1 The pre-listening stage 10

2.3.2 The while-listening stage 11

2.3.3 The post-listening stage 12

2.4 The roles of teachers and learners 13

2.4.1 Teachers‟ role 13

2.4.2 Learners‟ role 14

2.5 Listening tasks in a TOEIC test 15

vi

2.5.1 The general feature of a TOEIC listening test 15

2.5.2 The characteristic and strategies used in each part 16

2.6 Potential problems students encounter in the TOEIC test 18

2.6.1 Problems rooted from listeners 18

2.6.2 Problems related to such external factors as listening text and task, and environment and equipment 24

2.6.4 Problems related to teaching and learning environment and equipment 33

2.7 Previous studies on listening comprehension problems that students encountered in learning process 34

2.8 Conceptual framework 36

2.9 Summary 37

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 39

3.1 Research questions 39

3.2 Subjects 39

3.2.1 Learners‟ subject 39

3.2.2 Teachers‟ subject 41

3.3 Research design 42

3.4 Instrument 43

3.4.1 Questionnaires for learner subjects 44

3.4.2 Reliability of questionnaires 45

3.4.3 Questionnaires for teacher subjects 46

3.5 Procedures of the survey 47

3.6 Method of analysis 47

3.7 Summary 48

CHAPTER 4: FINDING ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION……… 49

4.1 Learners‟ questionnaire results 49

4.1.1 Learners‟ self-assessment of their major English skills 49

4.1.2 Have you attended a TOEIC course before learning at NTT College? 50

4.1.3 What language skills and knowledge of language are provided to students when taking the TOEIC listening test 52

4.1.3.1 Language skills 52

vii

4.1.3.2 Knowledge of language 52

4.1.4 The percentage of practicing listening comprehension in TOEIC test that teacher gave to students in comparison with other skills in class 53

4.1.5 The percentage of time spent practicing listening comprehension at home54 4.1.6 Learners‟ self-assessment of the current material 55

4.2 Teachers‟ questionnaire results 56

4.2.1 What do teachers frequently provide their students in TOEIC learning process? 56

4.2.2 Teachers‟ self-assessment of material 58

4.2.3 What activities are often taught within TOEIC listening setting? 59

4.2.4 Teachers‟ perception of difficulties that students encounter while listening 61

4.3 The results of difficulties that students encountered when taking the TOEIC listening test 63

4.3.1 Problems students reported when taking the TOEIC listening test 64

4.3.1.1 Problems rooted from external factors 65

4.3.1.1.1 The most salient external factors students encountered 65

4.3.1.1.2 The least salient external factors students encountered 66

4.3.1 2 Difficulties rooted from internal factor (learners themselves) 67

4.3.1.2.1 The most salient internal factors 67

4.3.1.2.2 The least salient internal factors 69

4.3.2 The relationship between length of English study and difficulties that students encounter when taking the TOEIC listening test 70

4.4 Discussion 72

4.5 Summary 74

CHAPTER 5: CONLUSION AND RECOMEMDATION 75

5.1 Summary of chapter 75

5.2 Pedagogical implications 76

5.3 Limitations of the study 78

5.4 Recommendations for further research 78

5.5 Summary of the study 79

viii

REFERENCES 80

APPENDIX 1A 87

APPENDIX 1B 91

APPENDIX 2 A 95

APPENDIX 2 B 98

APPENDIX 3A 101

ix

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CUP : Cambridge University Press EFL : English as a Foreign Language L2 : Second language

NTT : Nguyen Tat Thanh OUP : Oxford University Press

P : significance (two-sided) Sig (2-sided) : significance (two-sided)

SD : Standard Deviation SPSS : Statistics Package for the Social Sciences TOEIC :Test of English for International Communication

x

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.2.1 The description of learners‟ background information 40

Table 3.2.2 The description of teachers‟ background information 41

Table 3.4.1 Structure and aims of the questionnaire 45

Table 3.4.2 Description of Reliability Statistics of the Questionnaires 45

Table 3.4.3 5Structure and aims of the questionnaire 46

Table 4.1 Learners‟ self-assessment of their major English skills 49

Table 4.2 A TOEIC course students ever attended 51

Table 4.3 The result of language skills 52

Table 4.4 The result of knowledge of language 52

Table 4.5 The percentage of time spent in listening comprehension in class 53

Table 4.6 The percentage of time spent in listening comprehension at home 54

Table 4.7 Learners‟ self-assessment of the current material 55

Table 4.8 What is frequently taught to learners in TOEIC listening process? 57

Table 4.9 Teachers‟ self-assessment of material 58

Table 4.10 Activities are often used in the TOEIC listening process 59

Table 4.11 Teachers‟ perception of difficulties that students encounter while listening 61

Table 4.12 The result of One-sample T-test of problems that students encounter when taking the listening TOEIC test 63

Table 4.13 Difficulties that students encountered the most 64

Table 4.14 The result of the most salient external factors 65

Table 4.15 The result of the least salient external factors 66

Table 4.16 The result of the most salient internal factor 67

Table 4.17 The result of the least salient internal factor 69

Table 4.18 The result of Sig (2-sided) 70 Table 4.19 The relationship between length of English study and internal factor 71 Table 4.20 The relationship between length of English study and external factors71

xi

LIST OF CHARTS

Chart 4.1 The result of attending a TOEIC course before learning at NTT College.51 Chart 4.2 The percentage of time spent in listening comprehension in class 54 Chart 4.3 The percentage of time spent in listening comprehension at home 55 Chart 4.4 The results of mean scores of strategy use, internal factor, and external factors 64

The findings of the study revealed that internal factor (i.e learners themselves) and such external factors such as listening text and task, and learning environment and equipment influenced their listening competence when taking the TOEIC listening test Moreover, the result also showed that the most dominant problems in four parts

of the TOEIC test were presented For one thing, the relationship between length of English study and these problems was discovered by the researcher

Based on the problems in the study, some implications were made for the improvement of teaching and learning listening process within TOEIC setting for both NTT teachers and students in particular and for Vietnamese teachers and students in general

1

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In recent years, English has been used in Viet Nam widely because Viet Nam

has been integrated in the region and the world English, therefore, has been

considered an effective means for international communications in many aspects such

as politics, economy, culture, diplomacy, and social activities, etc Thus, the teaching

and learning of the English language with the focus on four language skills has been

spread out in VN in which Nguyen Tat Thanh College is not an exception These

skills were taught in almost colleges and universities in the country Among the four

language skills, listening is an important skill that contributes to a student‟s language

command (Anderson & Lynch, 1988) Different efforts have been made to find out

ways to assist learners in achieving fluency in this receptive skill Theorists and

practitioners have attempted to explore listening methods that enhance students‟

listening ability (Buck, 2001; Nunan, 1999; Rost, 1992) Others, however, have tried

to investigate the problems that students may encounter in listening so that solutions

could be offered (Underwood, 1989; Wilson, 2008) Given the latter, one direction of

studies that has received some interests is identifying the problems that EFL students

encounter in the context of standardized tests such as TOEIC In this introductory

chapter, some background to the study will be presented in relation to listening

problems in the context of TOEIC so as to provide readers the reason why the study

was carried out and the question that it attempted to answer This chapter will end

with the significance of the study and how the thesis is organized

1.1 Background to the study

The impetus of this study was rooted from our concern about how to improve

NTT EFL students‟ listening From our experience of teaching at NTT College, we

noticed that the students often complained about the challenges they face when taking

listening test, namely the TOEIC listening test applied at NTT College It would be a

as the US testing tradition A TOEIC test is designed with two main sections: Listening, with 100 multiple choice items, which runs forty-five minutes, and Reading, with 100 multiple choice items, which lasts in one hour and fifteen minutes

In other words, students totally spend two hours completing TOEIC tests Based on a figure collected by Buck (1001), 1.8 million learners, mainly in Asia took TOEIC courses in 2000, giving a picture that TOEIC is a huge testing program applied in many countries, including Viet Nam

According to the Ministry of Education and Training of Viet Nam (2011), TOEIC tests are widely applied in most colleges and universities with the aim of evaluating students‟ command of English before graduating In other words, college

or university students are asked to get a certain TOEIC level The level required is commonly TOEIC 350– 450 by the time they are granted a diploma (MOET, 2011) Thus, the TOEIC tests are regarded as an importa nt criterion to decide whether the students finish their learning program As a result, thousands of nationwide students have come to foreign language centers to attend TOEIC training courses, which have been popularly opened in order to meet the learners‟ enormous demand More importantly, TOEIC results have been treated to be a decisive factor for recruiting employers to multinational companies or some state-run enterprises

NTT College has used TOEIC as one of the important ways for graduating students Therefore, TOEIC classes, from TOEIC 100 to TOEIC 450, are taught during their -3 year-learning at the college It is fair to say that the significance of a

3

TOEIC certificate is evident in NTT College because TOEIC certificate is a necessary and sufficient condition for the permission NTT students to graduate Thus, they are asked to attend the TOEIC courses, and have to get a certain TOEIC level such as 350

or 450, depending on the requirement of their faculties For instance, those who belong to Faculty of Banking Finance, Accounting, Business Administration, and Nursing need to gain TOEIC 450; meanwhile, others coming from Department of Food Technology, Construction, Engineering and other departments are required to have TOEIC 350 As mentioned above, NTT students have to spend three years learning TOEIC classes at the college However, despite the long learning time, they still complain that they have problems in acquiring listening, or understanding the messages given in TOEIC listening tests From my own observation during teaching time at the school, difficulties that they often face come from: (1) listeners themselves such as inability to hear „question‟ word, lack of knowledge of „sentence‟ intonation, etc, …, (2) listening text and task, namely many new words in the oral texts, inability

to concentrate, the fast speed of speech, unfamiliar topic, similar sounds, and (3) teaching and learning environment and equipment, which are analyzed in chapter 2 The complaint provided an impetus for the implementation of the studies For up to now there have been no studies done in this area Therefore, an investigation into factors that hamper learners‟ comprehension of TOEIC listening tests is conducted at Nguyen Tat Thanh College

1.2 The statement of the problem

The fact that TOEIC listening tests are too much higher than NTT students‟ level, hundreds of NTT students get failure in taking the test every semester Many workshops have been opened to improve the situation but the challenge still becomes obsessive to them During working with the students, a reality is found out that they find it very hard to understand listening texts with business terminologies, or fail to use strategy to guess the content of the oral text Second, they have difficulty in concentrating during the listening time, so they often miss the important information for answering the questions in the listening test Moreover, speed of speech, invisible

4

questions, the organization of information in the text, quality of textbooks, and equipment used in learning cause remarkable obstacles for them when taking the TOEIC listening tests In short, these factors comes from the listening texts, learners themselves, the environment and the facilities that make considerable contribution to preventing learners from comprehending the texts

On that account, a study on encountering difficulties reported by NTT students

in learning listening comprehension within TOEIC setting comes up with the researcher‟ mind With a big effort, the factors in the TOEIC listening tests will be discovered with the aim in improving students‟ listening ability

1.3 Aims of the study

Acknowledging the problems that NTT students are facing in their leaning process, the researcher conducted the study: (1) to investigate the students‟ perceptions of difficulties when taking TOEIC listening tests, (2) to find out factors which hamper the students‟ listening competence, and (3) to examine the relationship among the three groups of students in terms of their English length in listening difficulties

5

b To what extent do external factors such as listening text and task, and environment and equipment create difficulties for the students when taking TOEIC listening tests?

2 What are the kinds of listening problems that can be found among the three groups of students in terms of their English study length?

1.5 The significance of the study

TOEIC tests play a crucial role in evaluating students‟ proficiency of English before graduating; but listening texts in the TOEIC create considerable challenges to pass TOEIC exams Therefore, the difficulties preventing students‟ comprehension of listening passages in the study make meaningful contribution to improving NTT college students‟ listening ability in English studying Moreover, the analysis of those problems is aimed to offer teachers deep insights into what hampers their students‟ ability to understand a spoken text in order to upgrade their method of teaching listening Moreover, the results of the study may help students raise their perceptions

of difficulties in the listening process

1.6 The organization of the thesis

The thesis comprises five chapters Chapter 1 presents the introduction, which introduces the background to the study, the statement of the problem, aims of the study, the significance of the study, research questions, and the organization of the study Chapter 2 provides the theoretical background as the basis for conducting the study Research design and methodology are presented in chapter 3 Chapter 4 is to talk about findings and discussion sections Chapter 5 is to summarize the whole

thesis together with implication, limitation and recommendation for further research

6

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, a framework of theory related to listening comprehension and potential problems that EFL students may encounter in the setting of TOEIC tests will first presented It will then be followed by a review of related studies in the field before a conceptual framework is presented

2.1 Definition of listening comprehension

Listening has been defined differently by theorists According to Buck (2001),

he defines that “listening comprehension is a complex process in which the listener takes the incoming data, an acoustic signal, and interprets it based on a wide variety of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge” (Buck, 2001, p 247) The linguistic knowledge includes that of phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, pragmatics and sociolinguistics And the non-linguistic knowledge includes that of the topic, the context and general knowledge about the world and how it works In the same sense, Richard and Platt (1992) consider listening comprehension as the process

of understanding speech in a second or foreign language Similarly, Underwood (1989, p 1) shares that “listening is the activity of paying attention to and try to get meaning from something we hear” From his view, in order to understand successfully what is delivered from speakers, listeners need to be able to analyze, recognize, and interpret what is used to convey speakers‟ messages What is more, Anderson and Lynch (1988) argue that to understand what a speaker says, listener has to receive sounds, use his/ her language knowledge and information available to decode the sounds and interpret the meaning of the speaker‟ saying

The two authors point out that listening effectively involves a multiplicity of skills as follows:

1 The spoken signals have to be identified from the midst of surrounding sounds

7

2 The continuous stream of speech has to be segmented into units, which have

to be recognized as known words

3 The syntax of the utterance has to be grasped and the speaker’s intended meaning has to be understood

4 We also have to apply our linguistic knowledge to formulating a correct and appropriate response to what has been said

(Anderson and Lynch, 1988, p 4)

2.2 The nature of listening comprehension

Before exploring difficulties in listening comprehension, it is worth discussing what listening comprehension is

Listening used to be treated as “a passive skill” (Celce- Murcia, 2001) It is fair to say that listener is considered as „a tape recorder‟ only For many years, therefore, listening was ignored in second language process because of the main focus on only productive skills This accounts for the fact that Vietnamese learners in particular are bad at listening and speaking However, several linguists rejected the argument that listening is an „active process” (Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Gerbhard, 1996; Littlewood, 2001) Clearly, in order to achieve an adequate understanding of a passage

of text, listeners ought to focus on distinguishing vowel and consonant sounds in the text, analyzing its structure, and recognizing lexical items in a speaker‟s utterance According to Thompson and Rubin (1996), they argue that listening process is an active one in which the listener selects and interprets information from auditory and visual clues to understand the spoken text Also, Anderson and Lynch (1988, p 6) do not reject the claim that “the listener has a crucial part to play in the process, by activating various types of knowledge, and applying what he knows to what he hears and trying to understand what the speaker means” In other words, in order to be successful in listening process, listeners have to activate all kinds of knowledge to elicit the speaker‟s meaning

8

In addition, to understand a spoken text, listeners have to be able to use information from context and general knowledge around the world to interpret what speakers mean Buck (2001, p 3) shares his opinion that

listening comprehension is a top-down process in the sense that the various types of knowledge are involved in understanding language” or, “listeners use whatever information they have available, or whatever information seems relevant to help them interpret what the speaker is saying

(Buck, 2001, p 3)

Furthermore, Nation and Newton (2009, as cited in Mahdalena, 2009, p 10) claim that “listening comprehension is an interactive process which requires the listener to use top down and bottom-up processing simultaneously” From that view, while listening, the listener needs to employ linguistic knowledge such as phonology, lexis, grammar, stress, etc., and non-linguistic knowledge relevant to culture, topic, and the world in order for him/ her to get the speaker‟ meaning

2.2.1 Bottom-up process

To Buck (2001), the bottom-up process makes the uses of linguistic knowledge (i.e knowledge of phonology, lexis, syntax, discourse structure, intonation, pragmatic, semantic) to decode oral texts to get a speaker‟s meaning He has also confirmed that acoustic input is decoded into phonemes that carry meaning, then identified individual words, and continued on to the next higher stage, the syntactic level, followed by an analysis of the semantic content to arrive at a literal understanding of the basic linguistic meaning Finally, the listener interprets that literal meaning in terms of communicative situation to understand what the speaker means

Wilson (2008, p 15) shares the same view that “the bottom-up model emphasizes the decoding of the smallest units – phonemes and syllables – to lead us towards meaning”

9

2.2.2 Top-down process

Different from the bottom-up process in which linguistic knowledge is used to interpret the meaning of a speaker‟s utterance, top-down process makes use of non-linguistic knowledge in understanding an oral text The non-linguistic knowledge used

in comprehension is knowledge about the topic, the context, and general knowledge about the world and how it works (Buck, 2001).In addition, Brown (1990) also claims that

a crucial part of the comprehension processes is this „top-down‟ processing, in which the listener actively marshals previous knowledge in interpreting what is being said,

as it is being said, so that prediction and interpretation have to be seen as interlinked processes which cannot be separated

(Brown, 1990, p 11) Likewise, Gebhard (1996) shares the same idea that the two distinct processes involved in comprehending spoken English are bottom-up processing and top-down processing In bottom-up processing, a message is decoded through the analysis of sounds, words, and grammar, while top-down processing refers to using background knowledge to comprehend a passage

In sum, both top-down process and bottom-up process play a crucial role in listening comprehension, thus both effective listeners and ineffective listeners are encouraged

to use the combination of top-down and bottom-up, which is called interactive processing (Peterson, 2001, as cited in Nunan, 2003) Indeed, activating the background knowledge will help interpretation, thus Nunan (2003) heightens the role

of pre-listening activities in listening stages

2.3 Stages of listening instruction

The listening stages are divided into three categories: Pre-listening, listening, and post- listening (Underwood, 1989; Harmer, 1991)

while-10

2.3.1 The pre-listening stage

Based on linguists‟ view, namely Underwood (1989), and Long (1987), the first listening stage is considered as an important part of listening comprehension That is to say that the activities in the stage are to orient learners before the incoming text, or get them involved in discussing what they are going to listen, and brainstorming vocabulary of the spoken text before tapes are played According to Underwood (1989), he asserts “it is helpful to focus at first on providing considerable pre-listening support so that the students can achieve a high level of success and thus become confident that they can listen effectively” ( Underwood, 1989, p 30) Clearly, the preparatory work aims to get listener engaged in discussing topic, using context clues to predict what is coming Therefore, a variety of activities and valuable ideas for the pre-listening activities are provided for the pre-listening stage, including:

► Pre-listening activities:

- The teacher giving background information;

- The students reading something relevant;

- The students looking at pictures;

- Discussion of the topic/ situation;

- A question and answer session;

- Written exercises;

- Following the instructions for the while- listening activity;

- Consideration of how the while-listening activity will be done

►Ideas for the pre-listening activities:

- Looking at pictures before listening

- Looking at a list of items/ thoughts/ etc before listening

- Making a list of possibilities/ ideas/ suggestions/ etc

- Reading a text before listening

- Previewing the language which will be heard in the listening text

- Informal teacher talk and class discussion

(Underwood, 1989, p 31, p 34 – 43)

Indeed, these suggestions have made a great contribution to learners‟

comprehension competence, or partly lessen obstacles learners face while listening

Also, the step gives an orientation for the while-listening stage

2.3.2 The while-listening stage

The while-listening stage is a stage that listeners are asked to fulfill the

requirement of the listening text That means the listener has to predict, match and

interpret what is said with what they expect to hear to get the overall meaning of an

utterance, or to provide appropriate answers for the given questions in the text Thus,

Underwood (1989, p 45) points that “the purpose of while-listening activities is to

help learners develop the skill of eliciting messages from spoken language” In order

to get learners involved in the activities, teachers are supposed to deliver listening

activities interesting and appropriate to their learners‟ level (Harmer, 1998;

Littlewood, 1991; Underwood, 1989) Also, ideas for while-listening activities are

supplied as follow:

- Marking/ checking items in pictures

- Which picture?

- Storyline picture sets

- Putting pictures in order

- Completing pictures

12

- Picture drawing

- Carrying out actions

- Making models/ arranging items in patterns

2.3.3 The post-listening stage

In an overall view, some activities used in post-listening stage are the extension

of what is done at the pre-listening and while-listening stages Underwood (1989, p 74) proves that “post-listening activities embrace all the word related to a particular listening text which is done after the listening is completed” Thus, common work is seen in the stage, including role-play, written work, summarizing, problem – solving, decision- making As a result, it can be said that listening work in the post-listening stage can be much longer than that while-listening activities Therefore, he realizes that learners found it hard to maintain interest at the stage with boring activities For this reason, teachers are advised to provide their learners motivating activities in order

- Matching with a reading text

- Extending notes into written responses

- Summarizing

- Using information from the listening text for problem- solving and decision-making activities

- Jigsaw listening

- Identifying relationships between speakers

- Establishing the mood/ attitude/ behavior of the speaker

- Role-play/ simulation (Underwood, 1989, p 80-90)

2.4 The roles of teachers and learners

Given what has been mentioned above, to have listening passages successfully

understood, the roles of teachers and learners in classrooms are evident

2.4.1 Teachers’ role

It can be seen that the role of teachers is various as being the support, the guidance, and the instruction in classrooms (Underwood, 1989) Sharing the same view, Harmer (1983) agrees that teachers sometimes work as a controller, an observer,

an assessor, a prompter, etc This will be clarified as follow

In listening, it is advisable to provide learners tasks which are interesting and realistic so that they can relate what they are learning in the lesson to things that happen in real life This really motivates them in listening learning True, language learners have admitted that among four skills, listening skill is the most difficult one

14

in learning process Therefore, they find it demotivated to listen to dull and hard spoken texts Again, the role of teachers is very important in giving listening passages which are both compelling and suitable for their language proficiency

More importantly, teachers should give their learners specific instructions before the tape That is, a clear purpose of what is asked to do, a prediction of the oral text based on context clues should be done to give them an orientation before the incoming text Besides, listening strategies are encouraged to introduce to learners in listening classrooms to lessen language students‟ listening difficulties Underwood (1989) emphasizes that listeners will become more confident and proficient in learning if they apply learning strategies In short, the instructions are aimed to orient, and help them go in a right direction through the organization of listening tasks so that they are likely to become better at listening In other words, the teachers actively guide learners through the processes of listening, monitor problems that they encounter in listening and support them in order to let them successfully listen

In brief, to ensure that listening lessons are admitted to be successful, teachers have to make good preparations for the target Beside the role of teacher, that of students‟ should be taken into consideration in language learning

2.4.2 Learners’ role

The previous section asserts the vital role of teachers in learning process; it might be said that the role of learners is also highly appreciated in the activity Nunan (1999) agrees that learners are active participants It is meant that to comprehend listening passages, learners need to follow their teachers‟ instructional activities given before the tape In addition, they are recommended to make use both bottom -up and top-down strategies, and other listening strategies such as using context clues to guess the meaning of the listening texts, picture strategies, etc to better understand the incoming data

Besides, learners are advised to take advantage of various types of knowledge, namely background knowledge, discourse knowledge, and grammar knowledge, etc to

15

get the meaning of what is going to be said In other words, it might be said that learners could control their learning process, and sometimes cooperate with their peers

in order to have good learning outcome

In conclusion, to get good results in teaching and learning process, the role of teachers and learners are very essential Based on teachers‟ careful instructions together with learners‟ collaboration, language acquisition is easy to achieve successfully

2.5 Listening tasks in a TOEIC test

To understand the difficulties that EFL students might encounter in English listening comprehension, namely in the setting of TOEIC, some discussion related to the nature of listening and listening comprehension has been provided However, to understand fully the problems that EFL students might face in performing a TOEIC listening test, it is also worth exploring the listening tasks as found in a TOEIC test

2.5.1 The general feature of a TOEIC listening test

The listening section has four parts displayed as follows

Part Task type No Task description

I Statement evaluation 20 Test-takers look at a picture, listen to

four statements, and select the picture referred to

II Response evaluation 30 Test-takers listen to a question followed

by three alternative responses, and choose the best one

III Comprehension questions

on dialogue

30 Test-takers listen to a dialogue and

answer four- option multiple-choice

16

questions

IV Comprehension questions

on mini-talks

20 Test-takers listen to a short mini-talk

and answer four-option multiple-choice questions

From what is displayed in the above table, it can be seen that the tasks all use the standard three or four option multiple choice format Furthermore, Parts I and II can be answered without reading, whereas Parts III and IV require some reading (Buck, 2001)

For another thing, he admits that the texts of TOEIC listening tests are very short Parts I and II are simple statements or questions Part III consists of dialogues with the same format: Speaker A, Speaker B, and Speaker A again Part IV consists of mini-talks, with the topic pertaining to work: office routine, manufacturing, personnel, purchasing, travel and other fields

In addition, the texts are carefully scripted, and read in a very slow, deliberate manner with careful pronunciation- the speakers sound more like announcers than actors Also, the texts have very few oral features: with little phonological modification, very little fast speech, no hesitation phenomena, no use of word choice

or structures typical of spoken language (Buck, 2000, p 210 – 216)

2.5.2 The characteristic and strategies used in each part

♦ Part I: Picture description

Test takers deal with ten pictures and choose one out of four options that best describe each picture The part is claimed to be a little simpler than the remaining parts of TOEIC tests (Buck, 2001) However, in order to help test takers easily to get the correct answer, photo strategies are encouraged to be used, that is making questions for the ten pictures are done before being heard (see more in Appendix 3A)

17

♦ Part II: Question and response

Test takers hear a question, followed by three alternative responses, and then choose the best response There are totally 30 questions in the part The questions have the form of „Statement‟, „Yes/ No‟ question, or „Wh-question‟ Lougheed (2007) recommends that using knowledge of sentence intonation is an effective way in order

to help listeners distinguish types of sentence (more detail in Appendix 3A) In short, based on the rise or falling tone, listeners decide if it is a Yes/No question with auxiliary word like Is, Are, Was, Were, Can, and so on, or a Wh-question with a question word such as Who, When, What, Which, How, etc,…

♦ Part III: Short conversations

In Part III, test takers have to comprehend dialogues – short conversations between two people, associated with five topics such as: Occupation (Who), Activities (What), Time (When), Location (Where), and Reason (Why) A question in the conversations has a four -option multiple- choice answer; test takers listen and select the best one To ease listeners‟ difficulties when dealing with those listening passages, listeners are recommended to read the questions and answer choices in the conversations before hearing the audio Furthermore, using context clues to guess what the conversation is about is encouraged to get background information of what is going to be said (Lougheed, 2007) (look at more detail in Appendix 3A)

♦ Part IV: Short talks

Test takers listen to short monologues that are all in informal, semi-formal, work- related situations (Buck, 2001) In another words, the topics relate to work: office routine, manufacturing, personnel, purchasing and so on Similarly, a question

in the short talks has a four- option multiple –choice answer; test takers choose the best one Again, listeners are recommended to use the given questions and answers to guess what the talk is about Besides, reading the questions and answer choices before the audio as well as giving the answers for the questions before the next talks should

18

be taken into consideration Or, if listeners cannot find out an answer, they are encouraged to guess (see more in Appendix 3A)

Generally speaking, it can be seen that a TOEIC test with a long listening part

is considered as the most demanding one Besides, unfamiliar topics as well as different listening tasks of the TOEIC cause many problems to learners while taking the listening test

2.6 Potential problems students encounter in the TOEIC test

The information given above should provide grounds for an understanding of the challenges that EFL students might face when working on a TOEIC test Below is a review of the ideas that theorists and practitioners have had concerning the issue being dealt with

2.6.1 Problems rooted from listeners

Inability to hear/ recognize ‘question’ word

The most important students‟ duty in this part is to realize types of questions in terms of Yes/ No question, or Wh-questions which are subdivided into questions with

‟Who‟, „What‟, „Where‟, „When‟, „Why‟, „Whose‟, „Which +Noun‟, „How‟, or statements in order to decide which answer choices are right for each type of question

in the text Usually, students get failure in catching the first word of a sentence or question For example, the pronoun „we‟ is misheard as the question word „will‟ On that account, Wislon (2008) blames it for „slips of the ear‟ –„murders and execution‟ instead of „mergers and acquisition‟, which is a very popular mistake that language learners face in listening Moreover, lack of knowledge of intonation is the best reason for their failure in hearing „question word‟ Driven and Oakeshott-Taylor (1984) indicates that “stress and intonation are very important in word recognition” (Driven

& Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984, as cited in Buck, 2001, p 37) Also, Buck (2001) shares the same view when he asserts the vital role of word stress, sentence and intonation in

19

comprehension Again, in order to help learners find it easy to recognize „question word‟, the use of „sentence intonation‟ is considered as an effective solution

Lack of knowledge of ‘sentence intonation’

Like what mentioned above, the use of knowledge of „sentence intonation‟ to distinguish „Statement‟ from „Question‟, and to subdivide categories of „Question‟ into „Yes/ No‟ question or „Wh- question‟ is very significant for learners Based on Wilson‟ view, mishearing leads to the wrong recognition of word, but „we‟ and „will‟ will be distinguished clearly due to sentence intonation because question or statement will be identified correctly depending on false or rise intonation of sentences True, Buck (2001, p 37) asserts that “In English, statements end with a falling intonation and questions with a rising intonation” Meanwhile, Wh-question has a rising intonation on Wh-word and a falling intonation at the end of the question; but Yes/ No question is distressed on the first word and has a rising intonation at the end of the question (Brazil, 1997; Bradford, 1998; McCarthey, 1991)

Eg: HOW did you ever escape ?

HAVE you ever been to Turkey ?

We looked at the sky and saw the cloud

In reality, sentence intonation, however, is not provided adequately for learners Particularly, to non-major English students, English is just a conditional subject, which requires students to fulfill school‟s demand before they finish their three -or four – year learning time at the college, thus a very short time (i.e 60 periods/ an English course) is spent teaching and learning English More importantly, vocabulary and grammar are invested much more whereas pronunciation, intonation, and listening strategies such as using context clues in guessing the topic of an oral text, etc were almost ignored despite their noticeable roles in listening As a result, knowledge of intonation cannot be provided adequately for students in the learning context In other words, lack of using intonation strategies causes a big problem to learners when doing the listening task Besides, it is worth to notice that other

20

listening strategies such as using context clues to guess what the conversations and talks is about before the tape should also be taken into account

Inability to recognize the types of the listening text

Learners cannot identify the topics of what is said because they fail in using context clues to guess the meaning of the listening message Oxford (1990) asserts that using language-based clues is a powerful way to guess the meaning of a listening passage Certainly, the approach enables students to strengthen their comprehensibility of the incoming information Ur (1984, p 16) ensures that “if the listener can make a guess as to the sort of thing that is going to be said next, he will be much more likely to perceive it and understand it well” In addition, Pearson and Johnson (1978) show strong evidence that background knowledge of the world is useful for setting up expectation of what they are going to hear (Pearson & Johnson,

1978, as cited in Buck, 2001)

However, Oxford (1990) argues that not only knowledge of the world, also knowledge of target language provides linguistic clues for guessing meaning For

instance, if a listener hears some English words „shovel, grass, mower, and lawn’, so

it is supposed that the conversation is about gardening Also, it is supported by Anderson and Lynch (1988, p 42) that “learners need to utilize knowledge of discourse content, of the context, and any available knowledge of the L2 linguistic system, e.g its grammar) to help them make predictions about the identity of incoming words, so as to make up for their natural shortcomings in acoustic processing” True, in TOEIC tests, the application of linguistic clues is treated as a listening strategy in order to lessen students‟ obstacles when dealing with conversations and talks Therefore, Lougheed (2007) suggests that learners should use clues in context to guess the conversation and talk is about However, most of the study learners fail to make advantage of these clues for prediction of the incoming data in their learning process Again, ability to use context clues to recognize the types

of listening text plays an important role in comprehending listening passages Clearly,

it can be seen that obstacles hinder learners‟ listening competence are various,

However, Ur argues that interesting texts but long also divert learners‟ attention He asserts that “The effects of fatigue vary a great deal, depending on how hard the learner needs to concentrate and on his ability to do so for long periods” (Ur,

1984, p 19) He explains that when contacting a long text, the listener runs out of energy to interpret unfamiliar sounds, lexis, and syntax so he/ she will get failure in understanding the spoken text The fact that a TOEIC test lasts forty-five minutes and

it is often played only once, leading to a heavy burden to students because of tiredness caused by a long tiring listening text Thus, they easily lose their attention to what is said Therefore, there is a strong evidence in Underwood‟s study that “inability to concentration can be caused by a number of things, but in listening work it is a major problem, because even the shortest break in attention can seriously impair comprehension” (Underwood, 1989, p 19) Obviously, of four parts in the TOEIC test, students often lose their concentration at the two last parts After spending the first two serious parts with ten pictures and thirty questions and responses, it seems that students feel exhausted to keep working on the remaining parts Sharing the same view, Wilson (2008) agrees that „long-term issues‟ get students sidetracked easily and lack their ability to sustain concentration Interestingly, vocabulary also impact on listener‟s ability to concentrate, causing problems for them to comprehend an oral text

22

Lack of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge

True, vocabulary and grammatical competence strongly influences listeners‟ ability to get the meaning of the listening texts Underwood (1989, p 17) agrees that

“For people listening to a foreign language, an unknown word can be likely a suddenly dropped barrier causing to stop and think about the meaning of the word and thus making them miss the next part of the speech” Due to the characteristic of TOEIC tests, their listening passages contain terminologies related to business English, preventing listeners from comprehending the content of the spoken texts

Besides, some linguists have proved negative effect of the shortage of vocabulary and grammar on understanding a spoken text (Harmer, 1998; Rubin & Thomson, 1994, and etc, …) Agreeing upon the claim, Buck (2001) shows evidence

that if a listener is told about a visit from a guest, he/ she will never confuse the word with a verb guessed due to his/ her good grammar knowledge

Similarly, Anderson and Lynch (1988), and Guo &Wills (1987) discover that lack of language knowledge in terms of vocabulary and grammar will have a harmful influence on listening comprehension Therefore, vocabulary and grammatical knowledge need to be introduced adequately and strategically to learners The fact that learners learn vocabulary and grammar unconsciously but fail to use them effectively

as clues to interpret the incoming data, thus, they cannot succeed in understanding the text (Long & Richard, 1987) Partly, this is explained by learners‟ lack of the use of strategies in listening comprehension

Lack of strategy use in listening comprehension

Educational researchers, namely Nunan (1999), Oxford (1990), and others have appreciated the importance of strategies in language learning True, in the light of strategies, the comprehension of a listening text will become easier for listeners (Oxford, 1990) On that account, strategies are referred to as “techniques‟‟, “tactics”,

“potentially conscious plan”, “learning skill, functional skills”, etc, which aid the learning of second language (Weden & Rubin, 1987) Therefore, Nunan (1999, p

23

171) asserts that “knowledge of strategies is important, because the greater awareness you have of what you are doing, if you are conscious of the process underlying the learning that you are involved in, then learning will be more effective” Also, Oxford (1990), Riding and Rayner (1998) agree upon the usefulness of strategies in language acquisition Thus, it can be said that the positive correlation between the use of strategies and the success in the language learning is evident Acknowledging the advantage of strategy, Lougheed (2007), the editor of the book, namely Longman Preparation Series for The New TOEIC, discovered useful strategies applied in TOEIC listening tests, and printed in each part of TOEIC tests for assisting learners in comprehending oral texts (see Appendix 3)

More importantly, the building of strategically learning approach and the extension of learners‟ awareness of strategy use should be concerned because the use

of strategy reflects learners‟ language proficiency This suggests that learners who learn successfully will use strategies effectively and vice versa In fact, Oxford (1990), Vandergrift (1999), and Wilson (2008) argues that the better the learning outcome is, the more productively strategies is used Again, training learners to become autonomous strategy users has received much attention from instructors in learning process

Understanding an oral text, therefore, is not really easy because it requires much work for listeners to do In other words, learners should apply different kinds of language knowledge as mentioned in the previous section and make use of strategies

to get the meaning of oral texts It is evident that these factors have a strong influence

on their listening ability However, it is also accepted that other difficulties caused by listening text and task, and learning environment and facilities make an enormous contribution to learners‟ success listening comprehension

The picture with many details

There is no doubt that picture-based activities facilitate learners much more than written words in L2 learning (Underwood, 1989) However, not all such activities attract learners‟ attention on topic Ur (1984) rejected that it is true for pictures simple

or not over-detailed That does not mean that the recognition of some pictures complicated seems to be an easy task for learners to do because pictures with many details will make confusion for listeners to identify The fact that listeners have to carefully observe it before the tape is played in order to catch up with the description

of the picture from the audio With ten pictures in the part, however, listeners find it very hard to remember all the details in these pictures More importantly, they have no enough time to do the task in a very short time before the test In contrast, in comparison with pictures focusing only on one subject or one person with very few details, listeners certainly understand it better than the previous ones Thus, Ur (1984,

p 31) suggested that “Both pictures and diagrams should be simple enough to be grasped at a glance” That is to say, over-detailed pictures make learners confused and difficult to scan As a result, learners are distracted by such elements Moreover, pictures unclear to see cause difficulties for learners in the listening, which is displayed in the following section

Unclear pictures

Again, the use of pictures in listening learning is beneficial Listeners, however, get troubles when they face with dim pictures in white-black books Simply, the focus on trying to identify what is in pictures takes them from attention to recognizing sounds and getting information important to best describe the pictures Ur

25

(1984, p 30) shares his view that “if something is conspicuous, colorful, humorous, dramatic or in motion – so much the better: striking and stimulating visual aids are likely to heighten students‟ motivation and concentration” He asserts that pictures used should be clear representation of objects, people and scenes in order to ease students‟ burden in listening

Honestly, the quality of copied books becomes obsessive to listeners to get overall look of the pictures in a TOEIC test Despite obstacles caused by sub-standard books, a harsh reality is often seen in Vietnamese college or universities that these kinds of books have been used widely due to the cost less spent on them than the original ones Short-term gains more increase difficulties to learners who are facing challenges of the characteristic of listening texts such as kinds of questions, language input and so on

The questions are not printed in the text

Due to the special design of the part in the TOEIC test in which the questions and answer choices in part 2 are invisible in the test, students have to recognize them

by only hearing from the audio Imaging how hard and difficult the listening task is when students have to both listen and interpret the meaning of what is said without any orientation or support The fact that if either questions or their answers are shown

in the test, partly students are able to guess what is coming based on these context clues True, Ur (1984) claimed that students may guess the meaning of the oral text from given meaningful words without necessarily perceiving them Again, in his study, he reemphasizes that “the presence of a written version takes some of the pressure off the listening: students can concentrate less with their ears, as it were, because their eyes are doing most of the work” (Ur, 1984, p 52) Therefore, Oxford (1990) encourages the use of clues given in the test to guess the content of the incoming text, a strategically listening activity that students should takes advantage in their learning language

26

Generally speaking, invisible questions cause considerable difficulties for students when taking TOEIC listening tests However, vocabulary competence may be said one of the biggest challenges for learners

There are many new words in the conversation and short talks

Based on Buck‟s description of a TOEIC test, the test content mainly takes place in a business or work environment, so it requires an amount of specialist vocabulary such as fax machine, managers, staff, and business reports, etc It is interpreted that these terminologies cause a negative effect of understanding the content of a spoken text Simply, during listening process, an unknown word can distract listeners‟ concentration causing them to stop and think about the meaning of the word, thus the next parts of the listening text are missed (Underwood, 1984) As a result, they get failure in comprehending the spoken text

However, others, namely Anderson and Lynch (1988), Nunan (1999), and Wilson (2008) express a different view that new terminologies cause misunderstanding or even incomprehension of an oral text On that account, they explain that the vocabulary barrier makes students have no idea of what is coming, leading them to the failure of comprehending the spoken passage Also, in Flowerdrew and Miller‟s study (1992), they agree upon difficulties pertaining to new terminologies that students faced while listening In addition, Harmer (1998), Rubin and Thompson (1994) explore that unknown words or phrases are considered as a major obstacle to comprehending what is said Again, the difficulty of language input will become obstacles for learners in decoding an oral text as well as a long listening text

Long conversation and talks

Based on the design of a TOEIC test, there are 30 short conversations and 20 short talks in which the minimum length of conversations and talks is about 30 seconds, while the maximum one last over 1 minute Unfortunately, these listening texts can be said to be an obsession to students in listening In other word, the last two parts of TOEIC listening tests are considered as the most demanding tasks to them when taking TOEIC tests However, according to O‟Neill and Scott (1974), a listening

27

conversation should not exceed about one and a half minutes so he asserts that

“understanding six minutes‟ speech in a foreign language appears to be a more demanding task than understanding ninety seconds‟ (O‟Neill & Scott, 1974, as cited in Buck (2001) Meanwhile, Underwood (1989) had unalike idea that listening texts lasting two minutes without a break will become to be a challenge for elementary and intermediate level students However, ironically, these conversations and talks in the TOEIC test whose the length is about one minute or less are regarded as the most difficult parts to students in the listening part To explain the paradoxical fact, Underwood (1989, p 103) shows that

very short passages of, say, half a minute or less sometimes cause problems because the students do not have time to get used to the voice(s) or to tune the topic, and the whole thing is over before they get to grips with it

(Underwood, 1989, p 103) Pre-listening preparation, therefore, should be given to students in order for them to know what they are asked to do when the tape is played, causing them to tune

in more rapidly

However, Buck (2001) rejects that not all long listening texts hamper learners‟ comprehension of an oral text On that account, he ensures that to low –language ability learners, producing more-words speech is easier to understand than shorter one (Buck, 2001) That is meant that the longer the listening text is, the easier students‟ work on comprehending the text is

In contrast, Harmer (1998, p 109) has different view that “long tapes on subject which students are not interested in it at all will be not motivated but also students might well „switch off‟ ” Thus, he strongly concludes that “comprehension is lost and the listening becomes valueless” (Harmer, 1989, p 109)

In general, there are two parties whose view of difficulties related to the length

of listening text is unalike However, from personal observation, students often have more problems in getting the meaning of long listening texts Or they are unable to concentrate well on speech which lasts more than two minutes In other words,