In order to serve this purpose, two sets of questionnaires were delivered to 213 first-year students in Course 2008-2009 and all 12 teachers currently in charge of Business English at th
BACKGROUND
Listening plays a key role in daily communication because people not only express their feelings or thoughts but also have to understand and react to what has been said by others as well A survey conducted in America suggests that an average person spends about 30% of their time speaking while 42% of their time listening (Cooper, 1988) In recent years, listening skills have grown in priority and are now considered essential in the development of language proficiency
We hardly have difficulty listening to our mother tongue, but in a foreign or second language (abbreviated as L2), listening is proved to be the most difficult skill to develop – dealing at speed with unfamiliar sounds, words and structures This is even more difficult if we do not know the topic under discussion, or who is speaking to whom In language teaching, it seems a little unfair to simply ask students to listen to something and answer some questions without telling them beforehand what to expect and what to listen for As a result, it makes improving listening skills much harder It will be greatly useful for language learners to perform some activities before they actually do a listening task and those activities are named pre-listening activities These kinds of activities not only get students to be interested, and confident but to facilitate their listening comprehension (Berne, 1995; Herron, 1994; Rost, 2000) They help learners develop background knowledge and improve their understanding of the spoken text Therefore, how pre-listening activities are designed and carried out in classrooms plays a crucial role in determining the success of a listening lesson
There have been a number of studies done so far in terms of finding out the causes and solutions to listening problems in English as Foreign Language (abbreviated as EFL) classes Nevertheless, the study on pre-listening stage is rarely done such as the thesis by Nguyễn Thị Thuý Loan (2006) who investigates the effect of pre-listening strategy instructions on improving listening skill for non-majored students at Ho Chi Minh City (abbreviated as HCMC) University of Industry
Although several studies which analyzed the samples’ perceptions and attitudes towards listening comprehension as well as recommended pedagogical implications have been carried out, there is no evidence that any researchers have conducted a study on the performance of certain pre-listening activities of current students’ listening comprehension skills in EFL classes This study attempts to explore pre-listening activities’ performance with an investigation at the Faculty of Economics (abbreviated as FE) as representatives
In this thesis, I shall take the benefits of pre-listening activities into consideration, focusing on the teachers’ and students’ perceptions, the teachers’ performance compared to the students’ preferences, investigating the negative factor on their listening comprehension and giving some recommendations on how to utilize pre-listening activities better In that way, the students are encouraged to activate their own schematic knowledge, activities which are closely related to the listening text and have educated anticipations in such a way that the relationship between predictions is evident to the listener so as a result, improve their listening comprehension skills.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Being a teacher of English for freshmen at the FE, Vietnam National University-HCMC, I find that it becomes so challenging for first-year students to make some improvements or to be interested in listening skills This may be partly because the teachers do not sufficiently focus on pre-listening activities and partly because the teachers do not apply the activities very effectively It seems that the students do not have an innate understanding of what strategic listeners are, of how beneficial pre-listening activities are They also do not recognize barriers limiting their acquisition of the spoken language Thus, I decided to take a survey into how pre-listening activities are performed and what difficulties the teachers and students face in the process of teaching and learning listening skills I also would like to suggest some implications for pre-listening teaching in accordance with the situation.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DTUDY
Theoretically, pre-listening is one of three stages during the listening comprehension teaching process – Pre-listening, While-listening and Post-listening, and it is supposed to be a stepping stone that helps L2 learners become more active and confident Many research papers and articles have proved that pre-listening activities make a considerable contribution to listening comprehension
Pedagogically, poor listening results are blamed on students’ poor learning ability, students’ insufficient effort, lack of readiness and guidance activities, teachers’ inappropriate teaching methods and classroom techniques, or wrong attitudes of both teachers and students towards the subject Being aware of the important role of pre-listening activities and skillful in designing them, the teachers themselves can help their students be more active, self-directed and autonomous in the process of listening comprehension This study is intended to provide research participants with a chance to reflect on their ways of teaching and learning listening and to yield suggestions on how pre-listening activities can best be implemented The insights and suggestions provided by research participants will be of great value not only for themselves as EFL lecturers, for other experienced EFL teachers, but also for learners, curriculum and textbook writers, and researchers
In practice, pre-listening activities are sometimes neglected and some instructors overlap the first two stages Additionally, the way in which the activity has been performed raises some trouble as well In most listening classes, the traditional pattern – listening to the text, doing the exercises, and checking the answers – is still quite common Learning this kind of lesson is like taking a test that focuses on learners’ memory rather than on the process of listening As a result, some problems occur such as; having a high level of anxiety and a low level of input Instead of being motivated, most of the time the learners suffer frustration; which results in an immediate answer to the question -“Which is the most difficult
English skill?” - with listening Thus, the study hopefully reminds both teachers and students of the important role of pre-listening in activating learners’ schematic knowledge during the listening comprehension process Furthermore, the teachers will be able to make the right choice when selecting pre-listening activities appropriate for a certain listening lesson; owing to identification of learners’ needs as well as interests and linguistic knowledge It is clear that pre-listening activity’s performance, if well-organized by the teacher, will contribute a great deal to the effective teaching and learning of listening
0.4 STATEMENT OF PURPOSE AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The study is intended to
(1) investigate the teachers' and the students' perspectives and attitudes towards the pre-listening activities
(2) find out the most common pre-listening activities applied by the teachers
(3) examine the students' preference for pre-listening activities
(4) recommend some efficient pre-listening techniques to enhance the students' listening comprehension basing on the result of the study
(5) explore main factors that have negative effects on the students’ listening comprehension
In order to achieve such purposes, the following questions are taken into consideration based on analysis of the questionnaires and semi-structured interview:
(1) What are first-year students at the FE and their teachers’ perceptions of the pre- listening activities?
(2) In what way can pre-listening activities assist first-year students at the FE to perform a listening task better?
(3) What are the main factors that have negative effects on FE first-year students’ listening comprehension?
As matter of fact, the students at the FE are supposed to finish the three-year-Business English (abbreviated as BE) syllabus ranging from Business English 1 (abbreviated as BE1) to Business English 6 (abbreviated as BE6) In this thesis, Business English 2 (abbreviated as BE2) (they are still first-year students) is the focus of the study since most of them spend little time learning listening In specific,
61.6% have one-year listening experience while 73.9% are devoted to English learning The very limited periods of time on listening makes itself become most challenging to EFL learners and they have learnt some general views of difficulties in absorbing the skill after finishing BE1 at school All first-year students are using the coursebook Business Basics (by David Grant and Robert McLarty 2001, Oxford University Press (abbreviated as OUP) as their main coursebook
0.5.2 Stages of the listening stages
The listening process has three stages (pre-listening, while-listening, post- listening) and pre-listening with its activities serves as an important preparation for listening in several ways These ways include increasing input, building listeners’ confidence, helping students become active participants, and facilitating listening comprehension More focus on this stage will benefit the students
0.5.3 Types of pre-listening activities
There are a variety of activities done before performing a listening task, but the six pre-listening activities, namely Brainstorming; Using a class discussion;
Questioning and answering session; Predicting the content of the listening text; Pre- teaching new words or difficult key words; Studying the listening tasks are the focus of the study because of their great popularity and benefits
Besides the introduction which states the study’s background, statement of the problem, significance of the study, statement of purpose, research questions, the scope of the study, and the conclusion, the thesis includes five chapters as follows: Chapter 1 provides the background to the study including a description of the English syllabus for FE first-year students and factors having effects on their studying listening skills
Chapter 2 reviews the relevant literature to the issues of teaching and learning of listening skills It provides the theoretical background for the research questions addressed in the study The chapter is demonstrated in five major sessions: (1) teaching productive skills and receptive skills; (2) the nature of the listening skill; (3) the important features of spoken texts; (4) the importance of pre-listening activities;
Chapter 3 focuses on how the study is conducted, and how data are collected and analyzed
Chapter 4 launches the results of data analyses, and discusses the findings in the light of research questions and issues raised in the literature review
Chapter 5 lists the researcher’s pedagogical implications and recommendations to improve first-year students’ quality of performing a listening task and shows what could be adjusted in case they are applied for other educational institutions
Hopefully, the study brings about some practical benefits to the EFL classes in general and to the teachers and students at the FE in particular in terms of teaching and learning listening skills by reminding them of the importance of pre-listening activities, finding out the students’ obstacles and suggesting some useful pre- listening techniques in order to make the teaching and learning of listening skills more effective
This chapter provides background information crucial to understanding why first-year students at the FE have difficulty improving their listening skills The chapter is organized in two sections The first section is a description of the BE syllabus with listening skills currently in use at the FE for first-year students The second is about factors which effecting first-year students’ listening skills
1.2 DESCRIPTION OF THE ENGLISH SYLLABUS FOR FE FRESHMEN
Over recent years, teaching English as Specific Purpose (abbreviated as ESP),
BE in specific, to first-year students who are not English majored has developed in many universities in Vietnam The effort was initiated as an improvement in the training of young, educated students in a variety of technical and scientific fields In order to introduce the teaching of ESP, many institutions have decided to skip portions of the General English (abbreviated as GE) curriculum There are many difficulties associated with this skipping of periods of GE
The most controversial issue is the need to upgrade all students to a pre- intermediate English level in order to allow them to acquire the knowledge of the BE courses Another problem is that the teachers are expected to have thorough background knowledge of BE However, this might not be the case To relieve some of these tensions, the FE, founded in 2001, one of the members of the Viet Nam National University-HCMC, in 2004 adopted a BE textbook to teach English to freshmen with the hope of decreasing the negative aspects with a chance to better apply communicative English in their future employment
This section describes the BE syllabus for first-year students at the FE, concerning the aims of the syllabus and coursebook in use