An investigation into the causesof difficulties English listening skills encountered by first year English majors atFaculty of English, Thuongmai University

I certify my authorship of the study report entitle “ An investigation into the causes of difficulties English listening skills encountered by first year English majors at Faculty of Eng

I certify my authorship of the study report entitle “ An investigation into the causes

of difficulties English listening skills encountered by first year English majors at Faculty of English, Thuongmai University”.

This graduation paper is the result of my own research and the substance of thisthesis has not been submitted for a degree to any other university or institution and that

if this declaration is found to be false, disciplinary measures and penalties can be taken andimposed in accordance with university policies and rules

SignatureNguyen Thi Thuy Linh

During the process of doing this graduation paper, I have received many necessaryassistances, precious ideas and timely encouragements from my teachers, family andfriends This paper could not have been completed without the help, encouragement andsupport from a number of people who all deserve my sincere gratitude and appreciation.First of all, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor – Ms PhamThuy Giang, the English teacher of Faculty of English, who has always been willing togive me valuable advice and suggestions in order that I can complete successfully this study.

I also would like to take this opportunity to show my sincere thanks to all my teachers atthe Faculty of English, Thuongmai University, who have handed me basic knowledge tocomplete this study

I am so thankful to students of K53N at Faculty of English for their whole – heartparticipation in the study

I would like to acknowledge my thanks to all the authors of the books, magazines,and other materials listed in the reference part for their ideas that have been reflectedand developed in the study

I am equally indebted to my classmates for their suggestions and encouragements

in the process of my study

Last but not least, my particular thanks are given to my parents for theirencouragement and support which played an important role in my graduation paper

Listening skill is one of the most necessary skills to communicate in the real life.Everybody knows that in order to listen to a message is not as simple as hearing it, so thelistener has to understand the message and respond in the right manner The thesis willstudy the subjective and objective difficulties of the students in learning the listeningskill Then, it would like to find out the reasons for those problems and the solutions forstudents in learning the listening skill Therefore, I applied the qualitative and quantitativemethods to do the research So the collecting data instruments like questionnaires,interviews were used to do the study The results of the research will point out thedifficulties that students meet when they learn the listening skill More importantly, thestudy helps me find out the causes of those difficulties so that I can work out the right solutions

to the problems With the hope of improving students’ listening competence

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 2

ABSTRACT 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 5

LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS 6

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale of the study 1

1.2 Aims of the study 2

1.3 Research questions 2

1.4 Scope of the study 2

1.5 Methods of the study 2

1.6 The organization of the study 2

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 4

2.1 Overview of listening 4

2.2 Difficulties in learning the listening skill 6

2.3 Causes of difficulties in listening 7

2.4 Extra linguistic factors 8

2.4 Summary 9

CHAPTER 3: THE STUDY 10

3.1 The participants 10

3.2 Data collection instruments 10

3.3 Data analysis and discussion 11

3.4 Main finding and discussions 21

3.5 Recommendations 23

CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION 24

4.1 Summary of the study 24

4.2 Limitations of the study 24

4.3 Suggestions for further study 25 REFERENCES

APPENDIX

FE: Faculty of English.

LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS TABLES

Table.1: The interview results of students’ assessment of English listening skill 12 Table 2: Students’ opinions about the activities that they like most in listening

English classes 19

CHARTS Chart 1: The students' assessment of learning the listening skill 12

Chart 2: The students’ interest in learning listening skill 13

Chart 3: Students’ attitudes towards the importance of English listening skill 14

Chart 4: The frequency of students having problems in learning English listening skill 15

Chart 5: Students’ interest in extra listening activities 16

Chart 6: Students’ difficulties in listening 17

Chart 7: Factors motivating students’ learning the listening skill 18

Chart 8: The subjective factors affecting the students’ learning listening skill 19

Chart 9: What students should do before listening 20

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale of the study

Nowadays, listening plays a vital role in daily lives People listen for differentpurposes such as entertainment, academic purposes or obtaining necessary information Ofthe four language skills-Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing-that all languagelearners are supposed to acquire, listening is believed to be the most challenging due tothe complex and subtle nature of listening comprehension in a second or foreign language

As a researcher, I would like to present the thesis title “An investigation into the causes of difficulties in English listening skills encountered by first year English majors

at Faculty of English, Thuongmai University” for several reasons.

First of all, listening is the most important skill in communication in the real life.Listening and speaking are two major parts of communication They are closelyinterdependent We are able to talk sensibly when we understand what is said to us If wefail to understand spoken language, we may miss important information and respond in a funnyway Moreover, in learning a language, listening is a useful means of providing students withcomprehensible input, which is an essential component of the whole language learningprocess And teaching listening skill in classroom helps students make transition fromclassroom English to real-life English more easily and effectively Therefore, I would like

to do this research to help the students pay more attention to listening skill

Secondly, learning listening skill is the most difficult in learning a foreignlanguage Listening, like reading, is a receptive skill but it is often the most daunting forstudents When reading, a reader usually has more opportunities to refer back to the text toclarify understanding, which a listener can not do in most listening contexts such as TVprograms, meetings, discussion, lectures or conversations

Last but not least, the reason for choosing this thesis title is that many students are notinterested in learning listening skill They find listening classes boring On the other hand,practicing listening skill is difficult and it takes long time That is the reason I would like towork out some suggestion so as to help students become more interested in learninglistening skill

After studying at Faculty of English, Thuongmai University for nearly four years, Irealize that first year students of English major still have many difficulties in their listeningskill In the hope of finding out the difficulties of listening that they normally get, a study

entitled: “An investigation into the causes of difficulties in English listening skills encountered by first year English majors at Faculty of English, Thuongmai University”

has been conducted because of all above mentioned reasons

1.2 Aims of the study

The study is done with the following aims:

Firstly, the study was carried out in order to survey the real state of learning Englishlistening skill in Thuongmai University so that I could work out the reasons for thosedifficulties

Secondly, most students find it difficult to learn listening skill so I would like tofind the common difficulties that the students face when they learn Englishlistening skill at Thuongmai University

Finally, because of the difficulties, many students are not interested in learning andpracticing this skill at the class, therefore the study would like to suggest some possiblesolutions to those difficulties These suggestions also wish to help the students catch upwith the speed of a normal conversation in the real life so that they can improve theircommunication competence

3 What are some solutions to improve in learning English listening ?

1.4 Scope of the study

The study is about learning listening skill for first-year students in Englishfaculty at Thuongmai University Because of the limitations of time and knowledge, theshortage of reference materials, this study cannot cover the whole issue of listening skill

It only focus on exploring common difficulties students get in listening skill.Moreover, the study could not touch upon all the students at Thuongmai University It isconfined to first-years tudents in English faculty at Thuongmai University only

1.5 Methods of the study

The study will be conducted using quantitative, qualitative methods The studyincludes survey questionnaires for both teachers and students, interview questions forstudents only of K53 at the FE

After getting the results, the researcher will use the tables and charts for presentingthe collect data

1.6 The organization of the study

The study includes four main chapters, organized as follows:

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Chapter 1: introduction

- Rationale of the study

- Aims of the study

- Research of the study

- Scope of the study

- Methods of the study

- Organization of the study

Chapter 2: Literature review

Theories difficulties to be resolved in the study

- Theoretical background related to English listening skill

- Difficulties in English listening skill

- Strategies of English listening skill

Chapter 3: The study

- Results of the study

- Discussions about the result of the study

- Suggestions for learning

Chapter 4: Conclusion

- Limitations of the study

- Suggestions for further studies

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Overview of listening

2.1.1 Definition of listening

Listening is considered as one of the most important skills in acquiring both anative language and a second or foreign language It is being paid more and moreattention to So far, there have been a number of definitions of listening by different linguistssuch as Howatt and Dakin (1974); Pearson (1983); Hirsch (1986); Scarcella and Oxford(1992); Bentley and Bacon (1996), Brown (2001), Gary Buck (2001), Scott Shelton(2008)

Howatt and Dakin (1974) defined listening as the ability to identify and understandwhat others are saying This involves understanding a speaker’s accent orpronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning

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

Pearson (1983) stated “Listening involves the simultaneous organization andcombination of skills in Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, and knowledge of the textstructure, all of which seem to be controlled by the cognitive process Thus it can be saidthat though not fully realized, the listening skill is essential in acquiring languageproficiency”

Hirsch (1986) gave another definition: “Listening as an aspect of skills: involvesneurological response and interpretations of sounds to understand and to give meaning byreacting, selecting meaning, remembering, attending, analyzing and including previousexperience”

Bentley and Bacon (1996) stated that listening, an important part of the secondlanguage learning process also has been defined as an active process during which the listenerconstructs meaning from oral input

According to Brown (2001), listening is “not merely the process of unidirectionalreceiving of audible symbols” He supposed that one aspect of listening comprehensionwhich is “the psychomotor process of receiving sound waves through the ear andtransmitting nerve impulses to the brain” Hence, listening comprises of three elements: thesender, the message and the listener

Gary Buck (2001), for example, pointed out that “listening comprehension is anactive process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the

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incoming sound” in which “a number of different types of knowledge are involved: bothlinguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge”.

Scott Shelton (2008) thought that listening effectively is a demanding and involvingprocess One must be able to deal with different accents or pronunciation, unfamiliarlexical items and syntactic structures, competing background noise, and also make aconscious effort to not switch off or become distracted while listening All of this must beachieved and dealt with more or less simultaneously in order to identify and understand themeaning in any given message

To sum up, all of the definitions are given with a view to clarify the nature of thelistening skill which is necessary in the process of acquiring a native language or aforeign one

2.1.2 The importance of listening skill

Listening is one of the necessary life skills which are defined as “skills which canprovide you with a better perspective on life, skills which can allow you to maintain a higherawareness of both yourself and the world around you” It is one of the most vital waysthat human beings feel the life and live Everyone, in the real life, often listens morethan speaks, reads or writes We listen everywhere and every time We listen toeverything and everybody For instance, at home, we listen to the news, watch films ortalk with others At school, students listen to the lecturers teaching At a meeting, the stafflistens to the new plan from the director, etc Without listening, the man becomesbackward in each minute of their lives It is obvious that listening is really important

in the real life

As it is mentioned in the differences between hearing and listening, hearing is apart of five senses (hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and looking) but listening is a choice

to hear and understand it As an integrative skill, listening plays an important role in theprocess of language learning or acquisition and facilitating the emergence of other languageskill According to Nord (1980, p.17), listening is the way of learning the language “It givesthe learner information from which to build up the knowledge necessary for using thelanguage When this knowledge is built up, the learner can begin to speak The listening-only period is a time of observation and learning, which provides the basis for the otherlanguage skills” (Nation, 1990, p.12) Most learners will spend more time listening tothe foreign language than producing it themselves Failing to understand spoken language,people may miss important information presented to them or respond in a funny way Sotraining in listening is really necessary It helps students make the transition fromclassroom English to the real-life English more easily and effectively

2.1.3 Types of listening

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

One type of listening, casual listening, means listening without a particularpurpose When we listen, we do not pay much or even any attention to the informationunless there is something that interests us Therefore, we hardly remember the content ofwhat we hear Normally, we do this kind of listening when we listen to music, or listen tonews on the radio or TV while doing some housework or chatting to a friend

Another type of listening is focused listening That is when we listen for aparticular purpose to find out information we need to know It happens quite popularly

in the real life In here, we listen with much more concentration and try to get as muchinformation as possible However, we do not listen to every word We know beforehandwhat we are going to listen so we only catch the most important information from thespeech or the lecture In classroom, learners also use this type of listening

2.2 Difficulties in learning the listening skill

First of all, in phonological aspect, the listeners always get trouble with sounds Theycannot catch the actual sound of the foreign language since most listeners rely mostly oncontext for comprehension Thus, they are often themselves unaware of inaccurate soundperception

Moreover, most learners cannot understand fast, natural native speech Normally, inEnglish classrooms, learners usually ask their teacher to speak clearly and slow down So theycan listen to the words or sound in isolation However, learners have to listen to fast, naturalnative speech in the real life or in listening recording

Vocabulary is also a big problem for listeners In a listening text, there are not few newand strange words which make listeners confused It is often colloquial such as they use “guy”for “man”, or “kid” for “child” Since the leaners always try to listen to and understand everyword Therefore they get more difficult to understand exactly what is said It is anunconscious results in ineffective comprehension as well as feeling of fatigue and failure Additionally, English grammar is too complicated for students to realize their meaningwhen listening Especially, beginners usually have poor knowledge of grammar They cannotunderstand all the natural talk with a lot of different structures or modality Informal speechalso tends to be somewhat ungrammatical such as unfinished clauses or sentences arecommon

Finally, the learner’s background knowledge about the world is not heterogeneous,which causes difficulty in understanding the discourse of the listening text It is not easy forthe behiners to get it correctly

2.3 Causes of difficulties in listening

There are eight characteristics of spoken language which makes listening difficult(Brown, 2001, p.252)

2.3.1.In spoken language, due to memory limitations we break down speech intosmaller groups of words They are called clustering For examples: “a lot of”, “a numberof”, etc Therefore when listening, learners have to learn to pick out manageable clusters ofwords, avoiding trying to listen to every word of the speech It is not necessary and makeslearners become distracted

2.3.2.Moreover, spoken language has a great number of redundancies They are theresult of rephrasing, repetitions, elaborations and some insertions such as “As I havesaid” and so on At first, learners may get trouble with this They are easy to be confused.However, with some training learners can take advantage of redundancies to have more timeand extra information

2.3.3.On the other hand, spoken language also has many reduced forms It may bephonological, morphological, syntactic or pragmatic like “you’re” instead of “you are”,

“won’t” instead of “will not”, or “can’t” instead of “cannot” These reductions arereally significant difficulties to the learners, especially beginners when they start getting

to know the full form of English language

2.3.4.The next characteristic of spoken language is performance variables As aresult of unplanned action, spoken language consists of a lot of hesitations (“er”, “uhm”),false starts, pauses and corrections They make the listeners confused

2.3.5Colloquial language is another problem that can interfere listeners in real lifelistening because they are familiar with standard written language In monologues anddialogues, the appearance of idioms, slang, reduced forms and shared cultural language arecommon

2.3.6.In listening, learners need to comprehend language delivered at varying rates ofspeed and delivered with few pauses because they do not have opportunity to stopspeaker and listen again many times

2.3.7.English is a stress-timed language so it is very important for learners tounderstand its prosodic features By stress, rhythm, and intonation, listeners can interpretmore subtle messages like sarcasm, endearment, insult, solicitation, praise, etc

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2.3.8.The last but not least, interaction is also an element that plays a large role inlistening comprehension Language learners should be taught the instruction in the two-waynature of listening They have to learn to continue the process of comprehending Some rules

of interaction are negotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn-taking, topic nomination,maintenance, and termination

In short, it is necessary for language learners to understand all of thesecharacteristics of spoken language in order that they get more ease in interaction in generaland in listening in particular

2.4 Extra linguistic factors

2.4.1 The class atmosphere

Sometimes inconvenience of classrooms affects students listeningcomprehension In the large classrooms students who are sitting on the back rows may nothear the recording as students sit in front Students who prefer to stay next to the windowsalso effected by the noise that come from outside The temperature of class can becounted as a factor that makes listening comprehension difficult The class that doesnot have air conditioner or heater may be too hot in summer or too cold in winter

2.4.2 Students’ motivation

Students’ motivation is one of the crucial factors that affect listeningcomprehension It can be difficult for students maintaining the concentration in a foreignlanguage learning classroom In listening comprehension, even the smallest pause inattention may considerably spoil comprehension When students find the topic of thelistening text interesting, comprehending would be easier For all that, students findlistening very boring even if they are interested in the topic because it needs a hugeamount of effort in order not to miss the meaning

2.4.3 Quality of Recorded Material

In some classes, teachers use some recorded materials that do not have high quality.The quality of sound system can impact the comprehension of learners’ listening

difficulties in listening This will certainly interrupt the whole listeningcomprehension process and at the same time an unfamiliar accent makes comprehensionprocess and at the same time an unfamiliar accent makes comprehension impossible for thelisteners.

2.4 Summary

In conclusion, this chapter mainly summarizes the theories, ideas, opinions related tothe listening skills It has presented the relevant literature, which has helped to form thetheoretical can conceptual framework for graduation paper The following chapter willdisplay the methodology and findings of the research under the light of all above

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CHAPTER 3: THE STUDY

In this chapter, the researcher will give the full analysis of data collected through thesurvey questionnaires for students and interview for students It shows an attempt to answerthe three research questions posed at the beginning of the study

3.1 The participants

3.1.1 The students

The research was undertaken with the participation of 52 first-year students in Faculty

of English They aged from 20 to 21 They were in K53N and in the second semester of theiracademic year 2017-2018 at Thuongmai University A large number of them have learntEnglish for 7 years ( 4 years at secondary school and 3 years at high school) However, theirEnglish backgrounds were quite similar because most of them come from different ruralareas in the North and under being influence of curriculum of English for high schoolsstudents in the past, students did not have many chances to practice English skills Thus,when entering Thuongmai University, their English levels were limited and they have

to face up with many difficulties in studying

3.1.2 The textbook

The textbook for first-year students of Faculty of English is Get Ready for IELTS Listening This is a good book powered by Cobuild There are 12 units with 12 interesting

topics which will help students improve their English listening comprehension

3.2 Data collection instruments

3.2.1 The survey questionnaire

The questionnaires are designed for students because the researcher finds them easy tosummarize and analyze the collected data Questionnaires for students consist of 14 questionswhich are specified in the three research questions Therefore, the survey questionnaires forstudents is delivered to 52 major first-year students of K53N at Faculty of English,Thuongmai University to find information for the three research questions Among the 14questions, the first part are designed for collecting general information of students,questions of part II aim at finding out the students’ attitudes towards rewriting Englishsentences; questions from part III mainly seek for the current techniques of learning inlistening English sentences for first - year students of K53 at Faculty of English, ThuongmaiUniversity

To guarantee the reliability and the validity of the results, the questionnaires forlearners were directly distributed for learners of K53N during their break time in theclass and collected right away That meant these learners could pay most attention to answer

the questions related to what they had just experienced Before asking the learners to dothe survey questionnaire, the researcher briefly stated the purpose and significance of thestudy and clarified any misunderstanding about the survey questions Beside the writteninstructions on the handout, the instructions and explanations in Vietnamese werepresented to avoid any ambiguity In the end, there were 52 students participating in givingresponses to the survey questionnaires.

3.2.2 The interview

An interview was carried out with 3 students in 2 classes of K53 in Faculty of English atThuongmai University All of them agree to help the researcher helpful and comfortably.This aimed to collect students’ ideas about the factors affecting the English listening skilland suggestions to improve them

After the interview, the researcher based on the interview results to analyze thedata The interview results were recorded carefully The interview data analysis werepresented with the collected data from the questionnaire in each part

3.2.3 Data collection procedures

The data collection in the study is derived from students who are in the majorfisrt year at Faculty of English To collect information about the issues of learning Englishlistening skill of fisrt year English major students at Thuongmai University, first of all,

52 copies of survey questionnaires were handed out to students in FE In addition, three otherstudents were also invited for the interview

When the data collection was accomplished, the data analysis was initiated

3.3 Data analysis and discussion

3.3.1 Students’ real situations of learning English listening skill

In the part personal information, most of the students come from rural areas Itmeans that many of them did not have much chance to practice English skills at high school

In addition, students recognize that they have learnt English from 7 to over 9 years

3.3.1.1. The difficulties

The 52 copies of the questionnaire were delivered to the learners The data wereanalyzed in this part of the study in the below tables and charts which show the responses forthe questions in the questionnaires Besides, the first question the questionnaires brought

a result that according to students’ opinion, listening skill is very difficult

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