In listening comprehension, it is commonly recognized that pre-listening is very important because it can make students interested in the listening tasks and they can listen to the tasks
INTRODUCTION
Background of the study
Listening is an essential skill in acquiring a language and it can be defined as the process of understanding speech in a second language or foreign language As mentioned in Richards (2008), listening is the most frequently used in communication It is stated that people spend 50 percent on listening, 25 percent on speaking, 15 percent on reading, and 10 percent on writing Moreover, according to Morley (1984), listening is a key to all effective communication without the ability to listen effectively, messages are easily misunderstood In listening comprehension, it is commonly recognized that pre-listening is very important because it can make students interested in the listening tasks and they can listen to the tasks better Pre- listening is a preparation of the listening class In this stage, teachers tend to arouse learners' expectation and interest of the language text they are going to listen They can also motivate learners by providing background knowledge of the text; organizing learners to discuss a picture or a related topic which involves in the text; asking some related questions to the text In general, pre-listening plays a role in warming-up and the main aim of this stage is to make learners focus their attention on the following while-listening stage and decrease the difficulties of the text
It can be said that the pre-listening is a kind of introductory work which used make the content explicit, clarify the purposes and establish roles, procedures and aims for listening In real life it is unusual for people to listen to something without having some idea of what they are going to hear Underwood (1989) described pre- listening as follows: before listening, students should be “tuned in” so that they know what to expect, both in general and for a particular task This kind of introductory work is generally described as pre-listening work or just pre-listening
To catch up with the new trends in language teaching, Vietnam is trying to launch reforms in education step by step Teachers, for example, are investing time and effort to help students improve their English, especially listening It is the fact that, communicative approach is used to teach English according to the policy of the Ministry of Education According to the 2020 Project of Vietnam’s Government, listening and speaking are more and more important in learning English Moreover, in high school, textbooks contain four skills which focus on students’ communication therefore; there are various effective methodologies for teacher to apply in teaching listening However, the students’ listening is still low due to some reasons Firstly, the English background of students in rural areas such as Tran Phu, Vo Nhai and Hoang Quoc Viet high schools are low because most of them come from remote areas, they did not have chances to exposure to English like the ones in the big cities The other reason might be the lacking of English learning facilities such as there is no specializing room for learning English The students share in the same room with the other subjects in which headphones and computers are not provided This directly affects students’ listening attitudes and listening comprehension The number of the students in class is normally about 40 to 50 whereas the ideal class for studying language is about 20 to 25 members This could be another reason why students listening skills cannot be improved As a result, the students are not interested in listening skills; therefore the teachers have no motivation to teach listening
In conclusion, pre-listening stage is very essential in the process of teaching listening The purposes are to involve students into the topic and make them interested in the listening lesson so that they will have higher level in listening comprehension Moreover, the testing and assessment system in Vietnam is primarily concentrated on grammar, vocabulary and reading ability This partly explains the reason why listening, one of the very important parts in learning a language, does not seem to be improved effectively in Vietnam.
Aims of the study
The study aims at examining the use of various pre-listening activities in the pre-listening stage to improve students’ listening comprehension
With the above mentioned aims, the study attempts finding answers to the following research questions:
How do pre-listening activities activate learners’ motivation?
What are the teachers’ attitudes toward pre-listening activities in enhancing listening comprehension?
Scope of the study
The study concentrates on the effects of alternating pre-listening activities to activate students’ motivation and the teachers’ attitudes toward pre-listening activities in enhancing learner’s listening skills The subjects of the study were Tran Phu high school students who are at low level.
Method of the study
The researcher used two kinds of data collection instruments including questionnaire and observation to collect information about student’s listening comprehension The observers were fourteen English teachers from high school in
Vo Nhai district also participate in the research
Hopefully, after the research, students will be interested in listening lessons; as a result their listening skills will be improved.
Significant of the study
Through a systematic review of the literature on listening, this study first highlights the essential role of listening skills in English language classrooms and then reveals a gap in understanding the factors that affect students’ listening comprehension After examining a range of studies, articles, and journals, a concentrated list of influential factors will be identified to serve as the theoretical framework for this research This framework will guide the investigation of how cognitive processes, linguistic proficiency, learner motivation, task design, instructional strategies, and classroom context interact to shape listening performance.
Through conventional teaching methods, the researcher observed that students showed little interest in listening lessons and their listening comprehension remained low A primary cause was the teachers' reliance on traditional instruction, particularly the neglect of pre-listening activities due to time constraints Textbook activities alone failed to support students' listening development because different listening tasks require varied pre-listening activities to activate background knowledge, interests, and motivation Without tailored pre-listening tasks, students struggle to connect content with prior knowledge, hindering comprehension Therefore, to improve listening outcomes, lessons should incorporate targeted pre-listening activities aligned with the specific listening task, ensuring engagement and better comprehension.
The researcher hopes that after four weeks of experiment, the students would participate in the varying pre-listening activities They would show great interest in pre-listening activities They felt more confident to work in groups, pairs to discuss their ideas about the topic before listening to the audio and they will have good attitude with the pre-listening activities Consequently, their listening skills will be better comprehended.
DEVELOPMENT
LITERATIRE REVIEW
This chapter reviewed the literature on the theories of listening comprehension The first section provided basic theories about listening comprehension and the second part discussed some factors that affect students’ listening comprehension Next, the listening stages of the listening lesson were reviewed In addition, some pre-listening activities were provided to help teachers and students improve listening comprehension Some previous researches were presented in the final part of the chapter
1 Theoretical background of listening skills
Listening skills are crucial for receiving information and are active, not passive, requiring a response to demonstrate accurate comprehension; they often form the first skill to develop and serve as a foundation for speaking, with strong links to reading and writing The relationship among listening, speaking, reading, and writing is complex, with listening providing the base for effective communication and shaping overall language proficiency In second language acquisition, listening has long been neglected, and as Nunan (2000) described, it is the Cinderella skill, often overshadowed by speaking As a result, many learners focus on speaking and writing while viewing listening and reading as secondary means rather than ends in themselves.
Goh (2002) referred to listening as the most frequently used language skills, which accounts for as much as fifty percent of human’s everyday communication time Sharing this opinion, Rubin (1994) stated that listening is used far more than any other single language skill in our daily lives, twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read and five times more than we write Good listening, therefore, significantly contributes to the success of communicating process Understanding spoken English is much more challenging to language learners than figuring out meanings of a written text Thus, the teaching of listening comprehension is of great importance
Rost (1994) argued that listening is a crucial element of communication and it is also an important factor for interaction A learner can express himself orally but never able to communicate with speakers of English if he is unable to understand what is said to him In general, listening is used far more than any other single language skill in our daily lives We can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times than we read, and five times more than we write
Underwood (1989) claimed that the listening skills includes everything from learning particular sounds to comprehending complicated messages Without this skill, communication can break down Therefore, successful communication really depends on listeners or receivers of messages Listening is defined as the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear It is different from hearing which is simply the process of recognizing the sound system of spoken words Listening skill is composed of everything from learning particular sounds to comprehending complicated messages More specifically, listening involves understanding a speaker’s accent, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary to grasp his or her meaning He also believed that listening to spoken language also requires the ability to understand the implicative in a conversation Moreover, he added that next difference is the sounds that can be easily mixed up As an example she uses words with vowel sounds like “sit and seat” Then there is the stress and intonation, which functions as a means to highlight words that carry the main information or to change the meaning of a speech without changing the order of the words The spoken English is also very often much simpler than writtenversion and speakers even use incomplete sentences and less specific vocabulary
Traditionally, listening has been treated as a passive language skill, placed beside reading, with learners often seen as passive recipients in the classroom—like a tape recorder or a trained parrot (Anderson & Lynch, 1988) In this view, learners merely hear what is being said without engaging with the discourse or paying attention to the speakers’ background knowledge, intentions, attitudes, implications, and other shades of meaning Such a narrow conception of listening comprehension fails to capture the full range of features involved in understanding spoken language Consequently, this traditional perspective is inadequate for explaining how listening actually works, indicating a need for a more comprehensive approach to teaching and assessing listening.
In addition, Buck (2001) described that listening is a complex process in which the listener takes the incoming data and interprets it based on a wide variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge Briefly, the linguistic knowledge includes knowledge of phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, pragmatics and sociolinguistics The non-linguistic knowledge included knowledge of the topic, the context and general knowledge about the world and how it works Thus, vocabulary and grammar knowledge are important issues in listening comprehension Learning new words and grammatical structures in pre-listening activities will lead students to better listening comprehension by recognizing them in the listening text This knowledge not only provided encouragement but also develops students’ confidence in their ability to deal with listening problems
Ur (1984:4) argued that what are the main characteristics of real language situations, as for example listener having a purpose for a listening and some expectations In real situations people that are communicating can see each other and receive some visual or contextual clues during listening Discussion is usually divided to short conversation As a result, it is different from formal spoken text in the quantity of redundancy, noise and colloquialisms
1.2 Listening comprehension in language learning and teaching process
It is believed that listening is a significant and essential area of development in a native language and in second language; therefore there have been numerous definitions of listening comprehension which presents views of scholars towards this concept
Buck (2001) defined listening comprehension as an active process of construction of meaning, done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound, involving both linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge
Regarding listening comprehension, many researchers agreed that context plays an important role and should be taken into appropriate consideration Garrod
(1986) and Mc Donough and Shaw (1993) shared the same idea that listening comprehension requires the activation of contextual information and background knowledge
Listening comprehension is an interactive process in which listeners engage with the text, and factors such as interest, emotional response, and motivation can either facilitate or interfere with understanding Successful listening involves the comparison and integration of new information with established knowledge structures, allowing meaning to emerge from the text Building on this, Mendelsohn and Rubin (1995) contend that listeners don’t passively understand the text; they actively construct their own knowledge and continuously monitor incoming information to develop it further, guiding ongoing interpretation.
The concept of listening and listening comprehension is also defined as everything that impinges on the human processing which mediates between sounds and the construction of meaning, Underwood (1989) This definition once again emphasizes the activeness of listeners in processing the information heard
So far, a number of methods to evaluate students’ listening comprehension ability have been suggested In this study, listening comprehension is measured by students’ performance on their listening tests He also divides listening process into three stages There are two level activities of the aural process: recognition and selection The first level is that the structure and relationship between syntax and phonology of the language are recognized At this level, the sound goes into a sensory store called the “echoic memory” “Echoic memory” is just the short term memory because there is continuous arrival of new information before the listener has opportunity to deal with it That is why there is the following stage which is called
“selection” In this level the listener selects what he finds most interesting or important or comprehensible in the utterance At this point, words or groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the long term memory and the meaning is extracted from them (Underwood, 1989: 2) Therefore, the listeners usually remember the meaning rather than the exact word spoken when he has to recall what has been said The basis of listening comprehension is the ability to recognize and select the specific details in the discourse
2 Factors affecting students’ listening comprehension
A great number of factors affecting listening have been reported so far According to Brown and Yule (1983), there are four groups of factors including the speakers (the number of speakers, speakers’ speed, accents); the listeners (the role of listeners, the listeners’ interest in the subject); the content (vocabulary, grammar, background knowledge) and the support (pictures, diagrams, visual aids, etc…) Krashen (1981) emphasizes performers with self-confidence and a good self-image tend to do better in second language acquisition and low anxiety seems to be conductive to second language acquisition, whether measured as personal or classroom anxiety Boyle (1984) states there are 3 classes of factors influencing listening, dividing them into listener factors, speaker factors and factors in the material and medium On the basis of the analysis of Boyle and some other researchers such as Brown (1989) and Anderson and Lynch (1988), proposes from cognitive perspectives that three interrelated aspects contribute to the difficulty of listening, namely text features, task features and contest features After the examination of the analysis of the above mentioned and some other researchers, the classification of two factors contributing to the effective factors of listening performance are proposed: the subjective factors and objective factors The subjective factors include lack of vocabulary of the topic, lack of background knowledge of the topic, lack of confidence The objective factors are the material, the medium, and the surroundings In this thesis, I concentrate on the relative contribution of pre-listening activities to the students’ performance in listening comprehension As a result, the following part of pre-listening activities was also discussed He also divided the influential factors into three different categories including the type of language, the purpose in listening and the context in which the listening takes place Their experiments showed a number of factors that may impede students’ listening performance: the organization of information, the familiarity of the topic, the explicitness and sufficiency of the information, and the type of referring expressions used and the relationships described in the text (dynamic of static relationships)
Influential factors affecting listening comprehension have been identified by researchers Helgesen and Brown (1994), Dunkel (1991), and Ur (1984), who outline a set of spoken-language features that listeners typically find troublesome: clustering, redundancy, reduced forms, performance variability, colloquial language, rate of delivery, stress, rhythm and intonation, and interaction.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This chapter discusses the research methodology used in the thesis Firstly, a general overview of the action research which is chosen as an appropriate approach is provided Moreover, the research questions, the participants of the study are presented The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of the chosen research method, research design, research strategies, research instruments, and techniques of data analyses
As cited in Creswell (2002), action research are procedures which are done by teacher to get information about what should be improve in school or organization about teaching or learning process
Cohen and Manion (1994) also stated that action research involves a self- reflective, semantic and critical approach to enquiry by people who are simultaneously members of the context in which the research take place
According to O'Brien (1993), action research is known by many other names, including participatory research, collaborative inquiry, emancipator research, action learning, and contextual action research, but all are variations on a theme Put simply, action research is “learning by doing” a group of people identify a problem, do something to resolve it, see how successful their efforts were, and if not satisfied, try again While this is the essence of the approach, there are other key attributes of action research that differentiate it from common problem-solving activities that we all engage in every day
Abbott and Mayes (2014) define action research as a self-reflective, semantic, and critical approach to inquiry carried out by practitioners who are simultaneously members of the context in which the research takes place, with the objective of improving the current state of affairs within the educational setting where the study occurs.
According to Creswell (2002), action research design has some following features: Practical focus, The educator-researcher’s own practices, collaboration, a dynamic process, a plan of action, and sharing research
Action research in education aims to solve real-world problems in school settings by focusing on practical issues that can improve teaching and learning, whether concerns originate with individual teachers or educational institutions Its core themes include empowerment of participants, collaborative participation, knowledge acquisition, and social change, while researchers structure routines for ongoing engagement with data on the health of the school community, often prioritizing the improvement of their own practice over studying external studies The inquiry cycle typically unfolds through five phases: identification of the problem area, collection and organization of data, interpretation of data, action based on data, and reflection on the outcomes.
Action research has been analyzed in many ways; MacIsaac (1995) introduced a simple cyclical model of the action research process (figure 3.1), identifying four steps in each cycle: plan, act, observe, and reflect.
Figure 1: Simple Action Research Model adapted from MacIsaac (1995)
To this model, Burns (2009) added a fifth step: dissemination, where the result of the research is made known through presentations and publications to a larger audience The essentials of action research design are considered by Elliott in Rudduck and Hopkins (1985) as per the following characteristic cycle: Initially an exploratory stance is adopted, where an understanding of a problem is developed and plans are made for some form of interventional strategy (The Reconnaissance and General Plan) Then the intervention is carried out (The Action in Action Research) During and around the time of the intervention, pertinent observations are collected in various forms (Monitoring the implementation by Observation) The new interventional strategies are carried out, and the cyclic process repeats, continuing until a sufficient understanding of (or implement able solution for) the problem is achieved (Reflection and Revision) The protocol is iterative or cyclical in nature and is intended to foster deeper understanding of a given situation, starting with conceptualizing and particularizing the problem and moving through several interventions and evaluations
Additional, Susman (1983) emphasized that action research have five steps and it is presented in a cycle as below:
Figure 2: Detailed Action Research Model adapted from Susman (1983)
Analyzing/ reflecting; hypothesizing; intervening; observing; reporting; writing and presenting
This study adopts the action research model proposed by McBribe (1989, as cited in Sadeghi, 2013) because of its straightforward structure and its suitability for the study context McBribe outlines a seven-step cycle: identifying the problem; collecting data; analyzing data and generating hypotheses; planning action; implementing the action plan; collecting data to monitor change; and analyzing data to evaluate the change.
Considering alternative course of action
Studying the consequences of an action
TAKING ACTION Selecting a course of action
Action research can be a worthwhile pursuit for educators for several reasons Foremost among these is the desire to know more, a point highlighted by Schein (1995), who describes action research as focusing on school issues, problems, or areas of collective interest Participants in action research are typically students and teachers While some view action research as detached from teachers’ daily lives, it actually ties inquiry directly to everyday practice For parents and education administrators outside the school, it is reassuring to see teachers transform knowledge into meaningful, evidence-based actions rather than blindly following the latest study.
In addition, action research allows teachers to grow and gain confidence in their work Action research projects influence thinking skills, sense of efficacy, willingness to share and communicate, and attitudes toward the process of change Through action research, teachers learn about themselves, their students, their colleagues, and can determine ways to continually improve The other important advantage is it potential to impact school change He also emphasizes that action research can serve as a chance to really take a look at one’s own teaching in a structured manner While the focus of action research is usually the students, educators can also investigate what effect their teaching is having on their students, how they could work better with other teachers, or ways of changing the whole school for the better
2.5 The method(s) of collecting data
To address the study's research questions, the researcher employed two data collection instruments—the questionnaire and observations—to gather information about students' listening comprehension.
Questionnaire is a form which used in a survey design that participants in a study complete and return to the researcher It is a valuable tool to do a research,
Creswell (2002) By using questionnaire, the researcher can collect a large number of information with a big number of participants Using questionnaire is also low cost in time and money, analysis of answer to closed question is straightforward, less pressure for an immediate response, respondents’ anonymity as cited in Gillham
Gass, Mackey, and Ross‐Feldman (2005)pointed that using questionnaires in language researches a perfect instrument that allows researchers to investigate and gather information on participants’ beliefs and motivations in such a short time with comparable information elicited from a number of correspondents For the outstanding advantage of questionnaires mentioned above, the author decided to use questionnaire in this paper to improve students’ listening comprehension through varying pre-listening activities
This study deploys a questionnaire to 120 students to assess their listening perceptions before and after engaging with various pre-listening activities The instrument, available in English and Vietnamese, comprises two parts: the first probes students' attitudes toward listening skills, their perceived importance, and the difficulties they encounter in learning English listening; the second examines students' motivation and attitudes toward English listening A separate teacher questionnaire, written in English and including both closed and open-ended items, consists of ten questions designed to reveal teachers' attitudes toward pre-listening activities, their purposes for using them, the current usage, teachers' views on the most effective pre-listening activities for students, problems teachers face when implementing these activities, and their comments and recommendations to improve pre-listening activities in the textbook.
DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
For this chapter, the researcher compares and contrasts the data from the two different sources, questionnaire from the students and questionnaire from the teachers While the results from the students allow the researcher to exploit the answer for the first research question whether varied pre-listening tasks activate student’s schemata, the questionnaires for the teachers seek for the answer of the benefits of pre-listening activities in enhancing listening comprehension After analyzing the data, the researcher has found some important findings: current teaching and learning and some comments on the pre-listening in the textbook grade
3.1 Data collected from questionnaire for students
3.1.1 Data collected from questionnaire for student’s part 1
Chart 1: Students’ comments about pre-listening activities
Chart 1 results indicate mean scores above 3.00 for most items, suggesting students found the listening lessons enjoyable, useful, satisfying, and appealing The data show that learners were drawn to the pre-listening activities in the pre-stage, as these activities facilitated easier understanding and better comprehension of the listening material However, Question 2 reveals that the proportion of students who consider pre-listening activities dull is very low.
3.1.2 Data collected from questionnaire for student’s part 2
Chart 2: Students’ comments on the varying pre-listening that the teacher applied
The chart shows that after the experiment, all questions had mean scores above 3.0, with Question 4 receiving the highest average, indicating that the majority of students liked the pre-listening activities in the listening lesson and felt these activities were effective for completing the task Specifically, 85% viewed the pre-listening activities as effective, and 65% believed they expanded their vocabulary and sentence structure An equal proportion (65%) also felt that these lead-in activities broadened knowledge across multiple fields Additionally, 64% said the activities were suitable for their knowledge level Finally, 83% thought the teacher should use more pre-listening activities in the future Taken together, these findings suggest that the pre-listening stage adopted by the teacher fosters a positive attitude toward listening lessons.
3.2 Data analysis on the teachers’ questionnaire
Question 1: What do you often do to start the listening lesson?
A survey found that fourteen teachers structured pre-listening activities before guiding students to the main listening task, and none proceeded directly to the listening without such preparatory work, underscoring their recognition of the value of pre-listening activities.
Question 2: How do you find the importance of pre-listening activities to students’ listening performance?
It is clear from the survey that the number of the teacher found pre-listening very important are 65% and 35% of which claimed that it is important while none of them thought pre-listening stage is useless Being aware of this, the teachers in high schools in Vo Nhai district often take consideration in choosing pre-listening activities in listening lessons
Question 3: How often do you use pre-listening activities?
The result shows that 80% of the teachers always used pre activities, and the rest 20% of them often applied these activities in listening lesson It means that applying pre-listening activities are very popular for the teachers due to the good effect they bring to the students In addition, different pre-listening activity has a different purpose that is the reason why the next question is available in the observation checklist
Question 4: What are your purposes in using pre-listening activities?
Chart 3: Teacher’s purposes of using pre-listening activities
The chart illustrates the purposes of using pre-listening activities are various Ten out of fourteen teachers (accounting for 72% of the total teacher) were for the purpose of providing background knowledge about the topic of the listening passage, which made up the most percentage of the purposes of using pre-listening activities
The same percentage belonged to the purpose of motivating students to participate in the lesson, followed by the purpose of teaching new vocabulary and structures which appear in the listening passage with nineteen percent The third rank was to help students predict the content of the listening passage, which accounts for 11% of the total number of teachers; followed by helping students more confident in listening lessons The least number of responses was to provide opportunities for students to communicate (only six out of fourteen responses) None of the teachers thought that the purpose of using pre-listening activities is to revise vocabulary and structures, and no one provided other purposes In short, most of the teachers aimed at providing background knowledge about the topic of the text and motivating students to participate in the lesson when using pre-listening activities Besides, teaching new vocabulary and structures appearing in the listening passage and helping students predict the content of the listening passage are also much paid attention to
Question 5, 6 and 7 focus on current situation of using pre-listening activities
In this part, the current situation of using pre-listening activities was shown through the result of question 5, 6 and 7
Question 5: How often do you use the following pre-listening activities?
Table 1: The table of teacher’s frequency of using some specific pre-listening activities
Teachers’ frequency of using pre-listening activities Pre- listening Activities
Always Often Sometimes Rarely Never
A Prediction of the content of the listening passage
B Pre- teaching new vocabulary or grammatical structures
C Using audio-visual aids to introduce the topic of the passage
H Using games to introduce the topic of the listening passage
Our analysis shows teachers' choices of pre-listening activities vary, with each option offering distinct benefits and giving teachers multiple approaches for different classes Notably, 90% of teachers preview the listening task before the main activity This resonates with Underwood (1989), who argued that previewing questions before listening helps students know what to seek and also benefits their reading Consequently, previewing the listening content is highly effective for predicting answers and guiding listening strategies.
Secondly, the most frequently used pre-listening activities used by the teachers are pre-teaching vocabulary or grammar structures, prediction of the content of the listening passage and using pre-listening questions, and brain storm which were the same accounted for 70 % always and often categories They are considered the traditional pre-listening activities and most of them are the activities in the text book so the teacher can use them to make use of time Next, the percentage of the teacher used questions and discussion is 20 and 10 % respectively Finally, 60% of the teacher sometimes used games to introduce the topic of the listening passage, 20% of them often used this activity and 10% of them applied games because they claimed that it is time consuming and hard to prepare They only introduced games to pre-listening task to change the learning atmosphere for students
It is the fact that teachers in Tran Phu, Hoang Quoc Viet, Vo Nhai high school often used various pre-listening activities such as predicting the content of the listening vocabulary and grammar pre-teaching, using audio to introduce the topic of the lesson, discussion, brainstorming and using games to motivate students in the listening lesson However, most of the teachers used previewing the listening; the reason is these activities are available in the textbook so they would like to make use of them Moreover, pre-teach vocabulary and grammar, predicted the content of the listening are teacher’s favorite activities before listening task However, the activity is used least is using audio visual aids to introduce the topic of the lesson because it may take time to finish
Question 6: Which pre- listening activity do you think is the most effective to the students? Why?
Chart 4: Teachers' opinions of the most effective pre-listening activity to the students
A: Prediction of the content of the listening passage
B: Pre-teaching new vocabulary or grammatical structures
C: Using audio-visual aids to introduce the topic of the listening passage D: Discussion
H: Using games to introduce the topic of the listening passage
It can be seen from the bar chart that the purposes of pre-listening was different Five out of fourteen students (36%) thought that the most affective pre- listening activity is predicting the content of the listening The same number applied for using audio-visual aids to introduce the topic of the listening passage The teachers also provided the answers that these pre-listening activities help the students do the tasks better, and get students into the listening lesson As mentioned earlier by some researchers such as Underwood (1989), Ur (1984), Anderson and Lynch (1988), pre- listening activities help facilitate comprehension, generate students’ interest and activate students’ background knowledge Prediction can facilitate comprehension of the listening passage Audio-visual aids may draw students’ attention and generate their interest From the chart it is also clear that the percentage of teacher’s choice is
15 and 13 respectively for Pre-teaching new vocabulary or grammatical structures and discussion Noticeably none of the teachers thought previewing the listening tasks, brainstorming, and using games before listening are the most effective to the students Although it was thought that reading and studying the task are not the most effective ways, in current teaching most of the teachers require their students to do it before listening
Question 7 aims at finding out specific techniques that the teachers often use in each pre-listening activity
Firstly, from the survey, it is clear that 73% of the teachers confirmed that they often ask students to predict the content of the listening through visuals and title Teachers in survey preferred using pictures to guess what the listening passage is about because it is a good way to present various things
Moreover, pre-teaching vocabulary and grammar structure are also necessary for students before the main listening task There are variety ways to teach vocabulary and structures, the below charts presents some common pre-listening activities
Chart 5: Teachers' techniques for pre-teaching new vocabulary and grammatical structures
B1 Using pictures, real objects, gestures
B3 Giving explanation and definition in English