Problems in learning english listening skill at high school and suggested solutions = những vấn đề trong việc học kĩ năng nghe tiếng anh ở trường phổ thông và các giải pháp gợi ý

Survey on Learning English Listening Skill at Nguyen Xuan On high school .... She has chosen the topic about “Problems in Learning English Listening Skill at High School and Suggested S

vinh university foreign languages department

- -

ph¹m thÞ thu mai

problems in learning English

listening skill at high school and

suggested solutions

ë tr-êng phæ th«ng vµ c¸c gi¶i ph¸p gîi ý)

graduation thesis

field: methodology

Vinh, 2009

Acknowledgements

My graduation thesis has been completed with a lot of encouragement and

support from my teachers, friends and family

First of all, I would like to express my deep grate to my supervisor, Mrs

Nguyen Thi Van Lam, M.A for her indispensable and useful advice,

suggestions and support But for her, this graduation thesis would not have

been completed

In addition, I want to give my sincere thanks to the Dean and the teachers in

the Foreign Language Department for their precious support and

encouragement

I also cannot forget the support of the students from Nguyen Xuan On high

school Without them, I could not have carried out the survey

Lastly, I wish to thank my family and my good friends who have been very

helpful and encouraged me during doing this graduation thesis

Vinh May 10th 2009

Pham Thi Thu Mai

TABLE OF CONTENT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT……… 1

TABLE OF CONTENT……… 2

LIST OF FIGURES……….5

PART 1: INTRODUCTION 6

1 Reasons for Choosing the Topic 6

2 Aims of the Study 7

3 Scope of the Study 7

4 Methods of the Study 7

5 Design of the Study 8

PART 2: DEVELOPMENT 9

Chapter 1: Theoretical Background 9

1.1 What is Listening Skill? 9

1.1.1 Definition of Listening Skill 9

1.12 Importance of Listening Skill 9

1.1.3 Types of Listening 10

1.2 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) 11

1.2.1 Characteristics of CLT 11

1.2.2 Teacher Roles in CLT 12

1.2.3 Student Roles in CLT 13

1.3 Teaching English Listening in CLT 14

1.3.1 Principles of Teaching English Listening Skill 14

1.3.2 Subskills in Listening 15

1.3.3 Types of Listening Activities 17

1.3.3.1 No Overt Responses 17

1.3.3.2 Short Responses 17

1.3.3.3 Longer Responses 18

1.3.3.4 Extended Responses 18

1.4 Summary 18

CHAPTER 2: REAL SITUATION OF LEARING LISTENING SKILL AT NGUYEN XUAN ON HIGH SCHOOL 19

2.1 Overall View about Real Situations of Teaching and Learning English Listening at Vietnamese High Schools 19

2.1.1 Some Comments on Listening Exercises and Activities in High School Textbooks 19

2.1.2 Difficulties in Teaching and Learning English Listening 21

2.1.3 Real Situation of Learning and Teaching English Listening at Nguyen Xuan On high school 22

2.2 Main Reasons for the Difficulties in Learning Listening Skill 23

2.2.1 Subjective Reasons 23

2.2.2 Objective Reasons 24

2.3 Survey on Learning English Listening Skill at Nguyen Xuan On high school 25

2.3.1 Aims of the Survey 25

2.3.2 Description of the Survey 25

2.3.3 Results of the Survey 26

2.4 Summary 35

CHAPTER 3: Suggested Activities to Improve Learning Listening Skill at High School 37

3.1 Introduction 37

3.2 Suggested Solutions 37

3.3 Some Suggested Kinds of Listening Exercises to Motivate Students into Listening 39

3.3.1.Chain Game- Retelling a Short Story 39

3.3.2 Drawings 42

3.3.3 Cross-words 42

3.3.4 Lucky Listening Topics 44

3.3.5 Guessing the Content of the Lesson 45

3.3.6 Rearranging the Order of the Conversation 46

3.3.7 Choosing the Right Topics 45

3.3.8 Making T/F Statements 46

3.3.9 Listening to Short English Songs 47

3.4 Summary 47

PART 3: CONCLUSION 48

3.1 Recapitulation 48

3.2 Suggestions for Further Study 49

REFERENCES 50

APPENDIX 52

LISTS OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Students’ Interest in Learning English ……… 25

Figure2.2 Students’ Opinions about Degrees of Difficulty of Listening Skill………26

Figure 2.3 Factors Affecting Students’ Listening……… 26

Figure 2.4 Students’ Amount of Time for Practicing Listening Skill…… 27

Figure 2.5 Students’ Frequency of the Guessing Habit………28

Figure 2.6 Students’ Ways of Listening……… ………….28

Figure 2.7 Students’ Frequency of Distraction……….29

Figure 2.8 Students’ Times of Listening per Lesson……… 30

Figure 2.9 Influenceof Listening Equipments on Students’ Listening… 31

Figure 2.10 Students’ Opinions about Listening Topics and Exercises… 32

Figure 2.11 Students’ Favorite Types of Listening Exercises……… 33

Figure 2.12 Students’ Opinions about Extra Listening Activities…… 34

Figure 2.13 Motivating Factors……… 35

Part 1: INTRODUCTION

1 Reasons for Choosing the Topic

English Teaching Methodology is a very important subject for everyone who wants to become teachers of English In this subject, students of English who are being trained to become teachers will be provided with necessary information about techniques and methods of teaching four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing Of all these four skills, listening skill

is considered to be one of the most difficult skills to teach and to learn As students of English, the author herself and others have met a lot of difficulties

in learning this skill She has chosen the topic about “Problems in Learning

English Listening Skill at High School and Suggested Solutions” for

several reasons

Firstly, listening skill is thought to be the most difficult in teaching and learning a language in general and English in particular A lot of teachers and students meet many problems and difficulties in teaching and learning this skill Therefore, the author studies this topic to point out the main problems and difficulties which teachers and students have met and then can find out the important reasons for these matters

Secondly, listening skill plays a very important role in teaching and learning a language so it should be paid much more attention to However, it seems that this skill is not really focused on in many high schools in Vietnam and the qualities of teaching and learning this skill are not very good Thus, this topic is chosen to study in order to find out some suggested solutions to partly improve this matter

Moreover, although learning English listening skill is significant, the fact is that not many students like learning this skill for many reasons such as the difficulty in learning it well or listening lessons are quite boring Thus, the purpose of studying this topic is to create some new and interesting listening activities to motivate students into listening skill

2 Aims of the Study

The study is conducted with the following aims: because teaching listening skill is one of the most difficult tasks for any ESL teacher, the first aim is to find out the problems and difficulties in learning and teaching English listening skill at high school Additionally, the study is carried out so as to get more information about the qualities of teaching and learning English listening skill at Vietnamese high schools It is also necessary to find out the main reasons for these problems and difficulties Last but not least, the study suggests some solutions to these problems to partly improve the qualities of teaching listening skill and motivate students into listening lessons

The topic about “Problems in Learning English Listening Skill at High

School and Suggested Solutions” is a broad topic and it cannot be exploited in

the study due to the limitation of a B.A thesis Therefore, the study only focuses on the main problems which cause difficulties for both teachers and students and the real situations of teaching and learning English listening skill according to a survey done in three grades of a high school Besides, from this survey, some suggestions and solutions are given in order to partly improve the quality of teaching and learning English listening skill at high school

4 Methods of the Study

Due to the scope and the characteristics of the study, the author follows the procedures:

 Collecting and analyzing the materials

 Synthesizing the information First, some materials referring to the issue are collected and analyzed Then, basing on the theoretical background described and analyzed, the survey will be carried out Next, the information from the survey will be analyzed in detail and the results will be categorized to synthesize From the

results collected, it will come to the general conclusion and some comments and solutions will be given

5 Design of the Study

The thesis consists of three main parts: the first part is Introduction This part provides the information about the reasons for choosing the topic, the aims of the topic, the scope of the study, the method of the study and the

design of the study In the second part – Development, there are three

chapters Chapter 1- Theoretical background discusses some main points relating to the topic: definition of listening skill and its importance, CLT with teachers’ roles and students’ roles, the main principles of teaching listening and the main kinds of listening activities This chapter focuses on the theory about the main types of listening activities and teaching it in CLT Chapter 2 - The real situation of learning English listening skill at Nguyen Xuan On high school describes the whole picture about the real situation of learning English listening skill of the students in this school through the survey done in three grades In chapter 3 - Suggested activities to improve learning listening skill at high school, some solutions to the problems students have when learning listening are suggested and some listening activities are recommended to be applied in teaching and learning this skill with the aim to motivating students

into learning this skill The last part is Conclusion This part summarizes the

main points discussed in the previous parts and offers some suggestions for further study The study ends up with references which are the materials collected to find necessary information for the study and appendix which is the questionnaire used in the survey

Part 2: DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 1: Theoretical Background

1.1 What is Listening Skill?

1.1.1 Definition of Listening Skill

Listening skill can be defined in different ways According to MC Milan

Dictionary, listening is to pay attention to a sound or to try to hear a sound or

to pay attention to what someone tells you and do what they suggest Babylon Dictionary views listening as an attempt to hear something, an act of paying careful attention to one who is speaking Similarly, in the New Era English-English-Vietnamese Dictionary, listening is to make an effort to hear

somebody or something

Thus, listening is the language modality that is used most frequently Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, and television), a message, and a receiver (the listener) Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery The complexity

of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language Listening skill is integrated with the other skills in language use Like reading, listening is a receptive skill where the purpose is to comprehend or understand what someone might be saying or writing

1.12 Importance of Listening Skill

In daily life, people spend a lot of time listening: officers listen to their boss’ talks, students listen to their teachers, old people listen to news on TV and radio It has been estimated that adults spend almost half of their communication time listening

In language use, listening skill plays a very important role: it includes various kinds of listener’s knowledge: knowledge of phonology, vocabulary,

semantics of the language in use, culture of its people, his life experience in the topic, his ability to predict and respond It decides his comprehension, content and attitudes in response to the speaker’s speech as well Therefore, if

we are bad at listening, we will fail to communicate with others In addition, there is a very close relationship between listening and speaking skills: in learning English as a foreign language, students cannot develop speaking skill unless they develop listening skill To have a successful conversation, they must understand what is said to them Moreover, it is vital for them to be able

to understand native speakers in order to develop their study and communicate more successfully Listening is an important way of acquiring the language or learning new vocabulary and structures

1.1.3 Types of Listening

In real life, there are two main kinds of listening (Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong, 2007): The first kind is casual listening: we listen to something without any particular purposes in our mind and we often do not concentrate on it much to get the information Usually, we hear it by chance Therefore, we rarely can remember much of its content This way is often used in entertaining activities For example, we listen to a song while doing the house work or talking to someone The second kind is focused listening which is quite different from the first one: we listen to something with some particular purpose in mind and pay much attention to it so as to get as much information as possible However, we do not listen to everything with equal concentration: we only focus on the important information for some purposes For example, students listen to an English text to do the tasks given by the teacher or a customer listens to the instructions of the seller to use a computer

In language learning, students usually use the second way of listening and casual listening is sometimes used for extra and further practice such as letting students listen to a song or a short story without any response required

1.2 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

1.2.1 Characteristics of CLT

CLT is one of the most popularly used approaches in language teaching

The origins of CLT are to be found in the changes in the British language teaching tradition dating from the late 1960s CLT has been used in language teaching with two aims: make communicative competence the goal of language teaching and develop procedures for the teaching of the four language skills At the level of language theory, CLT has a rich, eclectic and theoretical base Some of the characteristics of this communicative view of language are: language is a system for the expression of meaning, the primary function of language is for interaction and communication and the structure of language reflects its functional and communicative uses (cited in Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong, 2007) Nowadays, this approach has been widely used in many language schools in the world for its advantages such as:

it focuses on developing communicative competence of learners and reflects their needs including functional skills and linguistic objectives

1.2.2 Teacher Roles in CLT

In language teaching and learning, teachers play a predominant role because of students’ ages, character, psychology and lack of English knowledge Several roles are assumed for teachers in CLT, the importance of particular roles being determined by the view of CLT adopted According to Breen and Candlin (cited in Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong, 2006), the teacher has two main roles: the first is to facilitate the communication process between all participants in the classroom and between these participants, the various activities and texts The second role is to act as

an independent participant within the teaching-learning group Additionally, teachers can act as researcher and learner, with much contribution in terms of appropriate knowledge and abilities, actual and observed experience of the

nature of learning and organizational capacities

Other roles assumed for teachers are needed analyst, counselor, and group process manager The CLT teacher assumes activities which are responsible for determining and responding to learner language needs In the role as a

counselor, the teacher is expected to exemplify an effective communicator seeking to maximize the meshing of speaker intention and hearer interpretation, through the use of paraphrasing, confirmation and feedback Moreover, CLT procedures often require teachers to acquire less teacher – centered classroom management skills It is the teacher’s responsibility to organize the classroom as a setting for communication and communicative activities

All in all, teachers really play multiple roles in English language teaching: They are knowledge conveyers - supplying students language knowledge and skills, they are helpful helpers, helping students get English information and analyze it, helping students to learn, and solve problems Moreover, they are companions- staying by students’ side; they are organizers-organizing activities for students, and they are controllers, making sure students are disciplined in the classroom

1.2.3 Student Roles in CLT

Students play a role as the main body in language teaching and learning Furthermore, the emphasis in CLT on the processes of communication rather than mastery of language forms - these lead to different roles for learners from those found in more traditional second language classrooms Breen and Candlin (cited in Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong, 2006) describe learner roles as negotiators - between the self, the learning process, and the object of learning - emerges from and interacts with the role of joint negotiator within the group and within the classrooms procedures and activities which the group undertakes The implication for the learner is that

he should contribute as much as he gains, and thereby learn in an independent way

Thus, learners have the roles as negotiators, interactors, communicators and responsible managers of their own learning It is quite different from the traditional method of learning; students nowadays are taught to learn on their

own and learn to use knowledge to communicate with others well These are the important aims of teachers who use CLT to teach

1.3 Teaching English Listening in CLT

1.3.1 Principles of Teaching English Listening Skill

To teach any skill of a language, it is important for teachers to follow the

principles for teaching that skill so as to teach it more effectively and methodically Forseth (cited in Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong,

2007) suggests seven principles for teaching listening skill:

First, the teacher should use authentic texts and present them as naturally and realistically as possible Authentic texts can be taken from various radio broadcasts or interviews such as VOA and BBC These texts are very useful and necessary because they allow background noise or interruptions and contain different types of voices and accents and natural conversations These will help students get used to listening to daily life conversations of native speakers

Second, it is better to include different kinds of texts: conversations, dialogues, jokes, lectures, news broadcasts…For these kinds of texts, students can get used to listening to different pieces of speech and it helps avoid boredom caused by listening to the same topic or the similar type of listening texts many times

Third, the teacher should use primarily meaning- based tasks for students to

do This is an example of a meaning- based task: Circle the definition for the word you hear:

a It is a pet that likes eating mice (cat)

b It is an animal that can fly (bat)

Students will have to listen very carefully and pay attention to their meanings

to distinguish two words correctly because they are a minimal pair so they may confuse hearers These activities help them focus more on the meaning of the listening text

The fourth principle is that the teacher states a specific purpose for the listening task It is necessary that students be given a purpose for listening to a text or they may not know what they should focus when listening and then miss important information In addition, being given the purpose beforehand, students will be motivated into the lesson more

Another principle is that the teacher introduces the listening task

beforehand Be sure to prepare for them what they will hear This can be done

in many ways such as asking questions relating to the topic they will listen to

or asking them to talk about their own experience relating to the main topic so that students can think of the listening topic more carefully

The next principle is to avoid pre-teaching vocabulary unless necessary This helps students get used to guessing the meaning of the new words from the context Besides, students should have the habit of understanding the meaning of a text without trying to know the meanings of all the words as this can make their listening lessons more difficult and stressful The only words that should be pre-taught are those necessary for understanding the main idea

1.3.2 Subskills in Listening

Like the other skills, listening includes a number of different sub-skills (Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong, 2007): learners have to recognize differences between phonological sounds - the difference in a single sound makes a new word with a different meaning These pairs of words are very difficult to distinguish so they can cause confusion and misunderstanding Thus, it

is necessary to distinguish them correctly For example, the minimal pair bull

and pull contain two sounds /p/ and /b/ which make these two words different

in terms of meanings Another subskill of listening is comprehension of structures: For example, in the sentence “have you ever seen a fish walk?”, the listener must understand that “seen” is a verb and “fish” is a noun and this must be a question In addition, learners may guess the unknown words or recognize words which are unnecessary for understanding Like reading skill, when listening to a text, it is not necessary to understand the meanings of all the words Therefore, for some unimportant words, students can guess their meanings or even ignore them This helps them concentrate on catching the key words of the text There are also some other subskills such as recognizing discourse markers and cohesive words which help hold discourse together, the ability to infer information that is learners by hiding the direct answers and learners have to search for the indirect answers carefully To do this kind of exercises, learners are required to understand the listening text wholly For example, from the sentence “Today is Thursday and I will go to Ho Chi Minh

in two days”, the listener must infer that the speaker will go to Ho Chi Minh

on Saturday Furthermore, skimming is a sub-skill for which listeners do not need to understand every word they hear but they only need to catch the main idea because if they try to focus on listening all words, they will miss the important information This is very helpful when they listen to news on radio

or TV By contrast, for scanning skill, listeners have to look for the specific information This skill is often used to do certain listening tasks such as answering questions or choosing the best answer (multiple choices) For the summarizing skill, listeners should summarize what they have heard after listening or they have to decide what they are listening to is true or false or they agree with what they are listening or not- this is called critical listening and especially used for advanced learners Rather than only understand the message or the main ideas of the text, they have to make judgments of its Recognizing different styles, emotional tones and varieties of language is a quite challenging skill It is very interesting to listen to different styles such as

formal and informal, emotional tones such as anger, happiness and varieties of language such as British English, American English…but these are also very difficult to recognize particularly varieties of language Two more sub-skills

of listening are predicting what a speaker will say next - this helps the hearer respond more quickly and makes the conversation more cohesive and listening for total comprehension: The listener has to understand every thing the speaker says This skill is used for a special purpose For example, a patient has to listen to all the constructions the doctor says to drink the medicine correctly

1.3.3 Types of Listening Activities

There are four main types of listening activities mentioned in Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong (2007)

1.3.3.1 No Overt Responses

Students have to do nothing in response to the listening but teachers can check their understanding by their body language and expressions For this type, teachers can use some different activities For example, teachers may tell

a story or play a recording of the story and students will be motivated to attend and understand in order to enjoy it or teachers let students listen to songs: teachers may sing a song themselves or play a recording of the song Another no overt response activity teachers can use is that they may let students see an interesting film and students will be motivated into trying to understand it These activities are usually very interesting and can attract students’ attention easily However, teachers have to make sure that students pay attention to the content of the story, the song or the film and they should not only enjoy them without understanding any words

1.3.3.2 Short Responses

For this kind, students have to do various listening activities For example, they are asked to perform actions or draw shapes or pictures in response to the teacher’s instructions, tick off words while hearing them from the text within

a list of items given beforehand, or a number of statements are given after

listening and students are asked to point out which ones are true and which ones are false Also, there are some other activities such as detecting mistakes: the teacher may tell a story about something that students have known and this contains some mistakes and students have to point out these mistakes when listening to it, filling the missing information in the gaps, guessing definitions: the teacher gives students some definitions of something and students have to point out what it is, skimming and scanning: a listening text

is given and students are asked to look for the main content of the text or its specific information

1.3.3.3 Longer Responses

The listening activities for longer responses are often much more difficult than the short ones Students have to do the tasks such as answering questions, taking notes-this is a quite difficult response- students are asked to write down the main points of a listening text, paraphrasing a listening text after listening with their own words or translating it into another language, summarizing the listening text and filling in the long gap-a long gap is left and students have to find the missing information to fill in the gap

1.3.3.4 Extended Responses

These responses are called “combined skill” activities as they involve many skills at the same time Some of these responses are: Problem-solving: for this activity, students are asked to discuss a problem which has been orally described how to deal with it or to solve it and Interpretation: in this activity,

an extract from a piece of dialogue or monologue is provided with no previous information Listeners try to guess from the words, kinds of voices and other evidence what is going on These activities are suitable for advanced students because they can practice and develop many skills together

1.4 Summary

In short, this chapter deals with some main points relating to the topic about listening skill In the first place, it presents some definitions of listening skill according to some dictionaries, its importance and two main types of

listening-casual listening and focused listening The next main point presented

in the chapter is a popular approach for language teaching called Communicative Language Teaching ( CLT ) with its characteristics, teachers’ roles and learners’ roles At last, the chapter comes up with teaching English listening in CLT This part includes seven principles of teaching English listening skill, twelve sub-listening skills and four main types of listening skills which are no overt responses, short responses, longer responses and extended responses

is one of the most frequently-used kinds of listening exercises in the textbooks

of three forms The number of T/F statements is often from 5 to 6 ones The requirement in most of these exercises is not too difficult: students only have

to decide whether the statement is true or false and they do not have to correct the false information For this kind of listening exercises, students can do the exercise more easily but sometimes their answers cannot show their understanding as they can guess the answers without understanding the listening text The next type is comprehension questions: like T/F exercises, comprehension question exercises are also used in many listening lessons in these textbooks The number of questions is about five to six ones These questions are used for more specific information In fact, the questions are not too difficult for students to answer but they need to understand the specific information of the text This kind of exercises both requires much concentration of students and helps them pay more attention to the detail of the text It also can check students’ understanding more exactly Multiple-choice exercises are much used in many lessons of different language skills especially in reading comprehension skill They are also often used in many listening lessons of these textbooks particularly in 11th and 12th form textbooks These exercises are very useful for students to distinguish the different information but they cannot check students’ understanding exactly

because they can guess the answers with no need to understand the text Another type is gap-filling exercises: this kind of exercises is very much used

in many listening lessons The passages or sentences with missing information

in the textbooks are not too long but some of them are quite difficult These exercises are very useful as they can check students’ understanding and help them follow the content of the listening text better But for the low level of listening skill of high school students, it will be better if the missing information does not contain too many words

Those are the most frequently-used exercises in the textbooks of three grades However, it is thought that there should be more types of exercises so

as to avoid boredom and evoke students’ interest in learning more

2.1.2 Difficulties in Teaching and Learning English Listening

It cannot be denied that listening equipments such as listening tapes, cassette players play a very important role in learning listening skill Therefore, good and modern listening equipments are vital for teaching and learning listening However, there are not many high schools in VietNam which can meet this requirement: even some schools do not have normal listening equipments such as cassette players and the teachers have to read the text themselves Additionally, using cassette players is not a good way of teaching listening and this can make the listening text more difficult to hear to students because the volume of the cassette players may not be loud or good enough for students to hear or the noise outside classroom may affect their listening But most of Vietnamese high schools use cassette players as main listening equipments

Moreover, for many university students, listening is the most difficult skill to learn and they often get stressed or bored when they cannot understand any thing in the listening text This situation is even worse for high school students The followings are the popular problems they often meet when listening: The first challenging difficulty is linking sounds Native speakers always use linking sounds when speaking and it is very difficult for foreign

students to distinguish these sounds: they may think it is a new word and try

to guess its meaning Fast, natural native speech is also a hard problem to solve Most of native speeches are too fast for students to follow Consequently, they may miss much important information In fact, it is easier for them to listen to a foreign speech than a native speech Furthermore, the fact is that they need to hear a listening text more than once Because they cannot understand fast natural speech at the first time of hearing, they usually have to listen to it again and again They even have to spend most of the time listening to a short passage but they still cannot catch the main idea As a result, they get bored or disappointed and this can affect their interest in listening next time It is that many students are very bad at focusing on the key words or catching the main idea of the listening text This problem is rather popular Perhaps, they are able to hear what the speakers are speaking

or understand many words in the text but they cannot catch the main content

of its Another difficulty is that some students cannot concentrate on the listening task While listening, they often think of the other things or they let their mind wonder somewhere outside the classroom Even though they try to focus on listening, they are still distracted from it

2.1.3 Real Situation of Learning and Teaching English Listening at Nguyen Xuan On high school

Nguyen Xuan On high school is a rather famous school in Nghe An province It was founded in 1946 It is well-equipped with a lot of modern equipments: four labs with projectors, one lab for studying biology, one lab for studying physics and many cassette players for learning English In addition, it has a room with a lot of computers for teaching and learning informatics This school is really a good teaching and learning environment for teachers and students During two months of teaching practice in this school, it was realized that the teachers and students have made much effort to enhance the quality of teaching and learning English However, there are still some problems such as: the modern teaching and learning equipments have

not been used very effectively, some teachers do not have really creative methods of teaching so they cannot attract their students to learning Moreover, the number of students in this school who are good at English is not high Many of them do not pay much attention to learning English There are only a few of them in some classes such as 12B, 10C10, 11C10 who can learn English well while a lot of other students have difficulty in learning this subject Therefore, they meet many difficulties in learning the skills especially listening skill According to them, this is the most difficult skill of all A large number of students cannot understand any thing in a listening text The result

is that this skill is neglected In other words, it is ignored by many teachers and students Some teachers do not teach this skill very carefully, they just let students listen to a listening text in the textbook for a few times and ask them

to answer the questions without checking their understanding For students, most of them use reference books to answer the questions in spite the fact that they do not really understand the lesson

2.2 Main Reasons for the Difficulties in Learning Listening Skill

2.2.1 Subjective Reason

We cannot blame bad listening equipments for the low quality of teaching and learning listening because most of those difficulties are caused by

teachers and students themselves

Firstly, it is undeniable that not many students really pay attention to listening skill They only focus on learning grammar, vocabulary and ignore this skill Without spending time practicing, how can their ability of listening improve? “Practice makes perfect”, they cannot distinguish linking sounds or follow fast speaking speed of native speakers if they do not often practice hearing them

Bad methods of teaching listening of some teachers are another important reason They do not spend much time teaching this skill to students: they may pass some part that students cannot hear and move to another one or the way they teach listening lessons is not effective Interesting extra topics with new

listening activities for further practice are very important to motivate students into lessons and improve their listening ability but some teachers do not pay much attention to these They only teach the listening lessons in the textbooks Additionally, it is the bad ways of learning listening of many students that cause trouble They may be able to hear what the speakers are talking about but they cannot catch the main content or ideas This is the result of the bad habit of listening: they listen but they do not try to summarize what is going

on

Lastly, repeatedly used activities contribute boredom to learning listening

of students As it can be seen from three high school English textbooks, some kinds of activities are used again and again such as T/F statements or gap-filling exercises This may reduce students’ interest in the lessons and cause the boredom of doing the same exercises many times

2.2.2 Objective Reasons

As it was mentioned above, the quality of listening equipments in most of Vietnamese high schools is not good and this has bad affect on the quality of teaching and learning listening

Noticeably, the importance of listening skill has not been appreciated in many schools so it does not receive enough attention so that the necessary equipments which are used for teaching and learning this skill are not improved

In addition, many schools are not rich enough to pay for modern listening equipments Clearly, it is the best for students to study listening in a language lab but not many schools in Vietnam have a language lab Even some universities have a few language labs for students of foreign languages to study listening skill

Apart from those reasons, one more reason is that students do not have many chances to listen to native speakers in real life They only listen to them through the recording tapes Therefore, they will find it more difficult to get used to listening to native speech

2.3 Survey on Learning English Listening Skill at Nguyen Xuan On high school

2.3.1 Aims of the Survey

To learning listening skill well is really a big problem for many students Naturally, because they cannot learn this skill well, they often get bored or even ignore it This situation is very popular in most of high schools in Vietnam In fact, not only do teachers have difficulties in teaching listening skill but students also meet a lot of trouble when learning it Thus, the first aim of doing this survey is to check the ability of learning listening skill of students and find out the main problems or difficulties they have when learning this skill The second aim is to know what can motivate them into listening lessons: interesting listening activities, new listening topics or good method of teaching The third but the most important reason of doing this survey is to give some suggestions to motivate students into listening lessons better based on its results

2.3.2 Description of the Survey

The survey is conducted with a questionnaire which consists of 16 questions including both open and closed questions so as to check students’ listening ability and their interests in this skill better It was given to 135 students of three classes from three grades: 10C10, 11C10 and 12B All of the students in the survey learned English when they were in grade 6 They are the best students of English who are chosen to learn in the classes of English

of the whole school Especially, the students of class 12B are the best ones of three classes: they study the advanced text book Thus, English subject plays

an important role to these students and they are the students who pay most attention to this subject The aim of question 1 is to know the number of the years these students learn English, question 2 checks their interest in English and question 3 reveals their opinions about listening skill The information about the factors affecting students’ listening is given in question 4 Besides this, we will get information about how much time they spend on practicing

listening per day in order to know if they are interested in improving their listening skill or not thanks to question 5 Questions 6, 7, 8 and 9 show us students’ habits, their ways and their ability of listening Question 10 helps

us know whether listening equipments can affect students’ learning or not In addition, thanks to the answers of questions 11 and 12, we will collect their ideas of listening exercises and listening topics in the text books The aim of question 13 is to find out what kind of listening exercises in the textbooks students like most Questions 14,15 give us the information about the extra listening activities given by the teacher and students’ attitudes towards those activities The last question is used to analyze students’ ideas about some main factors which can motivate them into the lesson

2.3.3 Results of the Survey

The following pie chart presents the percentages of students who are interested in learning English

Figure 2.1 Students’ interest in learning English

According to the chart, although these students are from the classes of English of the school, only 70% of them are interested in learning English while the rest do not like learning English at all (30%) This is one main reason why they do not pay much attention to learning this subject Thus, how difficult is listening skill in their opinion? The bar chart below shows us students’ opinions about the listening skill according to four degrees of difficulty:

Figure 2.2 Students’ opinions about degrees of difficulty of listening skill

As can be seen from the chart, a lot of students find listening skill very difficult (34.81%) and difficult (48.15%) In their opinion, this is the most difficult skill of all and they really do not like it Many of them even cannot catch any information in a listening text in the textbooks (including the students of the 12th form) despite the fact that they are allowed to listen more than three times during a lesson On the contrary, a small number of the students think that listening skill is rather difficult (11.11%) and a few of them confirm it is not difficult at all (5.93%) In fact, these are the best students who are very good at listening Not only can they answer comprehension questions and exercises in the textbook but they also can answer the extra questions given by the teacher

Thus, why do so many students find listening skill very difficult whereas only some of them do not meet any trouble with it? The bar chart below shows us some information about three main factors what make listening difficult to students:

Figure 2.3 Factors affecting students’ listening