A study on prelistening activities to motivate 6th graders in listening lessons at nghi an junior high school

All these above reasons have inspired the writer to do research in listening activities and as a result, a research title goes as “A study on listening activities to motivate 6 th grader

TABLE OF CONTENTS Part A: Introduction

1 Rationale

2 Aims of the study

3 Research questions

4 Scope of the study

5 Methods of the study

6 Design of the study

6 Using symbol maps

7 Predicting the content of the listening text

Part C: Conclusion

1 Summary of the study

2 Limitations of the study and suggestion for further study

or who is speaking to whom So, simply asking the students to listen to somethingand answer some questions is a little unfair, and makes developing listening skillsmuch harder.

Many students are fearful of listening, and can be disheartened when they listen tosomething but feel they understand very little It is also harder to concentrate onlistening if you have little interest in a topic or situation Pre-listening tasks aim todeal with all of these issues: to generate interest, build confidence and to facilitatecomprehension All these above reasons have inspired the writer to do research in

listening activities and as a result, a research title goes as “A study on listening activities to motivate 6 th graders in listening lessons at Nghi An junior high

pre-school “

2 Aims of the study

- Find out the difficulties of the 6th graders at Nghi An junior high school during theListening lesson

- Provide pre-listening activities to motivate them in their listening time

4 Scope of the study

The study limits at finding out the difficulties in learning listening skill For graders

6th Nghi An junior high school

5 Method of the study

The study mainly uses qualitative and quantitative methods including questions andinterviews to study materials.

6 Design of the study

The study contains three main parts:

Part 1: Introduction that consists of rationale, aims, research questions, scope,method, design of the study

Part 2: Development – the main of the study – is divided into three chapters

- Chapter 1 is about the theoretical background

- Chapter 2 is about methodology

- Chapter 3 is about recommendation of pre-listening activities for 6th graders

Part 3: Conclusion that summary of the study and limitations of the study

PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

According to Howatt and Dakin (1974),listening is ability to indentify andunderstand what others are saying This process involves understanding a speaker’saccent and pronunciation, the speaker’s grammar and vocabulary and comprehension ofmeaning An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously

In addition, Lesley Barker (2001) states that: “ Listening, however, is more thanjust being able to hear and understand what someone else say, listening skills involveetiquette, asking for clarification, showing empathy and providing an appropriateresponse.”

According to Bulletin (1952), listening is one of the fundamental language skill It’s

a medium through which children, young people and adult gain a large portion of theireducation-their information, their understanding of the world and of human affairs, theirideals, sense of values, and their appreciation

Rubin (1991) defined listening as “the active and dynamic process of attending,perceiving, interpreting, remembering and responding to the expressed verbal and non-verbal needs, concerns and information offered by the human beings” Carol (1993)described listening as a set of activities that involve “the individual’s capacity toapprehend, recognize, discriminate or even ignore.”

Wolvin and Coakley (1985) pointed out that listening is “the process of receiving,attending to and assigning to aural stimuli” This definition suggests that listening is acomplex, problem-solving skill The task of listening is more than perception of sound.This view of listening is in accordance with second-language theory which considers

listening to spoken language as an active and complex process in which listeners focus onselected aspects of aural input, construct meaning, and relate what they hear to existingknowledge (O’Malley & Chamot, 1989; by, 1984; Richards, 1985; Holand, 1983).

Recently, Imhof (1988) stated that listening is “the active process of selecting andintegrating relevant information from acoustic input and this process is controlled bypersonal intentions which is critical to listening” Rost (2002) confirmed, “Listening isexperiencing contextual effects” which can be translated as “ listening as a neurologicalevent (experiencing) overlaying a cognitive event creating a change in a representation”,ect

1.2 Classification of listening

Almost the learners of English will sooner or later, find themselves in a variety ofsituation where they need or want to listen to English being used in the real-life forarrange of purposes However, they have to face many difficulties because there is the bigdifference between the listening activities in the classroom and actual situations In theclass, the learners listened to the very grammatical standard dialogues, conservations orpresentations The speakers often speak at perfectly controlled speed, with perfect voicetone, accent and correct grammar The learners even had the preparation already, andknew clearly about the topic that they are going to listen to

That is the reason why the learners can listen very well Whereas, in the real-lifeconservations, learners encounter various people speak with different accent, speed andvoice tone without paying attention to grammar The speaker also can use the difficultwords, idioms, proverbs, or even the slang words, etc As a result, the learners cannotlisten to perfectly

In the real-life, different situations call for different types of listening and as yourlistening skill evolves, so will your ability to hear what someone is really saying Thereare many types of listening However, in general and according to Adian (1995), there aretwo ways, which people often listen in the real-life They are “casual” listening and

“focused” listening

“Casual” listening (in another word, we call it “Appreciative Listening”) This is

one of the most enjoyable types of listening, and it comes naturally for many people.There are not a lot of responses necessary in appreciative listening though groups oflisteners might often talk among themselves to process the experience Appreciativelistening is most often used when people listen to music, plays, concerts or other

performances The typical feature is that we do not listen carefully and intentionally,therefore we may not remember much of what we hear or even thesis nothing in ourmind.

“Focused” listening (or “Intonational Listening”) This is simple, straightforward

listening The speaker intends to get a message across, and the listener’s goal should be tounderstand that message as completely as possible The listener might need to askquestions or request clarification to get the full message In this case we often listen withmuch attention for a particular purpose but we do not listen to everything we hear withequal concentration For instance, we want to know the answer to a question, we will askand expect to hear the relevant response This leads to our “listening out” for certain keyphrases or words Even when listening to entertainment such as plays, jokes or songs wehave a definite purpose (enjoyment), we want to know what is coming next, and weexpect to cohere with what went before There is an association between listenerexpectation and purpose and hi comprehension If the listeners expects and need areintentional, his listening is likely accurately perceived and understand than that which isunexpected, irrelevant or helpful

According to Rixon (1986) and Hublard, R and others (1984), there are two

main kinds of listening in classroom, they are intensive listening and

extensive listening

http://vi.scribd.com/doc/32124132/Teaching-Listening

Intensive listening (Comprehensive/ Informative Listening) means students listen

carefully for the detailed information, full comprehension or the content of the message.Anytime students listen to instructions or to a lecture from an instructor, listening to theannouncement or weather forecast, they are using informative listening The importantaspect of this type of listening is whether the listener misunderstand the message beingrelayed by the speaker If the listener misunderstand or does not pay close attention,informative listening is affected

This kind of listening helps learners develop their listening skill or knowledge ofthe language in the effort to do exercise or other activities The passage should be short sothat learners have chances to get to grip with the content They also feel it easy,interesting and encouraging when they listen to a short passage

Extensive listening (Appreciative listening) is free and general listening to natural

language for general ideas, not for particular details It is the art of listening for pleasure

and interest When people enjoy a concert, speech, short jokes or poems, ect they areexperiencing appreciative listening They are not asked to do any language work and theycan do their listening freely without any pressure Moreover, the topics are various andentertaining, therefore they are motivated to develop their listening skill.

Wolvin and Coakley (1988, 1993) have introduced another categorization oflistening, they identified five types of listening:

(1) Discrimination listening

(2) Listening for comprehension

(3) Therapeutic (empathic) listening

(4) Critical listening

(5) Appreciative listening

Discrimanative listening is the most basic type of listening, whereby the differencebetween different sounds is identified If listener cannot hear differences, they cannotmake sense of the meaning that is expressed by such differences As a result, a personwho cannot hear the subtles of emotional variation in another person’s voice will be lesslikely to be able to discern the emotions the other person is experiencing

The next step beyond discrinating between different sound and sights is to makesense of them To comprehend the meaning requires having a lexicon os words, rules ofgrammar and syntax by which we can understand what others are saying The visualcomponents of communication and an understanding of body language also help usunderstand what the other person is really meaning Comprehension is also known ascontent listening, informative listening and full listening

In therapeutic listening, the listeners have a purpose of not only empathizing withthe speaker but also to use this deep connection in order to help the speaker understand,change or develop in some way Moreover, this kinds of listening happens wherever andwhenever in life Critical listening is listening in order to evaluate and judge, formingopinion about what is being said Judgement includes assessing strengthts andweaknesses, agreement and approval This form of listening requires significant real-timecognitive effort as the listener analyze what is being said, relating it to existingknowledge and rules In appreciative listening, we seek certain information which willappreciate listening when we are listening to good music, poetry or made even the stiringwords of a great leader

Beside the above well-known classifications, Rost’s theory (1990) introduced fourtypes of listening suggested by Garvin (1985) with small modification:

Differently, Ur (1984) is another 1.2 researcher who classified listening its

function To her point of view, there are two types of listening: listening for perception and listening for comprehension To the former, it is the act of listening to perceive “the

different sounds, sound-combinations and stress and intonation patterns of foreignlanguage” While listening for comprehension is relevant to content understanding and it

is divided into two sub-categories, passive listening for comprehension implying the act

of making basic for other language skill with imaginative or logical thought and activelistening for comprehension Rather, she insisted that listening for comprehension should

be considered as a continuum from passive listening on the left side to active listening onthe right side of continuum

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid= 2555912

Extensive listening (Appreciative listening) is free and general listening to natural

language for general ideas, not for particular details It is the art of listening for pleasureand interest When people enjoy a concert, speech, short jokes or poems, ect they areexperiencing appreciative listening They are not asked to do any language work and they

can do their listening freely without any pressure Moreover, the topics are various andentertaining, therefore they are motivated to develop their listening skill.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid= 2555912

1 Potential difficulties in listening comprehension

1.1 Listening problems

The cause of not recognizing English sounds

When asked about the cause of difficulty with English sounds, 31% of respondentssaid that this difficulty was because they could not distinguish homophones, especiallywords with a way The pronunciation is nearly the same 28% of the students identified theconfusion between affirmative and negative forms as the main reason Especially 40% ofthe students surveyed said that they did not recognize the main information needed tohear is due to some characteristics of speech (connected speech) in English such as:swallowing phenomenon (elision ), weak form in pronunciation of some functions (weakform), phonemic assimilation (assimilation), word reduction (contraction), linkingphenomenon, As so, the fact that learners do not recognize English sounds is mainlydue to (1) not distinguishing homophonous words and words with similar pronunciation,(2) confusion between affirmation and form negative, especially due to (3) someinfluence on speech pronunciation in English

The cause of lack of concentration when listening

Data from the survey showed that 30% of the students said that the cause of lack ofconcentration when listening was due to poor health while the number of students wasmore (37%) considered inexperienced when Listening is the reason that makes them moreand more difficult to focus on the listening Meanwhile 32% of students surveyed thoughtthat their ability to focus less on listening was due to both of these reasons From thesedata it can be concluded that listeners often lose the ability to concentrate on hearingwhen (1) health conditions are not good and (2) lack of experience in listeningcomprehension

The cause of not being able to grasp the main idea of the listening

According to the data obtained, this is the most common cause of listeningdifficulties for learners (71%) When asked about the cause of this difficulty, 36% ofparticipants said they could hardly grasp the main idea of the listening because they didnot know what important information to listen to in the lesson 37% of students said thatthey could not deduce the main content of the song from key words that made them

unable to grasp the main idea when listening The number of people choosing both causes

is 25% These data show that the cause of the situation is difficult to grasp the maincontent of the listening lesson is (1) does not distinguish the information to be heard withthe remaining information and (2) does not deduce the main idea of the song heard fromimportant words

- Pre-teaching new vocabulary or grammatical structures

For students, a large number of unknown words or new grammatical structures mayencounter their comprehension and lower their confidence Thus, it is necessary to pre-teach new words and grammatical structures, especially items of great difficulty to thecomprehension before listening There are many ways of presenting new vocabulary:using visual aids (real objects, pictures, miming, gestures and facial expressions), usinggames (matching, crosswords, puzzle, etc.), synonyms, antonym or even translation.However, the teacher should not preteach too much new vocabulary and grammaticalstructures because it may remove the challenges and interest

- Using visual aids to introduce the topic of the text

Using visual aids is considered the most useful activities because showing visualsfocuses attention on meaning and help to make the language used in the class more realand alive A picture is worth thousand words This techniques is an effective way ofreminding students of lexis which have been forgotten and of focusing attention the topic

to be listened to

For example, it Unit 8 of English 6, students are asked to look at the tow pictures

of the same town to discuss the differences between them This kind of activity aims atdrawing students’ attention to the content of listening passage about the changes of atown This activity helps students activate their prior knowledge of lexis and grammar

- Discussion

Students are posed guiding questions or relevants topics and then they are asked todiscuss in pairs or groups It is very necessary for students because this activityencourages them to share ideas and knowledge, and give chance for them to involve inthe task as well as speak English It is noted by Doff (1988) that there should be fluentand less fluent students in one group because the former can help the latter confidentlyexpress their ideas

- Questioning

The teacher asks students questions and makes them think about the topic beforethey listen Students can work in pairs to ask an answer the given questions related to thelistening passage By doing so, students can build on their prior knowledge and at thesame time use vocabulary and structures that related to the topic

- Brainstorming

It is a good idea that students can brain storm ideas, possibilities or suggestion ofthe topic before listening After that they can use their own ideas, possibilities orsuggestions as basis for while-listening activities The great advantage of this activity isthat their ideas can contain words expression which they know, or which they learn byasking for help as they brainstorm This increases the likelihood of the student succeedingwith the task and is therefore motivating, particularly, for less able students

Brainstorming is a good pair or group activity and the whole class and can be done

in a relaxed way because there are no right answers

- Previewing the listening tasks

It is very useful indeed for the students to preview the task before they beginlistening to the text Not only do they then know what they have to seek from the text, butthey also benefit from the reading itself (Underwood, 1989) They even try to predictanswers before listening In addition, they listened specifically for answers, implying thatpreviewing the tasks affects their listening strategies

- Using games to introduce the topic of listening passage

There is a variety of games which can motivate students a lot in learning listeningsuch as guessing game, crosswords, hanging, etc Each game is appropriate with a kind oflesson Each of these activities helps to focus students’ minds on the topic by narrowingdown the things that the students expect to hear and activating relevant prior knowledge

and already known language The pre-listening activities are not used separatedly, manypre-listening activities can be used in a listening lesson to gain best effects.

The reason for conducting survey includes influencing a selected audience,modifying a service or product and understanding or predicting human behavior The data

of the survey reflects descriptive, behavioral or preferential characteristics of – according

to Alreck and Settle (1995) and Rea and Paker (1997) Basing on these advantages ofdoing survey research, the writer has decided to employ the survey questionnaire as amajor technique together with other methods to collect the information for the graduationpaper

In this chapter, the writer describes the setting of the study (students and theirbackground, resources and materials) The subjects, and instruments for collecting thedata and the data collection procedure and data analysis, which integrate with the researchpaper

2 The setting of study

Most of the 6th graders are between the age of 8 and 10 They have studiedEnglish at least 3 years at primary school or more However, at primary schools, thestudents only concentrated on learning vocabulary,reading and writing, rarely or evennever did the students have a chance to practice listening skill Consequently, it is the bigchallenge for them in changing learning habits and methods at secondary school

The textbooks used for the 6th graders are English 6 However, 6TH graders have nochance to enjoy many listening lessons so to improve listening skill better, learners shouldactively communicate with their friends and teachers in different periods of English and

find listening materials form different sources (on internet, from bookshop and library,etc) to practice listening more at home.

Two survey questionnaires for both students and teachers were designed and used as themain instrument for collecting data The questionnaires can range from short 5-8 iteminstruments to a long document, which requires one or two hours to complete Items inthe questionnaire can be open-ended format or closed, requiring the respondents to selectone from among a limited number responded The discourse structure of questionnaire isimportant to consider, as it seems obvious that the respondent must be able to understandthe language of the questionnaire

5 Data analysis

In this chapter, with data collected from the survey questionnaire, a comprehensiveanalysis will be presented It is the reorganization of the students’ common difficultieswhen studying listening skill through the data from the questionnaire by the means of piecharts and columns, laid our corresponding to the sequence of the questions and drawsout immediately conclusion at each figure

5.1 Students’ perceptions about their listening difficulties (Q5)

Factors affecting Strongly

Agree Neutral Disagree

Grammar helps you much

comprehension

You have problem with

accents

Stress and intonation

make you feel hard to

understand the message

intended

It’s difficult for you to

understand when native

speaker is too fast

You feel stressful and

you from listening

Your social and cultural

As can be seen from the table almost of the students (45%) are not confident withtheir vocabulary, 55% of them think that their vocabulary is good enough to helpthem in listening It can be said that they have obstacles in listening comprehensionbecause of lacking vocabulary but it is not a very bis and major problem The chartalso points out that grammar is not the problem of 6th graders in listeningcomprehension because most of the students (52.5%) thinks that their grammarcannot help them much to understand the spoken language Only 27.5% of thelearners seem to depend on the grammar in mastering this skill.

Besides, almost all of students (75%) find difficult to understand the spokenmessage because of various and unfamiliar accents Therefore, varying accentsbecome one of the difficulties that 6th graders encounter in listening comprehension

In addition, stress and intonation is a big challenge as well 86% of the studentsadmitted that they feel hard to understand the message intended because of thisphonological factor (stress and intonation) One more phonological factor affects tostudents’ listening competence is the connected speech The majority of students(80%) feel it is difficult for them to understand when the native speakers producespontaneous connected speech Speech rate of native speakers seems is not a verybig problem to the learners Only 40% of students think it is too fast to them to catchthe spoken text while 60% have no ideas about this question Maybe they feel thespeech rate is not affected them much in understanding the texts

To the non-linguistic field, it can be shown from the data collected that the majority

of students (52.5%) get stressful and nervous when they are listening to English.This psychology is a big problem of 1st year English majors to listen well Moreover,the chart indicates that 95% of the students become hesitant and unable toconcentrate on listening by the environmental factors such as the noise, physicalcondition or unpleasant atmosphere…during listening process Furthermore, most ofthe students (60%) think their social and cultural knowledge is good enough tolisten This factor together with hearing problems seem not the major challenges tostudents when only 5% of them complained for hearing problem and 10% of themare not confident with their understanding about culture and society