Developing pre - Listening activities in upper-secondary school

SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO THANH HÓA
TRƯỜNG THPT NGUYỄN HOÀNG -HÀ TRUNG
SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM
DEVELOPING PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES IN UPPER-SECONDARY SCHOOL
Người thực hiện: Lê Thị Giao
Chức vụ: Giáo viên
SKKN thuộc lĩnh vực: Tiếng Anh
THANH HÓA NĂM 2017
TABLE OF CONTENTS
 Trang
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Reason for choosing the study.
Listening is an important step in communication, for those who are “to engage in any form of communication, they have to understand and react to what has been said” . The teaching of listening in Vietnam is experiencing a change from simply providing practice opportunities to how to teach skills. Yet in most listening classes, the traditional pattern listen to the text, do the exercises, and check the answers is still quite common. Taking this kind of lesson is like taking a test that focuses on the learners’ memory rather than on the process of listening. In such a test-like situation, not only the students’ level of anxiety is high but also the input is limited. Instead of being motivated, most of the time the learners suffer frustration. How to help students overcome the above problems has been a major concern and a challenge to teachers. Moreover
skill of listening has been neglected in terms of research and shifted to a secondary position. The priority has been given to teaching speaking and writing. It is a surprising fact considering that it is the skill most often used in everyday life. According to L. Miller , more than forty percent of our daily communication is spent on listening, thirty-five percent on speaking, about sixteen percent on reading, and only nine percent on writing. Yet listening remains one of the least understood processes in language learning in spite of its critical role in communication and language acquisition.
Researchers and language teachers have often maintained that listening skills could be picked up by the learners. Now it is generally accepted that listening skills have to be taught like any other language skills. Currently more attention is being paid to developing and researching the field of teaching listening.
In high schools, students are often afraid of listening lessons for some reasons such as the dull lectures, the unsuitable level lessons, irrelevant strategy listening, unclear sounds in tapesThis leads to their nervousness during listening lessons and they can hardly listen to anything which causes the bad result in learning the listening skill.
From my experience in teaching English at Nguyễn Hoàng school I realized that the well – prepared lesson plans in which teacher simplify the tasks and use strategies helps the students have better results in listening lessons. That why I choose the theme “Developing pre-listening activities in uper-secondary school ” 
1.2. Objectives of the study 
The objectives I intend to review what some researchers and teachers write about pre-listening activities in Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in general and in teaching listening in particular in English textbook 12 to have effective lectures and develop student’s listening skills 
1.3. Scope of the study
This study is conducted among the 12th form students at Nguyễn Hoàng high school during the school year 2016- 2017
1.4. Researching method: 
 Reading reference books, discussing with other teachers, applying in teaching, observing and drawing out experiences.
1.5. The new location of the subject.
This study may provide insights into the process of learning the listening skill for the students. It motivates the students’ desire for learning English, and make them more confident and active in listening activities. It also gives some suggestions for other teachers for teaching listening lessons
2. CONTENTS
2.1. RATIONALE
 	* What is the listening skill?
So far, there have been a number of definitions of listening by different linguists such as Howatt and Dakin , Wolvin and Coakley, Pearson Howatt and Dakin defined listening as the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning. Wolvin and Coakley regarded listening "the process of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli".
Pearson stated “Listening involves the simultaneous organization and combination of skills in Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, and knowledge of the text structure, all of which seem to be controlled by the cognitive process. Thus it can be said that though not fully realized, the listening skill is essential in acquiring language proficiency”.
to study As the words suggest, this kind of activities should be performed before listening in order to get the learners prepared for the coming listening tasks. According to Medley, pre-listening activities can be subdivided into 
“readiness activities” and “guidance activities”.
“Readiness activities” aim at activating students’ prior knowledge by reading the title, new words of the text, sometimes looking at the picture given before the exercises in the text book, and also by asking provocative questions or introducing background knowledge.
“Guidance activities” are intended to specific aspects of language input by letting them bear certain purposes in mind in advance, in other words, letting students know what task or tasks they are going to do with the text, or letting the students themselves decide what they want to do with the text.
2.2. THE STATE OF PROBLEM
* Why should perform the operation before listening
 In fact, we rarely hear people problems that they do not know what they will hear. When listening to a radio program, they would know what issues are being discussed. When listening to an interview with a celebrity, they may know little about him then. A waitress staff know the menu from which diners choose their dishes.
 Rarely do we have trouble listening first language. However, with a second language, listening is one of the harder skills improve as quickly to capture the sounds, words and strange structure. It's even more difficult if we do not know the topic under discussion is what or who is talking to whom so asking students to listen to certain issues and answer some of the questions seem a bit unfair to them and make the development of listening skills more and more difficult.
Many students fear could hear and feel bored when they hear something but do not understand or see very little understood. Moreover, the focus is also difficult to hear if you are less interested, or not interested in a topic or a situation.
 Before listening activities aimed at solving all the problems. They create excitement, build confidence and support for the listening comprehension - making learners have reason to listen, to compare with the speculation of them, easily introduce the topic, some words and listening structure is introduced and makes listening easier, to promote the creativity of students, many different activities are applied to make sounds and interactive communicative better.
2.3. PROBLEM SOLVING
2.3.1. The purpose and types of activities before listening
- Create Context
 	This is probably the most important thing - the majority of tests to guide know who is speaking, where and why. In everyday life we ​​often know about the context of the problem that we are listening.
- Create excitement
Arouse interest and encourage students as core tasks we need to perform. If they listen to understand the sport is seeing a few vivid picture of athletes in sports or sporting events will make them more interesting and can also cause them to remember why they love sports. The personal activity plays an important role in generating interest in the students excited. A discussion in pairs on the sport they play or watch, and cause, will make them add the theme and makes them more confident to be ready to hear.
- Applying existing knowledge - you know about ...?
"You will hear a person go join ecological campaign talking about the destruction of tropical forests." Yourself instructions created context, but if you immediately start listening always, the students do not have time to contact or apply their knowledge (which may have been learned by the first language) into the second language. They have knowledge of the rainforest? What are rainforests? Where were they? The problems that tropical forests are facing is what? Why are rainforests important? One participant ecological campaign can do? Participating organizations, advocacy campaigns related to ecological problems?
- Acquiring knowledge
Students may have restrictions on basic knowledge, or background knowledge about a certain topic. Providing this knowledge will build confidence in students as they listen. This can be done through the delivery of a paragraph related to that topic for students to read or interesting than it might quiz, crossword.
- Applying the vocabulary / language
Since the adoption of knowledge related to important topics so that manipulation of language can be used in the test are also equally important. These activities primarily related to the knowledge that can be given for this purpose, but it can also perform other activities. If students prepare to hear a conversation between a segment parents and a teenager - who want to spend the night at a friend's house, then why not let students play this situation before heard. They can brainstorm about language first and then perform plays. By taking the time to think about the words used to the situation, they will be well prepared to do the listening.
- Guess content
Once we know the context of a particular issue, we will be able to predict the content. Try to offer alternatives where they can or can not predict when listening, and asking them to choose what they think will be mentioned. Guess the content can be:
* Guess topic
* Guess who join the conversation
* Guess the place of occurrence conversation
* Guess the words appear in the listening of the given words
* Guess True / False
* Guess the sequence of events that occur in the listening
- Learning previous vocabulary
Upon hearing the first language, we often focus on the whole meaning because we know the meaning of words. For students, many of them do not know often obstruct the listening and of course makes them unconfident. Select a few words to the students before the hearing, can give students homework transplant from the definition, then do an exercise as simple as filling in the blanks from.
- Check / Understanding spoken texts
 	By giving students time to read and understand the comprehension exercise mainly, teachers facilitate students to understand something about the content of the listening and even students can predict answers before listening.
2.3.2. The selection criteria
When planning lessons and especially prepared for operation before listening, teachers should pay attention to a few points:
- Time
- Resources
- The ability of the students in the class
- Interests or the problems that students in the class are often interested
- The nature and content of the listening
The selection of activities before listening to the teacher the opportunity to classify listening for different ability levels. If teachers have a general class of students are trying, hard to hear, the more enhanced activity as possible before heard. However, if teachers want to do better with exercise, requiring higher teacher can simply organize activities for the contents of the listening. Therefore, the same post can hear many activities for different ability levels.
 Pre-listening activity should moderate, not too much and mainly suggestions and stimulate curiosity with the main theme.
 In sum, making the operation before listening to a listening phase is important and necessary. Because the language proficiency of students in each class is not uniform, listening is a skill difficult that teachers need to be flexible in the application of this operation depends on the purpose, language skills of the children more longer duration of one hour to teach basic English only 45 minutes while English level input of the children is not high, making the operation before listening to the lessons that help them create excitement, language capabilities language and help them achieve more effective when done listening.
2.3.3. The important of Pre-listening Activities
Pre-listening activities change the role of listeners from passive“recorders” to active participants.
Anderson and Lynch put forward two different views of listening, one of which is “the listener as tape recorder”. This analogy suggests that “as long as the input is sufficiently loud to be recorded and does not exceed the length of the available blank tape, the message will be recorded and stored and can be replayed later”. The notion assumes that listeners can record, store and even replay the outside language input mechanically.
In the 1970s, the passive listening theory was challenged. More and more scholars turned to believe that listening was “an active and complex process” (Ur, 1984: 83) and in the process “listeners are assigned certain roles, such as participants, addressees, auditors, overhears and the process places responsibility for constructing an acceptable understanding on them” (Rost, 1990).
With the knowledge which pre-listening activities have offered and the relaxed atmosphere they bring about, students’ anxiety level will be lowered and they will be more confident of bearing certain purposes in mind in advance, and having the competence to decide what they want to do with the text. In this way the passive recorder become an active participant. 
2.3.4. Pre-listening activities increase the input
In China, students learn English as a foreign language and most college students have little exposure to cultural information. Without understanding the culture within which a foreign language is located, it is unthinkable and very hard for one to master a foreign language and communicate very well with its native speakers. Bearing this in mind, more and more language education researchers take cultural aspects into consideration in their research in language learning and teaching.
In listening class, listening materials should be used as useful sources of cultural knowledge whereas they are often taken as a test to complete some spot dictation, true or false questions.
The background or cultural knowledge is often ignored. While we know cultural background knowledge is an important consideration, it plays a significant role in ELT. Language is part of culture and language is impacted and shaped greatly by culture. Pre-listening activities can offer a chance to incorporate it into our teaching.
 This stage is aimed at preparing students with everything necessary for listening and understanding the listening text. Some activities are: 
2.3.5. Pre-listening in Practice
According to research findings, in active listening listeners make use of two principal sources of information in the process of comprehension: linguistic knowledge and real world knowledge. Listeners have to make full use of their linguistic proficiency and work out the literal meaning of the actually uttered words. Listeners’ real knowledge enables learners to make inferences and form expectations about common situations. The interaction between these two kinds of knowledge makes the learners acquire the meaning. So teachers should spare no effort to design the pre-listening activities which best integrate the two aspects. In learning English as a foreign language, students cannot develop speaking listening skills unless they develop listening skills. To have a successful conversation, they must understand what is said to them. Later on, the ability to understand the native speaker in direct conversations, on the radio or tape may be very important for them to further study the language and communicate in it. Finally, listening to spoken language is an important way of acquiring the language or "picking up" vocabulary and structures. The practical activity types are as follows:
2.3.6. Vocabulary introduction
Vocabulary introduction is the fundamental step before listening to a text with unfamiliar topic and unfamiliar language. Teachers usually notice the importance of this kind of pre-listening activity. Yet, they must pay attention to such a fact: even though pre-teaching vocabulary could facilitate students’ comprehension, the result is not always satisfying. The students may have difficulty transferring their meaning while listening. So it’s better not to give vocabulary introduction just before listening to the text but sometime before that. The teacher can list some words for students to look up in their spare time and remember their meaning, or they can give the students some sentences consisting of new words to study the meaning of the words in the context to strengthen their memory. This will pave the road for better comprehension.
2.3.7. Brainstorming
This kind of activity is especially helpful before students listen to a familiar topic. Take the text in Listen This Way for example:
The content of the first unit Is the Earth Being Squeezed Dry centers on some environmental issues including global warming, deforestation, water shortage, and so on. The brainstorming activities we can organize the students to do is: before listening to the text, the students can work alone or be divided into groups and discuss as many as possible environmental problems we are facing in the world and try to find out what have caused these problems. This approach activates students’ prior knowledge and enables learners to make inferences and form expectations about common situations. Besides, the students will realize how serious our environment is damaged and it is every student’s responsibility to protect the environment. The author considers this is also part of what education aims to achieve to develop all-around students. The students can benefit a lot from such preparatory activities.
2.3.8. Asking questions
Instead of listening to a text aimlessly, the students can be asked some questions beforehand to help them focus their attention on some particular aspects. This approach is especially helpful with regard to some long and difficult text.Take the text in Listen This Way (Book 1) for example:
The content of Part III of Unit 10 is about business trends in the milk drink market. The teacher can organize the following questions for the students to answer: What’s your favorite milk product?
If you are asked to describe the developing trends of milk, what kinds of expressions will be used, especially the verbs and adverbs?
Through this kind of pre-listening activities, students will not only have a clear idea about what they should focus on during the while-listening period but also have the vocabulary obstacles removed. The anxiety level is lowered and the input level is increased
2.3.9. Using visual support
In the form of pictures, graphs, diagrams, maps, etc., the visual support can help students predict incoming listening materials easily by supplying necessary information. Besides,Striking and stimulating visual aids are likely to heighten students’ motivation and concentration, taking the text 12 in Listening This Way for example:
The content of listening in unit 12 in text book is about giving directions. The speed of authentic version is very fast. If let the students listen to it without any pre-listening activities, the students will easily get frustrated, for as we know the speed of delivery is a common reason given for difficulty in listening comprehension . Before listening, the teacher can first stick pictures of the sports to the blackboard and then ask some students to talk about the water sports by following their classmates’ directions. The students will feel excited and have great interest in the exe