Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre - Listening activities

SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO THANH HÓA
TRƯỜNG THPT NGA SƠN
SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM
TÊN ĐỀ TÀI
 HELP GRADE 11 STUDENTS TO SUCCEED IN A 
 LISTENING LESSON BY PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES
 Người thực hiện: Tạ Thị Nga
 Chức vụ: Giáo viên
 SKKN thuộc môn: Tiếng Anh
THANH HÓA, NĂM 2017
TABLE OF CONTENTS
 Page 
PART I: INTRODUCTION.3
1. Reasons for choosing the research...3
2. Aims of the research.3
3. Object of the research...3
4. Research methods.....3
PART II. CONTENTS 4
1. Rationale...4
 2. Practical basis...4
3. Pre-listening activities help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening 
Lesson. .4 
3.1. Set up the context...........4
3.2. Activate existing knowledge..6
3.3. Build knowledge....9
3.4. Pe-teach vocabulary and structures...10
. Make predictions.......... 11
4. Research achievement.............13
PART III : CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION ...15
1. Conclusion....15
2. Recommendation..15
PART I. INTRODUCTION
1. Reasons for choosing the research.
 Listening is vital not only in language learning but also in daily communication. Because, If you can not hear well you will find it hard to communicate. However, listening skill seems to be ignored by most students. “Many students are fearful of listening, and can be disheartened when they listen to something but feel they understand very little” (Gareth Rees 2003). It is also harder to concentrate on listening if you have little interest in a topic or situation. The challenges of listening in another language are great. Our students have to deal with unfamiliar sounds, new vocabulary, and complex sentences. They may not be familiar with the setting, know nothing about the speakers, and have little knowledge of the topic being discussed. And they’re expected to listen and understand a text in real time, with no control of the discourse, in a classroom setting. Being a teacher, I thought a lot of this problem and I applied some strategies that help students in my school to improve their listening skill. Among strategies I used, pre-listening activities help me achieve good result in listening lessons. It is true that pre-listening plays a very important role in helping students to learn how to listen in the foreign language. Thanks to pre-listening activities, my students are more active, more confident and more excited in listening lessons. I hope that “Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities” can help students to upgrade the listening skill and take more interested in listening.
2. Aims of the research.
 This research aims to prepare grade 11 students for listening, to ensure students success, and to get them excited about listening by pre-listening activities, which help teachers find out about what students already know about the topic, prepare them for the vocabulary and language structures in the listening text, mitigate the anxiety which comes from listening in a foreign language and offer opportunities for class discussion and more interaction among students.
3. Object of the research.
 This research focuses on pre-listening activities for grade 11 students in a listening lesson in order to help them to deal with the listening text more easily.
4. Research methods.
- Find out difficulties students have in listening process.
- Read reference books.
- Discuss with my colleagues.
- Apply pre-listening activities in teaching
- Observe and draw out experience.
PART II. CONTENTS
 1. Rationale.
 “It would not be fair towards students to draw them straight into the listening without introducing the topic or the type of activity they are going to work on, since in the real life there are not many situations when people are supposed to listen with having no idea what they are going to hear so that is why students should be given a substantial pre-listening support. This pre-listening support will help them to become more confident and successful.” Eva Macháčková (2009). Pre-listening can be recognized as a stage of preparation and warming up of the whole process of listening. A good pre-listening activities enable the learners to deal with the following listening text smoothly and strategically, such as to generate interest, build up confidence and facilitate comprehension. About 170 students from different classes at Nga Son high school participated in this research, which shows that pre-listening activities are indispensable in listening process.
2. Practical basis.
 According to Ene Peterson (2015), “listening comprehension still remains one of the least understood processes and learners often regard listening as the most difficult language skill to acquire and evaluate”. In fact, students are quite passive in listening lessons. Because listening activities often create high levels of anxiety and stress among learners that can interfere with comprehension. They even listening and can’t concentrate on the listening text. Therefore, low scores in listening are unavoidable. This is also the teachers’ biggest difficulty. Since addressing listening in the language classroom poses some challenges. It is these problems that urge me to find out the solutions to hepl students get over the challenges and succeed in listening. 
3. Pre-listening activities help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson. 
3.1. Set up the context.
 The teacher can help provide the background information to activate learners' schema, so they will be better prepared to understand what they hear. Whether the teacher can effectively set up the scene depends on what he or she knows about the topic in question, what he or she has in hand, and also how well he or she knows about the language level of the students he or she is teaching. Setting up the context is what your textbooks often does for you. A good direction line may be just a line or two, but it can give key information – the speakers, their relationship, their location, and the topic. The direction line contains the basics. As a teacher, be sure to draw their students’s attention to this, but feel free to elaborate and to add further information to help orient students to what they’ll hear.
Examples: 
Example 1 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 2 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
 - The teacher asks students to look at the picture in the book and ask them some questions
+ What do you see in the picture?
+ What is happening?
+ What are people doing?
- After looking at the picture, students give the answers
Expected answer: In the picture, we see:
+ A house is on fire.
+ The fire brigade is fighting to put out the fire:
+  And people are running  away with the firemen’s help.
-> By setting up the context, Teacher provide the background information- an experience in a fire to encourage students to listen attentively, so they will be better prepared to make sense of what they hear.
Example 2 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 7. WORLD POPULATION
-The teacher ask students to look at the part: before you listen and the guidance in while you listen. And then, teacher catches their attention to the key words in this part.
Before you listen
 Work in pairs. Discuss the following questions. 
1. Do you think that our world is overpopulated?
2: What continent has the largest population?
While you listen
 You will hear Dr. Brown, a world population expert, talk about the world population. Listen to the interview and do the tasks that follow.
 -> Thanks to the keys words underlined: a world population, overpopulated, continent, expert students easily realize that they will hear an expert talk about the world population in which, he might compare the population among continents as well as the population explosion. Thus, these suggestions remind students of knowledge they acquired in geography and fell more confident in while listening.
 3.2. Activate existing knowledge.
 After setting up the context, if you go straight in to the listening, the students have had no time to transfer or activate their knowledge (which may have been learnt in their first language) in the second language. And students have difficulty in finding informations in while-listening part. It is known that “each student brings something different to the class – his or her own knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and, biases. It’s up to the teacher to activate their prior knowledge, or schema” (Pearson
2014). What do the students already know about the topic? Ask questions, Give a short quiz, Find out, Keep in mind, however, that background knowledge is not limited to content schemata. It also includes rhetorical schemata – the learners’ understanding of the structure and organization of the discourse. Here are some examples about activating current knowledge of grade 11 students in listening part:
Examples: 
Example 1 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 6.COMPETITION
 After looking at these pictures, students understand that the will hear some information about Boston marathon. Then teacher should ask students some questions such as: 
1. What is the Boston Marathon?
2. When did it begin?
3. Where do you think the Boston Marathon might take place?
4. How often is it held?
5. Who do you think can take part in the Boston race?
 These questions help students activate their existing knowledge about Boston Marathon
Expected answer
amateur and professional runners
 runners can take part in
 In 1897
in the USA
 BOSTON
 MARATHON
one of the world's best-known road racing events.
 Every year
-> The important information related to Boston marathon students provide helps not only raise their interest but also easily catch the details mentioned in while-listening.
Example 2 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 16 . THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD
 Students know that It is The Great Wall of China. So teacher should ask some questions to guide students to the main content they are going to hear. 
Questions
1. Where do you think it is? 
2. When do you think it was built? 
3. How long did it take to complete it?
4. How many provinces does the wall cover ?
5. How many kilometres does the wall stretch ?
6. When was it listed as World Heritage by UNESCO?
In China
The Great Wall of China
in 1368
200 years
 5 provinces
6,000km 
 In 1987
 Information sharing among students makes them be familiar with the listening task, which will bring them into the topic, and make them more willing to listen.
3.3. Build knowledge.
 When you activate existing knowledge, you may find that students may have limited general knowledge about a topic. Learners can build knowledge through the listening itself, but you may choose to build upon that knowledge before they listen. This then acts as a bridge to new concepts. There are many ways to do this. For example, you can have students read a short text, look at a photo or graph, or expose them to experiences they have never had before.
 Here is an examples to build up knowledge for grade 11students.
 Example : Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 15: SPACE CONQUEST
 Many students don’t know much about the subject – first moon conquest. So, in this lesson, the teacher can have students watch a Video which shows the first steps of humain beings in conquering the Moon. Thanks to this video, students can understand the important details in that historic moment and they will pay more attention to “while-listening”
 Here are some photos from the Video I provide my students with.
 ->The video created a positive atmosphere to listen the passage and help students imagine the contents of the listening text.
3. 4. Pre-teach vocabulary and structures.
 Included in building knowledge is exposing learners to the basic vocabulary and structures needed for comprehension while listening, as well as cultural information. An overly demanding vocabulary load can be demotivating and cause listeners to shut down. You may choose to elicit or remind learners of vocabulary or structures they already know, or explicitly teach the key words and phrases needed for comprehension. There are, of course, valid reasons for not pre-teaching, such as when focusing on listening for the meaning of vocabulary in context, or when teaching listeners to tolerate unknown words. It’s therefore up to the teacher to decide what (and whether) to pre-teach. In general, the new words are mentioned in “listen and repeat”. However, some words are unnecessary while some keys words or important structures are ignored. Make sure that your students can understand what they will hear, you have to provide them with these key words. Here are some examples.
Examples: 
Example 1 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 1 FRIENDSHIP
In the text book
 . Listen and repeat.
  apartment building guitarist motobike 
 sense of humour favourite around
 some words such as guitarist, motobike, favourite are very familiar with students while some difficult words and important structures are not mentioned. So the vocabulary should be:
Vocabulary
1. Apartment building
2 .Sense of humour 
3. Have a lot of things in common
4. Help somebody through hard time
5. Give somebody a ring
 These words and structures help students can understand the questions in task 1 of “while listening” (They have a lot of things in common or Minh always helped Long out of difficulties) and catch the information in the passage easily 
Example 2 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 13 HOBBIES
 In This unit, the vocabulary in “listen and repeat” is quite enough. But the words “magazines” or “available” are mentioned in Unit 9 and Unit 11. Therefore, the teacher can add some important structures to the vocabulary such as : get fed up with, enable , cope with to help average and below average students can understand the lesson. The vocabulary of listening part in unit 11 may be:
 Vocabulary
 1. get fed up with
 2. continually (n)
 3. enable somebody to do something
 4. bygone (adj)
 5. gigantic (adj)
 6. cope with
 7. otherwise 
 8. ignorantly(adv)
 -> The structure “get fed up with” will help students to give the answer to the question 2 in Task 1 “his parents were interested in reading fairy tails and other stories to him”. The structure “enable somebody to do something” is also a suggestion for students to the statement “reading helps the writer to know many things”. Other words and structures play an important role in guiding students to the passage.
 By having the time to think about the language needs of a situation, students will be excellently prepared to cope with the listening.
3. 5. Make predictions.
 Predicting is one of the most effective pre-listening tasks because it creates a real, focused purpose for listening. It is very motivating for students to see whether their predictions were correct. There are a lot of things that can be predicted and checked. With the teacher’s help, students can predict what words will be in the script, what topics the speakers might discuss, the order of events, or the answers to general content questions. These are usually done at the beginning, before listening, and then checked during the initial, gist listening. Then while listening you can stop from time to time to check their predictions. This works especially well with stories or reports such as unit 2, unit 3, unit 12, unit 13, unit 15. 
 If there is a picture with the listening passage, the students can be asked to predict what the passage will contain before they listen.
Example 1 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 12- THE ASIAN GAMES
 Teacher asks students to look at the pictures in the text book and predict what sports will be mentioned in the passage. Students can easily guess that there are four sports in the report: high jump, long jump, swimming and gymnastics. 
So students can predict the answer to the question 5 in task 1
Question 5. Which of the following sports events was NOT mentioned in the report?
A. swimming                    C. long and high jumps
B. gymnastics.                   D. weightlifting
 Another type of predicting task is to let students read the listening comprehension questions before they listen. In this way, they can guess the topic of the listening text. Sometimes, the teacher can even ask the students to guess the answers to the questions before they listen. Acoording to Berman(2003), “the answers to the questions you form during this pre-listening step will often correspond to the actual main ideas of the lecture; in this way, these questions actually improve comprehension by helping you to identify main ideas and discriminate them from less important details”. Even though it may be impossible to predict the correct answers, the students will be more motivated to listen to the passage to see if their predictions are correct or not.
 In question 2, students can predict the answer by analyzing the situation: An presentative athlete mentioned in the report has a high point and A. 9.5 might be the answer after comparing the choices in this question
Question 2.  Lily got an average ofpoints in her gymnastics event.
A. 9.5                B. 5.9               C. 15             D. 5
Example 2: Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 10- NATURE IN DANGER.
 After activating existing knowledge about national parks in Viet Nam as well as in national parks in the word among students, students can understand the purposes and the common state of national parks and thus they have enough knowledge to predict if these statements are true or false.
1. National parks protect and preserve the natural beauty of the land.           
2. They usually contain a variety of scenic features.                         
3. All national parks are in danger of being destroyed.                       
4. Large areas of national parks can be destroyed by fire.                  
5. Visitors do not help to preserve and protect national parks.           
 “Research in listening has shown that good listeners are good predictors”.(unit 8:teaching listening skill- A course in English language teaching). By helping our students become better predictors, we are helping them become better listeners. In the beginning, the students may have difficulty predicting. So if the teacher can help them by asking leading questions, they are more interested in listening lesson and certainly will achieve surprising results.
4. Research achievement.
 “Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities” has become rather effective for my students, who are generally struggling with listening work. After applying these pre-listening activities to the listening lessons, my students are more interested in listening lessons and work more effectively. Real numbers are shown by the two following tables. 
 The result in listening before applying new pre-listening activities
Grade
Total students
Excellent grade
Good grade
Average grade
Below average grade
number
%
number
%
number
%
number
%
11B
31
1
3.2%
3
9.7%
10
32%
17
55.1%
11C
33
0
0%
2
6%
12
36%
19
 58%
11D
36
2
5.5%
4
11%
20
55%
10
28.5%
11E
41
2
4.9%
3
7.3%
15
36.6%
21
51.2%
11H
34
0
0%
1
2.9%
7
20.6%
26
76.5%
 The result in listening after applying new pre-listening activities
Grade
Total students
Excellent grade
Good grade
Average grade
Below average grade
number
%
number
%
number
%
number
%
11B
31
3
9.7%
8
26%
16
52%
4
12.3%
11C
33
2
 6%
7
21%
19
58%
5
15%
11D
36
5
14%
9
25%
17
47%
5
14%
11E
41
4
9.8%
9
22%
20
49%
8
19.2
11H
34
2
5.9%
7
20.5%
20
59%
5
14.6%
 As can be seen from the tables, the number of students achieving excellent and good grade increases considerably while the ones having below average grade decrease dramatically. It means that these pre-listening activities are very helpful to the teacher as well as students in a listening lesson.
PART III: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
 1. Conclusion.
 The old sayin