Improving 11th form students’ listening comprehension through modified listening tasks of the new textbook English 11 at Trieu Son No2 High School

THANH HOA SERVICE OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
TRIEU SON No2 UPPER-SECONDARY SCHOOL
EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE
IMPROVING 11TH FORM STUDENTS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION THROUGH MODIFIED LISTENING TASKS OF THE NEW TEXTBOOK ENGLISH 11 AT TRIEU SON No2 UPPER-SECONDARY SCHOOL
	 Researcher: Lê Đình Thắng 
 Post: The head of group
 Field: English
THANH HÓA, NĂM 2018
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
1. INTRODUCTION
3
1.1. Rationale
3
1.2. Aims of the study...
3
1.3. Scope of the study..
4
1.4. Methods of the study...
4
2. CONTENT
5
2.1. Theoretical basis of the initiative
5
2.2. The real situation of teaching listening skills at Trieu Son No2 upper-secondary school.
2.2.1. The syllabus of teaching and learning English.
2.2.2. The teaching and learning English speaking skills. 
2.3. The used measures to solve the problems.
2.3.1. Initial data
2.3.1.1. Results from pre-listening test
2.3.1.2. Results from pre-action stage observations.
2.3.1.3. Results from students’ questionnaire 1.
2.3.1.3.1. Students’ evaluation about listening skill and their own listening competence.
2.3.1.3.2. Students’ opinions about listening tasks in English 11.
2.3.1.3.3. Students’ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11 
2.3.1.3.4. Students’ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks to their listening competence.
2.3.1.3.5. Students’ preferences for listening tasks.
2.3.1.3.6. Students’ opinions about the way their teachers treat listening tasks
2.3.1.4. Results from document analysis
2.3.1.4.1. English 11
2.3.1.4.2. Listening tasks in listening sections of English 11
2.3.2. The hypothesis
2.3.3. Planning action steps.
2.3.3.1. Replacing
2.3.3.2. Omitting
2.3.3.3. Changing
2.3.4. Data collected in the action stage
2.3.4.1. Results from action stage observations
2.3.4.2. Results from Questionnaire 2 
2.3.4.3. Results from teaching diaries
2.3.4.4. Results from post-test
2.3.5. Action research evaluation
2.3.5.1 Students’ involvement in tasks before and after action plan.
2.3.5.2. Students’ progress reflected through tests.
2.3.5.3. Students’ preferences for listening tasks.
2.3.5.4. Modified listening tasks could help improve students’ listening comprehension
3. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
3.1. Conclusions
3.2. Recommendations
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REFERENCES
APPENDICES
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale for the study
 The years 2006, 2007 and 2008 marked a milestone in the ways of teaching and learning English when the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) introduced the new sets of English textbook English 10, English 11 and English 12 to school curriculum. The aim of MOET is to develop students’ communicative competence so as to meet the demand of integration and globalization. That is the reason why in the new textbooks, four skills including reading, speaking, listening and writing are put in priority and integrated. 
 Of the four skills mentioned above, listening is considered to be the most challenging one. Most students find it hard to master this skill and soon feel bored with listening periods. The reasons for this are various, such as uninteresting topics, fast speed, students' poor pronunciation or lack of background knowledge and cultural understanding.
 Eleven graders at Trieu Sơn No2 High School have encountered such a lot of difficulties when dealing with listening lessons. However, after five years of teaching English 11, I also discover that the listening tasks themselves are also a factor affecting students’ listening comprehension.
 It is obvious that suitable tasks make students more interested in the listening passages and then help them develop their listening skills. Inappropriate tasks, on the contrary, can demotivate students. In listening sections of English11, some tasks are too difficult or too long and some are boring. In this case, it is necessary for teachers to modify listening tasks to make the tasks more suitable and interesting for learners, even though it is not an easy job for the teacher as modifying tasks means having to take many things into accounts such as the objectives, the criteria or the student’s needs. However, for the benefit of students, it is worth doing so.
 For the above reasons, especially for the researcher’s desire to help her students better at listening, the choice of the study entitled “Improving 11th form students’ listening comprehension through modified listening tasks of the new textbook English 11 at Trieu Son No2 High School ” is not accidental.
1.2. Aims of the study
 The main purpose of this research is to study the effects of modified listening tasks of English 11 on improving 11th form students’ listening comprehension at Trieu Son No2 Upper-Secondary School. The specific objectives of the study are:
 To investigate students’ attitudes towards listening tasks in English 11 and the difficulties they face.
 To study whether the modified listening tasks could help students improve their listening comprehension
1.3. Scope of the study
 Due to the limited knowledge, energy and time, the researcher was unable to carry out the investigation on a large scale. This action research was only conducted for only 8 weeks with the four listening lessons and in the context of 40 eleventh-grade students at Trieu Son No2 High School in the academic year 2017-2018 only. Hence, the results of the study is only limited to the above teaching context and participants.
1. 4. Methods of the study
The author has applied the following methods in this study:
Data collection results from interviews (for teachers), survey questionnaires (for students) and class observations.
Data analysis is done through coding, classifying, and reporting the information.
2. CONTENTS
2.1. Theoretical basis of the initiative
 In our daily life, outside the classroom, listening is used twice as often as speaking, which in turn is used twice as much as reading and writing (River, 1981). Inside classroom, the two often used skills are listening and speaking (Brown, 1994). Therefore, listening plays an important role in the processes of learning and communication essential to productive participation in life.
 What is listening? Through years, various definitions of listening have been proposed. Listening is more than merely hearing words. It is considered to be an active process by which students receive, construct meaning from, and respond to spoken and or nonverbal messages (Emmert, 1994). 
Brown (1994) argues that listening is a skill in which to identify and understand what is being said, listeners must comprehend “a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary”.
Sharing similar ideas, Barker (1971) defines listening as “the selective process of attending to, hearing, understanding and remembering aural symbols”
Listening comprehension is very important in the process of learning a language. According to Rost (1994: 141), listening comprehension is “vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner. Without understanding input at the right level, any learner simply can’t begin”. He also argues that “Spoken language including listening provides a mean of interaction for the learners. Because learners must interact to achieve understanding access to speaker of the language is essential. Moreover, learner’s failure to understand the language they hear is an impetus, not an obstacle, to interaction and learning”. Obviously, listening comprehension is an essential skill for almost interaction. It is therefore the most primary medium for input in language learning process and by speeding up the students' ability to perceive speech, the amount of input they get will increase and thus aid students' language acquisition.
 To conclude, given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help students become effective listeners.
2.2. The real situation of teaching listening skills at Trieu Son No2 upper-secondary school.
2.2.1. The syllabus of teaching and learning English.
At Trieu Son High School No2, English is one of the compulsory subjects in the curriculum. The syllabus and the textbooks for English including “Tiếng Anh 10”, “Tiếng Anh 11”, “Tiếng Anh 12” are prescribed by the Ministry of Education and Training. 
The English curriculum for grade 11th students is divided into two semesters with a total of 105 periods, 3 periods per week. Each period is 45 minutes long.
The textbook which is currently used for teaching and learning English for grade 11th at Triệu Sơn High School No2 is “Tieng Anh 11” which was designed following communicative approach. The textbook consists of 16 units with 5 parts in each unit arranging as follows: reading, speaking, listening, writing and language focus in which a variety of exercises and tasks was compiled for practice. Also, there exists a consolidate unit after every 3 units. The objective of these units is to examine how well the students have achieved in the previous units.
2.2.2. The teaching and learning English speaking skills. 
It has been accepted that students’ communicative ability is the proper aim for language teaching. This makes teaching and learning speaking skills seem to be an important part in any English course. Like many other high schools in Vietnam, teaching and learning listening skills at Triệu Sơn High School are affected by some constraints such as large class sizes, students’ unfamiliarity with CLT, students’ low English proficiency, students’ low participation in class time. Normally, in a class at Triệu Sơn High School, a number of students who have a good knowledge of English are eager and active during the class while a majority of those with low English proficiency are very passive. Besides, lack of training in teaching methods, especially CLT makes it difficult for the teachers to access to new approach, which makes the teaching and learning listening skills more challenging.
2.3. The used measures to solve the problems.
2.3.1. Initial data
2.3.1.1. Results from pre-listening test
Students would do a test to measure their level. 
Below are the results of the test
Table 1: Results of the pre-test
Marks 
Marks 1-2
Marks 3-4
Marks 5-6
Marks 7-8
Marks 9-10
Numbers of students
9
28
10
3
0
Percent
18%
56%
20%
6%
0%
From the table, it can be seen that 74% of the students scored below average, whereas students achieving average scores made up 20% and only 6% could get from mark 7 to mark 10. The result of the test showed that most of the students were quite weak at listening skill. Students need to be helped to improve this skill.
2.3.1.2. Results from pre-action stage observations.
At pre-action stage, the researcher taught Unit 1 (Friendship) and Unit 2 (Personal experiences) with non-modified tasks. The lessons were observed by another teacher. During the observations, this teacher took notes and gave the total marks of students’ involvement in the tasks in the two periods. The following is the description of one lesson: 
Class: 11C4
Number of students in class: 40
Time: 45 minutes
Unit 1: Friendship
 Period 5: C - LISTENING
As usual, the lesson started with warm-up. The teacher asked her students some questions (Who is your best friend?, How long have you known each other?, What qualities do you admire in your best friend?). Then, students worked in pairs to ask about their best friends in 4 minutes. After calling one pair to ask and answer in front of the class, the teacher introduced the lesson (Today we will listen to two monologues of Lan and Long. They are talking about their best friends). Before students listened to the passages to complete the tasks, teacher introduced some words and phrases. Then students continued the lesson with task 1 deciding True/False statements. They were asked to work individually, run through the 11 sentences in task 1 and underline the key words. Then teacher played the tape twice
After that, the teacher asked students to give answers. However, few of them had all the answers. Some even paid no attention to the task. The teacher stopped by each sentence for checking. 
Students, then, came to task 2 in which they had to take notes of what Lan and Long like about their friends and how and where they met. The teacher again played the tape twice. However, this task seemed to be difficult for students as almost no student noted down anything. The teacher had to provide help. The lesson flew slowly. 
Finally, the teacher gave some cues and asked students to work in pairs to talk about Lan’s and Long’s best friends.
Here are the results from the observations. First, it should be mentioned that the observation sheet had six items, but during unit 1 and 2 the observer only used four items to observe students’ involvement in the tasks. The highest mark for each item was 5 and the highest mark for the whole class in each lesson was 20. The highest total mark for the observations during two lessons was 40.
Below are the concrete results: 
Table 2: Students’ involvement in the tasks
Units
Unit 1
(Friendship)
Unit 2
(Personal experiences)
Marks of students’ involvement in the tasks
8
9
Percent
40%
45%
It can be seen from the table that level of students’ involvement in the tasks was quite low. In Unit 1 (Friendship), the percent of students who involved in the tasks accounted for 40%, while in Unit 2 (Personal experiences) was a bit higher with 45%. This figures showed that more than half of the students paid no attention to studying listening. They barely participated in the lessons. This may be resulted from two main reasons: the first one, maybe, is that the tasks themselves are uninteresting; the second one is probably due to students’ low level of listening competence.
2.3.1.3. Results from students’ questionnaire 1.
2.3.1.3.1. Students’ evaluation about listening skill and their own listening competence.
(Questions 1 and 2)
When answering the first question about their evaluation about learning listening skill, most of the students (96 %) admit that learning listening skill is difficult, even extremely difficult. 
Regarding to students’ self-evaluation about their own listening comprehension ability, only 1 out of 50 students confidently said that her listening ability was very good; whereas 78% thought that they were very bad at listening. In listening lessons, they almost hear nothing.
2.3.1.3.2. Students’ opinions about listening tasks in English 11. (Questions 3, 4 and 5)
When answering the question how often they completed listening tasks in listening lessons, 2% of the students said that they always completed listening tasks, 14% often finished, but 84% sometimes could finish the tasks. The result also showed that 66% of the students confirmed that kinds of listening task in the textbook were not very diversified .
 Question No 4 tried to seek the frequency of listening tasks in listening lessons. The results are clearly presented in the table below: 
Table 3: Frequency of listening tasks in listening lessons
Answering open-ended questions (%)
Filling missing words (%)
Deciding T/F statements
(%)
Numbering the pictures (%)
Multiple choice questions
(%)
Completing missing information in the table/ charts (%)
Ticking the things you hear (%)
84%
24%
24%
10%
12%
4%
10%
As can be seen that the most frequently used tasks in listening lessons are answering open-ended questions. Filling missing words and deciding T/F statements rank second with 24% for each kind. Such kinds of task as numbering the pictures, multiple choice questions and ticking the things you hear are sometimes present. Only the tasks of completing the missing information in the table/charts are rarely used. The information in this table once again confirmed that listening tasks in English 11 are not very plentiful.
2.3.1.3.3. Students’ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11 
Question No 6 examines students’ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11. The results can be seen in the following table:
Table 4: Students’ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11
Very interested (%)
Interested (%)
Normal (%)
Bored (%)
Very bored (%)
2%
6%
38%
0%
54%
When asked to express their feeling when doing listening tasks in English 11, the majority of the students (accounting for 54%) said they felt very bored with the listening tasks in the textbook. 38% of them felt normal and only a small number of students were interested in the tasks.
It is obvious that listening tasks in the textbook dissatisfy most of the students, which can not motivate students to participate in the lessons as well as not to encourage them to develop their listening skill.
2.3.1.3.4. Students’ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks to their listening competence.
Table 5: Students’ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks
Very effective (%)
Effective (%)
Not clear (%)
Ineffective (%)
6%
8%
34%
52%
Table 5 presents that only 6% and 8 % of the students thought that listening tasks in the textbook were very effective and effective, while 34% of them spoke that they were not clear whether the tasks could help them improve their listening comprehension. Especially, 52% believed that their ability for listening comprehension was not improved. They claimed that the tasks were totally ineffective.
2.3.1.3.5. Students’ preferences for listening tasks.
Question 8 was used to collect information about the listening tasks that students preferred. The results are shown in the table below:
Table 6: Students’ preferences for listening tasks
Answering open-ended questions (%)
Filling missing words (%)
Deciding T/F statements
(%)
Numbering the pictures (%)
Multiple choice questions
(%)
Completing missing information in the table/ charts (%)
Ticking the things you hear (%)
2%
36%
29%
30%
64%
16%
28%
According to the information in the table, the most preferred listening task is multiple choice questions. The next one is tasks with filling missing words. Tasks of deciding T/F statements rank third. Followings are such kinds of tasks as ticking the things you hear and completing missing information in the table/charts respectively. The least favorite one is answering open-ended questions.
2.3.1.3.6. Students’ opinions about the way their teachers treat listening tasks
Table 7: Students’ opinions about the way their teachers treat listening tasks 
9. In what way does your teacher teach listening tasks in the Textbook?
Options
Result (%)
a. The teacher always follows the given tasks in the textbook. 
76%
b. The teacher sometimes replaces difficult tasks for easier ones.
8%
c. The teacher often modifies listening tasks to fit students’ level.
16%
Most of the students said that their teacher always follows the given tasks in the textbook without any adapting, while 16% stated that the teacher usually modifies listening tasks to help them listen better and 8% admitted that their teacher occasionally replaces the difficult tasks for easier ones. These figures clearly show that most of the teachers still depend too much on the textbook. They hardly have any changes to fit their students’ level.
2.3.1.4. Results from document analysis
2.3.1.4.1. English 11
English 11 was officially in use in the year 2007. It is developed from a theme-based syllabus. Like English 10, English 11 consists of 16 units. Each unit presents a topic as shown in the below table:
 Table 8: Topics in English 11
UNIT
TOPICS
UNIT
TOPICS
1
Friendship
9
The post office
2
Personal experiences
10
Nature in danger
3
A party
11
Sources of energy
4
Volunteer work
12
The Asian Games
5
Illiteracy
13
Hobbies
6
Competitions
14
Recreation
7
World popula