Methods of teaching listening skills for the 10th grade students in nhu xuan high school

CONTENTS
 Page
1. Introduction ............................................................................................... 2
1.1. The reason to choose the theme.............................................................. 2
1.2. Purpose to research ............................................................................... 3
1.3. The subjects to research ......................................................................... 3
1.4. The researching methods ....................................................................... 3
2. Contents and researching procedure ....................................................... 3
2.1. Theoretical background ......................................................................... 3
2.2. Status of the study problem ................................................................... 4
2.3. Measures for implementation ............................................................... 7
2.4. Study effects ........................................................................................... 11
3.Conclusion and propossals ....................................................................... 12
Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 12
Propossals ...................................................................................................... 13
REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 14
ASSESSED INITIATVE EXPERIENCES ................................................ 15
(DANH MỤC CÁC SKKN ĐÃ ĐƯỢC ĐÁNH GIÁ)
Introduction
1.1. The reason to choose the theme
	English plays an important role in our life. Nowadays. In the information technology times and global integration, English is getting more and more important and is gradually becoming the means of the international communication. It is used in all the fields such as science, technique, economy, culture, education, tourism ... It was estimated that over 4000 people speak English as their mother-tongue and the same number use English as their second language. Moreover, English is compulsory in the GCSE exammination, so every student at high school must have a certain level of English to prepare for the exam and after graduation they can communicate, read and write some normal texts. Therefore, English is an essential means to everybody with their practical aims. To do this, we constantly innovate teaching methods as well as curricula to achieve substantive results of English in general and we can provide students with some basic skills domestically and internationally. This change facilitates the teaching and learning of English in high school to become a teaching language instead of teaching grammar-translation many years ago. However, to forge English skills for students, teachers have to face many difficulties, especially for listening skills. In fact, at school, when I started to study foreign languages, most students liked to study, but gradually the students got tired of studying. Most of them are very weak in listening skills. It is difficult for them to hear the content of a text or a conversation. After each lesson, it is very difficult for the teacher to check the information they have listened to, and checking old lessons is often not easy.
	It is said that “ Teaching is an art and teacher is an artist that creates that art”, so a teacher can only create that one when he is aware of their roles and the teaching environment. In the class the teacher is not only an instructor but also a leader, an enalyst who guides the students the different situations to make the communicative activities more effective.
	Facing that situation, I am a teacher who directly teach the subject English10 for the students exposed to English in the upper secondary school, I myself worry so much how students can master, Listen to information and use information proficiently. In the process of teaching and learning to observe students, I discovered that teaching students' listening skills has many problems. Most students do not know how to learn to listen, they usually think the listening practice is the hardest. In the classroom, students often say that , there are many words that are known in the listening tapescript but they can't hear. How can students be able to use their vocabulary and grammatical structures to understand effectively? So in the process of teaching, I searched for some positive, simple, easy-to-understand, practical, scientific methods to develop thinking, speculative and creative ability for students. For those reasons I carry out the researching problem: “ METHODS OF TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS FOR THE 10th GRADE STUDENTS IN NHU XUAN HIGH SCHOOL”
1.2. Purpose to research:
Although learning English is very important, students have not been aware of its importance. Especially learning English in mountainous and remote areas is much more difficult. Because English is a compulsory subject, students have to study for their marks or for the examinations, they don’t study for their job or their daily communication. Most students find learning English very boring. To be honest, our teaching method is not very good, teaching materials is not enough.... In English, vocabulary is a very important problem. How to teach vocabulary effectively? That requires teachers to find out new methods, choose appropriate words and teaching materials. This subject has been researched and applied for the purpose of contributing to the common voice of English teaching at the school. From the practical work, we want to help students develop English listening skills to improve the quality of teaching English to the grade-10 students gradually in Nhu Xuan high school. 
1.3. The subjects to research: The grade-10 students in Nhu Xuan high school
1.4. The researching methods: Study the teaching materials on Internet, textbook, the demands and likes and mentality of students.
 2. Contents and researching procedure
Theoretical background:
Using teaching methods and techniques in accordance with the content of lessons and students in a class is very important factors to promote self-awareness, activity in learning English so that the lessons are more effective. If teachers use teaching methods and techniques that are inappropriate for the content of the lesson and for the learners, so the lesson becomes boring and students have difficulty in finding knowledge, students do not want to learn, are not active in learning. Therefore, the results are not high, and we do not achieve our goals. In order to effectively use teaching methods and techniques, especially active teaching methods and techniques in a lesson that requires the teacher to be flexible, The content of the lesson, consistent with the teaching equipment of that section has to be suitable for students of each class. 
As we know, in the curriculum, in response to the demands of the education and the demands of the society, many new teaching methods and techniques have been required, so the teachers have to be up-to-date in effective use in specific lectures, which are:
- Cooperative Teaching: Cooperative Teaching is the method that the teacher leads students to work in small groups so that students work on a certain assignment in a certain period of time. In the group, under the guidance of the group leader, students combine personal work and pair work, share experience and collaborative work to solve assigned tasks. [1]
 - Project-Based Learning: Project-based learning is a learning activity that is designed to provide students with the opportunities to synthesize knowledge from a variety of areas of study and apply creativeness to life. The project is a situation that learners have to solve with knowledge according to the content of the lesson. Project-based learning puts learners in a problematic situation, but solving problems requires high self-reliance. [1]
 - Technique for Questioning: In teaching, the teacher's question system plays an important role, is one of the factors determining in the quality of the student's knowledge. This technique is often used in conversation questions with students, instead of presentations, reading, writing and the teacher preparares questionaires for students to think about, developing the lesson content as well as encouraging the students' brainstorming, is centered around the ideas and content of the lesson in logical order. [1]
 - For foreign language teaching in general and teaching English in particular, the innovation of teaching methods is very important. It is hard for students to master the language, be good at all the skills, specially for students at Nhu Xuan which is one of 11 mountainous districts of Thanh Hoa province. Listening is one of the basic content, a subtle combination of teaching skills and a difficult skill to achieve. From the above point, the use of appropriate songs really helps the students interested in the subject, better at listening skill. In my opinion, every teacher needs to find an optimal method, in accordance with the actual situation and the individual pupils.
As a teacher of English, I hope to bring my knowledge to impart easily to the students, and find out teaching methods for myself. So I boldly launched research projects: “ METHODS OF TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS FOR THE 10th GRADE STUDENTS IN NHU XUAN HIGH SCHOOL”. I hope the use of appropriate songs for listening skill will help the students extremely interested in the subject, better at listening skill.
Status of the study problem:
The definition of listening is understood by scientists in different ways.
 - According to Field (1998: 38), “Listening is an invisible intellectual process, so it is difficult to describe. Listeners must distinguish sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, grasp the tone and intent of the speakers to be able to recall and understand it in the socio-cultural context of the speech.” [2]
 -Nderson & Lynch (1988: 21) provide the definition of listening comprehension as follows: “Listening comprehension means to understand what the speaker has said. The listener plays a particularly important role in the listening process by using his diverse knowledge to analyze what he hears in order to understand the speech of the speaker.” [2]
 - The definition of listening comprehension, according to Van Tan and Nguyen Van Dam (1997) in 'Vietnamese Dictionary', is as follows: “Listening is a process in which auditory receives external sounds and transitions. It reaches the central nervous system. Here, these sounds are analyzed, transformed into signals, and transmitted to the senses that help shape human reflections for those sounds. " [3]
In teaching English, for teachers, combining the four skills: Listening - Speaking - Reading - Writing is indispensable in order to comply with the reform programs by the Ministry of Education and Training. Teachers need to teach tricks for students to be distinctive, easily recognizable and well in actual use, as well as the associated test concerned so that they can listen properly. However, over the years, we have become familiar with such ideas as: "We do not have listening competition for students at all levels."; "We need to help students understand and use the phrases, grammar proficiency points as much as possible, so that they can achieve high scores in these tests ". In fact, according to the reforms enacted by the Ministry of Education, students learn Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing Skills equally, but they almost only use Writting skill in their final exam. That may be the reason that we do not pay attention to teaching Listening skills perfectly for students. This leads to the fact that pupils have good grammar and are weak at listening and speaking ability. Like students in other countries in Asia, they have been trained through a system focusing on English grammar, very little on the listening and speaking ability to communicate. Therefore, many students understand the rules of grammar well but cannot express their opinions and have difficulties in listening and pronunciation. Listening English seems to be the most difficult task of the Vietnamese in general and students in particular. They frequently have some errors in English as:
+ Do not recognize the English tones:
When asked about the cause of difficulty with the sounds in English, 31% of students said that this difficulty was because they could not distinguish homophones, Similar pronunciations. 28% of students said that the confusion between assertion and negative form is the main reason. In particular, 40% of the students surveyed said that they did not recognize the key information they needed to hear because of some of the features of connected speech in English such as elision Weak form of sound, assimilation, contraction, linking, etc. Thus, learners do not recognize the sounds in English mainly because they do not distinguish between homophones and words with similar pronunciations, confusion between assertions and forms Negative, especially due to some of the effects of phonetic speech in English. [4]
+ Lack of concentration when listening:
The data from the survey shows that 30% of students think that the reason for lack of concentration is due to poor health while the number of students is higher (37%). Listening is the reason that makes them more and more difficult to focus on listening. While 32% of the students surveyed think that their ability to concentrate on listening is due to both. From these data it can be concluded that listeners often lose the ability to listen while their health is poor and lack of experience in listening comprehension.[4]
+ Can not capture the main idea of the listening:
According to data obtained, this is the most common cause of difficulty in listening to learners (71%). When asked about the cause of this difficulty, 36% of participants said they could hardly grasp the main idea of the article because they did not know what the important information was. 37% of students said that they could not deduce the main content of the list from key words that left them unaware of the main idea. The number of people choosing both causes is 25%. These data indicate that the cause of the difficulty in capturing the main content of the listening post is (1) not distinguishing the information to be heard with the remaining information and (2) Of hearing from important words.[4]
 + Have to understand every word.
Students tend to hear every word from the tapescript and think they are all equally important. Actually, it is not true. If students do not have the ability to select important words from the speech of others, they fail to understand others, which will lead to utter frustration.
 + Cannot understand fast, natural native speech
This is because students have few opportunities to hear native speakers say. Students only hear the words of the teachers who speak English slowly.
 + Find it difficult to keep up
Because students are familiar with the sayings of the teachers, when the hear the words quickly in tapes, or direct native dialogue , they can’t understand.
 + Need to hear things more than once. 
Few Vietnamese students can understand English words when hearing for the first time. They have to listen to it so many times to be able to understand.
	Because of these difficulties, a teaching method which is effective and makes the students excited is needed.
Measures for implementation:
In fact, with the reforms enacted by the Ministry of Education, students learn Listening and Speaking Skills in paralell to Reading and Writing Skills, but in their final exams Listening skill isn’t refered to. That may be the reason why we do not pay attention to teach the listening skill for students perfectly. However, this skill is very important on the way to reach the target language of ours. And we will not develop speaking skill if we do not develop listening skill. To have a successful conversation, students need to understand what partners are talking to them. Listening also helps students permeable vocabulary, sentence structures ... So, when teaching listening, teachers should teach students to listen in different ways. Capturing small following skills will help students' listening skill improve rapidly:
Step 1: Before - Listening:
At this stage, teachers need to apply some teaching tips to help students think, discuss, explore the topic they are about to listen, how to attract the interest of students, create their demands.
Set up the context: Ask students to look at pictures, hints by asking questions related to the content of the listening lesson so that students can guess the topic they are about to listen.
Teach or explain the vocabulary (Pre-teach): Just teach the active words 
( about 3 – 5) from each lesson or from the part “ Listen and repeat section”.
Aks the children guess the new words left on their own in the process of listening or ignored. Teachers should also solve pronunciation difficulties, necessary cultural knowledge for students to grasp.
Lastly, the teacher needs to tell the students how many times they will listen (often 2 or 3 times).
Next, one of the following three tricks may be applied before listening. Ordering Statements / Pictures: Normally, the teacher give the listening items that have the same content as a story or a process. Use the sub-table or projector to present some (5 - 7) sentences or pictures of the listening content, ask them to rearrange them in the order so that they can predict the content of the story or That process.
True / False Statements Predictions: Use the listening items such as a paragraph or a conversation. Also use the sub-table or the projector to make some statements, ask students to make correct guesses based on their knowledge.
Open Predictions: It is often used for short, descriptive quotes. Students can fill the gap with the data or characteristics, ... It can be the table with the columns that data is missing. Ask the students to anticipate the data and information. The teacher can use Networks / Brainstorm instead.
Besides, the teacher can use the Pre-Questions technique by giving some hinted questions about the topic that you are about to ask students to think about and discuss the content or ask the students to make some questions themselves. I hope the listening tapescript will answer.
Step 2: While - Listening:
This is an important step that requires students to understand the main content by conducting some basic exercises.
Once the student has completed the Before-listening exercise, the teacher asks the student to open the task to read and to check whether his / her predictions are true or false, redundant or missing, to correct them. Therefore, learners also can understand some of the main content of the listening (Checking).
Next, students need to do one more exercise to deepen their knowledge, for example: Gap-Filling (Listening to words in fill in the blank); Comprehension questions (Listening and answering system questions).
Multiple Choice (Listen and select the correct answer); Identifying specific information; True / False questions.
Listening and numbering pictures (Listening and numbering pictures); Completing a dialogue.Completing the exercises, the students can understand the listening tapescript specifically, , the next step is to help them have a basis for developing thinking and reproducing the content of listening item.
Step 3: After - Listening:
This is the final stage of the lesson, students are required to do more some types of exercises to reinforce their knowledge and broaden their thinking abilities:Gap - Filling: Use words to fill in the blanks.Survey: Ask questions and repond about the problem in the listening item in the classroom or outside of life.Trasformation Writing: