Problems in learning english listening skill at nguyen xuan nguyen high school and suggested solution

THANH HOA PROVICIAL DEPARTMENT OF
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN HIGH SCHOOL
EXPERIENCE INNOVATION
TOPIC:
PROBLEMS IN LEARNING ENGLISH
LISTENING SKILL AT NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN HIGH SCHOOL AND SUGGESTED SOLUTION
 Writer : Pham Thi Tuan 
 position: Teacher
 Subject : English
THANH HOA – JUNE 2017
INDEX
TABLE OF CONTENT page
LIST OF FIGURES.2
PART 1: INTRODUCTION 
Part 1: INTRODUCTION
1. Reasons for Choosing the Topic
 English Teaching Methodology is a very important subject for everyone who wants to become teachers of English. In this subject, students of English who are being trained to become teachers will be provided with necessary information about techniques and methods of teaching four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Of all these four skills, listening skill is considered to be one of the most difficult skills to teach and to learn. As students of English, the author herself and others have met a lot of difficulties in learning this skill. She has chosen the topic about “Problems in Learning English Listening Skill at NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN High School and Suggested Solutions” for several reasons.
 Firstly, listening skill is thought to be the most difficult in teaching and learning a language in general and English in particular. A lot of teachers and students meet many problems and difficulties in teaching and learning this skill. 
 Secondly, listening skill plays a very important role in teaching and learning a language so it should be paid much more attention to. However, it seems that this skill is not really focused on in many high schools in Vietnam and the qualities of teaching and learning this skill are not very good. Thus, this topic is chosen to study in order to find out some suggested solutions to partly improve this matter.
 2. Research’s objectives
 The study is conducted with the following aims: because teaching listening skill is one of the most difficult tasks for any ESL teacher, the first aim is to find out the problems and difficulties in learning and teaching English listening skill at high school. Additionally, the study is carried out so as to get more information about the qualities of teaching and learning English listening skill at Vietnamese high schools
3. Research’s objects
 The topic about “Problems in Learning English Listening Skill at High School and Suggested Solutions” is a broad topic and it cannot be exploited in the study due to the limitation of a B.A thesis. Therefore, the study only focuses on the main problems which cause difficulties for both teachers and students and the real situations of teaching and learning English listening skill according to a survey done in three grades of a high school. Besides, from this survey, some suggestions and solutions are given in order to partly improve the quality of teaching and learning English listening skill at high school.
4. Research’s methods
 Due to the scope and the characteristics of the study, the author follows the procedures:
Collecting and analyzing the materials
Synthesizing the information
 First, some materials referring to the issue are collected and analyzed Then, basing on the theoretical background described and analyzed, the survey will be carried out. Next, the information from the survey will be analyzed in detail and the results will be categorized to synthesize. 
5. New points of innovative experience
 The thesis consists of three main parts: the first part is Introduction. This part provides the information about the reasons for choosing the topic, the aims of the topic, the scope of the study, the method of the study and the design of the study. In the second part – Development, there are three chapters. Chapter 1- Theoretical background discusses some main points relating to the topic: definition of listening skill and its importance, CLT with teachers’ roles and students’ roles, the main principles of teaching listening and the main kinds of listening activities. This chapter focuses on the theory about the main types of listening activities and teaching it in CLT. Chapter 2 - The real situation of learning English listening skill at Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school describes the whole picture about the real situation of learning English listening skill of the students in this school three grades. In chapter 3 - Suggested activities to improve learning listening skill at high school, some solutions to the problems students have when learning listening are suggested and some listening activities are recommended to be applied in teaching and learning this skill with the aim to motivating students into learning this skill. The last part is Conclusion. 
 Part 2: content
Chapter 1: Theoretical Background
2.1 Literature Review 
 Listening skill can be defined in different ways. According to MC Milan Dictionary, listening is to pay attention to a sound or to try to hear a sound or to pay attention to what someone tells you and do what they suggest. Babylon Dictionary views listening as an attempt to hear something, an act of paying careful attention to one who is speaking. Similarly, in the New Era English-English-Vietnamese Dictionary, listening is to make an effort to hear somebody or something. Thus, listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, and television), a message, and a receiver (the listener), [ 1 ]
2.2 The problems before applying the innovative experience
 In daily life, people spend a lot of time listening: officers listen to their boss’ talks, students listen to their teachers, old people listen to news on TV and radio. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half of their communication time listening.
 In real life, there are two main kinds of listening .The first kind is casual listening: we listen to something without any particular purposes in our mind and we often do not concentrate on it much to get the information. Usually, we hear it by chance. Therefore, we rarely can remember much of its content. This way is often used in entertaining activities. For example, we listen to a song while doing the house work or talking to someone. The second kind is focused listening which is quite different from the first one: we listen to something with some particular purpose in mind and pay much attention to it so as to get as much information as possible. 
 In language teaching and learning, teachers play a predominant role because of students’ ages, character, psychology and lack of English knowledge.. According to Breen and Candlin, the teacher has two main roles: the first is to facilitate the communication process between all participants in the classroom and between these participants, the various activities and texts. The second role is to act as an independent participant within the teaching-learning group. [2]
 Students play a role as the main body in language teaching and learning. Furthermore, the emphasis in CLT on the processes of communication rather than mastery of language forms - these lead to different roles for learners from those found in more traditional second language classrooms. 
2.3 The experience innovative or suggestion used to solve problems
 To teach any skill of a language, it is important for teachers to follow the principles for teaching that skill so as to teach it more effectively and methodically
 First, the teacher should use authentic texts and present them as naturally and realistically as possible. Authentic texts can be taken from various radio broadcasts or interviews such as VOA and BBC. These texts are very useful and necessary because they allow background noise or interruptions and contain different types of voices and accents and natural conversations. Second, it is better to include different kinds of texts: conversations, dialogues, jokes, lectures, news broadcasts Third, the teacher should use primarily meaning- based tasks for students to do. This is an example of a meaning- based task: Circle the definition for the word you hear:
a. It is a pet that likes eating mice (cat)
b. It is an animal that can fly (bat) [3]
Students will have to listen very carefully and pay attention to their meanings to distinguish two words correctly because they are a minimal pair so they may confuse hearers. Lastly, the teacher should let students listen to the text more than once. Moreover, after each time of listening, students should be allowed some time to check their answers. 
 Like the other skills, listening includes a number of different sub-skills (Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong, 2007): learners have to recognize differences between phonological sounds - the difference in a single sound makes a new word with a different meaning.. For example, the minimal pair bull and pull contain two sounds /p/ and /b/ which make these two words different in terms of meanings. when listening to a text, it is not necessary to understand the meanings of all the words. Therefore, for some unimportant words, students can guess their meanings or even ignore them. This helps them concentrate on catching the key words of the text. [12]
2.3.1. Types of Listening Activities
 There are four main types of listening activities mentioned in Nguyen Thi Van Lam and Ngo Dinh Phuong (2007) 
 Students have to do nothing in response to the listening but teachers can check their understanding by their body language and expressions. For this type, teachers can use some different activities. For example, teachers may tell a story or play a recording of the story and students will be motivated to attend and understand in order to enjoy it or teachers let students listen to songs: teachers may sing a song themselves or play a recording of the song.[13]
2.3.2 Short Responses
 For this kind, students have to do various listening activities. For example, they are asked to perform actions or draw shapes or pictures in response to the teacher’s instructions, tick off words while hearing them from the text within a list of items given beforehand, or a number of statements are given after listening and students are asked to point out which ones are true and which ones are false,the teacher gives students some definitions of something and students have to point out what it is, skimming and scanning: a listening text is given and students are asked to look for the main content of the text or its specific information.
2.3.3. Longer Responses
 The listening activities for longer responses are often much more difficult than the short ones. Students have to do the tasks such as answering questions, taking notes-this is a quite difficult response- students are asked to write down the main points of a listening text, paraphrasing a listening text after listening with their own words or translating it into another language
 1.4. Summary
 In short, this chapter deals with some main points relating to the topic about listening skill. In the first place, it presents some definitions of listening skill according to some dictionaries, its importance and two main types of listening-casual listening and focused listening. The next main point presented in the chapter is a popular approach for language teaching called Communicative Language Teaching ( CLT ) with its characteristics, teachers’ roles and learners’ roles. This part includes seven principles of teaching English listening skill [ 15]
 2.4 THE EFFECTIVENESS OF INNOVATIVE IN TEACHING ACTIVITIES AT NGUYEN XUAN NGUYEN HIGH SCHOOL
 Three textbooks of three grades in high school contain many different types of listening exercises and the followings are the main kinds of listening exercises selected from those textbooks: The first kind is T/F statements. This is one of the most frequently-used kinds of listening exercises in the textbooks of three forms. The number of T/F statements is often from 5 to 6 ones. The requirement in most of these exercises is not too difficult: students only have to decide whether the statement is true or false and they do not have to correct the false information. For this kind of listening exercises, students can do the exercise more easily but sometimes their answers cannot show their understanding as they can guess the answers without understanding the listening text. The next type is comprehension questions: like T/F exercises, comprehension question exercises are also used in many listening lessons in these textbooks. It also can check students’ understanding more exactly. Multiple-choice exercises are much used in many lessons of different language skills especially in reading comprehension skill. They are also often used in many listening lessons of these textbooks particularly in 11th and 12th form textbooks. [4,5,6] .
 2.1. Difficulties in Teaching and Learning English Listening
 It cannot be denied that listening equipments such as listening tapes, cassette players play a very important role in learning listening skill. Therefore, good and modern listening equipments are vital for teaching and learning listening. However, there are not many high schools in VietNam which can meet this requirement: even some schools do not have normal listening equipments such as cassette players and the teachers have to read the text themselves. Additionally, using cassette players is not a good way of teaching listening and this can make the listening text more difficult to hear to students because the volume of the cassette players may not be loud or good enough for students to hear or the noise outside classroom may affect their listening. But most of Vietnamese high schools use cassette players as main listening equipments.[7] .
2.2 Real Situation of Learning and Teaching English Listening at Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school
 Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school is a rather famous school in Thanh Hoa province. It is well-equipped with a lot of modern equipments: four labs with projectors, one lab for studying biology, one lab for studying physics and many cassette players for learning English. In addition, it has a room with a lot of computers for teaching and learning informatics. This school is really a good teaching and learning environment for teachers and students. During two months of teaching practice in this school, it was realized that the teachers and students have made much effort to enhance the quality of teaching and learning English. However, there are still some problems such as: the modern teaching and learning equipments have not been used very effectively, some teachers do not have really creative methods of teaching so they cannot attract their students to learning. Moreover, the number of students in this school who are good at English is not high. Many of them do not pay much attention to learning English. There are only a few of them in some classes such as 12B2, 10C10, 11C10 who can learn English well while a lot of other students have difficulty in learning this subject. Therefore, they meet many difficulties in learning the skills especially listening skill. 
2.3. Main Reasons for the Difficulties in Learning Listening Skill
2.4. Subjective Reason
 We cannot blame bad listening equipments for the low quality of teaching and learning listening because most of those difficulties are caused by teachers and students themselves.
 Firstly, it is undeniable that not many students really pay attention to listening skill. They only focus on learning grammar, vocabulary and ignore this skill. Without spending time practicing, how can their ability of listening improve? “Practice makes perfect”, they cannot distinguish linking sounds or follow fast speaking speed of native speakers if they do not often practice hearing them.
 Bad methods of teaching listening of some teachers are another important reason. They do not spend much time teaching this skill to students: they may pass some part that students cannot hear and move to another one or the way they teach listening lessons is not effective. 
 Lastly, repeatedly used activities contribute boredom to learning listening of students. As it can be seen from three high school English textbooks, some kinds of activities are used again and again such as T/F statements or gap-filling exercises. This may reduce students’ interest in the lessons and cause the boredom of doing the same exercises many times. 
2.5. Objective Reasons
 As it was mentioned above, the quality of listening equipments in most of Vietnamese high schools is not good and this has bad affect on the quality of teaching and learning listening. 
 Noticeably, the importance of listening skill has not been appreciated in many schools so it does not receive enough attention so that the necessary equipments which are used for teaching and learning this skill are not improved.
3. Survey on Learning English Listening Skill at Nguyen Xuan Nguyen high school
3.1.Objects of the Survey
 To learning listening skill well is really a big problem for many students. Naturally, because they cannot learn this skill well, they often get bored or even ignore it. This situation is very popular in most of high schools in Vietnam. In fact, not only do teachers have difficulties in teaching listening skill but students also meet a lot of trouble when learning it. Thus, the first aim of doing this survey is to check the ability of learning listening skill of students and find out the main problems or difficulties they have when learning this skill. The second aim is to know what can motivate them into listening lessons: interesting listening activities, new listening topics or good method of teaching. The third but the most important reason of doing this survey is to give some suggestions to motivate students into listening lessons better based on its results.
3.2. Description of the Survey
 The survey is conducted with a questionnaire which consists of 16 questions including both open and closed questions so as to check students’ listening ability and their interests in this skill better. It was given to 135 students of three classes from three grades: 10C10, 11C10 and 12B. All of the students in the survey learned English when they were in grade 6. They are the best students of English who are chosen to learn in the classes of English of the whole school. Especially, the students of class 12B are the best ones of three classes: they study the advanced text book. The aim of question 1 is to know the number of the years these students learn English, question 2 checks their interest in English and question 3 reveals their opinions about listening skill. The information about the factors affecting students’ listening is given in question 4. Besides this, we will get information about how much time they spend on practicing listening per day in order to know if they are interested in improving their listening skill or not thanks to question 5. Questions 6, 7, 8 and 9 show us students’ habits, their ways and their ability of listening. Question 10 helps us know whether listening equipments can affect students’ learning or not. In addition, thanks to the answers of questions 11 and 12, we will collect their ideas of listening exercises and listening topics in the text books. The aim of question 13 is to find out what kind of listening exercises in the textbooks students like most. Questions 14,15 give us the information about the extra listening activities given by the teacher and students’ attitudes towards those activities. The last question is used to analyze students’ ideas about some main factors which can motivate them into the lesson.
3.3. Results of the Survey 
 The following pie chart presents the percentages of students who are interested in learning English.
 Figure 1; Students’ interest in learning English 
 According to the chart, although these students are from the classes of English of the school, only 70% of them are interested in learning English while