Some experiences to teach english listening skill for students in grade 4 in dien bien 1 primary school

thanh hoa education and Training derpartment
Thanh Hoa City education and Training office
---------- & ----------
experience initiative
Some EXPERIENCES TO TEACH ENGLISH LISTENING SKILL FOR students in grade 4 IN Dien bien 1 primary school
 Writer: Nguyen Thi Thu Ha
 Position: Teacher 
 School: Dien Bien 1 Primary School
 Subject: English
Thanh Hoa 2018
INDEX
1. INTRODUCTION
PAGE
1.1. The reasons for choosing the topic
1
1.2.  The purpose of research.
2
1.3. The objects of research.
2
1.4. The method of research.
3
1.5. The new points of experience initiative
3
2. CONTENT
4
2.1. Theoretical basis of the experience initiative.
4
2.2 . Situation issues before applying experience initiative.
4
2.3. The solutions of implementation.
6
2.4. The effect of the experience initiative.
14
3. CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS
16
3.1. Conclusion
16
3.2. Suggestions
16
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 The reason for choosing the topic
	Nowadays the trend of international integration in many areas including the field of education has brought English up a very important position. English as a means of communication is the key to the treasure of humanity. On the other hand, the wide application of information technology has made learning English become urgent and indispensable. So learning English of Elementary School students is particularly concerned by students, parents, all the teachers of education in our country. English has become one of the main subjects in the curriculum of students.
	Learning and use of English require a diligent process of creative practice of both learners and teachers. Especially in the situation of education reform as currently, teaching English in view of communcation methods is widely supported. According to this method, students have many opportunities to communicate, to practise language and to participate in practical situations: Learning coupled with practising.
	Primary level English program has been implemented in all regions across the country. Innovation prominent feature of the content of this program is to privide maximum opportunities for students to practise four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing on the topics and situations, communication contents related to environments living at home and abroad. The change in facilitating the teaching and learning of English in secondary schools becomes teaching living language instead of teaching words as many years ago. However, in practical English skills forged for students, teachers confronted with many difficulties, especially listening skill forged. Through my school in the rural areas, when students started to learn foreign languages, most of them were very interested in English, but eventually they fell tired of it. Most of them are very bad at listening skill. It’s difficult for them to understand the content of an essay or dialogue they hear. After each listening lesson, the teacher meets difficulty checking information that students had heard and checking old lesson often not easy.
	Facing with that situation as a direct teacher to teach English for students in grade 4, who was exposed to the English language through grade 3, I myself always think of how to help students master, listen comprehention and maturely manipulate information. During both teaching and observing the students, I found the discipline and listening skill of the students having a lot of problems. Most students do not know how to learn listening skill effectively, students often find most diffcult while they practise listening or doing listening tests. In the classroom, students often say that although there are many words in the test they know but they can not hear out. I always ask myself “ How to help students to use vocabularies and grammaticals structures itself to effective listening” . Therefore, in the teaching process, I find a number of methods for positive, simple, easy to understand pratical ensure to develop thinking ability, speculation and creativity of students. With my little experience I boldly go into a topic “Some experiences to teach English listening skill for students in grade 4 in Dien Bien 1 Primary School”.
1.2 The purpose of research
	Learning English requires learners to practice four skills: Listening, speaking, reading and writing. The ultimate goal of learning a language is to communicate fluently with everyone. I wrote this topic based on the status of the study English at my school now. The aim of this research is to help students learn English more excitedly in order to remove the difficulties that they have encountered for a long time. I hope my initiative will help my school eager to learn English subject more and become successful learners.
1.3 The objects of research
	Some experiences to teach English listening skill for students in grade 4 in Dien Bien 1 Primary School.
1.4 The methods of research
	With this topic I have applied the following methodology:
- Observa students .
- Interview students.
- Check and compare learning outcomes of students.
- Studying the textbook program, instruction manuals.
- Discussing with experienced colleagues in professional meettings.
1.5 The new points of experience initiative
	This experience initiative is not similar to the content of the solutions that has registered and admitted before. The content of the solutions has not applied in the lessons yet as well as has not regulated into the obligatory methods yet.
2. CONTENT EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE
2.1. Theoretical basis of the experience initiative
	English, one of the foreign languages, has been being learned by many Vietnamese people for communicating, learning and research. Currently, because of new method in learning and teaching, students have more favorable exposure to the English language. Students have the opportunity to communicate with people in English and easy to apply in life. Prominent feature of the innovation agenda for new textbooks is maximum opportunity for students to practice four skills. In fact, listening skill is one of the focused skills developments in the new methods of teaching foreign languages. Listening is important because students can not communicate with words without understanding what is heard.
2.2 . Situation issues before applying experience initiative
a. Advantages:
	- Dien Bien 1 Primary School is located in the center of the city. 	The school has a teaching staff who are young, fit, enthusiastic, capable of teaching and always love their job. Qualifications and standards are on 100%. In the field of education, my school is always interested, focused on teaching and learning, always enabling teachers and students to fulfill the duties and assigned targets. And the school has always received the active support of the local government so many years, the school was rewarded as the advanced school in the city.
	- Administrators of our primary school always care about and create favorable facilitities and profestional documents serve as teaching subjects: projectors, TV.
	- Most students prepare books and supplies for learning English department.
b. Disadvantages:
	- Although our primary school located in the center of the city, the situations of the students face many difficulties. There is not enough investment in English in time. Students also are not familiar with the method of learning in English listening skill as well as how to make really effective.Beside that the total number of classes and students are overcrowded.
	- To the parents, also very difficult to check or guide them to learn a foreign language at home by subjects, parents do not know. They have limited access to communicate in English outside school hours.
	In addition, English is a difficult subject, the knowledge is difficult but less study time, and in the listening process they do not control what they will be listened. Words in tape are too fast, not familiar. A lot of new words, word stress, sentence stress, intonation are very different and difficult for students to understand the content. The questions is how we overcome these weaknesses in order to contribute to improve the learning qualityof listening skill, help students communicate more confident in using English as a second language, proficient in words, sentences, especially for students in as grade 4 students in Dien Bien 1 Primary School.
	In order to solve this problem, the first semester of school year 2017 - 2018, I had a small survey with two classes of grade 4 with a test within 35 minutes. 
Result:
Class
Total
(fairly good %)
Average (%)
Weakness (%)
Total
%
Total
%
Total
%
4D
38
17
44,74%
18
47,37%
3
7,89%
4E
39
18
46,15%
19
48,72%
2
5,13%
Sum
78
35
44,87%
37
47,44%
5
6,41%
	With this result we can see the results of students in inadequate. Results good one, is low, while weak results. So requires teachers to find remedies, to help them improve their learning outcomes.
3. The solutions of implementation
3.1. Flexible use good techniques in listening skill.
The practice listening skill in a class or part of listening is done through 3 stages.
	a. Pre-listening
	- The purpose of the activities in this phase is to help students focus their attention on the subject, especially anticipate the information of the topic they are going to hear. To overcome the difficulties of listening in class, teachers should introduce the topic, context, situation- related to the content of listening, especially taking pictures, intuitive furniture to introduce for students in order to know what students knew and did not know about the content that they will listen, intrigued, create excitement for all activities.
	- Ask students to think, guess what they are going to hear in a certain context.
	- Teach vocabulary, however not introduce all new words. Students should guess the meaning of word in context, teacher should offer the purpose of listening, requests and task assignments for the content heard.
	- When carrying out the pre-listening activity, the use of visual maps accompanying illustrations will give very good support to clarify the context suggests the content that they are going to hear. Pictures is also a means to check the level of students listening comprehension.
	- Show the pictures or questions of exercise to students in order to figure out all information nedded to hear.
	* Some tricks taught in this phase.
	True/ False statements prediction.
	- Open- prediction.
	- Ordering.
	- Pre- question.
	The choice to perform activities in this period will depend on a number of factors such as time of listening exercises, documentation provided available or not available, the level and interests of students. Conditions of classroom teaching is also one of the factors leading to decide what technique. Besides teaching purposes and objectives of the test are also the basic elements for teachers to make their selection.
b. While- listening
	- The purpose of the activities in this phase is to help students practise listening skill that is to say verbal drawwn convey information.
	- Have students listen and do exercise. If the students previously guessed the contents of the listening exercise in this section, ask them to compare what they had guessed with what they have just listened.
	- For all hard to hear, the teacher can divide the process into a listening exercise hear from easy to difficult.
	- For long listening exercises, we can make it easier by giving all kinds of exercises that are suitable for the level of students.
	- Some expressions in this phase:Defining True- False, check the correct answer, matching, filling in the grip/ chart/ gap, answering comprehension questions, selecting, deliberate mistakes, listen and draw.
	c. Post- listening:
	- The purpose of the activities after listening are to:
Check to see that if students can understand the information requested or not and complete the operation in stage “While- listening” or not.
	- Find out the reasons why students do not hear or not understand some of the listening exercises.
	- Help students with the opportunity to assess the attitudes of people who express the intonation of commmunication conversations.
- Use extension exercise themed listening skills used to supplement more ear training.
Some tricks during this period
- Give the answers and feedback.
- Ask students to repeat or say some words or sentences heard. Feedback (white listening).
- Organize students to say about them or their friends by relying on some information in the test.
- Have students mention some comments on the results of the listening group.
- Give students play out conversations heard.
- Use extra exercises to help students have more information about listening test. Depending on the specific details, teacher can use one of these activities.
* For example:
- Post- listening
Write it up.
Transformation (writing)
- Ask students to base on the following passage, write another passage about you.
- Feedback:
- But according to the characteristics of each lesson, teacher can carry out three step process listening and comprehension practice for students, especially first step that can help them shape and develop the ability to focus interest, speculation using information that will listen. Thus students will actively listen and feel more confident.
- Requests of the listening period are:
	+ Quality Assurance hears samples.
	+ Good quality of radio.
	+ Teachers read with average speed, correct pronunciation.
For example: Teaching listening skill.
 Unit 12: What does your father do?
 Lesson 2: Part 4, 5, 6 - Period 82
Activity 4: Listen and number
Unit 12: What does your father do? – Page 15 (English 4)
 a. Pre-listening: 
- Elicit Ss to talk about the pictures on page15.
 - Tell Ss that they are going to listen to the story about jobs and places of the people.
- Point to each picture and elicit Ss’answer to the information they indicate.
Eg: What does he/ she do? What does he/ she work?
- Let Ss’ guess the answers.
b. While -listening
- Play the recording twice.The first listening, Ss to listening all the way through and the second listening for them to do the task.
 	- Ask all Ss to raise their answers to check their answers. Get Ss to check the answers in pairs.
 	- Pause after each part in give Ss sufficient time to select and tick the right pictures.
- Give answers: 1. c	2. a	3. d	4. b 
c. Post-listening: 
- Have Ss work in groups to share their answers with their classmates.
- Check Ss’comprehension of the text.
3.2 Combining practice listening to other technical groups
	a. The technical team practice facility:
	These are tricks premise significants in shaping students listen to English ability.
*Practice routines focus attention to hear.
	Ask students to listen to your sentences and call them to repeat individual what you read. Teacher referred repeat individual students. Help students have habits and awareness to listen to the teachers. One way to help students focus on hearing is to ask students to use the information from what their friends said to answer.
For example:
	Student A says: “Let’s go to the bakery. I want to buy some bread.” After student A stops talking. I can ask another students to answer the question: 
	Where does student A go? Why does student A go to the bakery?
Once a week, have students to play a game focused on listening.
For example:
+ The first game: Find your friend to communicate.
	Teacher prepares some questions and answers on paper, pair with answers to our questions by the numbers: For example, question one corresponds to answer 5. Students find the answer by finding their corresponding answers from the friends, the pair receiving first will win.
	+ The second game: The spread information
	If the class has 10 rows of desks, teachers make 10 votes, per share recorded a statement. Then vote for one student a warded top row. The student is responsible to whisper in his or her friend’s ear what he or she read. Continue whispering one by one until the end of the sequence. The last person will speak loudly what he or she heard from their friend and the first student will determine if the sentence is correct or not.
Listening word stress and sentence stress:
	When the British listen to a word that has many syllables, they only listen to the stress of word. When you hear a word having more syllables, you should practise listening to the accent of the word.When you hear a sentence, pay attention to hear the accent in question and accents that coordinate to guess the meaning of the whole sentence.
For example: When listening to this sentence.
Let’s go to the bakery. I want to buy some bread.
Note:
	Hear the word accent then guess the meaning of that phrase. Thus, with this technique I practice for students to both hear and guess the meaning by grasping accent. The training stress of words or phrases shold be done not only in the listening exercise that words in many different stages of English language teaching: practice reading new words, introduce new grammatical structures, or perform. Before you read but also in the listening and reading or reading in each unit of study.
	*Practise listening and make differences of similar pair sounds, pronunciation of difficult sounds and sound connecting while the natives say.
	In fact, many students receiving an English voice are often not prepared or do not contain many sounds similar to the pronunciation of the natives. It is also an obstacle for students to hear native speakers say. Thus, students needs to practice consciously and recognize the difficult pronunciation sound, or the sound as well as easy connection and sound while speaking of the natives, the ear training should be implemented and integrated frequently while reading from the new training, introducing new grammatical structures, or performing operations listen and read or read in each unit of study. In addition, teachers can make some games to help children just relax, just reinforce sound recognition skills and specific way audio connection closer to the native pronunciation.
b. Stress training technical group:
These measures help students practise listening skills to understand a conversation or reading the textbook. There are two main measures:
Combine listening and reading
	Teacher help students have opportunities to practice listening by utilizing language data in this section and designing listening exercise. Part listen and read, repeat or number is a conversation to introduce thematic content and vocabularies, new grammar structures. Despite the introduction of new language, listening and reading part always imply the corpus that students have learned, so teachers can exploit certain part in this stage of listening.
	- How to proceed:
	Before students listen to tape, require students not to use textbooks teachers create situations using context or the surrounding real environment, or the real situations in the classroom, or real family life and friends of the students, or the real thing, the real phenomention, common or map, the newspaper reports.
	In addition, teachers can set up situations and contexts with the support of visual aids and language, students have learned, they are connected with the content will be listened. This step is to help students feel interested and realize direction of the listening subject.
For example: Unit 16: Let’s go to the bookshop.
 Lesson 2: Part 1: Look, listen and repeat
Unit 16: Let’s go to the bookshop - Page 42 (English 4) 
Set the scene:
In pictures a and b, Tony makes a suggetion to go to the zoo, Linda declines, saying Sorry, I can’t, and Mai accepts, saying Yes, I’d like to. Then Mai makes another suggestion, asking Can we go to the supermarket first? In picture C, Tony asks Mai for the reason, using Why do you want to go to the supermarket? and Mai gives a reason, say