Some suggested listening tasks designed basing on English Textbook 11 to teach listening skills for weak students

TABLE OF CONTENT
TABLE OF CONTENT...
i
1. INTRODUCTION...
1
 1.1. Rationale of the theme....
1
 1.2. Aims of the theme...
1
 1.3. Scope of the theme..
1
 1.4. Methods of the theme.
2
2. CONTENT ...............
3
 2.1. Theoretical basis.....
3
 2.1.1. Definition of listening..
3
 2.1.2. A framework for planning a listening skills lesson.....
3
 2.2. Practical basis.
5
 2.3. Some rules of desinging listening tasks for weak students.
6
 2.4. Some suggested listening tasks designed basing on English textbook 11 to teach listening skills for weak students
8
 2.5. Results of applying suggested listening tasks designed basing on English text book 11 to teach listening skills for weak students..
8
3. CONCLUSION ...
10
 3.1. Conclusion...
10
 3.2. Suggestions..
10
REFERRENCES..
I
LIST OF GRADED STUDIES...
II
LIST OF ABBRIVIATION.
III
APPENDIX 1
IV
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale 
It is common knowledge that English plays an important part in the development of Vietnam firstly because it is an international language; secondly it is also seen as a means to promote mutual understanding and cooperation between Vietnam and other countries. Therefore, English is being taught as a compulsory subject in all classes of schools all over our country with a view to helping students use it not only as a mean of communication but also as a key to science and technology.
Of the four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing, listening is always considered to be the most difficult for teachers to teach and for students to improve themselves, which leads to the fact that most listeners have low level of proficiency in their listening skill. In fact, in the process of teaching and learning English, listening not only provides them with a wide range of knowledge but also has great influence on other skills, especially speaking skills as While, G (1998) pointed out that “being good listener involves collaborating with speakers and taking an active role in asking for clarification when you do not understand”. [5]
 However there still exist many difficulties facing English teachers, especially in teaching listening skills for low level students who cannot finish the task required in the Textbooks. Gradually these pupils will lose their motivation in learning English. Eventually, it is impossible for them to catch up with the others in school.
All of the reasons have inspired the author to do the study “Some suggested listening tasks designed basing on English Textbook 11 to teach listening skills for weak students” with the purpose of helping many teachers to deal with teaching listening skills for these leaners.
1.2. Aims of the study
The study only aims at providing teachers some suggested tasks designed basing on the Textbook “English 11” that can be applied to overcome the difficulties arising during the process of teaching listening skills to low-level students in grade 11. Thus, this study is expected to make a small contribution to improve the quality of teaching listening skills for those who are not good at English.
1.3 Objectives of the study
Learning a second language as a scholar once said “is a long and complex undertaking”. Therefore, teachers of a second language certainly have to apply a lot of techniques. In the scope of this study, however, the author only has ambition to propose some suggested listening tasks designed basing on the material provided in the Textbook “English 11” with a view to improving the qualities of teaching listening skills for low-level students. 
1.4. Methods of the study
To achieve the objectives of the study, several methods were used, but the author used mainly quantity and quality methods such as: class observations, data collections, interviews, consultancy from colleagues, references from the internet, books, magazinesetc.
2. CONTENT
Theoretical basis
Definition of listening
There are many different viewpoints on the definition of listening:
 According to Underwood (1989, p.1): “Listening is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something you hear” [4]. As a matter of fact, to succeed in listening, the duty of listeners is not only to understand of the words given, but also to find out the real meaning hidden in words. 
Another notion of listening was given by Buck (2001, p.3): “Listening comprehension is the result of an interaction between a number of information sources, including the acoustic input, different types of linguistic knowledge, detail of the context, and general world knowledge, and so forth, and listeners use whatever information they have available, or whatever information seems relevant to help them interpret what the speaker is saying” [6]. In this definition, Buck aims at highlighting the active role of the learners who act as the negotiators and integrators in the process of learning listening, in which learners activate both linguistic cues and nonlinguistic knowledge to achieve the meaning. In other words, listening is the active combination of new input gained by what the listeners get and their prior knowledge and experience. This view is valuable and worth considering in setting up listening syllabus in the sense in order to build communicative competence to the learners in listening lessons. 
In conclusion, listening demands many supportive skills. It is an active process in which learners have to use their prior knowledge to understand the message of the listening text
A framework for planning a listening skills lesson.
It is stated that a common way of dividing up a listening lesson is into three stages: pre-listening stage, while-listening stage and post-listening stage.
Pre-listening stage: 
In general, it is difficult for students to have ideas of what they are going to hear if the teachers just says “listen to this” then switches on the cassette recorder or begin to read out loud. Even if the sounds and words are familiar, they may still be unable to comprehend because of the lack of background knowledge of the topic, setting or the relationship between the speakers. Therefore, pre-listening stage is carried out to provide them with everything necessary for listening and understanding the text such as the topic, related vocabulary and additional information. This stage also helps the teachers to arouse their interest and curiosity to listen.
There are some techniques that teachers can apply to teach at the pre-listening stage such as:
Discuss a relevant picture.
Discuss relevant experiences
Associate ideas with the topic
Predict information about the topic
Vocabulary teaching
Checking/ understanding the listening task
While-listening stage:
While-listening activities are what students are asked to do during the time that they are listening to the text. The purpose of while-listening activities is to help learners understand the text and to develop the skill of eliciting message from spoken language. Teachers should not expect them to try to understand every word. They had better help them understand rather than testing their understanding the whole time.
There are some techniques that are suggested being used in this stage:
Identifying the exact topic, or an aspect of it
Answering the questions
Deciding the statements are True/false 
Choosing the best answer 
Gap-filling
Completing a table, map or picture.
Ordering picture, name or event
Post- listening stage:
This stage is to help the learners connect what they have heard with their own ideas and experiences, just as people often do in real life. It also allow teachers to move easily from listening to another language skill. For instance, they may practice speaking by role-playing interviews similar to one they have heard. The purposes of post-listening activities are:
Checking whether the students have understood what they need to or not.
Reflecting on why some members of the class have failed to understand or miss parts of the message
Giving them the opportunity to consider the attitude and manner of the speakers of the listening text.
Expanding on the topic or language of the message and transferring learned things to another context
Making introduction for the planned work.
Some possible post-listening activities are:
Giving opinion
Relating similar experiences
Role-playing a similar interaction
Writing a brief report
Writing a similar text
Debating the topic 
To sum up, in order to help students to communicate in English successfully, teachers should raise their awareness of listening as a skill that requires active engagement. Moreover, they should assist them develop both the skill and the confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom. Only by this way, can the teachers give their leaners the foundation for communicative competence in the new language. 
Practical basis
Teaching listening as well as learning Listening skills is so complex and difficult that both teachers and students meet many challenges. The problems deprive not only from the listening material, the teachers themselves but also from students themselves, especially weak-ability ones.
Generally, English Textbook 11 Published by Education Publishing House is designed for all students from pre-intermediate to advanced level in grade 11. Therefore, it is quite difficult for low-level ones to meet all the demand of all the tasks in the textbook. Once they cannot do the task, they will feel demotivated and easily be distracted from the lesson. Some even possibly pretend to listen to the tape when it is playing. In fact, they are doing something irrelevant or thinking of something outside the lesson. Gradually, their decrease in the involvement in the activities will lead to bad results.
Sometimes the problem originates from the teachers themselves. Many teachers think that if they teach in a class with many weak-ability learners, they cannot spend a lot of time teaching listening. They do not use all of activities they had designed when writing lesson plans because if they do, these ones will not keep up. Some other teachers may be aware of the causes of the problems, however they are either too busy or not patient enough to redesign some tasks in the Textbook to teach the weak students. Hence, the quality of teaching listening skills for this type of leaners still failed up to our expectation.
When it comes to the students, normally teaching listening to intermediate and advanced ones is difficult, and for the beginners, the case is more complex because they do not gain themselves a lot of experiences with listening, plus their lack of linguistic and cultural knowledge of the language. Therefore, it is not easy to understand the provided input to infer the meaning of the listening text. That’s why low-level students hardly finish all the task in the textbooks.
To make it more clearly, I conducted an experiment in class 11A1 and 11A2 school year 2016-2017. These two classes had the same numbers of students at nearly the same level. When teaching listening lesson of Unit 1, I gave them the copy of the listening tasks then asked them doing the tasks on the photocopied papers. At the end of the lesson I collected their works and got the result that:
The level of finishing
(Students)
Class A1
Class A2
Good
0
2
Average
12
14
Poor
31
26
Total
42
42
As can be seen, the number of students who could not do the task accounts for more than half of the total and remarkably outnumbers the students who finished the task at average and good level 
Taking more details into consideration, I also found out that almost all students could not do task 2 in the textbook, while task 1 seems to be easier to be completed. All of these things are indicated in the following table:
 Level (students)
	Class
Task 1
Task 2
Total
good
average
poor
good
average
poor
A1
4
15
23
0
7
35
42
A2
7
18
27
2
10
30
42
When interviewing them about the reasons why they could not do task 2. Many students said that they could not hear long sentences, some others shared that they were able to hear words related to the requirement but they did not know how to use them to make sentences to answer the questions. The others indicated that they could not infer from what they heard to the answers. However, almost all the listening lessons in the English Textbook 11 normally ask students to practice listening for gist or inferring meaning from what they hear. Obviously, these two listening skills prove to be too difficult to be enhanced by weak students. 
From the above given facts, so as to teach incompetent students effectively, teachers should invest more time and effort in desinging eligible listening tasks based on the Textbook so that they can do them then be more motivated to study, which will create more successful and effective lesson.
Some rules of designing listening task for weak students.
When designing listening task it’s difficult for the teachers to decide what should be taught, what techniques are better or simply what words should be introduced. To deal with the problems, they should follow some rules for each stages.
* Pre-listening:
Pre-listening step is normally considered very important to a listening lesson. It helps students to know the topic, recall the background knowledge and understand the related word. Hence, in this stage, teachers should:
- Try to be as well-prepared as possible because once they understand what should be required in the lesson they will choose the best things to be taught for their learners
- Try to design the most simple task but gain the class’s much involvement as possible to introduce the topic or recall the background knowledge. Because this is the first part of the lesson therefore the teacher should create a positive atmosphere of the class so that the students will be motivated to be ready for the next part.
- Decide what are the key words in the listening text, and what are the key words in the listening task to teach. In the textbook there are some new words given in the “listen and repeat” part; nevertheless, these ones are usually not enough for incompetent students. Thus, teachers should provide some more key words in the text or in the listening tasks to make them understand the text and do the task more easily.
* While-listening: 
This stage is the main part of the lesson, through which students can improve their listening skills. In this part teachers should: 
- Have pre-task step to help them understand carefully what they have to do to complete the task, and what are the key words they should pay attention to find the answers. 
- Ask them to guess before they listen to the tape. And do not say what they guess is wrong or right, ask why they guess so if necessary. This step will make learners more curious and hence eager to listen and do the task.
- Write a very easy question so that they can answer after the first listening. The purpose of the question is to encourage them to listen, to make them have a feeling of success. 
- Write more additional questions to the listening tasks to make them easy to understand the content of the tape scripts.
- Be flexible when getting the pupils to listen to the tape. Read the listening text if it is helpful to them. When teaching weak students, sometimes the different accents or speed of speech pose obstacles for them to listen. In this case, the teachers can support them by reading the tape scripts. 
- Instruct students how to make the answers while listening (short answers or main ideas). This will help them develop note-taking skills, which are very essential in listening.
* Post-listening: 
This is the last process of a listening lesson in order to help them recall and construct the information they get from listening and practicing new words and phrases from the listening in speaking or writing. When designing this stage teachers should pay attention to these following factors:
- The time which is allowed to do post-listening work. If there still are a lot of time teachers can ask pupils to use the words or phrases learned to speak or write. But if there is not much time left, they should only be summarized the main point of the listening text.
- The amount of language work which the teacher wishes to do in relation to the particular listening text. Base on this, the teachers will decide whether this work should consist of speaking, reading or writing. They also have to decide whether the class should work in pairs, in groups or individually.
- The chosen activity should be motivating .Whatever are required, the teachers should make it as simple as possible so that the low level students can do it. For example, gap-filling is always one of the best suggestions for this step.
2.4. Some suggested way to design listening task basing on English Textbook 11 to teach listening skills for weak students.
Below are some redesigned listening tasks of some units in the English Textbook 11 (Appendix 1) which I personally think is rather difficult to teach for weak students. 
. Results of applying redesigned tasks in teaching Listening skills
In order to assess the effectiveness of applying this method to teaching listening for weak students. I have compared my work with two classes 11 A1 and A2 (school year 2016 -2017). At first, The level of members in these two class is relatively the same. In class A1 I teach them all the things designed in the English Textbook 11. And in class A2 I designed some listening tasks based on the English Textbook 11. After a term I’ve got some following results:
First of all, The result of listening test in class A2 is better than in class A1, which is demonstrated by the following statistic:
LISTENING TEST RESULT 
(students)
CLASS A1
CLASS A2
Good
1 
9
Average
14
22
Poor
27
11
Total
42
42
Secondly, it is a matter of fact that after applying some listening tasks I designed base on English Textbook11, my students in class A2 and I felt it more motivated to learn and to teach listening skills, they seemed to be very eager for Listening lessons. During the lessons, all of them were involved in trying to finish the tasks , they worked excitingly to find out the answers to the question. After each listening lesson, they could improve their listening skills more or less. Besides, they had many chances to practice many other skills like writing and speaking, especially speaking in pairs, in groups or in individually in front of the whole class.
Thirdly, these listening tasks brought a more positive atmosphere to class which motivated each member to learn and get higher result because they give the feeling of understanding the lesson and the sense of “I can do it” to students. 
To sum up, all the results indicate that to deal with low-level students, applying the listening tasks I designed basing on the English Textbook 11 makes teaching and listening skills more effectively. 
CONCLUSION
3.1. Conclusion
Listening is one the receptive skills, through which students can gain more vocabulary, grammar structures and knowledge about the world. Besides, listening helps them learn other skill. Therefore, the importance of listening is undeniable. In the process of teaching listening skills to weak learners teachers have to cope with a lot of problems. Thus, they should be flexible to decide which can be used in the Textbook, and what should be redesigned. When desinging task teachers should follow some rules so that the task they give can get highest result.
In effort to give a support to teachers, this study have some suggested listening tasks designed basing on the English Textbook 11 in order that the teachers can save time by using them to teach low-level students.
And in order to raise the quality of teaching English to low-level pupils, the author personally hope that there will be more other suggested ways to de