Some suggested strategies to encourage high school students to learn listening skill

TABLE OF CONTENT
1. INTRODUCTION..........................1
 1.1. Rationale.....................................................................................................1
 1.2. Aims of the study........................................................................................1
 1.3. Subjects of the study...................................................................................2
 1.4. Research methodology................................................................................2
2. CONTENT
 2.1. Theoretical background..............................................................................3
 2.1.1. The process of listening...........................................................................3
 2.1.2. The priciples for teaching listening.........................................................4
 2.2. Practical background..................................................................................6 
 2.3. Solutions to the problems..........................................................................7
 2.3.1.Suggested strategies..................................................................................7
 2.3.1.1.What Should Teachers Do ?..................................................................8
 2.3.1.2. Helping Students Focus on Meanings,Not Just Words.........................9
 2.3.1.3. Selecting Materials ............................................................................10
 2.3.1.4. Using Texts and Tapes or CDs ..........................................................11
 2.3.1.5. Arranging Engaging Activities...........................................................11 
 2.3.2. Applying the study in teaching..............................................................12
 2.4. Effectiveness of the teaching experience..................................................17
3. CONCLUSION.............................18
REFERENCES..............19
1. INTRODUCTION:
1.1. Rationale:
 The application of the new English textbooks at high school level in the year 2006 has made Vietnamese teachers and students more familiar with listening skill. However, there come two trends when teachers respond to the task of teaching listening to their students. Some may think, "Wow, this is an easy class to teach!" or some may feel, "Boy, this is going to be boring!" Both of these responses are common ones, but actually they do not reveal how difficult it is for students to listen and comprehend a foreign language, nor how challenging it can be for a teacher to help them. 
 If you have taught listening, you may have noticed that your class is divided between those that seem to manage to "get" a fair amount, and those that struggle to understand recorded materials. I have observed that a class often contains three types of students: those who have grasped the process of listening, those who understand certain aspects of the process, and those who really have no idea about how to listen in a foreign language. Those in the first group will continue to progress in their listening ability as they build their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. Once they know how to listen, they can 
continually apply those principles. Those in the second group may slowly improve their listening. However, those in the third group may flounder with little progress, no matter how many listening exercises they do. 
 What is the problem? What makes one student a successful listener while another does not seem to progress at all? Certainly, knowledge of grammar and vocabulary are essential to good listening, but they are not enough; some students who have memorized many words, and can do well in grammar exercises, still have a difficult time understanding spoken English. A student must have a good technique for listening. While all of us have learned to listen in our native language with little training or conscious effort, only a small number of students intuitively know how to listen in a second language. Many students not only come to listening activities with little knowledge of how the 
listening process works, but also with serious misconceptions about what will make them successful in listening. 
 Our role as teachers includes planning and managing the activities of the 
classroom, but we also have another role, which is to coach students as they learn. The coach' s job is to watch what the player/student is doing, see where he is going wrong, and help him find more effective ways of completing the task. Many students like to be told explicitly how to study, which means pointing out not only the ineffective techniques they are using, but also the incorrect ideas on which those techniques are based. In this study, I would like to focus especially on what is needed to help those listeners who are not progressing in their listening skills. 
1.2. Aims of the study:
The study aims to:
+ Analyze the major cause to the students’ reluctance to get more involved in learning and practicing listening
+ Suggest some strategies so as to change students’ attitude toward listening skill and some ways to select appropriate materials to attract students’ attention in listening lessons. 
1.3. Subjects of the study:
+ The students in 10th grade at Ha Van Mao high school
1.4. Research methodology:
+ Reading reference books 
+ Discussing with other teachers
+ Applying in teaching
+ Observing and drawing out experiences.
2. CONTENT:
2.1. Theoretical background: 
2.1.1. The Process of listening. 
 A variety of new insights into the listening process have been developed in the past 15 years, and yet there are two points on which most researchers and teachers continue to agree: First, listening is an active rather than a passive process, and second, listening is both a top-down and a bottom-up process. 
 We can see that listening is active because there is often a great difference between what is said and what the listener hears. It is obvious that the listener is constructing his or her own meaning, which sometimes corresponds to the speaker' s meaning, and sometimes does not. This happens both in our native language and in a second language. This is sometimes described as an "interactive" process, where both the input and the activity of the listener' s mind interact to form an understanding. 
 Researchers also tend to agree that the listening process contains both bottom-up and top-down elements. Bottom-up processing refers to the listening processes that start with discriminating sounds, identifying words, and comprehending grammatical structures, and build eventually to the comprehension of meaning. This is a somewhat mechanistic or "data-driven" (Brown. 1994: p67) view of processing, and has been the focus in some 
styles of teaching. Top-down processes may be described as holistic or "conceptually driven" (Brown. 1994: p68) in that they focus on the overall meaning of a passage, and the application of schemata. Schemata are mental frameworks based on past experiences which can be applied to and help us interpret the current situation. Inferring ideas, guessing words' meanings, and identifying topics are all examples of top-down processing. Figure 1 
lists various examples of bottom-up and top-down exercises. 
Figure 1. Examples of bottom-up and top-down exercises (adapted from Brown. 1994). 
Exercises for bottom-up processing
- discriminating sounds
- listening for word ending
- discriminating intonation patterns
- word recognition
- recognizing reduced forms ( for example, "didya"?) and linked words
- using stress to understand words and find key ideas
- using organizational cue words
Exercises for top-down processing
- listening for emotions
- getting the gist
- recognizing the topic
- finding main ideas
- making inferences
- making and checking predictions
- using background knowledge to fill in gaps
- identifying discourse structures and speaker's purpose
 It is useful for students to recognize the importance of both of these types of processing, and for teachers to arrange opportunities to work on both aspects. Generally, bottom-up exercises will be more useful for beginners, and top-down exercises will be more necessary for intermediate and advanced students, but both types should be used for all levels. Recently, teachers have put much stress on activating students' schemata, that is, helping them anticipate a situation and what they may hear based on their previous knowledge. In some circumstances this could also involve the teacher introducing cultural 
background, and thus beginning to help students build a new schema. 
 The ability to anticipate and guess may be less developed in students from a traditional learning system; thus, teachers may need to show students how to make use of schemata properly to increase their comprehension. Similarly, teachers may need to help students see how to take information from within a passage and make inferences from it. While students may need much help in these areas, teachers need to make sure not to ignore bottom-up exercises that are also critical for improving listening. 
2.1.2. The principles for teaching listening.
 a. Expose students to different types of processing information: bottom up vs. top down.
 The bottom up vs. top down processing of information has been proposed by Rumelhart and Ortony (1977) and expanded upon by Chaudron and Richards (1986), Richards (1990) and others. The distinction is based on the way learners attempt to understand what they read or hear. With bottom up processing, students start with the component parts: words, grammar and the like. Top down processing is the opposite. Learners start from their background knowledge, either content schema (general information based on previous learning and life experience) or texual schema (awareness of the kinds of information used in a given situation).There is also interactive processing. The use of the combination of top down and bottom up data processing is called interactive processing.
b. Expose students to different types of listening:
 Any discussion of listening tasks has to include a consideration of types of listening. Here tasks as well as text should be considered. When discussing listening text refers to whatever the students are listening to, often a recording.
The most common type of listening exercise in many textbooks is listening for specific information. This usually involves catching concrete information including names, time and so on.
 At other times students try to understand in a more general way. This is global or gist listening. In the classroom this often involves tasks such as identifying main ideas, noting a sequence of events and so on. But these two types of listening do not exist in isolation. Inference is another critical type of listening. This is “listening between the lines”- that is, listening for meaning that is implied not stated directly. It is a higher level skill.
c. Teach a variety of tasks.
 Learners of listening need to work with a variety of tasks. Since learners do the task as they listen, it is important that the task itself does not demand too much production of the  learner. If for example a beginning level learner hears a story and is asked to write a summary in English, it could well be that that the learner understood the story but is not yet at the level to be able to write the summary. It may also be the case that they fail to respond even though they do understand. It may so happen that they understood at the time but forgot by the time they got to the exercise. In this example of a summary task based on a story, it may be better to have a task such as choosing the correct summary from two or three choices.
d. Consider text, difficulty, and authenticity.
 Spoken languages are very different from written language. It is more redundant, full of false starts, rephrasing and elaborations. Incomplete sentences, pauses, and overlaps are common. Learners need exposure to and practice with natural sounding language.
 When learners talk about text difficulty, the first thing many mention is speed, indeed which can be a problem. But the solution is not to give them unnaturally slow, clear   recordings. Those can actually distort the way the language sounds. Speed, however, is not the only variable. Brown (1995) talks about “cognitive load” and describes six factors that increase or decrease the ease of understanding.
- The number of individuals or objects in a text.
     - How clearly the individuals or objects are distinct from one another.
     - Simple relationships are easier to understand than complex ones.
     - The order of events.
- The number of inferences needed.
     - The information is consistent with what the listener already knows.
 Any discussion of listening text probably needs to deal with the issue of authentic texts. Virtually no one should disagree that texts students work with should be realistic. However, some suggest that everything students work with should be authentic. However the issue of authenticity is not so simple as it sounds. Most of the recordings that accompany textbooks are made in recording studios. And recordings not made in the studio are often not of a usable quality.
Brown and Menasche (1993) suggest looking at two aspects of authenticity. They suggest this breakdown:
     - Task authenticity
     - Input authenticity
e. Teach listening strategies.
 In considering listening, it is useful to note the items Rost (2002, p. 155) identifies as strategies that are used by successful listeners.
 *Predicting: Effective listeners think about what they will hear.
    * Inferring: It is useful for the listeners to listen between the lines.
    * Monitoring: Good listeners notice what they do and do not understand.
    * Clarifying:Efficient learners ask questions and give feedback to the speaker.
    * Responding: Learners react to what they hear.
    * Evaluating: They check on how well they have understood.
2.2. Practical background:
 After conducting observation, unstructured interview with several of my own students, I found that problems are clearer than ever before. The following part mentions what problems I have found listening skill at Ha Van Mao High school. 
Why Do Students Have Trouble in Listening?
 In some cases, students may lack specific bottom-up and top-down listening skills. In other cases, they do not have a vocabulary large enough nor a sufficient grasp of the structures of English for the materials they are listening to. There are two other things that may specifically interfere with students' listening: their misconceptions about how to listen and their fears of failure. 
 Since we all learned to listen in our mother language without much effort, we may not be aware of how we learned to listen. Therefore, it is easy to make incorrect assumptions about what will lead to successful listening. One misconception students may have is that when they listen in their native language, they pay attention to and remember every word; they thus assume that this is what they should do in a foreign language. Actually, native speakers can listen to and comprehend 30 phonemes per second (Chastain), but we obviously do not pay conscious attention to each of them—they seem to be instantly processed and are not stored in memory. 
 Much research shows that for listeners, most storage in memory is the storage of meanings rather than the exact forms that the speaker used. Whether in our native language or a foreign language, only on rare occasions do we pay attention to the exact words that were used. We regularly have evidence of this when we discuss with a friend what a third person said. Going back and reconstructing the exact wording is often a challenge because in most cases (except those we regard as critical) we almost immediately dispose of the exact words, and only retain the meanings. 
 In a foreign language, listeners need to learn to process sounds quickly, and while they must initially pay conscious attention to this processing, the process needs to become automatic in order to improve their listening ability. Naturally, when listening to a complex passage, an unusual accent, or an entirely new idea, anyone has to pay more attention to individual sounds and words, but students should be taught that they do not need to concentrate so much attention on consciously processing each sound or word in ordinary situations. 
 Another common misconception students may hold is that they understand everything they hear in their mother language. They forget that there are times when they mishear or misunderstand another' s words. There are other times when native listeners do not understand, and simply choose to let something pass because they do not perceive it to be important. In addition, students may not consider that they often make inferences, because the speaker' s message was somewhat ambiguous or because the speaker only gave the minimal information needed if they believe a listener has the necessary background knowledge. Because everyone does this so easily in their mother tongue, they are not always aware of it, and it is not always easy to apply these same strategies to foreign language listening. Thus it may be useful for teachers to make students aware of these misconceptions by helping them realize that listening in their native language requires less attention to specific words and more guessing than they may have thought. 
 Fear also interferes with students' ability to listen. One of the most common fears students have is that not understanding a word will keep them from understanding the meaning of a sentence. Actually, this may often be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because when students cannot understand a word, they stop listening and, while puzzling over that one word, may miss several phrases. If instead they listened to the rest of the sentence, 
rather than worry over that one word, they might well guess the word from the context, or at least not miss so much of the material that follows. Because this behavior belongs to the affective or emotional region of learning, it is not easy for teachers to change this fear response. However, making students aware of the fact that they can understand a sentence without hearing or understanding one of the words should increase their confidence. 
 Listening causes anxiety for students for another reason: Unlike in reading, listeners cannot control the rate at which information comes to them. In the case of conversation, they may be able to ask the speaker to repeat information or slow down, but in many other listening situations (such as listening to a lecture or radio program), they will hear the information only once and cannot adjust the rate. Students are aware of these problems, and are often quite anxious about them. To address this problem, teachers can help students see how much redundancy exists in speaking, and how much they can infer from the immediate context and more generally from the schemata. In addition, as students see that their goal is to get main ideas and important details, they realize that there is not such a great need to understand and remember every word. 
 Exercises in the listening classroom may also increase students' performance anxiety. They may feel a pressure, whether internal or external, to get the right answer immediately. In addition, lack of success can cause them to anticipate that they will not understand and lead to a spiral of expecting failure and then actually failing. It is vital for teachers to give appropriate tasks and training so students can frequently experience success in their listening. It is especially important for teachers to have realistic 
expectations for what their students will be able to hear and remember, so that they will not feel they are always struggling with listening