Using some authentic techniques to enhance competence of the 10th graders’ listening skill at Nhu Thanh high school

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
I. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY
	Nowadays English has become an international language because it is widely used in many parts of the world. English may not be the most spoken language in the world, but it is the official language in a large number of countries. It is estimated that the number of people in the world that use English to communicate on a regular basis is about 2 billion. In the tendency of integration of the global economy, English is one of the effective communicative tools for everybody. The role of English is considered to be very important in the fields of economics, politics, science, culture and education. Especially, Vietnam’s official membership of WTO on 7th November 2006 opened a new door for integrating into the world economy. Hence, more and more people want to learn English to communicate with foreign partners, tourists, study tours; or getting good position in the work force.
	Thanks to the innovation of ways in teaching English which is stated by the MOET, English lessons are taught with four skills (speaking, reading, listening, and writing) in one unit. Moreover, there exist three stages - Pre - While - Post - teaching in one lesson. This really helps students improve their skills beside the grammar exercises to pass the exams. 
	Among these four skills, listening skill is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in - school information through listening to instructors and to one another. Often, however, language learners do not recognize the level of effort that goes into developing listening ability. Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.
	When teaching listening skill to the 10th grade students at Nhu Thanh High School the author find out that pre – listening stages and listening activities are very important in teaching listening and it also has significant effects on the students’ performance. If students do not prepare well enough or if they are not motivated they can not listen well, they can not even listen any thing at all. In addition, the listening tasks also have important effects on students’ listening skill. Therefore, in this study I present some techniques which I have used successfully in classes of different sizes and levels to improve the students’ listening skill at Nhu Thanh high school.
	Based on the results of this innovation in teaching some changes and improvements could be applied in the author’s lessons, and some appropriate strategies needed to be designed with the hope that students will work more effectively in a listening lesson. Hopefully that the results of this study would be shared with any colleagues who had the same problem or anyone who is interested in this study.
II. AIMS OF THE STUDY
	Listening, one of the two communicate skills, has always a significant position in language teaching. Nevertheless, how to teach and learn listening effectively often poses great problems to both teachers and students. For the teachers of English at high school, listening is considered a difficult skill to teach. Some of them even ignore teaching listening skill and focus only on grammar exercises for the exams. However, nothing is difficult if we, the teachers make decision to make it easier. That is the reason why I start this study with the title : “ Using some authentic techniques to enhance competence of the 10th graders’ listening skill at Nhu Thanh high school.
III. RESEARCH QUESTIONS	
	This study aims at finding answer to the following research question:
How can some authentic listening techniques help the students at Nhu Thanh High School improve their listening skill?
	How do Practical listening activities affect the students’ listening performance?
IV. PARTICIPANTS
	The subjects chosen for the research include 80 grade 10th non – major English students in class 10C1, 10C2 of Nhu Thanh High School with the survey questionnaires, and 7 teachers who are currently teaching English. To be more specific, the teachers’ ages range from 30 to 44. Their experience of teaching English varied from 8 year to 20 years. The research was carried out during the academic year 2016 - 2017 at Nhu Thanh High School.
V. METHODS OF THE STUDY
	The study is basically a qualitative research, which employs the following methods:
1. Data is collected by means of three sets of questionnaires, one on the teachers and the others on the students in pre – improvement stage and post – improvement one. The questions are of the three – kinds: close – ended questions, open – ended questions and scaling
2. Other sources of data come from listening tasks from the textbooks English 10 of the MOET. The analysis of the data hopefully will bring about reliable findings useful for the teaching of listening to non – major students at Nhu thanh high school Thanh Hoa
PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
I. OVERVIEW OF AUTHENTIC TECHNIQUE.
	Authentic technique is real activity. It is a style of activity that encourages students to create a tangible, useful product to be shared with their world. Once an educator provides a motivational challenge, they nurture and provide the necessary criteria, planning, timelines, resources and support to accommodate student success. The teacher becomes a guide on the side or an event manager, a facilitator not a dictator. Processes become the predominant force and the content collected is organized appropriately into portfolios. 
Authentic techniques allow students to create a meaningful, useful, shared outcome. They are real life tasks, or simulated tasks that provide the learner with opportunities to connect directly with the real world.
II. OVERVIEW OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION.
	There have been differently points of view on the matter of listening.
	According to Howatt and Dakin (1974), listening is ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This process involves understanding a 
speaker’s accent and pronunciation, the speaker’s grammar and vocabulary 
and comprehension of meaning. An able listener is capable of dong these four thing stimulatory.
Bulletin (1952), listening is one of the fundamental language skill. It is a medium through which children, young people and adult gain a large portion of their education, their information, their understanding of the world and of human affairs, their ideas, sense of value, and their abreactions.
Carol(1993) described listening as a set of activities that involve “the individual’s capacity to apprehend, recognize, discriminate or even ignore. 
Wolvin and Coakley (1985) pointed out that listening is “the process of 
receiving, attending to and assigning to aural stimuli”. This definition 
suggests that listening is a complex, problem-solving skill. The task of 
listening is more than perception of sound. This view of listening is in 
accordance with second-language theory which considers listening to spoken 
language as an active and complex process in which listeners focus on 
selected aspects of aural input, construct meaning, and relate what they hear 
to existing knowledge.
	Recently, Imhof (1988) stated that listening is “the active process of selecting and integrating relevant information from acoustic input and this process is controlled by personal intentions which is critical to listening”. 
Rost (2002) confirmed, “Listening is experiencing contextual effects” which can be translated as “listening as a neurological event (experiencing) overlaying a 
cognitive event creating a change in a representation”.
	In the general meaning, listening is a critical element in the competent language performance of all learners, whether they are communicating at school, at work, or in the community they truly need a good listening skill.
III. SOME FACTORS THAT AFFECT THE LISTENING PROCESS
Listening is a demanding process, not only because of the complexity of the process itself, but also due to factors that characterize the listener, the speaker, the content of the message, and any visual support that accompanies the massage.
1. The listener
	The interest in a topic increases the listener's comprehension; the listener may tune out topics that are not of interest. A listener who is an active participant in a conversation generally has more background knowledge to facilitate understanding of the topic than a listener who is, in effect, eavesdropping on a conversation between two people whose communication has been recorded on an audiotape. Further, the ability to use negotiation skills, such as asking for clarification, repetition, or definition of points not understood; enable a listener to make sense of what they hear.
2. The speaker
	Colloquial language and reduced forms make comprehension more difficult. The extent to which the speaker uses these language forms impacts comprehension. The more exposure the listener has to them, the greater the ability to comprehend. A speaker's rate of delivery may be too fast, too slow, or have too many hesitations for a listener to follow. Awareness of a speaker's corrections and use of rephrasing ("er. . . I mean . . .That is . . .") can assist the listener. Learners need practice in recognizing these speech habits as clues to deciphering meaning.
3. Content
	Content that is familiar is easier to comprehend than content with unfamiliar vocabulary or for which the listener has insufficient background knowledge. 
4. Supporting equipment.
	- Tape recorder, or CD, Listening laboratory.
	- Visual support, such as video, pictures, diagrams, gestures, facial expressions, and body language, can increase comprehension if the learner is able to correctly interpret it
IV. THE STEPS IN A LISTENING LESSON
	The teacher can facilitate the development of listening ability by creating listening lessons that guide the student through three stages: pre - listening, the listening task, and post – listening.
Engage the learners in a pre – listening activity.
	This activity should establish the purpose of the listening activity and activate the schemata by encouraging the learners to think about and discuss what they already know about the content of the listening text. This activity can also provide the background needed for them to understand the text, and it can focus attention on what they listen
While listening tasks.
	The task should involve the listener in getting information and immediately doing something with it.
Engage in a post – listening activity.
	This activity should help the listener to evaluate success in carrying out the task and to integrate listening with the other language skills. The teacher should encourage practice outside of the classroom whenever possible.
CHAPTER 2: PRACTICAL SITUATIONS
I. THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH LISTENING SKILLS AT NHU THANH HIGH SCHOOL
	Nhu Thanh high school’s board of managers always deeply care about the English teaching condition of the teachers and students. The school has been equipped with full conditions about facilities for study like language laboratory, books, tapes, and radios. However, after many years teaching English in this mountainous school, I have noticed the fact that the majority of students in this high school are afraid of learning English. Moreover, they constantly have a heavy feeling in the English lesson, especially in a listening lesson. In addition, there is a deep seated belief in their mind that they can not evenly listening any thing. These are a truly barrier for the quality of students’ listening skill 
	Bearing in mind, I really indeed want to make students have a real enthusiasm about learning a foreign language, namely English subject and make students look forward to and hope for this subject without feeling bored. Or, how to help students be able to understand when listening to a foreigner? Therefore, I start on this study to try to find out the effect of some practical listening techniques to help my students integrate to the new world.
II. THE PRACTICAL SITUATION OF TEACHERS AND STUDENTS
1. The advantages of teaching listening lesson:
1.1. For students:
	Most students in Nhu Thanh high school have studied English since they were in secondary school and the knowledge they are provided at this level of education is relatively high on grammar, vocabulary. Most students are obedient and hard working.
	Some students themselves and their parents have realized the importance of learning English so they have had the interest and considerable investment in many aspects to this subject, and it is no longer considered a subordinate subject.
1.2. For teachers:
	Teachers have satisfied the school’s demand as well as education and applied the new teaching methods.
Most teachers have long lasting experience in teaching English
2. The disadvantages of teaching listening lesson:
2.1. For students:
	There are so many different students in class and the quality of each student is uneven.
	Many students haven’t determined the importance of English in the current period, so they aren’t aware of their own learning.
	Some students have a limited vocabulary so they can’t know understand the meaning of the words in listening materials.
	The number of students in classes is crowded, while there are only 40 cabins in the language laboratory. Some of these machines couldn’t work properly.
2.2. For teachers:
	There are still some teachers who have difficulty in teaching listening skills and choose suitable material for each lesson.
	Teachers don’t assign the tasks to students clearly. 
	Teachers don’t pay much attention to listening activities.
2.3. Specific survey in classes 10C1, 10C2
	I have use the whole procedure of teaching and learning similarly to all students of the classes of different sizes. However, due to the limit of the study, I only focus to collect information from the learning engagement of two classes (C1, C2) during this process as the data for analysis. 
At the beginning of the academic school year 2016 - 2017, I have test students on their listening skill and the statistics will be shown below.
Survey: Practical Situation of learning Listening Skill at Nhu Thanh High School.
Questions for students
A
B
C
D
1. Do you like studying listening lesson?
Very Much
10%
Not Very much
20%
Do not like
30%
Really do not like
40%
2.What do you think of listening skill?
Very essential
24%
Essential
50%
Not really essential
16%
Not essential at all
10%
3. Does the teacher provide you with suitable activities?
Really suitable
4%
Suitable
12%
Monotonous
41%
Really boring
43%
	From the survey, we can see that even though listening skill is considered to be very necessary, its importance has not been paid much attention in Nhu Thanh high school. Consequently, student often feel that listening is a difficult, boring skill to acquire.
Basing on the Experimental English Curriculum of the National Foreign Languages 2020 Project, I really want to help students to improve English communication which will certainly bring them variety of chances in the work force. Then I decide to work on this research. 
 CHAPTER 3:
RECOMMENDATIONS TO IMPROVE THE STUDENTS’ ENGLISH LISTENING SKILLS
I. RECOMMENDATIONS 
	Basing on the result of the above survey, I personally found that it is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom. Listening is a pre – step to advance student in communicating in English thanks to the variety accent, vocabulary, etc. 
	Therefore, I am going to give “Some authentic techniques to enhance competence of the 10th graders’ listening skill at Nhu Thanh high school.”
II. PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS 
1. Using Authentic Pre – listening Activities.
	To effectively activate the students' prior knowledge, I often use Top - down activities in my listening classes and will introduce some of them here in this study.
1.1. Picture - Based - Questioning Activities.
	I have used this many times with grade 10th learners because they are good at reading pictures. If you want to check whether the students can name some of the items in the listening text, pre-listening "looking and talking about" is an effective way of reminding the students of lexis which they may have forgotten or never known. It will also help them to focus their attention on the coming topic. This is very good for narrative or descriptive passages.
	In addition to this, usually teachers ask students questions after they finish listening. Here my suggestion is giving them the questions before they listen to the target text. This task more closely relates to what happens in the real world. We most often listen to the speaker to find answers to the questions in our minds, relating to a certain topic, or to confirm what we already thought to be true. Pre - passage questions induce a selective attention strategy. If we use a certain textbook, in which questions always follow a passage, we may ask the students to read the questions first. By reading the questions, students may build up their own expectations about the coming information, and also by trying to find answers to these questions, their prior knowledge on the topic can be activated. They can even have a framework of the organization of the passage to be read if the questions are arranged in a well-arranged order.
For instance, In unit 1: A Day In A Life Of.. – Part C listening, students are expected to answer the following questions before they listen to a passage.
Have you ever traveled by cyclo?
What are the benefits of traveling by cyclo?
What do you think a cyclo - driver often does everyday?
Do you think that working as a cyclo is a hard work?
Ask the students to read the questions carefully, they will know the main idea of the passage is day in the life of a cyclo - driver, and the speaker will mainly talk about his activities.
	We can also use the student-generated questions by giving them a topic, letting them ask questions about what kind of information they would like to know, and then ask their classmates to give answers to the questions. Before they listen to a dialogue between a policeman and a thief, tell them who the two speakers are, then ask what they may talk about. You may also ask the learners to role play the dialogue.
Brain storming Activities.
	Brain storming is originally an effective activity to evolve students to new lesson because this lets students to feel active to new lesson. Consequently, teachers should take the advance of this kind of activity. Some of the useful activities which the author of this innovation has used are presented below.
1.2.1. Word association task.
	 This method helps to determine what prior knowledge students bring to the new topic before they listen to the passage. In teaching Part C: Listening, in English 10 text book, Unit 5 Technology and you, students will be asked to respond to a key word or phrase such as “ Using Computer” They can write down as many words and phrases as possible in five minutes' time related to this topic, or they may write freely on this topic. While they write,