Luận Văn Pre-listening activities to motivate the first year English major students listening skill

Khóa luận tốt nghiệp năm 2013
Đề tài: Pre-listening activities to motivate the first year English major students listening skill




TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I – INTRODUCTION . 1
1. Rationale 1
2. Aims of the study 2
3. Research questions 2
4. The significance of the study 2
5. Scope of the study . 2
6. Methods of the study . 3
7. Design of the study 3
PART II – DEVELOPMENT 4
CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND . 4
1. Listening 4
1.1 Definition of listening . 4
1.2 Type of listening . 6
2. LISTENING COMPREHENSION 10
2.1 Definition listening comprehension 10
2.2 Listening comprehension process . 12
2.2 The stages in listening comprehension . 15
3. POTENTIAL DIFFICULTIES IN LISTENING COMPREHENSION . 17
3.1 Listening problems 17
3.2 Pre-listening activities . 21
3.2.1 Why should we do pre-listening activities? . 21
3.2.2 Aims of pre-listening activities 21
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY A STUDY ON PRE-LISTENING
ACTIVITIES FOR 1
ST
ENGLISH MAJOR IN HAIPHONG PRIVATE
UNIVERSITY 24
1. Introduction . 24
2. The setting of the study . 24
2.1 Students and their background 24
2.2 Resources and materials 25
3. The subjects . 25
4. Instruments for collecting data 25
5. Data collection procedure . 26
6. Data analysis . 26
6.1 Years of studying English (Q1) 27
6.2 Students’ attitude toward listening skill (Q2&3) 27
6.3 Students’ time allocation for self-study (Q4) 28
6.4 Students’ perceptions about their listening difficulties (Q5) 29
6.6 Students’ perceptions about their pre-listening activities (Q7) 31
6.7 Students’ attitude toward pre-listening activities (Q8&9) 32
7. Findings and discussions . 33
CHAPTER 3 – RECOMMENDATIONS OF PRE-LISTENING
ACTIVITIES TO MOTIVATE THE FIRST YEAR ENGLISH MAJORS
AT HAIPHONG PRIVATE UNIVERSITY . 35
Activity 1: Using song to predict the content and catch the student interest 35
Activity 2: Using games to activate existing vocabulary . 36
Activity 3: Predicting vocabulary . 36
Activity 4: Using pictures to predict topic 36
Activity 5: Asking relevant warm-up questions . 38
Activity 6: Using photos to review vocabulary and grammar structures . 38
Activity 7: Using “Reading something relevant” to pre-teach preposition of
place . 41
Activity 8: Using symbols/maps to review vocabulary 41
Activity 9: Preparing vocabulary 43
Activity 10: Predicting the content of the listening text . 44
PART III – CONCLUSION . 46
1. Overview of the study . 46
2. Limitations and suggestions for further study. . 47
REFERENCES 48
APPENDIX . 50




PART I – INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale
If you want to understand clearly about costume and culture of any country,
first of all, it is necessary to know about the language that country. As you
know, today about 2/3 countries in the world use English as their mother
tongue. So English does not only become popular but it is also a main
international language.
Like students from different universities, the writer has faces many
difficulties in listening. With four-year experiences in learning the skill and
from what I observed in practicing listening of other classmates, it can be
found that many students failed in practicing listening skill. Some of them
complained that they felt unconfident with listening tasks so they could hardly
understand spoken messages
In real life it is unusual for people to listen to something without having some
idea of what they are going to hear. When listening to a radio phone -in show,
they will probably know which topic is being discussed. When listening to an
interview with a famous person, they probably know something about that
person already. A waiter knows the menu from which the diner is choosing
their food.
In our first language we rarely have trouble understanding listening. But, in a
second language, it is one of the harder skills to develop - dealing at speed
with unfamiliar sounds, words and structures. This is even more difficult if we
do not know the topic under discussion, or who is speaking to whom. So,
simply asking the students to listen to something and answer some questions
is a little unfair, and makes developing listening skills much harder.
Many students are fearful of listening, and can be disheartened when they
listen to something but feel they understand very little. It is also harder to
concentrate on listening if you have little interest in a topic or situation. Prelistening tasks aim to deal with all of these issues: to generate interest, build
confidence and to facilitate comprehension.
2
All these above reasons have inspired the writer to do research in prelistening activities and as a result, a research title goes as” Pre -listening
activities to motivate the first year English majors in listening at Haiphong
Private University”.
2. Aims of the study
The study has two main purposes as follows:
Finding out the difficulties encountered by the 1
st
year English major in
listening comprehension.
Giving some pre-listening activities to these problems
3. Research questions
The study is conducted to answer the following questions:
What difficulties do HPU 1
st
year English majors face in listening
comprehension?
What methods should be used to help HPU English major students
overcome their difficulties?
4. The significance of the study
Although listening has been one of the most common skills, there are few
studies on listening problems and factors affecting listening ability. The most
well known one is done by Boyle (1984) identifying and classifying factors
affecting listening comprehension. This thesis is designed to investigate
second year English major students’ obstacles and causes of those difficulties
especially it is done by a HPU student of English so it can be more subjective
and appropriate to the situation in HPU.
5. Scope of the study
The study limits at finding out the difficulties in learning listening skill of first
year English majors. Moreover, the researcher concentrates on studying
linguistic problems ( vocabulary, grammar, connected speech, stress and
intonation, accents, speech rate) and non-linguistic ones (skills, psychology,
environment, social and cultural knowledge ) accessed in the view of both
students and lecturers.
3
6. Methods of the study
The following methods are employed to collect data for the study:
Quantitative method (survey questionnaires were designed with
participants of English major students at HPU)
Direct observation and conservation
The major source of data for the study was students’ survey questionnaire
respondents while direct observation and conservation applied with an aim to
get more information for any confirmation of the findings.
7. Design of the study
This study consists of three main parts: the introduction, the development and
conclusion.
Part I: Introduction presents the rationales, aims, research questions,
significance, scope, method and design of the study.
Part II: Development is divided into 4 chapters:
Chapter 1: Theoretical background – deals with the concepts including
listening, types of listening, listening comprehension, listening
comprehension process, and potential difficulties in listening comprehension.
Chapter 2: Methodology – gives the situation analysis, subjects, data
collection instruments, data analysis – shows the detailed results of the survey
and a comprehensive analysis on the data collected, findings and discussions.
Chapter 4: Recommendations – refers to major findings, discussions and
offers some pre-listening activities for improving students’ listening
comprehension.
Part III is the Conclusion presenting an overview of the study, suggestion for
further research and limitations of the study.




REFERENCES
1. Anderson, Anne & Tony Lynch, (1988), Listening. Oxford: Oxford
University press.
2. Boyle, J.P (1984), Factors affecting listening comprehension ELF
Journal 39 (1), 34-8
3. Brown, G.(1986). Investigating listening comprehension in context.
Applied Linguistics
4. Brown, H.D. (2001). Teaching by principles, An Interactive Approach
to Language
5. Buck, Gary, (2001). Assessing listening. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
6. Canh, Le Van (2004). Understanding Foreign language teaching
Methodology: VNU Press
7. Dunkel, P (1986). Developing listening fluency in L2: Theoretical
principles and pedagogical considerations. The Modern Language
Journal, 10(2)
8. Dunkel, P (1991). Listening in the native and second/foreign language
9. Field, J. (1998) skill and strategies: Toward a new methodology for
listening ELT Journal
10. Flowerdew, J. and Miller, L. (1996), Students perceptions, problems
and strategies in second language lectures comprehension. RELC
Journal 23(2). 60-80
11. Kong, D. (1989). Second language listening comprehension: a
schematheoretic pespective Modern Language Journal.
12. Goh, C. (2002), Exploring listening comprehension tactics and their
interaction patterns
13. Mendelsohn, D.J. (1994). Learning to listen: A strategy-based
approach for the second-language learner. San Diego: Dominie Press
49
14. Morley, J. (1991), Listening comprehension in second/foreign
language instruction. In M.Celce-Murcia (Ed), Teaching English as a
second as foreign language (2
nd
ed.), (pp.81-106)
15. Numan, D., & Miller, L. (Eds). (1995), New ways in Teaching
Listening, Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speaker of Other
Languages, (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No.ED 388 054)
16. Petersom,p.w, (1991) A synthesis of methods for interactive listening.
In M.Celce-Murcia (Ed.). Teching English as a second/ foreign
language (2
nd
ed.) (pp.106-122)