Part A Introduction
1. Rationale
It is undeniable that English is a means of international communication in the fields
of science, technology, culture, education, economy and so on. It is not only the native
language of about 300 million of speakers around the world but also the official language
in many countries as well as second / foreign language in many nations in the world. In
Vietnam, where people are carrying out the modernization and industrialization, English
becomes more important. That is the reason why it has been made a compulsory subject in
the curriculum of almost all universities in Vietnam. In UFFP, English is taught in 270
lesson periods which constitutes a major of the whole curriculum. However, English
teaching is strongly influenced by the traditional methodology. Emphasis has been placed
on the mastery of forms and vocabulary, rather than the language in use. Start a new line in
learning English, listening seems to be the most difficult skill for first year students of
UFFP. There are a number of possible reasons for this.
First, this might be due to the fact that most students lack necessary strategies to
fulfill the listening tasks. Next, they often have difficulties in catching the meaning from
the tape. Besides, they are afraid of listening and have no head for it. These are among the
problems concerning non-major students of English as Brown (1994; p101) states:
“Teaching beginners is considered by many to be the most challenging level of language
instruction. Since students at this level have little or no prior knowledge of English on
which to build, the teacher and accompanying techniques and materials become a central
determiner in whether or not students accomplish their goals”.
Therefore, it is essential for teachers to find out some ways to help students
overcome their difficulties, and make them feel more comfortable when practicing
listening to English so as to assist them in approving their skills as well.
It is also essential to note that listening, as an efficient channel to provide
comprehensible input for learners, its teachers should be paid due attention to from the
very beginning.
All in all, the above has encouraged the writer of the thesis to carry out the study
entitled:



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- Pre-test and post-test;
- Interviews, observation and discussion.
6. Design of the study
This minor thesis consists of three parts:
Part A, Introduction, presents the rationale, hypothesis, aims, scope, methodology
and design of the study.
Part B, Development which is divided into 3 chapters:
Chapter 1 sets up theoretical background that is relevant to the purpose of the study.
Chapter 2 deals with analysis of the general learning situation at UFFP, learners’
difficulties in teaching and learning listening skills and the effects of using bottom-up
strategies in teaching listening skill to freshmen at UFFP.
Chapter 3 emphasizes the implications of the study in which suggestions for
improving listening skills to the students at UFFP are proposed.
Part C, Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the limitations
and provides some suggestions for further study.

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Part B Development
Chapter 1: Literature review
To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to the
reexamination of the concepts most relevant to the thesis’s topic. Firstly, an account of the
theory on listening is made. Secondly, the teaching of listening skills is discussed. Finally,
the listening difficulties for foreign language learners are referred to.
1. 1. Theory on listening
1.1.1. Definitions of listening
It is believed that listening is a significant and essential area of development in a
native language and in a second language. Therefore, there have been numerous definitions
of listening (by O’Malley, Chamost and Kupper (1989); Buck (2001)) which present

comprehension is not a skill which can be mastered once and for all and than ignored while
other skills are developed. There must be regular practice with increasingly difficult
materials” (Wilga, 1986, p157).
1.1.2. Types of listening
There are many different types of listening. We can classify these according to a
number of variables, including listening purposes, the role of the listener and the types of
text being listened to.
Real-life listening
Many students feel a big gap between listening activities in the classroom and actual
situation. This is because most listening materials including dialogues in text books are
very grammar-oriented and controlled in many ways. The speakers often speak with
perfectly controlled speech, voice, tone, accent and correct grammar. Whereas, in real-life
conversations learners encounter various people with different gender, age, accent, speed,
voice, tone. There may be improper grammar usage, incomplete sentences, redundancy,
contractions, overlap and so forth.
There are two ways which people often listen in real-life, they are “casual” and
“focus” listening.
“Casual” listening
A lot of students have a habit of listening to a radio while studying or the television
is on while we are doing something else. We listen with no particular purpose. This kind of

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listening is called “casual” listening, the typical feature is that we do not listen closely and
intentionally, thus we may not remember much of what we hear or nothing is left in our
mind.
“Focus” listening
“Focus” listening happens when listening for a particular purpose to get the
information we need to know or to study the language. In this case we often listen with
much attention, but we do not listen to every thing with equal concentration. There is an
association between listener expectation and purpose and his comprehension. If the listener

Intensive listening is the careful, focused listening to a short passage for detailed
information or full comprehension, for example, listening to a dialogue on the tape to study
its structures, intonation patterns in an English class.
Extensive listening
Extensive listening is freer and more general listening to natural language for general
ideas, not for a particular detail and not necessary under the teacher’s direct guidance. The
listening passage for extensive listening can be long or short. The language that is used in
the type of listening is often within the students’ current ability so that they find it pleasing
and interesting when they are listening. With this type of listening, students are not
reinforcing a structure or practicing a grammar point linked to the rest of the course.
1.1.3. Listening process
A variety insights into the listening process have been developed in the past 40
years by Richards (1983); Anderson (1983; 1985); Wolvin and Coalky (1985); Underwood
(1989); Buck (2000). Listening to spoken language has been acknowledged in second
language theory to consist of active and complex process that determines the content and
level of what is comprehended. These processes use utterance as the basis for constructing
meaning based propositional presentations that are identified initially in short term
memory and stored in long term memory. Anderson (1983; 1985) differentiates
comprehension into three interrelated and recursive process: perceptual processing, parsing
and utilizing. During a single listening event the processes may flow one into the other,
recycle and may be modified based on what occurred in prior or subsequent processes.

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Bang and Ngoc (2001, p38-39) divided the listening process into three stages
namely perception-cracking the code, decoding-making sense of the message, prediction
and selection. In the second stage of decoding-making sense of the message they describe
listening process the following model.
They argued that stages 1 to 6 follow each other very quickly and that the processing
time available within STM may be very short indeed. Stages 2, 3, 4 and 5 involve not only
the recognition of lexical meaning but also the perception of grammatical relationships as

and…
Figure 1.1: Model of the process of listening comprehension (Bang and Ngoc, 2001, p38)
groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the long term
memory and the meaning is extracted from them. When the meaning is grasped the actual
words of the spoken discourse are generally forgotten and only the meaning retained.
Therefore, the listeners usually remember the meaning rather than the exact words spoken
when he has to recall what has been said. The basis of listening comprehension is the
ability to recognize and select the specific details in the discourse. It, of course, needs a
certain time for the learners to become used to listening and process some familiar
utterances more automatically.
On the other hand, the conceptions of bottom-up and top-down processes in
comprehension are mentioned by some authors such as Lynch (1988), Rubin (1994),
Nunan (1999). According to them, bottom-up process refers to the listening process that
starts with discriminating sounds, identifying words and comprehending grammatical
structures and build eventually to comprehension of meaning. This is a somewhat
mechanistic or "data-given" (Brown, 1994) view of processing and has been the focus in
some styles of teaching.
Top-down process may be described as holistic or "conceptual driven" in that they
focus on the overall meaning of the passage and the application of schemata. Schemata are
mental frameworks based on past experiences which can be applied to help us interpret the
current situation. Inferring ideas, guessing words’ meaning and identify topics are all
examples of top-down processing. As such, bottom-up process sees language
comprehension as a process of passing through a number of consecutive sequences or
levels and the out put of each sequence becomes the input for the next higher one. That is
the reason why Buck (2001) considers it one way street.
From these ideas, it is useful for students to recognize the importance of both these
types of processing and for teacher to arrange opportunities to work on both aspects.
Generally, bottom-up exercises are more useful for beginners because at this level they
have limited language knowledge, thus, little of what they hear can be automatically
processed. They need to focus on details of what they hear and given limitation of working

appearance of Communicative Language Teaching, teaching listening seems to be more of
meaningful to students due to the fact that they have chance to develop their listening skills
and other language skills as well.
1.2.2. Bottom-up techniques in teaching listening

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Techniques are defined as the specific activities, exercises or devices used in the
language classroom for realizing lesson objectives (Bang and Ngoc (2002)). They are
characterized by the resources in terms of time, space, equipments used by the teacher;
interactional patterns observed in lessons; tactics and strategies used by teachers and
learners.
Bottom-up is the language learning that proceeds from the most basic blocks of
language, such as words, and then proceeding to more complex structures and finally to
meaning. Listening for exact phrases or words would be considered a bottom-up listening.
Studying individual grammatical structures or sentence structures would be bottom-up.
Brown (1994, p260) emphasized that bottom-up techniques typically focus on sounds,
words, intonation, grammar structures, and other components of spoken language.
Generally, bottom-up exercise will be more useful for beginners.
Peterson (1991, p114-121) suggested several techniques for teaching listening
comprehension. Below are some kinds of bottom-up exercises for beginners.
Goal Example
Discriminating
between intonation
contour in sentences
Listen to a sequence of sentence patterns with either rising
or falling intonation. Place a check in column 1 (rising) or
column (falling), depending on the pattern you hear.
Discriminating
between phonemes
Listening to pairs of words. Some pairs differ in their final

listening passage they are going to listen, arouses students’ interest and provides students
with the purposes of listening.
Underwood (1989, p.30) defined pre-listening stage as follows: “Before listening,
students should be "turn in" so that they know what to expect, both in general and
particular tasks. This kind of preparatory work is generally described as “Pre-listening
work” or just “Pre- listening” ”.
As for her, pre-listening work can consist of a whole range of activities, including:
the teacher giving background information, the students reading something relevant, the
students looking at pictures, discussion of the topic/situation, a question and answer
session, written exercises, following the instructions for the while listening activity and
consideration of how the while-listening will be done.
These activities may provide an opportunity for students to gain some knowledge
which help them to follow the listening text. Moreover, each of these activities help
students focus their mind on the topic by narrowing down the things that students expect to
hear. However, the teacher when choosing an activity should consider the factors which
Underwood (1989) mentions: The time, the material is available or not, the interest of the
class and the teacher, the place in which the work is being carried out, the nature and the

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content of the listening text itself. If one of these is forgotten, the whole process of activity
can be failed. She especially emphasizes on the importance of the nature of the listening
text, because each listening text itself has an especially appropriate type of activities. When
the teacher pays attention to this factor properly, the activity chosen for students will be
more specific and effective.
While-listening
The while-listening stage involves of activities that students are asked to do during
the time they are listening to the text. The purpose of while listening activities is to help
students develop their skills of eliciting messages from spoken language. Rixon (1986)
pointed out the purposes of while-listening stage is to challenge and guide students to
handle the information and the message from the listening text. Activities of this stage

some students have failed to understand or miss parts of the passage.
Another purpose of post listening activities is to expand the topic or the language of
the listening text. Students are asked to deal with activities which are more or less general
language learning activities. Sometimes, this does not mean that they should not be done,
but it should be recognized they do not give practice in listening skill, although the
additional language learning can well enable students to listen more successfully in the
future.
The fourth purpose is to give students opportunity to consider the manner and
attitude of the speaker in the listening text. This is also important because the listeners can
see the aims of the speakers based on his/her attitude.
Additionally, the general factors listed in pre-listening and while-listening,
Underwood (1989) indicates that the attention should be given to the following factors in
selecting post-listening activities:
• the amount of language work the teacher wish to do in relation to the particular
listening text.
• the time which is allowed to do post-listening
• the speaking, reading or writing skills should be included in the post-listening
work.
• the students should work in pairs or in groups.
• the chosen activity should be make motivating.
It can be seen that the learning language programme consists four skills: listening,
speaking, reading, and writing. In fact, speaking, writing and reading can arise from

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listening, especially from post-listening work. The order and organization of a language
lesson are usually not decided at the same time integrating these into other language skill
work. For instance, the students listen and respond in writing, the teacher ask students to
answer orally. Therefore, listening exercises always involve in the rest three skills.
1.2.4. Teacher’s role in teaching listening
As many students feel afraid of listening, teachers should be a guide to help them and

problems as follows: (1) lack of control over speech at which speakers speak; (2) not
being able to get thing repeated; (3) the listeners’ limited vocabulary; (4) failure to
recognize the “signal”; (5) problem of interpretation; (6) inability to concentrate; (7)
established learning habits. She saw these problems as being related to learner’s different
backgrounds; such as their culture and education. She pointed out that students whose
culture and education included a strong story telling and oral communication tradition are
generally better as listening comprehension than those from a reading and book-based
cultural and educational background. Moreover, learners whose native language possesses
the stress and intonation feature similar to those of English are likely to have less trouble
than the learners who L1 is based on different rhythms and tones.
Under these assumptions, Vietnamese learners appear to operate under the least-
optimal English language learning circumstances and therefore face many difficulties in
listening comprehension.
Goh (2002) investigated listening comprehension problems in students in college
EFL studies. Findings include ten listening comprehension problems in relation to three
cognitive processing phases: perceptions, parsing and utilization proposed by Anderson
(1983; 1985). First, in the perception stage, learners revealed that their most difficulties as
“do not recognize words they know”; “neglect the next part when thinking about meaning”;
“can not chunk streams of speech”; “miss the beginning of the texts”; and “unable to
concentrate”. In parsing stage, Goh (2002) found that listener complained of problems
such as “quickly forget what’s heard”, “unable to form a mental representation from
words heard”, and “do not understand subsequent part of input because of early problem”.
Third in the utilization stage, “understand the words but not the intended message” and
“confused about the key ideas in the message” were mentioned. These reported difficulties
partially reflect Underwood’s view on L2/FL listening problems.
Yagang (1994) attributed the difficulties of listening comprehension to four sources:
(1) the message; (2) the speaker; (3) the listener and (4) the physical setting. Higgins

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(1995) studies Omani students’ problems in listening comprehension and find the factors

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written text. Other measures of difficulty in listening comprehension relied on some
undefined and unspecified inherent qualities of the tasks.
The listening passages, thus should be modified, or simplified for teaching purpose,
and the determination of levels of difficulties was often arbitrary or subjective (Lynch,
1988: 178).
1.4. Summary
The chapter has presented the relevant literature, which has helped to form the
theoretical and conceptual framework for the study.
Firstly, a number of concepts about listening comprehension are given according to
some leading scholars and then the types of listening, listening process are presented.
Secondly, the teaching of listening is discussed which includes some common
methods of teaching listening, three stages of a listening lesson and the teacher’s role. In
the listening stage, each stage plays a different role and carries certain activities to
complete the listening task in an effective way. However, the activities in three stages
should not be isolated in a listening lesson; they always have close relationship with one
another.
Lastly, the common problems faced by learners in learning listening should be
taken into consideration which can be the foundation for investigating listening difficulties
of the participants in the study.

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Chapter 2: The study
The study attempts to investigate the difficulties encountered by first year students as
well as their needs in learning listening to English and evaluate to what extent the bottom-
up techniques can help first year students at UFFP to improve their listening skills. In order
to achieve the mentioned aims, a survey questionnaire and two tests were conducted to
collect data for the study. In addition, interviews and discussion with teachers and students
were also carried out.
2.1. The setting of the study

overcome the difficulties.
The fact is that not all the teacher uses the same techniques and strategies to teach
listening skills. Some of them choose to use “giving background information and new
words” as the most effective techniques, other may take some other techniques such as
“choose authentic and suitable listening texts” as the most effective one. Some teachers
said that teaching students how to listen is also an important factor because they see that
most of students lack needed strategies for listening. The teachers have tried to choose the
activities that are suitable for their students. It is good for students to get used to as many
types of activities as possible.
2.1.3. Resources and materials
As far as the materials are concerned, Lifelines textbooks, workbooks and CDs
(Elementary and Pre-intermediate) are chosen for teaching GE. In this series of book, four
basic language skills are equally developed. The teaching of English lessons takes place in
two language laboratories which are well-equipped with personal headphones, computers,
projectors, televisions, DVD players. It is a good place for teaching a foreign language.
Besides using the tape in the textbooks, teachers often choose the listening task for
extra practice from other sources. The most commonly used references for extra practice
are Listen Carefully, Listen to this, Let’s Listen, New Headway (Elementary and Pre-
intermediate). Teachers also adopt listening tasks from website for students to practice
their pronunciation, word recognition.
In their first year, students will finish Lifelines Elementary in 90 periods. The book
consists of 14 units. Each unit has one listening session. These listening sessions are under
the tendency of theme-based and task-based approaches. The book provides different wide

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rage of different listening texts and tasks at each stage. Generally, the topic of the listening
is of students’ interest. However, there are some listening texts, according to students’
opinion, containing many new words and the speakers speak too fast for them to follow
such as a listening text in unit 2, 7, 9. It is possible to say that no textbook is completely
perfect and no text book can suit every learner’s need and interest. Therefore, teachers

Step 1: The investigator taught two classes for two weeks and gave them a listening
test as a pre-test and then delivered them a questionnaire to get their ideas.
Step 2: The investigator taught them for the whole term which last from January of
2008 to May 2008. During that time, the control group was taught listening skills under
normal conditions, whereas bottom-up techniques were applied to the experimental one.
Step 3: Ask the two groups to do the post-test which is used as a mean to measure the
effects of using bottom-up techniques in teaching listening skill. Informal discussions with
students were carried out in the experimental class to get their opinion on listening skill.
2.5. The application of bottom-up techniques in listening class
Firstly, when teaching the experimental group, the teacher will not follow the exact
orders suggested in the textbook. Instead of introducing grammar structures after the
students have finished the listening tasks as suggested in the textbook, she will explain new
vocabulary, grammar structures at pre-listening stage.
Secondly, in while-listening stage, after students have finished the listening tasks, the
teacher will play the tape again and pausing at sentences or phrases that students may not
understand, she will explain whether it is contraction, short forms, reduced form, and
colloquial patterns and so on to help students pick out manageable clusters of words.
Because the listening passages in the textbooks are not very long, so the teacher will
help students to listening again and again to make them familiar with the native speaker’s
accent, speech rate, help them to deal with difficulties that might occur in the listening
session. Listening for exact phrases or words also can be done. Tape scripts can be used by
students if necessary.
2.6. The data analysis
2.6.1. Analysis of the questionnaire results

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The aim of this questionnaire was to collect data relating to students listening
difficulties, their personal views of possible causes and activities which they desire to do
during the listening lesson. The questionnaire consists of 13 questions; the information
gathered by means of these questions is presented and analyzed as follows.

discussing with the students about the materials, some revealed that some listening lessons
were easy enough while others lessons were too difficult. They often complained that the
speech rate of native speakers was too fast to follow. In addition, others said that listening
without pictures, videos made it more difficult. In all, the students had different attitudes
towards the same kind of material exploited in listening classes. To put it simply, students
take the spoken input and process them in difficult ways depending on their listening
abilities and consequently, their contributions to listening classes are not equal or differ
from person to person.

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2.6.1.4. Helpful activities to students before listening
Options Results (%)
A. Learning pronunciation and meaning of new words 61,4%
B. Brainstorming, discussing the listening topic in pairs or groups 11,4%
C. Giving back ground information 14,3%
D. Answering relevant questions 12,9%
E. Other ideas 2,8%
Table 2.1: Helpful activities to students before listening
Question 5 was aimed at identifying activities which are helpful to students before
listening to the tape. The results in the table show that a large number of the informants
(61,4%) agreed that learning new words and their meaning before listening was a helpful
activity. When being asked why the students preferred learning pronunciation and the
meaning of new words, many of them said that it could make their listening less difficult
and stressful. They also added that, at the beginning level, they had limited vocabulary,
grammar, so it was hard for them to discuss the topic in pairs or in groups in the target
language. That is the reason why only 11,4% of the informant showed their expectation to
brainstorm and discuss the listening topic. Giving back ground information wad approved
by 14,3%, meanwhile 12,9% of them prefered answer relevant questions. From students’
opinion, teachers at UFFP should focus more on students’ need in order to help them to
become better listeners. As Lewis and Hill (1992) pointed out that materials and students’