VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES
PHẠM THỊ PHƯỢNG
THE DIFFICULTIES OF NON - MAJOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH AT
HAIPHONG FOREIGN LANGUAGE CENTER - HAIPHONG UNIVERSITY
IN LEARNING LISTENING SKILL AND SOME SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN CỦA SINH VIÊN KHÔNG CHUYÊN ANH TẠI TRUNG
TÂM NGOẠI NGỮ - ĐẠI HỌC HẢI PHÕNG TRONG VIỆC HỌC KỸ NĂNG
NGHE VÀ MỘT SỐ GIẢI PHÁP ĐỀ XUẤT
M.A.MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS
Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60140111 HANOI - 2014 i
DECLARATION

Honestly, the thesis has been resulted from my own research. Therefore, all the
statistic given must be reliable. Moreover, all the reference information was quoted
or summarized with the clear original sources which have been shown in the
references part.
I truthfully assure that the thesis has been completed by myself.
Hanoi, 2014
Phạm Thị Phượng ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I would like to send my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Prof.
Dr. Hoàng Văn Vân, who guided me throughout the accomplishment of this research.
If it had not been for his kind guidance, insightful comments and valuable support, my
thesis would not have been completed.
I also owe my gratitude to my family, who has always been very supportive
with my study.
In addition, I am grateful to all my colleagues and students at Haiphong Foreign
Language Center, who have encouraged me and shared me useful information. Their
cooperation helped me a lot to finish the thesis.
Personally, I highly appreciate all the assistance. I am greatly interested in this
study as it is of great help for me. However, I am responsible for any remaining iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 3.1: Purposes of learning English at HFLC
Figure 3.2: Learners' time distribution in practicing four language skills
Figure 3.3: Students‟ attitude toward listening skill
Figure 3.4: Students‟ time allocation for self-study
Figure 3.5: What the learners do before and while listening
Figure 3.6: Learners‟ assessment on the listening tasks in the textbook
Figure 3.7: Learners‟ interest in different listening activities
Figure 3.8: Learners‟ interest in extra listening activities
Figure 3.9: The objective factors affecting learners' learning the listening skill
Table 1: Problems from the listeners
Table 2: Problems from the listening material
Table 3: Problems from environment factors

2.1.2. Resources and materials 11
2.1.3. Teachers and Teaching methods 13
2.2. Data collection. 13
2.2.1. Participants 14
2.2.2. Data collection instruments 14
CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 15
3.1. Intended research contents 15
3.1.1. Purposes to learn English at HFLC 15
3.1.2. Students‟ attitude toward listening skill 16
3.1.3. Students‟ strategies in listening 18
3.1.4. Learners‟ assessment on the listening task in the text book 20
3.1.5. Problems experienced by learners in learning English listening
skill 23
3.1.5.1. Problems from listeners 23
3.1.5.2. Problems from the listening materials 25
3.1.5.3. Problems from environment factors 27
3.2. Summary 30
3.3. Suggested solution improving the teaching of English listening
skill to learners at Haiphong Foreign Language Center 32
3.3.1. Recommendations for teaching English listening skill for non-
major students at HFLC 32
3.3.1.1. Improving teacher‟s classroom techniques 33
3.3.1.2. Training students to become active listeners 34
3.3.1.3. Developing the listening materials 36
3.3.1.3.1. Adapting and improving listening materials 36 vii
3.3.1.3.2. Choosing supplementary listening materials 37
3.3.1.4. Improving teaching facilities and resources 37

Foreign Language Center and from what I observed many classes at HFLC, it can be
found that many students failed in practicing listening skill. Some of the students
complained that they were not confident with listening tasks so they could hardly
understand the spoken messages
Realizing the problem from teaching experiences, I have decided to carry out a
study namely “The difficulties of non-major students of English at Haiphong
Foreign Language Center-Haiphong University in learning listening skill and some
suggested solutions”.
2. Aim of the study and research questions
The aim of the study is to probe difficulties experienced by students at
Haiphong Foreign Language Center (HFLC) in learning listening skill and to offer
solutions to help students overcome these difficulties. 2
To achieve this overall aim, the following research questions are raised for
exploration:
1. What are the problems experienced by learners in learning English listening
skill at HFLC?
2. How can the teacher help learners overcome the difficulties?
3. Scope of the study
The study is limited to finding out the difficulties that the learners at HFLC
cope with in learning English listening skill.
The objects of the study are the learners at HFLC aged from 15 to over 50.
They are studying the second of three levels of English at HFLC. In this center, the
textbook that the learners use is New English File-Pre intermediate (Clive Oxenden,
Christina Latham-Koenig, Paul Seligson). This textbook is intended to develop
learners‟ four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
4. Method of the study
To fulfill the above aim, both qualitative and quantitative methods are used.

find out the current state of learning listening skill at HFLC. Chapter 3 offers some
solutions to improve learning English listening skill for learners at HFLC.
Part III: The Conclusion summarizes what has been studied and makes some
recommendations for further research. 4
PART II
DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
Listening plays an important role in second language instruction for several
reasons. If you cannot hear it well you will find it hard to communicate or perhaps you
cannot pass your listening examination (Rost, 1994) It should be noted that the
learner‟s perception of their listening problem and strategies can affect their
comprehension both positively and negatively (Wenden, 1986). Thus, in order to help
students improve their listening skill, it is necessary to find out their listening
problems, what cause them and how to solve them.
1.1. What are listening and listening skill?
1.1.1. Definitions
In this study, listening is listening comprehension. It is a significant and
essential area of development in a native language and in a second language.
Therefore, there have been many definitions of listening.
Gary Buck (2001: 31), for example, points out that “listening comprehension is
an active process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to
the incoming sound” in which “a number of different types of knowledge are involved:
both linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge”.
On the other hand, Wolvin and Coakley (1985) see listening as “the process of

Failing to understand spoken language, people may miss important information
presented to them or respond in a funny way. So training in listening is really
necessary. It helps students make the transition from classroom English to the real-life
English more easily and effectively.
From the point of view of psychology, listening is a necessary skill to facilitate
autonomous learning and encourage learners‟ independence. Listening is also an
important form of communication. This is the reason why “We were given two ears
but only one month; this is because God knew that listening was twice as hard as
talking”. People need to practice and acquire skills to be good listeners.
1.1.3. Potential difficulties in listening skill
1.1.3.1. Listening problems 6
In her book entitled Teaching Listening, Mary Underwood (1989), points out
the following listening problems:
* Lack of control over the speech at which speakers speak
This means the learners cannot control how quickly the speaker speaks. They
feel that the utterances disappear before they can sort them out. “They are so busy
working out the meaning of one part of what they hear that they miss the next part. Or
they simply ignore a whole chunk because they fail to sort it all out quickly enough”.
One of the reasons for this is that learners cannot keep up with the speech and they
often try to understand everything they hear. When they fail in sorting out the meaning
of one part, their following will be missed. This can lead to the ignorance of the whole
chunk of discourse. Obviously, they fail to listen. One method of tackling this is to
show students how to identify the important words that they need to listen out for. In
English this is shown in an easy-to-spot way by which words in the sentence are
stressed (spoken louder and longer). Another is to give them one very easy task that
you know they can do even if they do not get 90% of what is being said to build up
their confidence, such as identifying the name of the famous person or spotting

and teach them how they can do the same in their own time with vocabulary lists,
graded readers, monolingual dictionary use, etc.
(4) Not recognizing the words that have been known. The common reasons
why students might not recognize the words include not distinguish between different
sounds in English, or conversely trying to listen for differences that do not exist. Other
reasons are problems with word stress, sentence stress, and sound changes when words
are spoken together in natural speech such as weak forms. What all this boils down to
is that sometimes pronunciation work is the most important part of listening
comprehension skills building.

* Inability to concentrate
This can be caused by a number of things but in listening work it is a major
problem because even the shortest break in attention can seriously impair the
comprehension of the whole process of listening. Whether the topic is interesting or
not, students sometimes find tired and unable to concentrate. The outside factors may 8
well make concentration difficult, too. For instance the bad quality machines, poor
recording, unfavorable rooms for the use of recorded materials, street or next-door
class noise…all of these facts prevent strongly to the concentration of the result, they
cannot get full of the message intended.
* Not being able to catch information repeated
This type of difficulty connects with what the speakers say or “input” while the
listeners are not always in the positions to get the repetition. This is the case when
learners join in conversation outside the classroom. Repetition cannot be asked for
when listening to the radio or watching television. Even in the classroom, when
listening to the lectures, learners cannot frequently order the lecturers to repeat the
utterance as many times as they wish. Therefore, the teacher can be solved only when
learners are given the opportunity to control their own machines and proceed in

1.1.3.2. Language problems
Anne Anderson and Tony Lynch (1988: 37) point out that problems in listening
comprehension encountered by L2 learners created by primarily linguistic knowledge
though language system may not always be the principal cause of comprehension
difficulty. They explain that one obvious way in which input can be more or less
complex is in terms of syntactic structures for ESL learners. It is understandable as
learners adopt a target language that possesses certain characteristics of ESL far
different from their native one in terms of grammatical structures, lexicon, vocabulary
and its mechanism meanwhile listening is most closely related to mechanics which
refer to basic sounds of letters syllables, pronunciations of words, intonation and
stress. From another perspective, Scarcella and Oxford (1992) maintain that listeners
comprehend spoken messages either through isolated sounds or recognition within the
sound stream phrase or formula recognition, clause or sentence, and extended speech
comprehension. That means ESL students operate simultaneously in one or two of
these areas depending on many factors, one of which is proficiency level. Nunan
(1989) clarifies that the difficulties of language learning usually lie in the difficulty of
the materials used as the content for the comprehension activities, and was often
borrow from the readability measures for written texts. With this provision of the 10
reviewed literature including the definition, the process of listening comprehension
and its potential difficulties, the researchers hope that these serve as a base in
understanding to continue with other chapters related to them. 11
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY
2.1. An overview of the current situations of teaching and learning English
listening skill at Haiphong Foreign Language Center

there are great individual differences, which depend on effort, attitudes, amount of
exposure, quality of teaching, and plain talent, but there seems to be a gap for the best
adults in the best circumstances.
Despite some clear distinctions in learners‟ age as shown above, most of the
learners here are from 15 to 35. They are either students of upper secondary schools or
universities, who need English for their study or future jobs, or employees at offices
which require English for the accomplishment of their jobs, or workers at foreign
invested companies, in which English is the key factor for successful communication.
The learners are, therefore, strongly activated.
With learners of various ages, language competence, learning purposes, etc., it
is hard for teachers at the center to find the best way to teach them, especially when
four skills of English are interwoven and required to be taught simultaneously by only
one teacher.
An HFLC, English is taught mainly at three levels: elementary (level A), pre-
intermediate (level B), and intermediate (level C). The main textbook is New English
File by Clive Oxenden, Christina Latham-Koenig, Paul Seligson. The purpose of this
English textbook is to develop all four language skills such as listening, speaking,
reading and writing and to improve language knowledge like phonetics, grammar and
vocabulary for learners.
Each classroom is equipped with a board, a CD player, four fans and fourteen
tables. There are some high-quality classrooms which have a projector and an air-
conditioner. Each class consists of more than twenty students. Listening lesson is
usually taught in normal conditions. Each lesson lasts an hour and a half. It is often
taught in combination with the other skills such as reading, speaking or writing skill. It
seems that listening is always the most difficult and frustrating for learners. As a
consequence, practicing this skill always takes much time and requires more
concentration both from the teacher and the learners. At first, listening to English
seems to be impossible for the learners. Because, here, they get started with English
systematically for the first time or their knowledge of the English language is still
poor.

countries, etc. They are also in different classes. Each class has at least twenty and no
more than twenty-five learners. 14
The second group under study consists of the teachers at HFLC. These teachers
have been teaching here for more than two years. Their ages range from 26 to 34. Four
of them have obtained M.A degrees in English; another teacher has obtained a B.A.
degree from Haiphong Private University. They are active, creative and enthusiastic
teachers.
2.2.2. Data collection instruments
To arrive at the reliable data, a survey was conducted and questionnaires were
administered to 75 learners of 3 level B classes. The questionnaire used as instrument
for data collection was designed to get information about:
1. The students‟ purposes to learn English at HFLC (Q. 1)
2. The students‟ attitude toward listening skill (Q. 2 - 3)
3. The students‟ strategies in listening (Q. 4 - 5)
4. The students‟ assessment on the listening tasks in the text book New English
File Pre-intermediate (Q. 6 - 9)
5. The problems experienced by the students in learning English listening skill
(Q.10 - 11)
All the questions in the survey were designed with a hope that the researcher
can get students‟ opinions about their English listening skills and their attitudes,
motivation and other information about the textbook, listening tasks or teachers‟
teaching methods. These questions were close to the techniques that the researcher
expects to be appropriate for the improvement of students‟ listening ability.
Additionally, interviews were used for the teachers. Five teachers who have
been teaching the level B of this program were interviewed directly about their own
ways of teaching listening to the learners, and their comments on their students in
learning that skill. Also, the interviewer would like them to suggest some

12%
applying for jobs work requirement improving English at school Other purposes

Figure 3.1. Purposes to learn English at HFLC 16
The chart on the purposes to learn English at HFLC gives a positive sign that
all of the learners here have their own motivation to learn this foreign language. It is
one of the most basic elements that encourage the learners to work hard and get
success in learning English.
3.1.2. Students’ attitude toward listening skill
How do the students learn the listening skill in English? And how do they
distribute their time in practicing the four skills of language learning: listening,
speaking, reading and writing? The following chart shows the differences in time
distribution among them
51%
16%
13%
20%
Listening
Speaking
Reading
Writing

Figure 3.2. Learners' time distribution in practice four language skills

As can be seen from the chart, most students spend their time practicing
listening skill (51%). It means that students have awareness of learning communicative
language so that they can apply it when they need while speaking (16%), reading skill