VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ LAN

ACTIVATING PRIOR KNOWLEDGE IN
IMPROVING LISTENING SKILLS OF HIGH
SCHOOL STUDENTS KÍCH HOẠT KIẾN THỨC NỀN ĐỂ NÂNG CAO KĨ NĂNG NGHE CHO
HỌC SINH TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG M.A. Minor Programme Thesis Field : English Teaching Methodology
Code : 60.14.10

Code : 60.14.10
Supervisor : Dr, Huỳnh Anh Tuấn
Hanoi – 2013

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DECLARATION

I, hereby, certify the thesis entitled “Activating prior knowledge in
improving listening skills of high school students” is the result of my own research
for the Minor Degree of Master of Arts at the University of Language and
International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, and this thesis has not,
wholly or partially, been submitted for any degree at any other universities or
institutions.

Hanoi, 2013 NGUYEN THI LAN
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to all those who have
supported me in doing this independent study.
Firstly, I would like to express my greatest appreciation to my supervisor,
Dr. Huynh Anh Tuan for his valuable time and useful guidance towards the
completion of this study.

Sharing the same concern, this research aims at providing some information relating
to the perception of activating prior knowledge in improving listening skill to high
school students. Firstly, the author briefly reviewed some literature concerning this
issue. Then data were collected by two instruments, namely questionnaires for both
students and teachers, and class observations. Nine teachers and 221 students in
grade 10 and 11 were sampled. The Microsoft Excel was undertaken to analyze the
data. The final results indicated that the teachers and students had inadequate
knowledge about the role of activating prior knowledge in listening lessons. The
study also showed the difficulties that students encounter due to lack of prior
knowledge in listening. Lastly, the study offered some implications for activating
students’ prior knowledge in teaching and learning listening skill. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
Declaration ………………………… …………………………… i

CHAPTER 2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
2.1. Research questions 16
2.2. Research approach…………………………………………… 16
2.3. Data collection methods……………………………………….…… 16
2.3.1. The questionnaire for the teachers……………………………….… 17
2.3.2. The questionnaire for the students………………………….… 17
2.3.3. Classroom observation 18
2.4. Data collection procedure
2.4.1. The setting of the study 18
2.4.2. Participants’ background information……………………………….19
2.4.2.1. The teachers……………………………………………… 19
2.4.2.2. The students……………………………………………….… 19
2.4. 3. Procedure…………………………………………………… 20
2.5. Data analytical units 20
CHAPTER3. DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSIONS
3.1. DATA ANALYSIS OF THE TEACHERS’ SURVEY QUESTIONAIRE AND
THEIR PERFORMANCE IN CLASSROOM OBSERVATION SHEET.
3.1. 1.The teachers’ attitudes toward the difficulties that high school students
encounter when their prior knowledge is not activated 21
3.1.2. The situation of applying the techniques of activating prior knowledge
in the pre-listening stage at Giao Thuy B High School 23
3.1.3. Teachers’ comments on the roles of activating prior knowledge in pre-
listening activities… ……………………… 26
3.2. DATA ANALYSIS OF THE STUDENTS’ SURVEY QUESTIONAIRE AND
THEIR PERFORMANCE IN CLASSROOM OBSERVATION SHEETS.
3.2.1. The students’ attitudes toward the difficulties that they encounter when
their prior knowledge is not activated 28
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3.2.2. The students’ attitudes toward the situation of applying the techniques of
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Tables
Table 1: Teachers’ remarks about activities used to motivate students’ prior
knowledge in the pre listening stage (appendix 3, page V)
Table 2: Students’ attitudes toward activities teachers carry out in the pre listening
stage. (appendix 3, page V)
Figures
Figure 1: Teachers’ comments on the difficulties in activating prior knowledge in
pre-listening stage (appendix 4, page VI)
Figure 2: Teachers’ comments on the difficulties students encounter if their prior
knowledge is not activated in the pre-listening stage (appendix 4, page VI)
Figure 3: Teachers’ comments on the frequency of activating student’s prior
knowledge (appendix 4, page VII)
Figure 4: Teachers’ remarks about the problems when motivating prior knowledge
(appendix 4, page VII)
Figure 5: Teachers’ remarks about the importance of activating prior knowledge in
the pre-listening stage. (appendix4, page VIII)
Figure 6: Teachers’ remarks about the benefits of activating students’ prior
knowledge. (appendix4, page VIII)
Figure 7: Students’ opinions whether it difficult when listening to a lesson if prior
knowledge is not activated or not. (appendix4, page IX)
Figure 8: Students’ opinions about the difficulties students encounter when their
prior knowledge is not activated. (appendix4, page IX)
Figure 9: Students’ attitudes toward the currency of being motivated prior
knowledge in the pre listening stage. (appendix4, page X)
Figure 10: Students’ attitudes toward the duration of the pre listening stage for
activating prior knowledge. (appendix4, page X)
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knowledge in improving listening skills of high school students”.
2. Aims and objectives of the study
The study aims at helping high school students improve their listening skills by
activating their prior knowledge. In order to achieve the aim, the study has to fulfill
the following objectives:
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- investigating problems that SLL in general and high school students in
particular encounter while listening when prior knowledge is not activated in the
pre-listening stage
- exploring the process of activating prior knowledge by the teachers and
students in the pre-listening stage at Giao Thuy B High School
- finding out teachers’ and students’ comments on the role of activating prior
knowledge in the development of listening skill
- giving some suggestions for successful implementation of activating students’
background knowledge to help ease the difficulty of listening
3. Scope of the study
Various forms of support and factors have a valuable role to play in teaching
listening skills but the researcher’s particular concern in this research is activating
prior knowledge in pre- listening activities which interferes with the students’
ability to demonstrate the level of listening comprehension. More specifically, the
author concentrates on the difficulties in pre-listening activities that teachers and
students at Giao Thuy B high school have to cope with. Based on that, some
recommendations are given for teachers to improve their pre-listening activities to
activate students’ background knowledge to cope with their listening problems in
the class.
4. Significance of the study
As one of the uninvestigated issues in teaching listening for high school students in
Vietnam, the present study on activating prior knowledge in pre-listening stage will
make certain contributions to the development of listening skills among high school

conclusion.
Part I: Introduction. This part presents the rationale, the aim and objectives of the
study, scope of the study, method of the study and design of the study.
Part II: Development. It is divided into 4 chapters:
Chapter 1: Theoretical background and literature review. This chapter discusses the
theoretical background and previous studies relevant to the study.
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Chapter 2: Research methodology. It discusses the research questions, the approach
adopted, the methods of collecting data, the data collection procedure (timeline),
and data analysis methods.
Chapter 3: Data analysis and discussion. It shows the detailed results of the surveys
and covers a comprehensive analysis on the data collected from questionnaires and
class observations.
Chapter 4: Findings and recommendations. This part shows the findings and
suggests some techniques in activating prior knowledge
Part III: Conclusions. This part includes a review of the study, suggestions for
further research and limitations of the study.
Most of the students at Giao Thuy B High School have been learning English since
they were 6
th
grade students. That is to say they have had four years of learning
English at lower secondary school. However, their levels of English proficiency
vary from individual to individual.

input, construct meaning from passages, and relate what they hear to existing
knowledge” (O’Malley, Chamot and Kupper, 1989: 418). In order to construct the
message that the speaker intends, the hearer must “actively contribute knowledge
from both linguistic and nonlinguistic sources” (Buck, 2001: 1-2). Anderson and
Lynch (1988:35) also share this point of view that the role of the successful listener
has to be thought of as an “active model builder”. The listener plays an important
part in the process, by activating various types of knowledge, and by applying what
he knows to what he hears and trying to understand what the speaker means.
In conclusion, listening comprehension has been defined in many different
ways. Nevertheless, the active role of listeners has been emphasized in every
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definition. The effective listener actively engages in the process of comprehension,
not passively receive or record anymore.
1.1.2. The processes of listening comprehension
Schema is the guiding structure in the comprehension process. Schema is
defined by Anderson and Lynch (1988: 14) as “a mental structure, consisting of
relevant individual knowledge, memory and experience, which allow us to
incorporate what we learn into what we know”. If the incoming information is
matched with the schema, then the listeners have succeeded in comprehending the
text; if they are not compatible, either the information or the schema will be
discarded or modified. The principle of schema leads to two basic modes of
information processing: bottom-up processing and top-down processing. These two
processing intersect to develop an interactive processing. Thus, models for listening
process fall into three types: bottom-up processing, top-down processing and
interactive processing.
Bottom-up processing is activated by the new incoming data. Schema is
formed hierarchically, from the most specific at the bottom to the most general at
the top. According to this type of processing, listening is a process decoding the
sounds, from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts. Hence,

capable of interacting and influencing each other”. (Buck, 2001: 2). We must
realize if the incoming information the listener hears is unfamiliar to him, it can’t
evoke his schemata and he can only depend heavily on his linguistic knowledge in
listening comprehension. Besides, although the listener can trigger a schema, he
might not have the suitable schema expected by the speaker. Thus, only replying on
top- down processing may result in the failure of comprehension.
The interactive processing overcomes the disadvantages of bottom-up and
top-down processing to augment comprehension. However, it is now more
generally accepted that both top-down and bottom-up listening processing should be
combined to enhance listening comprehension. Complex and simultaneous
processing of background knowledge information, contextual information and
linguistic information make comprehension and interpretation become easy. If the
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content is familiar with the listener, he will employ his background knowledge at
the same time to make predictions which will be proved by the new input. If not, he
can only depend on his linguistic knowledge, especially the lexical and syntactical
knowledge to make sense of information. Underwood (1989: 2) divides the aural
process into two stages. There are two levels of activities of the aural process:
“recognition and selection”. The first level is that the structure and relationship
between syntax and phonology of the language are recognized. At this level, the
sound goes into a sensory store called the “echoic memory”. “Echoic memory” is
just the short term memory because there is continuous arrival of new information
before the listener has opportunity to deal with it. That is why there is the following
stage which is called “selection”. In this level the listener selects what he finds most
interesting or important or comprehensible in the utterance. At this point, words or
groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the
long term memory and the meaning is extracted from them (Underwood, 1989).
Therefore, the listener usually remembers the meaning rather than the exact word
spoken when he has to recall what has been said. The basis of listening

that learners construct concepts from prior knowledge (Resnick, 1983; Glaserfeld,
1984). Activating prior knowledge in the pre- listening stage plays an important role
in a listening lesson. Buck (1995) mentions pre-listening activities can provide a
context for interpretation and can activate background knowledge. Mendelsohn
(1995: 140 ) also points out that the important role for pre-listening activities is to “
activate the students‟ existing knowledge of the topic in order for them to link what
they comprehend and to use this as a basis of their hypothesis – information,
prediction, and inference”
Brown & Yule (1983) found four clusters of factors which can affect the
difficulty of spoken language: the speaker (the number of the speakers, speech rate,
the types of accent), the listener (the role of listener, the level of response, the
interest in the subject), the content (vocabulary, grammar, information structure,
background knowledge), and support (visual aids to support the text – pictures,
diagrams, etc. It is believed in the literature that among these factors learners’
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background knowledge and content schemata can affect the quality of listening
comprehension to a large extent. Research in reading supports the notion that
activating background knowledge and applying this knowledge to new input
greatly facilitates processing and understanding (Graves & Cook, 1980). Listening
has been considered, like reading, as an active process of interpretation that goes
beyond the simple decoding of the signal. In addition, its major purpose is the
construction of meaning (Rost, 2002) by matching what listeners hear with what
they already know, i.e. their background knowledge
According to Underwood (1989: 44), “ Pre-listening work is the „build-up‟ to the
actual listening and serves not only to assist with comprehension but also to
motivate students to want to listen”. Many students are fearful of listening, and can
be disheartened when they listen to something but they understand very little. It is
also harder to concentrate on listening if you have little interest in a topic or
situation. When listeners know the context of a text or an utterance, the process is

narrowing down the things that the students expect to hear and activating relevant
prior knowledge and already known language. The pre-listening activities are not
used separately; many pre-listening activities can be used in a listening lesson to
gain best effects.
1.2.4. Factors affecting the choice of pre-listening activities
In order to gain the best result in activating prior knowledge in the pre-
listening stage of a listening lesson, the teacher should take the following factors
into account:
 The time available
 The material available
 The ability of the class
 The interests of the class
 The interest of the teacher
 The place in which the work is being carried out
 The nature and content of the listening text
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Underwood, (1989: 33)
The last item on the list “the nature and content of the listening text” is very
important when choosing activities. Some kind of activities are simply not
appropriate to some types of text, and in other instances, the text itself very
naturally makes one type of activity especially appropriate.
Listening texts which naturally rise to certain kind of top-down activities are
particularly useful and generally quite motivating for the students.
When the instructor designs these kinds of activities, they should also take the time
element into consideration. You cannot have a fifteen- minute activity for a passage
which will last only three minutes. Remember the pre-listening process should not
last longer than the actual listening activity. The learners' proficiency is also a factor
to consider. The activities should not be too demanding, otherwise the students will
lose their interests

knowledge about objects, situations, events, or actions” (p.28). Cook (1997)regards
schema as “a mental representation of a typical instance” (p.86).
1.3.2. Characteristics of schema
The following are some special features of schema according to Anderson,
(1997, p.418-419):
_ Schemata are always organized meaningfully can be added to, and, as an
individual gains experience, develop to include more variables and more specificity.
_ Each schema is embedded in other schemata and itself contains subschema.
_ Schema change moment by moment as information is received.
_ They may also be reorganized when incoming data reveals a need to restructure
the concept.
_The mental representations used during perception and comprehension, and which
evolves a result of these processes, combine to form a whole which is greater than
the sum of its parts.
1.3.3. Types of schema
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Schemata are classified into two types: content schemata and formal schemata
(Carrell, 1983). The content schemata refer to “background information” on the
topic, provides readers with a foundation, a basis for comparison (Carrell &
Eisterhold 1983; Carrell, Pharis & Liberto 1989). Formal schema, often known as
textual schema. It relates to “knowledge about how discourse is organized with
respect to different genres, different topics, or different purposes (e.g., transactional
versus interactional), including relevant sociocultural knowledge” (Celce-Murcia
and Olshtain, 2000, p.102). It can include knowledge of different text types and
genres, and also includes the understanding that different types of texts use text
organization, language structures, vocabulary, grammar, level of formality/register
differently. Besides, Juan and Flor (2006 : 93 ) insist that “content schema are
networks of knowledge on different topics and formal schema are derived from our
knowledge of the structure of discourse is being listened to make it easier to engage

find the pre-listening activities not various and interesting enough. However, the
study cannot cover all the factors affecting the students’ performances in listening
lessons
Besides, Berne (1995) investigated how varying pre-listening activities affect
second language listening comprehension. According to the study, comparison of
the listening comprehension of second language learners completing three different
pre listening activities after one and two exposures to a passage shows that scores
for subjects completing the question preview activity were higher than for subjects
completing the filler activity and that additional exposure improves comprehension.
In addition, Chang and Read (2006) investigated the effects of four types of
listening support on a listening test: previewing the test questions, repetition of the
input, providing background knowledge about the topic, and vocabulary instruction.
In conclusion, all the above studies are related to the pre-listening activities. I
found that they are quite general and difficult for adapting effectively in Vietnamese
schools. So in my study, I focus on the topic: “activating prior knowledge to
motivating listening skill in the pre-listening stage.”