5

TABLE OF CONTENT
Acceptance
i
Abstract
ii
List of figures
v
PART A: INTRODUCTION
1
1. Statement of the problems and the rationale for the study
1
2. Aims and objectives of the study
2
3. Scope of the study
3
4. Methods of the study
4
5. An overview of the rest of the paper
4
PART B

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
6
1.1 Communicative view on teaching listening
6
1.1.1 The importance of listening
6

6

2.5. Limitation of the study
25
CHAPTER 3: DATA PRESENTATION & ANALYSIS
26
3.1 Description of the survey (questionnaire & interview)
26
3.2 Findings analysis
26
3.2.1 Findings
26
3.2.1.1 Findings from questionnaires
26
3.2.1.2 Findings from interviews
41
3.2.2 Interpretations of the findings
46
3.2.2.1 Situation
46
3.2.2.2 Benefits of using online materials
47
3.2.2.3 Ways of using online materials
48
3.2.2.4 Problems
49
CHAPTER 4: USING AUTHENTIC MATERIALS ON WEBSITES AS
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS FOR TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS
TO 2
nd

List of Figures
Figure 1: Top-down vs. Bottom-up Listening Process……………………
10
Figure 2: Seniority in teaching listening…………………………………
27
Figure 3: Popular materials in use…………………………………………
28
Figure 4: The use of online materials……………………………………
28
Figure 5: Reasons for not using online sources……………………………
29
Figure 6: Reasons for using online sources………………………………
30
Figure 7: Ways of using online materials………………………………….
31
Figure 8: Prospects of utilizing online materials…………………………
32
Figure 9: Types of speech normally used with online materials…………
33
Figure 10: Problems when using online materials………………………
33
Figure 11: Frequency of online materials using in class…………………
34
Figure 12: Evaluation of students’ progress after using online materials…
35
Figure 13: Supplementary materials in use………………………………
36
Figure 14: The use of online materials…………………………………….
36
Figure 15: Frequency of online materials using…………………………

Figure 28:
63
Figure 29:
64
9

PART A: INTRODUCTION
1. Statement of the problems and the rationale for the study
In the light of the communicative approach for language teaching and
learning, “communicative competence” is a stressed element or in other
words, it is the “goal” of the teaching and learning process (Richards &
Rodgers, 1995: 67). In order to master the communicative competence,
second language learners are supposed to study the four skills, namely
listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among these four skills, listening is
often claimed to be the most important skill to be acquired as “in the foreign
environment, the ability to make sense of these messages is often crucial for
survival” (Hood: 65). As a result, listening has taken much attention and
efforts of language researchers and teachers. Much research has been
conducted on how to teach and learn listening skills effectively. For instance,
on the web site www.abax.co.jp/listen, an article named “Teaching Listening
Better: Is listening being taught as well as it could be?” provides readers with
a thorough overview of how listening should be taught; Penny Ur (1992)
dedicated a nearly-two-hundred-page book on “Teaching Listening
Comprehension” and Gillian Brown (1984) also wrote “Listening to spoken
English”. All these contributions are very useful for enhancing the listening
skills. However, as far as I have investigated, most of the research focuses
largely on methods of teaching and learning rather than exploring new

2. Aims and objectives of the study
Conducting this study, my aim is to address two main issues:
(1) How listening skills are taught to second year EFL students at ULIS-
VNU; to be more specific, what materials lecturers are using as
supplementary listening materials for their students. 11

(2) Outline possible prospects to use authentic materials on websites as
supplementary materials to teach listening skills to second year EFL students
at ULIS-VNU.
I do hope that this study will be beneficial not only to lecturers who teach
listening skills for second year EFL students; to the students in their self-
study but also to the students who are becoming teachers in the near future
since it would, hopefully, serve as a useful resource they can refer to.
Conducting this thesis, I also wish that in applying these materials in teaching
listening to the second year EFL students, teachers could familiarize their
students with the current language in use and at the same time help them
enhance their social background knowledge, which is said to be poor among
today students.
3. Scope of the study
Due to time constraint, my thesis would only be narrowed to a small scale.
Firstly, its subject is specifically second year EFL students at ULIS-VNU.
Studying at university for two years would equip students with more self-
study skills, which is a factor that can facilitate the use of online listening
materials. Moreover, it is time their English reach proper level of
intermediate and upper-intermediate, which is suitable to use these materials
to supplement their listening.
Secondly, the paper would focus mostly on ways to develop the use of online

listening and the current authentic materials used for teaching listening.
Chapter 2 justifies the use of the qualitative and quantitative methodology for
this research. Chapter 3 presents and discusses the findings of the survey
investigating into how the teachers are exploiting listening materials to teach
their second year students and what their attitude towards using online
sources for listening materials is. Chapter 4 gives some recommendations on 13

how to use authentic materials on websites as supplementary materials for
teaching listening skills to second year students. Part C is the conclusion to
the study.
14

PART B
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1 Communicative view on teaching listening
1.1.1 The importance of listening
The importance of listening to foreign language teaching and learning has
been reflected in a 30-year shift towards interaction-based acquisition
(Krashen 1981, 1985; Pica et al., 1987; Swain, 1985), rather than learning
through the translation of written text and through formal grammar learning.
Though once regarded as a passive skill, listening is actually an active
process which requires the listeners to activate all their knowledge of
different fields such as phonology, vocabulary, culture and their life
experience and so on in selecting and interpreting information (1983,

Listening is, in fact, the most crucial medium for input in learning a foreign
language and by increasing students‟ ability to perceive speech and thus
aiding language acquisition (1993, Lewis, quoted in
).
In fact, listening provides a “foundation” for all aspects of “language and
cognitive development” (). It plays a life-long role
in the processes of learning and communication essential to productive
participation in life.
Bearing in mind the importance of listening and the fact that it has been an
underestimated skill, I now move on to review its characteristics.

1.1.2 Characteristics of listening
Most linguists and educators share the same opinion of listening‟s
characteristics. According to Wilkinson, Stratta, Dudley (1974) and 16

Brubridge (1986) and Penny Ur (1996) they all agree upon the common
characteristics of listening as follows:
First to mention, looking at the characteristics of listening is actually looking
at those of spoken language. Spoken language is normally disorganized due
to the fact that it is spontaneous. The speakers talk impulsively rather than
reading aloud some thing written beforehand. As a result, the speech is full of
incomplete sentences, paraphrases, hesitation, repetition and interruptions.
This is also the explanation for the fact that so many students good at
listening task using artificial dialogues are not necessarily good at real-life
listening.
The understanding of spoken language could be facilitated a great deal by
non-verbal clues. It is said that people listen more effectively when they can

Based on the ways listeners process and comprehend what is heard, listening
is said to be composed of two opposite processes, namely top-down and
bottom-up processes (Helgesen, Brown, 1994).
Top-down Listening:
It is listener based. The listener privies to background knowledge of the topic,
the situation or context, the type of text, and the language (Richards, 1990).
This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the
listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next.
According to David Nunan, the top-down view suggests that the listener
actively constructs the original meaning of the speaker using incoming
sounds as clue (o)
Bottom-up Listening
It is text based. The listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the
combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning (Richards,
1990) 18

Life-
experience

Vocabulary

Structure
Top-down
Bottom-up
Activation
Figure 1: Top-down vs. Bottom-up Listening Process
(Helgesen and Brown, 1994, xii)

To put it most general, listening may be divided into real-life listening and
classroom listening.
Real-life Listening
This is what we have to do in our daily life. We hear music, radio, the noise
and people talking, etc. Sometimes, people just listen without paying much
attention. People may listen and do something else at the same time. This
kind of listening is called Casual Listening (cited in Bang Nguyen, Ngoc
Nguyen, 2002). On the other hand, people listen with a certain purpose in
mind, hence, they really concentrate to get the content of what is said, which
constitutes another type of real-life listening, namely Focused Listening
(cited in Bang Nguyen, Ngoc Nguyen 2002).
Classroom Listening
Penny Ur argues that classroom listening should be addressed accurately as
Real-life listening in the classroom. Though a paradox can be sensed in this
way of addressing, it is not only true that classroom listening is not real-life
listening; but a clear envision of the notion “classroom listening” is also
created. All the listening activities in the classroom aims at equipping
students with skills to deal with real-life listening. Even in classroom
listening, it can be subdivided into intensive and extensive listening as
collected and classified by Bang Nguyen and Ngoc Nguyen (2002).
According to Broughton et al. (1978) extensive listening is concerned with
the more general listening to natural English. It serves the function of letting
the student hear the vocabulary items and structures which are unfamiliar to
him. Rixon (1986) added that extensive listening is listening for pleasure and
interest without having to pay a lot of attention to content and language. 20

Extensive listening keeps the student's motivation and interest high, as well

and bias; sensing the speaker's purpose.
According to Burns and Lowe (1966) some authors have also suggested
levels of listening such as little conscious listening, half listening, listening
passively, listening and expressing some reaction and listening with a real
meeting of the minds. However Burns and Lowe (1966) pointed out that there
is no research evidence to indicate such levels.

1.1.3.2 Types of Listening Tasks
Having investigated into the characteristics of listening as well as the types of
listening, I now move on to review different listening tasks that reputable
educators have suggested in order to develop students‟ listening skills. These
listening tasks are various. Though sorted respective to the way listening is
viewed from different perspectives, they consist of a rather fixed set of tasks.
As held by Penny Ur, the kinds of listening tasks are classified by the natures
of students‟ response.
No overt response
Students‟ concentration and understanding of the listening are revealed
mostly through their non-verbal language especially their facial expression.
Students actually “do not have to do anything in response to the listening”
(Penny Ur, 1996, 113). The main listening tasks are: story-telling, songs,
entertainment. The only task for students is that they enjoy and understand
the general content of the listening.
Short response
Students are asked to do some tasks in the form of simple and short answers.
For example,
- Obeying Instruction: Students perform actions according to instructions. 22


must have comprehended what they hear first before they can write it down
(2002).
Extended response
Problem solving and Interpretation are two typical tasks. However, these are
better classified as follow-up listening tasks to integrate the teaching of other
skills.
If listening tasks are built up for students to practice their listening skills by
developing the top-down and bottom-up listening strategies, they can be put
thereby ()
Top-down strategies include:
 listening for the main idea
 predicting
 drawing inferences
 summarizing
Bottom-up strategies include:
 listening for specific details
 recognizing cognates
 recognizing word-order patterns

1.2 Authentic materials used for teaching listening
Materials play a very crucial part in the teaching process. According to
Nunan, syllabus is the bone and material is regarded “flesh on the bones of
these specifications” (1991: 208). Richards and Rodgers (1995) add that
instructional materials can provide “specifications of content even in the
absence of a syllabus” (208, quoted from Nunan, 1991). Consequently, a
good set of listening materials and tasks is one of the guarantee factors for the 24



teachers, it offers more room for teachers‟ creativity. Yet, this source of
materials has not been utilized to its fullness and little literature has been
spared on the field.
1.3 The needs to vary the sources
The most widely used for listening teachers is uncontroversially course
books. However, any course books will be incapable of catering for the
diversity of needs although users are embarrassed by their riches. Language
teachers need a source that provides them with recordings with which they
can freely tailor the tasks for a particular group of students.
Another reason is that course books are made to be used for a long time;
therefore the language and topics may no longer stay up to date. Meanwhile,
students are more motivated by what is fresh and interesting. As held by Ur,
“motivation makes teaching and learning immeasurably easier and more
pleasant, as well as more productive” (1996), it is time a source that can
enhance students and teachers‟ motivation be found and put into practice.
It is the fact that when using commercially produced materials, it is easy to
run the risk of studying what students have already learnt. Thus, it is
suggestible that teacher-developed materials should be employed as
supplementary task
Students may have access to well-established materials at ease for their own
practice; hence class-hour would be more productive and attracting if learners
are exposed to a unique set of listening materials.
Moreover, as the aim of language learning is communicative competence,
students need to be familiarized with real-life listening which is a huge gap
from simulated ones in listening textbooks, few of which provide
opportunities for “genuine communication with a real purpose” (Nunan,
1991: 214)

27

Languages and International Studies. Hence, it is hoped to be tailor-made for
the teaching and learning in this university.
In brief, with the high practicality of the thesis, it is worth carrying out with a
view to bridging the research gap and assisting teachers in the course of their
teaching.
28

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY
2. 1. A qualitative and quantitative study

This research was conducted as a qualitative and quantitative study, in
which I used interview, information collection and analysis as well as
questionnaire to collect data. The reason for my choice lies in the aims of this
study, in which I would like to answer two questions as follows:
1. What materials are lecturers using as supplementary listening materials
for their students?
2. What are the possible prospects of using authentic materials on
websites as supplementary materials to teach listening skills for second
year EFL students at ULIS-VNU?
As Bouma has stated “both qualitative and quantitative approaches are
essentials to the research process in social sciences” (1996: 173); moreover,
each methodology has its own strengths and weaknesses, thus could not alone
help to find out satisfactory and sufficient information. As a result, I chose to
make full use of both approaches rather than advocate one and dispose the

already used such materials, in which way they have been using them. Their
insights are of great use for the process of analyzing data.

2.2. Selection of participants
In order to investigate into the situation how listening skills are taught for
second year EFL students and what materials lecturers are using as
supplementary listening materials for their students, I conducted the survey
among two different groups of subjects. The first one is the teachers who
teach second year students. The second one is the second year students. There
are a few reasons for this selection of mine.