VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
DEPARTMENT OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES HOÀNG THỊ NGÁT AN INITIAL EVALUATION OF THE ACTIVITIES TEACHERS
USE FOR TEACHING LISTENING SKILL FOR 10
TH
TEN FORM
STUDENTS AT TRAN HUNG DAO HIGH SCHOOL

Đánh giá bước đầu về hoạt động giáo viên sử dụng
trong giờ dạy kĩ năng nghe hiểu cho học sinh lớp 10
trường THPT Trần Hưng Đạo

MA. MINOR THESIS
FIELD: ENGLISH METHODOLOGY
CODE: 60.14.10

FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE: 60.14.10
SUPERVISOR: Vò mai trang, M.A

HANOI – 2012

i
TABLE OF CONTENT
TABLE OF CONTENT iv
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES vii
ABBREVIATIONS viii
PART A: INTRODUCTION 1
1. Rationale 1
2. Aim of the study 2
3. Research questions 2
4. Scope of the study 3
5. Methods of the study 3
6. Design of the study 3
PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5
Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5
1.1. Theory on listening comprehension 5
1.1.1. Definition of listening 5
1.1.2. Classification of listening 6
1.1.2.1. Real – life listening 6
1.1.2.2. Classroom listening 7
1.2. Listening teaching skills 8
1.2.1. Grammar – translation method 8

4.1.1. The current situation of teaching and learning listening skill 35
4.1.2. The current situation of listening activities used by teachers
at Tran Hung Dao high school 35
4.1.3. The students‟ evaluation of the activities available in the
text book and their suggestions 36
4.1.4. Evaluation of the listening activities used by teachers at THD
high school 36
4.1.5. The students‟ preference for class listening activities and their
perception on authentic listening 37
4.2. Suggestions 38

iii
4.2.1. Improving the listening activities available in the text book 38
4.2.2. Improving the ways that the teachers use listening activities 39
4.2.3. Using authentic materials and situations 39
4.2.4. Useful activities for three stages of a listening lesson 40
PART C: CONCLUSION 41
1. Recapitulation 41
2. Limitations and suggestions for further study 42
REFERENCES 43
APPENDIXES I


ABBREVIATION
THD Tran Hung Dao

v
CLT Communicative Language Teaching

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PART A: INTRODUCTION
1 Rationale
It can be denied that nowadays English is one of the most popular languages
in all over the world. In the era of globalization and international exchange, English
has become the main means of communication in many fields of our life such as
medicine, science, technology, sports, education, etc. Therefore, teaching and
learning English have been paid much attention in every country.
In Viet Nam in recent years the number of people who want to know English
has become increasing and teaching and learning English have paid much more
attention. In most schools, through out the country, English has become a
compulsory subject. However, how to teach and learn English effectively is not
simple. Compared to other language skills, listening is considered as one of the
most difficult one for both teachers and students. Many studies have been done to
seek the ways to make listening lessons less difficult, to give students more
confidence, and also some practical strategies to help them study listening skill
better. Like many teachers at other high schools, the teachers of English at THD
high school also wish and always try their best to make listening lessons more
interesting and attractive to their students. Despite their great effort, the teachers
still fail to get students involve in their lessons and a lot of the students fail to take

3. Research questions
To achieve the above aims, the study focuses on finding out the answers of the
following questions:
1. What kinds of activities and the ways do teachers at THD high school use to
teach listening comprehension?
2. What are teachers‟ and students‟ attitude towards these activities in term of
authenticity, suitability and integration?
3. What activities can teachers use in order to teach listening skill more
effectively?

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4. Scope of the study
Though the study focuses on evaluation of activities teachers use for teaching
English listening comprehension skill, due to the limitation of time and page
numbers of the minor thesis, the researcher can only conduct a survey on the
students of 10
th
form and ten teachers of English at THD high school to identify
some activities to help them better in teaching and learning listening skill. their
evaluation of the listening activities used by teachers, after that suggest
5. Methods of the study
To achieve the aims mentioned above, the study was carried out with data
collected from different sources: two questionnaires were designed for collecting
data for analysis from students and teachers at THD high school. The researcher
also interviewed some teachers and students to double-check the information
obtained from the survey questionnaires. Beside survey questionnaires and
interview, the researcher also makes some class observations to collect information
needed for the study.
6. Design of the study
The study is divided into three parts:

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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 concepts most relevant to the thesis‟s topic. It includes three
sections. The first section addressed major issues reflecting the theory on listening,
including definition, classification of listening, some methods to teach listening skill
and the discussion of three stages of the listening lesson. Come up next in this
chapter are major issues in theory on activities including definition, classification of
activities and criteria for activities evaluation. The last section included some
theoretical discussions about materials adaptation. Therefore, this chapter can be
seen as the theoretical foundation for the applications for the study in chapter 3.
1.1. Theory on listening comprehension
1.1.1. Definition of listening
Listening is believed to be one of the most important skills in learning a
language. It is considered as the key language skill; hence, there have been varieties
of definitions of listening which hold different views towards the concept.
According to Rost (1994), listening is referred to a complex process that
enables us to understand spoken language. Harmer (2001, p197) categorizes
listening into receptive skill, the way in which people extract meaning form the
discourse they hear or see.
Wolvin and Coakley (1985) hold the same idea. They see listening as "the
process of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli". This
definition indicates that listening is a complex process which students have to deal

There are two ways which people often listen in real-life, they are “casual”
and “focus” listening.
“Casual” listening

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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 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 expects and needs are intentional, his listening is
likely accurately perceived and understood than that which is expected, irrelevant or
helpful.
1.1.2.2. Classroom listening
Class-room listening may be divided into intensive listening and extensive
listening.
Intensive listening
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.
Listening intensively is quite important to understand the language form of the
text as we have to understand both the lexical and grammatical units that lead to
form meaning. So, intensive listening requires attention to specific items of
language, sound or factual detail such as words, phrase, grammatical units,
pragmatic units, sound changes (vowel reduction and consonant assimilation),

at a written text while they listen to a recording. This forces them to do several
things: identify words by their position in the sentence, work out the relationship

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between words and phrases, use forward and backward inferencing cues, and make
intelligent guesses based on textual cues.
Audio-lingual method: Audio-lingual method of listening emphasizes first
listening to pronunciation and grammar forms and then imitating those forms by
way of drills and exercises. Dialogues and drill are the basis of classroom practice
with this method. Students are encouraged to listen carefully either to the taped
recording, or a teacher reading out, a dialogue, or a drill. They then record their own
version or respond to cues from the teachers to repeat parts of the dialogue or drill.
Basically, the more the students repeat a correct phrase or sentence, the stronger of
their memory of the structure will be.
Task-based method: this method places stress on activities or tasks that
learners do in class in order to develop their communicative competence. A task-
based syllabus should be constructed according to the difficulty of the tasks
required of the learners at different stages in a course.
In short, the four methods of the teaching listening are not mutually exclusive
and in reality, they may be mixed in any particular course or class. However,
nowadays, with the appearance of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT),
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.
1.3. Stages of a listening lesson
A listening lesson can be divided in to 3 main stages: Pre-listening, while-
listening, post-listening. Each stage has its own aims and activities.
1.3.1. Pre-listening
It is obvious that learners will find it extremely difficult to do a listening
lesson when they have no idea of what they are going to hear. Even if the sounds or
the words which they hear are familiar, they may still be unable to understand

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1.3.3. Post-listening
The activities done by students after the listening completed is known as
“post-listening”. Some post-listening activities are extensions of the work done at
the pre- listening and while-listening stage and some relate only loosely to the
listening text itself. According to Underwood (1989), the purposes of this stage are:
to check whether the learners have understood what they need to or not; to see why
some students have missed parts of the message or fail to understand the message;
to give the students the opportunity to consider the attitude and manner of the
speakers of the listening text; to expand on the topic or language of the message and
to transfer learned things to another context; to make introduction for the planned
work. She also states that, when selecting post-listening activities: the teachers
should keep in mind the following factors: 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 work, the speaking, reading or writing skills should be included in the
post-listening work, the students should work in pair or in groups, and the chosen
activity should be made motivating.
1.4. Theory on activities
1.4.1 Definitions of activities
There are many definitions of activities. According to the webpage
myeurope.eun.org, activity is defined as “collection of people, work items,
communications, and processes that represent a collaborative effort to achieve a
goal”. From this definition we can infer that an activity is a way for us to organize
our work and collaborate with others in a share working condition and coordination
in a small teams. However, more narrow definition, such as that presented by
definition.net an activity can be understood as a state or quality of being active;
nimbleness; agility; vigorous action or operation energy; active force; as, an

related to daily life. They are ultimately free to use what grammar constructs and

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vocabulary they want. This allows them to use all the language they know, rather
than just the 'target language' of the lesson, which may further motivate them in
their language learning; whereas, exercises are beneficial especially when focusing
on accuracy. In order to become successful in language teaching, it is wise for
teachers to combine both tasks and exercises to fulfill the goal of each lesson.
1.4.3. Criteria for Activities Evaluation
According to Dudley- Evans and St. John (1998), in the evaluation process,
evaluators must take evaluation criteria into account before any evaluation takes
place. Graves, 2000 synthesized fifteen criteria that should be paid attention to
when designing listening activities. However, in this paper, the author only
mentions some most frequent consideration criteria. The following is the list of
these criteria:
- Authenticity: It means that the teaching activities should correspond to real-world
ones. To achieve this criteria, activities should:
+ help students develop specific skills they need for authentic
communication.
+ focus on students‟ outside class needs, if appropriate.
+ use authentic text or realia when possible.
+ build students‟ confidence so that they can feel confident in transferring
what they lean outside of the class.
- Suitability: Activities should be suitable with students‟ ability and needs, draw on
what students know (their experience, their current situation) and be relevant to
them so that they can engage students‟ interest.
- Integration: Activities should integrate the four skills of speaking, listening,
reading and writing because the four skills mutually reinforce each other.

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the study, in which the settings for the study, the subject of the study, as well as the
description of the text book are discussed. Instruments for the study are discussed in
the second part. The last part is the description of procedure for the study.
2.1. Situation analysis
2.1.1. The setting of the study
The study was conducted at THD high school, where the author is teaching.
The school was set up 35 years ago with only two classes. However, today it is
widened with 30 classes. The size of the class is rather large. Each class has from 43
to 50 students. There is no lab for learning English listening skill. Students have to
learn listening with cassette players in their classrooms. This is inconvenient
condition for teaching and learning listening as crowded class and learning listening
in classrooms can be very noisy so that students can not concentrate on the lesson.
Furthermore, it is difficult for teachers to control the class and hold activities with a
large size class.
2.1.2. Subject of the study
2.1.2.1. Teachers of English
The school now has eleven English teachers including the researcher. They
are aged between 30 and 53. Eight are female teachers and only two are male ones.
Two of them graduated from the English department, college of foreign languages,
Viet Nam National University. Eight others are from the English department, Hai
Phong University. One of them completed their post-graduate courses. All of the
teachers are willing and enthusiastic toward their teaching. However, they all meet
some difficulties when teaching at the school. First, the teachers do not have enough
materials, such as cassette, CDs and reference materials, which are very necessary
for both the teachers and students. The second difficulty is that the teachers do not

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have chances to contact with native speakers or specialists who can give very
precious help and advice. Last but not least, the living condition of the people in An
Lao district where the school located in is still very low; therefore, not only students

interesting topics about Van Cao, a well-known Vietnamese musician is provided in
unit 12.
However, there are also some listening texts too difficult for students as these
listening texts containing many new and difficult words, such as listening text about
whales in unit 9 or about Vang Trang Khuyet in unit 4. Many students find it
difficult to comprehend the listening text about the statue of Liberty in unit 15 or
about the accent town of Hoi An in unit 16 because of their lack of background
knowledge.
2.2. Instrument for collecting data
The researcher used survey questionnaire, interview and classroom
observation as the sources for data collection. According to Veronica.A Thurmond,
(2001), triangular method involves gathering data from multiple sources so that the
finding data could be more persuasive. The author of this research chose these three
methods for data collection because of the following reasons:
As for Survey questionnaire it is one of the most common methods of data
collection. It is easily designed and can help the researcher collect a large amount of
information only within a short time. According to Wallace (2001), the
questionnaire is a popular means of collecting data as it enables the researcher to
collect data in field settings. Furthermore, it is rather easy for the researcher to
summarize, analyze and report the data because all the answers are given to the
same questions. Finally, the questionnaires can consist of both close and open
questions so that the informants have chances to express their opinion individually.
For the above reasons, doing the questionnaires, the researcher can investigate the
teachers‟ and students‟ attitude to the activities used in listening lessons.

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Another tool of the study is classroom observation. Wallace (2001) asserts
that it is an important technique for the researcher to record what is happening at the
time that the teaching and learning of the foreign languages take place. In fact, with
classroom observation, the researcher can watch, follow and record all activities that