VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY-HA NOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES
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LÊ THỊ HƯƠNG GIANG
USING PORTFOLIOS IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILL TO
THE FIRST-YEAR NON-ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS OF
ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT, ACADEMY OF FINANCE

(SỬ DỤNG HỒ SƠ BÀI TẬP ĐỂ DẠY KỸ NĂNG NGHE HIỂU
CHO SINH VIÊN KHÔNG CHUYÊN TIẾNG ANH NĂM THỨ
NHẤT KHOA KẾ TOÁN HỌC VIỆN TÀI CHÍNH) M.A Minor Programme Thesis

Field: English Methodology
Code: 601410
Hanoi - 2010
Hanoi - 2010
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Declaration ……………………………………………………………………………. i
Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………… ii
Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………… iii
Table of contents …………………………………………………………………… iv
List of abbreviations …………………………………………………………………. vii
List of figures, tables and charts ……………………………………………………… viii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………. 1
1.1. Rationale of the study……………………………………………………………
1.2. Aims and research questions of the study ………………………………………
1.3. Scope of the study ……………………………………………………………….
1.4. Methods of the study …………………………………………………………….
1.5. Design of the study ……………………………………………………………
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW …………………………………………
2.1. Theoretical background of listening comprehension ……………………………
2.1.1. Definitions of listening comprehension ……………………………………….
2.1.2. Listening comprehension process ……………………………………………
2.1.3. The importance of listening …………………………………………………
2.2. Theoretical background of teaching and learning listening skill ………………
2.2.1. Components skills for listening ……………………………………………….
2.2.2. Potential problems in learning to listen to English ……………………………
2.2.3. Stages of a listening lesson ……………………………………………………
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2.3.3. Phases of portfolio development ………………………………………………
2.3.4. Benefits of using portfolios ……………………………………………………
2.3.5. Weakness associated with using portfolios ……………………………………
2.4. Summary ………………………………………………………………………
CHAPTER 3: THE STUDY ……………………………………………………….
3.1. Context of the study ……………………………………………………………
3.1.1. The institution …………………………………………………………………
3.1.2. The teachers …………………………………………………………………
3.1.3. The students …………………………………………………………………
3.1.4. The course ……………………………………………………………………
3.1.5. Introduction to the coursebook ………………………………………………
3.2. Research methodology ………………………………………………………….
3.2.1. Participants ……………………………………………………………………
3.2.2. Data collection procedure …………………………………………………….
3.2.3. Data collection instruments ……………………………………………………
CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION …………………………
4.1. Data analysis of the students' survey questionnaire before the portfolio process
4.1.1. Students' motivation in learning listening skill ………………………………
4.1.2. Students' past learning experience …………………………………………….
4.1.3. Students' knowledge of portfolios …………………………………………….
4.2. Data analysis of the students' survey questionnaire after the portfolio process
4.2.1. Students' feelings and awareness of the portfolio process …………………….
4.2.2. Students' attitudes towards the effects of portfolio listening activities ……….
4.2.3. Students' opinion related to portfolio sharing activities ……………………….
4.2.4. Students' difficulties in implementing the portfolio …………………………
4.2.5. Students' opinion to improve the self-learning portfolio ……………………
4.3. Summary ………………………………………………………………………

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5.1.2. Students' attitudes towards the effects of the portfolio listening activity ……
5.1.3. Students' difficulties in implementing the portfolio …………………………
5.1.4. Students' suggestions to improve the self-learning portfolio ………………….
5.2. Suggestions for using portfolios ………………………………………………
5.2.1. Suggestion for the teachers …………………………………………………
5.2.2. Suggestions for the students …………………………………………………
5.3. Summary ………………………………………………………………………
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION …………………………………………………….
6.1. Summary of the study …………………………………………………………
6.2. Limitations of the study …………………………………………………………
6.3. Suggestions for further researches ………………………………………………
REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………
APPENDICES ………………………………………………………………………
Appendix 1: Portfolio guidelines for students ……………………………………….
Appendix 2: Listening portfolios …………………………………………………….
Appendix 3: Description of portfolio assessment and evaluation …………………
Appendix 4: Learning log ……………………………………………………………
Appendix 5: Questionnaire (N01) for students ………………………………………
Appendix 6: Questionnaire (N02) for students ………………………………………

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AOF: Academy of Finance
L2: Second Language

9
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale
English is thought to be one of the decisive factors for people's success at the
period of globalization. Therefore, it leads to the increasing number of users of English in
many parts of the world. Since the open-door policy was introduced in Vietnam, English
has become increasingly important not only as a means of global communication but also
as bridge to mankind's knowledge. To students, nowadays, English is not only a subject in
the curriculum at university but also a key to gain access to the information world that
proves of great value to all people in general and to students of Academy of Finance in
particular. However, obtaining a good language competence is not easy for all
students; it requires a huge effort from them, especially self-study.
Of four language skills - listening, speaking, reading and writing, listening is
believed to be the most difficult skill to students. They encounter difficulties in
comprehending the information due to unfamiliarity with the pronunciation, stress,
intonation and a lack of listening skill, etc. To overcome such difficulties, it is
necessary for students to spend much more time practicing listening skill at home.
The time to practice listening in class is not enough because every week students
have only two periods lasting 90 minutes to learn this skill.
The question posed for English teachers is how to help students overcome
difficulties and improve their listening skill. One of the ways to help students deal
with difficulties is using portfolios to learn at home. Surely, portfolios which reflect

54 first-year non-English major students were chosen randomly to take part in the
research of applying portfolio listening activity to develop learner self-study. They came
from two classes of Accounting Department, AOF. They are both male and female, at the
age from 19 to 20 and have learnt English for at least three years at high school.
Questionnaires were delivered to first-year students at AOF before and after the
portfolio process to collect the most reliable data for this study. This research also based
itself on some previous studies in listening skill and portfolios.
1.5. Design of the study 11
The study is comprised of five chapters: Chapter I: Introduction; Chapter II:
Literature review; Chapter III: The study; Chapter IV: Major findings and discussions and
Chapter V: Conclusion.
Chapter I: Introduction
This chapter introduces the rationale, the aims, research questions, the scope, the
methodology and the design of the study.
Chapter II: Literature review
This chapter reviews the literature related to the nature of listening comprehension,
the importance of listening, components skills for listening, potential problems in learning
to listen to English, stages of a listening lesson, the roles of teachers in a listening lesson,
ways of encouraging students' self-learning, definitions of portfolio, the contents of
portfolio, phases of portfolio development, benefits of using portfolios and weakness
associated with using portfolios.
Chapter III: The study
This chapter presents the methodology used in the study including the context,
participants, data collection procedure, data collection instruments and data analysis.
Chapter IV: Major findings and discussions
This chapter shows some major findings which lead to some suggestions for using
the portfolio.

listen successfully to spoken language, we need to be able to work out what speakers mean
when they use particular words in particular way on particular occasions, not simple to
understand the words themselves".
Gary Buck (2001: 31) states 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 if knowledge are involved: both linguistic knowledge
and non-linguistic knowledge".
Sharing the same view, listening is viewed as "an active, purposeful processing of
making sense of what we hear" (Helgesen, 2003: 24). Rost (2002: 279) defines listening as
"the mental process of constructing meaning from spoken input".
Richards and Schmidt (2002: 313) point out that "listening comprehension is the
process of understanding speech in a first or second language. The study of listening
comprehension in second language learning focuses on the role of individual linguistic 13
units (e.g. phonemes, words, grammatical structures) as well as the role of listener's
expectations, the situation and context, background knowledge and topic".
All in all, listening has been conceptualized in different ways. However, the words
like "active" and "construct" have been found and highlighted. Listeners are considered as
an "active model builder" (Anderson & Lynch, 1988: 11), who goes through a complex
process, drawing upon knowledge of linguistic code, cognitive processing skill, scheme-
based understanding, and contextual clues to reach the essence of spoken message.
2.1.2. Listening comprehension process
Listening comprehension is regarded theoretically as an active process in which
individuals concentrate on selected aspects of aural input, form meaning from passages,
and associate what they hear with existing knowledge.
Cognitive psychology, the most developed model in accounting for comprehension
processes, defines comprehension as information processing. Schemata are the guiding
structures in the comprehension process. The schema is described by Rumelhart (1980, p.

However, bottom-up processing has its weak points. Understanding a text is an interactive
process between the listener’s previous knowledge and the text. Efficient comprehension
that associates the textual material with listener’s brain doesn’t only depend on one’s
linguistic knowledge.
Secondly, top-down processing is explained as employing background knowledge
in comprehending the meaning of a message. Carrell and Eisterhold (1983, p. 557) point
out that in top-down processing, the system makes general predictions based on “a higher
level, general schemata, and then searches the input for information to fit into these
practically satisfied, higher order schemata”. In terms of listening, the listener actively
constructs (or reconstructs) the original meaning of the speaker employing new input as
clues. In this reconstruction process, the listener employs prior knowledge of the context
and situation within which the listening occurs to understand what he/she hears. Context
and situation involve such things as knowledge of the topic at hand, the speaker or
speakers, and their correlation with the situation, as well as with each other and previous
events. 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
LC. Besides, although the listener can trigger a schema, he might not have the suitable
schema expected by the speaker. Thus, only relying on top-down processing may result in
the failure of comprehension.
Apart from bottom-up and top-down processing, more specific listening
comprehension processes have been analyzed. One of them is the interactive model 15
illustrated by Clark & Clark (1977) and Richard (1983). Comprehension results from a
number of different cognitive and affective mechanisms, which mainly falls into eight
processes:
- The hearer processes what we will call "raw speech" and holds an "image" of it in short-
term memory. This image consists of the constituents (phrases, clauses, cohesive markers,
intonation and stress pattern) of a stream of speech.

their appreciation. In this day of mass communication, it is of vital importance that
students are taught to listen effectively and critically.
According to L2 acquisition theory, language input is the most essential condition
of language acquisition. As an input skill, listening plays a crucial role in students’
language development. Krashen (1985) argues that people acquire language by
understanding the linguistic information they hear. Thus language acquisition is achieved
mainly through receiving understandable input and listening ability is the critical
component in achieving understandable language input.
In short, listening is essential not only as a receptive skill but also to the
development of spoken language proficiency.
2.2. Theoretical background of teaching and learning listening skill
2.2.1. Components skills for listening
Based on the listening skills, processes, and behaviors, Michael Rost (1994: p.142)
draws up a partial list of components skills for listening:
- discriminating between sounds
- recognizing words
- identifying stressed words and groupings of words
- identifying functions (such as apologizing) in a conversation
- connecting linguistic cues to paralinguistic cues (intonation and stress) and to non-
linguistic cues (gestures and relevant objects in the situation) in order to construct meaning
- using background knowledge (what we already know about the content and the form) and
context (what has already said) to predict and then to confirm meaning.
- recalling important words, topics and ideas
- giving appropriate feedback to the speaker
- reformulating what the speaker has said
Willis (1981: p.134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which she calls
enabling skills. They are: 17
18
- Failure to recognize the 'signals'
- Problems of interpretation
- Inability to concentrate
- Established learning habits.
According to Yagang (1994), the problems in listening were accompanied with the
four following factors: the message, the speaker, the listener and the physical setting.
Furthermore, a numbers of research have been carried out to pick out the problems in
listening. The problems were believed to cause by the speech rate, vocabulary and
pronunciation (Higgins, 1995). As Flowerdew & Miller (1996) assumed that the problems
of the students were for the speed of delivery, new terminology and concept, difficulty in
focusing and the physical environment.
Whatever the reasons for students' problems, it is important that teachers recognize
the features of the spoken language and understand how they affect students. From that,
teachers can design exercises and assignments to help students practice and become
familiar with the specific features of the English language such as sounds, stress,
intonation, etc.
2.2.3. Stages of a listening lesson
A listening lesson is often divided into 3 stages: Pre-listening stage, While-listening
stage and Post-listening stage. Each stage has its own aims and activities.
2.2.3.1. Pre-listening stage
It is difficult for students to have ideas of what they are going to hear if the teacher
just says "Listen to this" and then switches on the cassette recorder or begin to read aloud.
Even if the sounds and words are familiar with students, they may still be unable to
comprehend because of the lack of necessary knowledge of the topic, setting or the
relationship between speakers. Therefore, the aim of pre-listening stage is to provide
students with everything necessary for listening and understanding the text such as the
topic, related vocabulary and additional information. This stage also helps the teacher to

factors:
- The possibilities for varying the level of difficulty if required;
- The inconvenience of carrying out activities which require individuals to give their
responses orally in the classroom. This kind of work is best done in a language laboratory.
Classroom while-listening activities generally have to be limited to those which can be
done without the need for each student to respond by speaking; 20
- Whether the work is to be done by the students with the teacher present or whether it is to
be done as private study, either in the classroom or at home. This will influence the
teacher's choice of activity as he/she may want to give different students different work
according to their level of ability, to provide additional instructions, or to select activities
which generate little or no marking;
- Whether or not the while-listening activities generate material or ideas which might be
used for other, post-listening work, and if so, whether the teacher wishes to make use of
these.
2.2.3.3. Post-listening
Some post-listening activities are extensions of the work done at the pre-listening
and while-listening stages and some relate only loosely to the listening text itself. The
purposes of post-listening activities are:
- Checking whether the students have understood what they need to or not;
- Reflecting on why some students have failed to understand or miss parts of the message;
- Giving the students the opportunity to consider the attitude and manner of the speakers of
the listening text;
- Expanding on the topic or language of the message and transferring learned things to
another context;
- Making introduction for the planned work.
Again, According to Mary Underwood (1989), when the teachers select post-
activities, the attention should be given to the following factors:

lesson carefully. There are a number of steps to take when the teacher plans the listening
activity for the class:
- Choose the listening text.
- Check that the activities are suitable
- Adjust the level of difficulty of the activities if you need to.
- Consider whether the listening work you are planning will fill the time available.
- Think about visual aids.
- Make up your mind what procedure you will adopt for the listening session.
- If you are planning to present the listening text 'live', practice reading it aloud.
(Mary Underwood, 1989: 21) 22
Most of the teacher's work associated with listening practice is done before the
actual lesson. During the lesson, the teacher should create and maintain an encouraging
class atmosphere by:
- Being available to give help whenever it is needed, but not inflicting help on those who
do not need it. This may be at any stage during the lesson
- Encouraging the students to help each other, so that the emphasis is on the successful
completion of the task(s) rather than on who got it 'right' or 'wrong'
- Not treating the activities as tests to be marked and scored
- Encouraging the students to alter their answers if they wish to, perhaps after listening for
a second time
- Encouraging students to jot down odd words, ideas and thoughts as they are doing their
listening task
- Suggesting that the students use dictionaries when it would prove helpful
- Including lots of pair-work and group work
- Making listening work enjoyable
- Leaving out part of the work rather than rushing
- Giving immediate feedback.

answer is wrong or right, and will be independent as far as checking routine answer is
concerned.
 Listening outside the classroom
For teachers working with students within the United Kingdom, the opportunities to
use English outside school are huge, but those working abroad need not despair either.
There are two ways in which you can encourage students to listen outside the school. The
first is to get student to exercise their listening outside school and the second is about
finding opportunities for listening for pleasure.
- Listening assignments outside the school
According to Shelagh Rixon (1986), self-access listening has been discussed as a
stepping stone between listening guided by the teacher and greater independence. Students
who have met certain types of listening experiences in the listening library may feel
prepared to try them in their own time. Radio programs are an obvious example.
Opportunities for work involving live listening vary from place to place. For example, it
may be a project of finding a tourist and asking about his or her impressions of the town.
- Listening for pleasure outside the school. 24
Opportunities for making contact with the language outside the school will vary, as
will the amount of enthusiasm shown by students about non-obligatory, 'extra-mural'
listening. Students have a perfect right not to be keen, but they should be equipped with
good information. Teachers need to do some research into: what English language
broadcasting station can be receptive, what English language film showings are available
and so on. 2.3. Theoretical background of portfolio
2.3.1. Definition of portfolio
In the last decade, there have been numerous innovations in education theory and

- “Revisions of student work” that are “graded and then revised, edited, and rewritten”;
- Reflections that are associated with the “processed samples” and these reflections give
students opportunities to identity their own strengths and weaknesses;
- And portfolio projects, which cover work designed for the sole purpose of inclusion in
the student portfolios and that can be arise from a review of portfolios that shows a
particular interest or challenge to overcome.
For each item, a brief rationale for choosing the item should be covered. This may
relate to students' performance, to their feelings considering their progress and themselves
as learners.
According to Huong Nguyen Le et al (2007: 11-13), listening portfolio entails
teamwork expose to a variety of listening resources and listening practice. Thus, apart from
listening skill building, the task also aims at students' development of information literacy
and collaboration skills. The contents of portfolios are presented as follows:
A. Cover Sheet
B. Declaration and Statement of Authorship
C. Index of Listening Files
D. Listening Files
1. File identification
2. Full script
E. Reflection checklist 26
Students are to write only one reflection for the whole portfolio and this should not
exceed 600 words (two pages). The reflection should contain the following components:
1. Reflection on strategies used.
- The steps students went through when doing the portfolio.
- The strategies students used while transcribing the files, especially how they coped with
words that are hard to identify.
2. Reflection on the contents of the files.