VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HA NOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
*** NGUYỄN THỊ THU HƯƠNG
A STUDY ON NON-MAJORS’ MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS
IN LEARNING ENGLISH LISTENING AT HAI PHONG
PRIVATE UNIVERSITY

(NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ NHỮNG YẾU TỐ ẢNH HƯỞNG ĐẾN HỨNG THÚ HỌC NGHE TIẾNG
ANH CỦA SINH VIÊN KHÔNG CHUYÊN TẠI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC DÂN LẬP HẢI PHÒNG) M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Methodology
Code: 601410 Hanoi – 2010



DECLARATION i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii
ABSTRACT iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS iv
LISTS OF TABLES AND CHARTS vi
PART I: INTRODUCTION 1
1. Rationales 1
2. Aims of the study 1
3. Research questions 2
4. Method of the study 2
5. Scope of the study 2
6. Significance of the study 2
7. Design of the study 3
PART II: DEVELOPMENT 4
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 4
1.1. Theoretical background of motivation 4
1.1.1. Definition of motivation 4
1.1.2. Classification of motivation in second language learning 4
1.1.3. Motivational factors in second language learning 6
1.1.4. Characteristics of motivated learners 9
1.2. Theoretical background of listening 10
1.2.1. Definition of listening 10
1.2.2. The process of listening 10
1.2.3. Common approaches to listening teaching 11
CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 13
2.1. Introduction 13
2.2. Situation analysis 13
2.2.1. The setting of the study 13
2.2.2. TOEIC – test – based program and listening materials 14

APPENDICES I
APPENDIX 1 I
APPENDIX 2 IV
APPENDIX 3 VII

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LISTS OF TABLES AND CHARTS
1. List of tables
Table 1: Students’ hometown 16
Table 2: Students’ aptitude factor VII
Table 3: Students’ personality factor …………………………….…….……… ………………………VII
Table 4: Students’ motivation and attitude factor VII
Table 5: Students’ preference factor VIII
Table 6: Students’ belief factor IX
Table 7: Teachers’ behavior factor 29
Table 8: Teachers’ competence factor 31
Table 9: Teaching method factor IX
Table 10: Grading and assessment factor IX
2. List of charts
Chart 1: Students’ auditory ability 16
Chart 2: Students’ grammatical sensitivity 17
Chart 3: Students’ ability in memorizing new words 17
Chart 4: Students’ extroversion 18
Chart 5: Students’ relaxation 19
Chart 6: Students’ self – confidence 19
Chart 7: Students’ perceived the importance of listening 20
Chart 8: Students’ effort in listening 21
Chart 9: Students’ interest in listening 21
Chart 10: Students’ language learning for communicative needs 22
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PART I: INTODUCTION
1. Rationales
In the process of global integration, English is widely spoken all over the world and has
become an international language used for all aspects of life: business, education, politics, etc.
Therefore, mastery of English is, nowadays, one of the desires of most generations. Having
assessed the importance of English in the market economy and responding to learners’ needs,
in 2005, the Ministry of Education and Training signed an agreement with Educational
Testing Institute – based in the United States regarding the use of TOEIC (Test of English for
International Communication) to assess students’ English language proficiency. Thus,
universities and colleges in Vietnam can apply the TOEIC program to teach and evaluate
students’ learning outcomes instead of the old program and tests for A, B, C certificates.
The TOEIC - test – based program has been used at Hai Phong Private University (HPU)
in Hai Phong, Vietnam since 2008. However, this program itself has raised some controversial
issues. With two - year experience in teaching English for non - majors and from what the
researcher observed in TOEIC classes, it can be found that many lecturers failed in listening
periods especially concerning TOEIC materials. They complained about students’ indifference
to their lectures despite they had well – prepared lesson plans. From that reason, “A study on
non-majors’ motivational factors in learning English listening at Hai Phong Private
University” was chosen for the thesis. With this study, the researcher hopes to find out
motivational factors affecting students’ learning listening at HPU. This will be the basis for
the researcher in particular and the HPU teachers of English in general in arousing motivation
for students in listening, helping them to get involved in different listening activities, keep
their efforts during learning process and then achieve successes.
2. Aims of the study

Learners - related factors consist of aptitudes, personality, motivation and attitudes,
preference, and beliefs.
Teachers - related factors consist of behaviors, competence, methods, grading and
assessment.
6. Significance of the study
Motivational factors assessed in this study will help teachers have better techniques and
teaching activities. Therefore, non-majors can overcome devotives to achieve great successes
in second language acquisition.
The study is also used as reference for teachers of English at HPU to compile more suitable

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suitable books for the TOEIC – test – based program.
7. Design of the study
This study consists of three main parts: the introduction, the development and the
conclusion.
Part I is the Introduction. It lays out the reasons for choosing the topic for this thesis and
points out the aims, the scope, the methods, significance and the design of the study.
Part II is the Development consisting of three chapters:
Chapter 1 – Literature Review - presents the theoretical background related to
motivation, listening and motivation in learning second language listening.
Chapter 2 – Research methodology - gives the situation analysis, subjects, data
collection instruments, data collection procedures
Chapter 3 – Data Analysis – shows the detailed results of the survey and a
comprehensive analysis on the data collected.
Chapter 4 - Findings, discussions and recommendations – refers to major findings,
discussions and offers some recommendations for enhancing students’ motivation in listening
skills.
Part III is the Conclusion presenting the review of the study, suggestions for further
research and limitations of the study.


1.1.2.1. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Motivation can be from inside or outside a person, which forms two kinds of motivation:
intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation, in Harmer’s opinion, “comes from within the
individual and a person might be motivated by the enjoyment of learning process itself or by
the desire to make them feel better”. Besides, Edward Deci (1975:23) defines intrinsic
motivation: “intrinsically motivated activities are ones for which there is no apparent reward
except the activity itself. People seem to engage in the activities for their own sake”.
Contrarily, extrinsic motivation is caused by number of outside factors (Harmer, 2003).
It includes circumstances, situations, rewards or punishment. “Extrinsic motivation is one in

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which the student engages in an activity in order to obtain a reward, or to avoid a punishment.
This student is not really interested in the activity for its own sake, but rather for what it will
gain them” (Woolfolk, 2001). Douglas Brown (2007) explaines “extrinsic motivation is fueled
by the anticipation of a reward from outside and beyond the self”.
In comparing two kinds of motivation above, the main difference found is the goals of
the students. With intrinsic motivation, the student studies subject material for the sake of
learning. Extrinsically motivated students study for the sake of outside influences.
1.1.2.2. Integrative and instrumental motivation
Motivation falls into two other categories: integrative and instrumental. Dornyei (2001)
and Gardner and Lambert (1972) suggest that “integrative motivation refers to positive
attitudes and feelings toward the target language group”. While, Lambert (1974:98) define
integrative motivation as “a sincere and personal interest in the people and culture represented
by the other language group.” He explains that some learners might choose to learn a
particular second language because they were interested in the people and culture.
Contrary to integrative motivation is the form of motivation referred to as instrumental
motivation. Dornyei (2001) and Gardner and Lambert (1972) define it as “the potential
utilitarian gains of second language proficiency such as getting a job or higher salary”.
Gardner (1985:168) state: “an instrumental motivation is a powerful motivator, it will
influence achievement”. So, it is seen that learners will have instrumental motivation if they

Intelligence
Traditionally, intelligence is measured by an intelligence quotient (IQ) test. It usually
measures only two types of intelligence: verbal/linguistic and mathematical/logical
intelligence. Linguistic intelligence is showed by speaking, using words, writing, giving
presentations, solving word problems.
Aptitude
According to Lightbown and Spada (1999:53), aptitude is the factor that “predicts whether
individuals become efficient learners of foreign language in a classroom setting”. An aptitude
is an innate. Aptitude comprises different types of abilities: auditory ability (the ability to
identify and memorize new sounds), grammatical sensitivity (the ability to figure out
grammatical rules from language samples, the ability to understand the function of particular
words in sentences) and memory (the ability to memorize new words).
Personality
Personality of the students constitutes a major factor contributing to success or failure in
language learning. For example, Ellis (1997) proves that extrovert students are advantaged in

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the development of language associated with interpersonal communication. From the same
point of view, Lightbown and Spada (1999) give a number of personality characteristics:
extroversion, inhibition, self – esteem, empathy, dominance, talkativeness, responsiveness.
To sum up, personality characteristics are likely to affect second language learning
including extroversion, relaxation, self-esteem (self-confidence), anxiety and empathy.
Motivation and attitudes
According to Gardner (1985), “the relationship between attitudes, motivation and second
language achievement is complex; they always interact and influence each others”. In learning
listening, they are expressed through the awareness of the importance of listening, learners’
needs (personal growth, cultural enrichment, practical goals, and intergrative reason) and
learners’ effort and interest in learning and practicing listening.
Learners’ preference
It refers to learning styles involving an individual’s natural habitual, preferred ways of

learning, and the context in which the learner learns second.
1.1.3.2. Teachers - related factors
Teacher’s behavior
It is the teacher’s attitudes to students and to learning and teaching. In fact, it is directly
related to teacher’s characters including niceness and politeness, enthusiasm, sense of humor,
closeness and flexibility.
Niceness and politeness: the teacher encourages students to learn and never insults them.
Enthusiasm: the teacher is willingly to help students whenever they want
Flexibility: the teacher must have quickly response to problems arisen, solve them.
Closeness: the teacher gets on well with students. Therefore, students can sometimes
share their difficulties in real life with their teacher.
Sense of humor: the teacher involves more than simply telling jokes. Rather, it seems to deal
more with a teacher's ability to pleasantly communicate with students.
Teacher’s competence
It refers to teacher’s proficiency, social and cultural background knowledge. The
proficiency shows by the level of mastering and using the second language, the ability to
perform teachers’ mastery suitably to the content of each lesson. Social and cultural
background knowledge is known with the understanding of society and culture in both the
second language community and the mother tongue community and shown in teaching.
Teaching methods
Teaching methods refers to a set of techniques and activities used to get learners involved

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in learning to achieve a goal. In listening, teaching methods of one lesson can be different,
they depend on three stages: pre – listening, while – listening and post – listening. However,
when deciding what teaching method to use, a teacher needs to consider students' background
knowledge, environment, and learning goals. The teachers aware that students learn in
different ways so they must use techniques which cater to multiple learning styles to help
students retain information and strengthen understanding.
Grading and assessment

Perseverance: The learners make effort in learning and they are not discouraged by any
setbacks or apparent lack of progress.
Tolerance of ambiguity: The learners are not disturbed by situation involving a
temporary lack of understanding. They are still confident for the later understanding.
Sharing the same point, Crooks and Schmidt (1989) (cited in Ellis, 1997:42) describe a
motivated student as someone who “becomes productively engaged on learning tasks, and
sustains that engagement, without the need for continual encouragement or direction”.
1.2. Theoretical background of listening
1.2.1. Definition of listening
There are different points of view on the definition of listening. According to Field
(1998:38), listening is “an invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe. Listeners
must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures,
interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret this within the intermediate as well as the
lager socio-cultural context of the utterance.” Mary Underwood (1989:1) gives that “listening
is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear so that
the listener must recognize and interpret the other factors which are used to convey the
messages”. According to Susanne Flohr and Pia Paesler (2010:3- 4), listening composes
important many factors and there are three stages of listening: pre – listening, while – listening
and post – listening. Pre – listening means that the teacher makes the students aware of a
situation and activate their prior knowledge. While – listening means that the teacher gives the
students visual support or guiding questions beforehand. Post – listening is the stage where the
students become active and work with what they had heard”. All in all, is a complex, active
process of interpretation in which listeners matches what they hear with what they already
know. Listening involves a sender, a message, and a receiver (the listener) and also consists of
three stages: pre – listening, while – listening and post – listening.
1.2.2. The process of listening
Listening process is viewed differently. It can be divided into steps or is considered as an

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interpretive process. Lisa J. (2008:1) looks at listening with a five - step process: attending,

The main idea of grammar – based listening exercises is to analyze the language by its
components and reconstruct an incomplete text. Rost (1994:35) (cited in John Flowerdew,

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Lindsay Miller, 2005:6) states that “in order to understand, we must know how words and
phrases are bound to each other”. Thus, teacher requires students to look at the written text
while they are listening to the recording. This forces them to do several things: identify words
by their position in the sentence, work out the relationship between words and phrases, use
forward and backward cues, and make intelligent guesses based on text cues.
Audio – lingual method
The method is claimed to be “scientific” and “new”. “It was theoretically underpinned
by structural linguistic, which held that learning a language involved mastering the building
blocks of the language and learning the rules and the behaviorist theory of learning, which
viewed language as a form of behavior like other aspects of human activities” (Canh, L.V,
2003:65). In this method, the linguistic patterns are elicited, repeated and tested until the
responses given by the student in the foreign language are automatic. The more students repeat
a correct phrase or sentence, the stronger of their memory of the structure will be.
Task - based method
In this method, listening lesson is based around the completion of activities or tasks so
that teacher should understand listening materials and process materials into a variety of tasks
in order to develop students’ communicative competence. Task means “ a piece of classroom
work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the
target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than on form”
(Canh, L.V,2003:102). The typical listening lesson of this method follows certain stages: pre –
task, task, planning, report, analysis and practice.
TOEIC listening level 2 has fifteen periods for the whole semester while fifteen units in
Reward book has forty five periods. Lastly, students are always gathered for different subject
classes so they do not know each other well, which makes difficult for teachers to conduct
activities.
Although it is unavoidable that there are strong and weak points for learning and teaching

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at HPU at the same time, in comparison with other universities all over Vietnam, HPU is still
assumed as a university with a good educational environment.
2.2.2. The TOEIC – test – based program and listening materials
* The TOEIC – test – based program
The TOEIC – test – based program has been implemented at HPU since 2008. In the
whole program, there are 8 frame marks. The class division depends on the marks that
students get in TOEIC tests. There are 8 types of classes in the correspondence to 8 levels as
follows:
TOEIC Level
Mark
Level 1
100 – 200
Level 2
205- 300
Level 3
305 – 400
Level 4
405 – 500
Level 5
505 – 600
Level 6
605 – 780
Level 7

them are compiled by teachers of English in Foreign Languages Department. Listening books
are designed depending on the book “Learning to listen 1, 2 and 3” written by Lin Lougheed
in 2003. Listening books of level 2 are lessons complied from unit 9 to unit 16 in the book
“Learning to listen 1”. Basic TOEIC is the book assigned as reference book for this level.
2.2.3. Subjects
The study was carried out with the participation of 186 students at HPU. These students
are between 18- 21 , both male and female, have learnt English for at least nearly four years,
three years at high school and about one year at university. They get used to learning a
language by focusing extensive vocabulary and grammatical structures so language function
and communicative competence are their weak points.
The students were randomly chosen from 1078 learners at TOEIC level 2 during the
school year 2010 – 2011 belonging to seven classes. Certainly, it was very difficult to select
random sample of individuals since the students had already been assigned to different classes.
In this case, cluster random sampling was chosen.
2.3. Instrument for collecting data
After carefully examining the instruments given by Hoa, H. X. and Minh, N. T. T.
(2006) and concerning her teaching experience, the investigator designed the close – ended
questionnaire in Likert Scale pattern to get the information on factors affecting English non –
majors in learning listening. This kind of questionnaire is easy to understand and answer. It
also takes less time to complete than the other kinds of questionnaire.
2.4. Data collection procedures
First, the questionnaire was delivered to students of seven different classes of the first
term in the school year 2010 – 2011 to measure motivational factors. Then, the data was
collected and prepared for the next step of the analysis.
2.5. Conclusion
This chapter has been presented the methodology employed in the research. The next
chapter will offer a descriptive data analysis of the collected data.

50%
60%
Strongly
agree
Agree
Neutral
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
1%
6%
14%
59%
20%
0%
5%
22%
57%
16%
Country
City

Chart 1: Students’ auditory ability

Countryside
City
No. of students
112
74
Percentage

7%
1%
Country
CityChart 2: Students’ grammatical sensitivity
The chart shows that a large promotion of the students (73% of the suburbanites, 86% of
the urbanites) admits their sensitivities in learning English grammatical rules and only few
people (11%, 8%) have difficulties in discovering structures. Obviously, this is one of strong
points of HPU students, which makes it easy for teachers to design listening activities while
they do not need to care much about grammar.
Statement 3: I can memorize new words for a long time.
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
Strongly
agree
Agree
Neutral
Disagree
Strongly
disagree

Statement 4: I like learning English through extracurricular activities
As can be seen from the chart 4, 59% of the suburbanites and 74% of the urbanites prefer
learning English through extracurricular activities. Only 12% of each group dislikes activities
outside classroom. Meanwhile, the percentages of “no idea” are up to 29% for the suburban
group and 15% for the urban group. It means that the majority of learners is energized by
being with people and interacting with them, and can often think best if they can talk over
their ideas.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
Strongly
agree
Agree
Neutral
Disagree
Strongly
disagree
17%
42%
29%
11%
1%
28%
46%
15%
4%
7%

8%
10%
15%
32%
34%
9%
Country
CityChart 5: Students’ relaxation
It can be drawn from the chart that 27% of the suburbanites and 25% of the urbanites are
comfortable during listening activities. 27% and 32% of the two groups choose neutral idea.
38% of the suburbanites and 34% of the urbanites choose the “disagree”. The “strongly
disagree” idea is shown with the rates of 8% and 9%. So, relaxation negatively affects
students’ learning because lack of relaxation during listening process makes students
uncomfortable and passive. This is one of reasons why learners do not concentrate on learning
and easily make noise in class. As a result, controlling the whole class becomes more difficult
for teachers.
Statement 6: I never feel embarrassed when speaking in front of the class
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
Strongly
agree
Agree