VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
********************* LÊ VĂN BẰNG “DESIGNING SUPPLEMENTARY ACTIVITIES TO ENHANCE
LISTENING SKILL FOR 11
th
GRADERS AT LÊ LAI HIGH SCHOOL,
THANH HÓA PROVINCE”

“Thiết kế hoạt động bổ trợ nhằm nâng cao kỹ năng nghe của học sinh lớp 11
trường THPT Lê Lai, Thanh Hóa” M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE: 60140111 Hanoi, 2014
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

i
CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT

I hereby certify that the thesis entitled “Designing supplementary activities to
enhance listening skill for 11
th
graders at Lê Lai High School, Thanh Hoá” is the
result of my own research for the Degree of Master of Arts at University of
Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi and that
this thesis has not been submitted for any degree at any other university or tertiary
institution.
Signature Lê Văn Bằng ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


eleventh-form students and the observation sheet for teachers of English. English
tests and teaching diaries are also carried out to elicit hidden reasons behind
participants‟ answers in the questionnaires and to help the researcher draw a vivid
picture of a listening lesson as well. From the results inferred in the analysis, the
researcher designed supplementary activities to make teaching and learning English
listening skills more effective.
.
iv
LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS
Tables:
Table 1: Results of the pre-test
Table 2: Frequency of listening tasks in listening lessons
Table 3: Students‟ feeling when doing listening tasks in English 11
Table 4: Students‟ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks
Table 5: Students‟ preferences for listening tasks
Table 6: Students‟ opinions about the way their teachers treat listening tasks
Table 7: Types of listening task in English 11
Table 8: Students‟ involvement in the tasks
Table 9: Students‟ involvement in the supplementary activities
Charts:
Chart 1: The frequency of using language games in warm-up activities
Chart 2: The effectiveness of language games in warm-up activities in listening
lessons


1.2.4. Techniques for adapting materials 10
1.3. Relevant studies on the same topic 11
CHAPTER TWO: THE STUDY 13
2.1 Research questions re-stated 13
2.2. Participants 13

vi
2.2.1. The teacher/ researcher 14
2.2.2. The non-participant observer 14
2.3. Data collection instruments 15
2.4. Summary 16
CHAPTER THREE: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 17
3.1. Findings from the pre-listening test and the survey questionnaire with 11
th
graders.
17
3.1.1. Results from pre-listening test 17
3.1.2.3. Students‟ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11 18
3.1.2.4. Students‟ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks to their
listening competence. 19
3.1.2.5. Students‟ preferences for listening tasks 19
3.1.2.6. Students‟ opinions about the way their teachers treat listening tasks 20
3.1.2.7. The fact of using language games in warm-up activities 21
3.1.2.8. Effectiveness of language games in warm-up activities in listening lessons . 22
3.2. Findings from the discussion with English teachers 22
3.3. Findings from the textbook analysis 24
3.4. Findings from classroom observation and teaching diaries 26
3.4.1. Classroom observation 26
3.4.2. Teaching diaries 29
3.5. Summary 30

compulsory subject. So far, there have been remarkable changes in the way of
teaching and learning English. However, English teaching in general and teaching
listening in particular still is far from satisfactory. How to motivate students to
listen is really necessary, and is a big question to most teachers in Vietnam now. On
the other hand, each student has different language learning capacity. Especially, in
my high school in a mountainous area, students have quite low levels of English. So
it is important for me to find effective ways to increase my students‟ interest in
listening and hence improve their listening skill.
In reading relevant literature, I can see that students find listening extremely
difficult and boring due to different reasons. For instance, the listening tasks may
be monotonous, repetitive and beyond their language level, or there could be too
many new words in the listening records; the pronunciation of several words in the
record may be unfamiliar to students who are used to pronouncing them wrongly; or
the speakers may speak too fast for them to hear, as they are used to hear each word
separately in the Vietnamese language rather than focusing merely on stressed
syllables and essential key words in English, etc. Supplementary activities before
listening, while listening and after listening, especially language games, are highly
needed in order to ease the listening tasks for them while they may add fun to the
listening lesson and hence help them improve their listening skill.
There may have been a good number of interesting materials for use by
English teachers in their listening lessons, but which of them can be suitable to the
particular students at my school remains a question to answer, since each group of
students may have their own problems and capacity, as discussed earlier.

2
For the above reasons, I decide to embark on the task of designing
supplementary activities to enhance listening skill for the 11
th
graders at Lê Lai
High School, Thanh Hóa.

3.2. To seek answers to the three research questions above, I will apply the
following methods and instruments:
Question 1:
- Using survey questionnaire to ask a number of 11
th
graders to find out what
difficulties they expect to encounter in listening lessons in the 11
th
grade and
causes of those difficulties;
- Discussing with English teachers at my school to gather more information on
difficulties 11
th
graders have faced with, or may have to face with, and their
causes. Part of the information from teacher discussions will also help
answer question 2 below.
Question 2:
Analyzing listening tasks, texts and audio resources in English 11 to identify
problems and their possible causes, including new words, pronunciation,
speed, intonation, etc.
Question 3:
Designing supplementary activities and listening tasks to help address the
difficulties identified so that listening tasks are easier, more suitable and interesting
to the students.
4. Structure of the thesis
As indicated above, the output of the study will be a set of supplementary
activities for use in listening lessons for 11
th
graders at Lê Lai High School. These
will form part of my thesis which is structured as follows:

The purpose of this chapter is to present the theoretical bases which are used
for this study of mine, and also reviews relevant studies concerning listening tasks
for high school students in Vietnam in general, and English 11 textbook and 11
th

graders in Vietnam in particular.
1.1. Teaching Listening
1.1.1. 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, it 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.

6
1.1.2. Three stages of the listening lesson
In order to help learners get most from a listening lesson, a lesson plan of

is to check how well the students understood and whether they have completed the
listening task. The second purpose is to reflect on why some students have failed to
understand or miss parts of the passage. The next is to expand on the topic or the
language of the listening text. The fourth purpose is to give students opportunity to
consider the manner and attitude of the speaker in the listening text. In addition, the
general factors listed in pre-listening and while-listening , Underwood (1989)
indicates that the attention should be given to the following factors in selecting post-
listening activities: How much language work you wish to do in relation the
particular listening text; whether there will be time to do much post-listening work
at the end of the listening lesson; whether the post-listening work should consist of
speaking, reading or writing; whether the post-listening stage is seen as an
opportunity for pair or group work; whether it is necessary to provide post-listening
activities which can be done outside the classroom; how to motivate the chosen
activity will be and whether it can be more motivating.
1.2. Material adaptation
1.2.1. Definition of material adaptation
Madsen and Bowen (1978: ix) argues that adaptation is an action of
employing „one or more of a number of techniques: supplementing, expanding,
personalizing, simplifying, modernizing, localizing, or modifying cultural/
situational content‟. Similarly, Tomlinson (1998) believes that adaptation means
“reducing, adding, omitting, modifying and supplementing.”
It is also quite necessary to differentiate the terms “adapting” and “adopting”.
Adaptation is a process subsequent to, and dependent on adaptation .In addition,
while adoption deals with the whole course book, adaptation is only concerned with

8
the parts that make up the whole. Last but not least, adoption is related to
evaluation, but adaptation is related to changing or adjusting various parts
In short, adaptation matches internal to external factors. It involves changing
some of the internal characteristics of a course book to better suit a particular

It is obvious that material adaptation is necessary. However, this process can
not be done casually and arbitrarily. It must follow some certain principles.
According to McDonough and Shaw (1993), adapting materials must ensure three
principles, namely „personalizing‟, „individualizing‟ and „localizing‟:
„Personalizing‟ refers to increasing the relevance of content in relation to learners‟
interests and their academy, educational or professional needs.
„Individualizing‟ addresses the learning styles both of individuals and of the
numbers of a class working closely together.
„Localizing‟ considers the matters of international geography of English language
teaching and recognizes that what may work well in this learning environment may
not do so in that environment.
In brief, the above principles play a vital role in adapting materials. In this
study, the author also bases on these principles for designing supplementary
activities for the listening lessons in English 11.

10
1.2.4. Techniques for adapting materials
To adapt materials, McDonough and Shaw (1993) offer a list of techniques as
follows:
 Adding: The term “Addition‟ mainly means that materials are supplemented by
adding more to them “while taking into account the practical effect on time
allocation‟. There are two ways of adding, namely extending or expanding.
Extending means teachers supply more of the same type of materials to make a
quantitative change in the material. Expanding means adding some things
different to the material to make qualitative change.
 Deleting or omitting: Like technique of addition, a teacher can delete or omit
materials both quantitatively ( by subtracting ) or qualitatively ( by abridging )
 Modifying: „Modification‟ at one level is a very general term in the language
applying to any kind of change. In order to introduce further possibilities for
adaptation, we should restrict its meaning here to an internal change in the

1.3. Relevant studies on the same topic
Before I carried out this study, there were some relevant studies on my topic.
For example: Hoàng Phương Thảo (2010), “Improving students‟ listening
comprehension through focused on listening tasks”, M.A. thesis, University of
Languages and International Studies, Việt Nam National University, Hà Nội. In this
study the researcher mainly focused on students‟ attitudes towards listening learning
basing on the survey questionnaire, and then she gave out some suggestions to
improve students‟ listening comprehension. The good point of this study is that the
researcher investigated the students‟ attitudes to wards listening learning so well,
but the limitation of this study is the researcher did not give out the concrete

12
solutions through each listening activity or each listening lesson in the text book
basing on the results of the survey questionnaire about the students‟ attitudes. The
topic 2, Nguyễn Diệu Huyền (2010), “ A study on the effects of pre-listening
activities on the listening performance of non-major 10
th
grade students at Nguyen
Gia Thieu high school, Ha Noi” ”, M.A. thesis, University of Languages and
International Studies, Việt Nam National University, Hà Nội. In this study, the
researcher investigated the effects of pre-listening activities on the listening
performances of grade 10 students at Nguyen Gia Thieu high school by using the
observation sheets and survey questionnaire in three classes. The good point of this
study is that the researcher pouted out the effects of pre-listening activities on the
listening performance, for example: Students lack vocabulary and structures related
to the topic of the listening passage, encounter their limitted background
knowledge, lack preparation for the task, unfamiliar topics and the speed of the
listening. Besides, the limitation of this study is that the researcher did not give out
the concrete solutions in pre-listening activities through each listening lessons.
Driving from the good points and the limitations of those two studies, in my study

School, where the data were collected, analyzed and improvement strategies were
tried out. The people who took part in this study were:

14
2.2.1. The teacher/ researcher
The researcher has been teaching English at Lê Lai High School for 10 years.
He is thirty two years old. He graduated from Vinh University and now he is
attending a Master Course in TESOL at University of Languages and International
Studies (ULIS), VNU.
2.2.2. The non-participant observer
The observer was a teacher of English at Lê Lai High School. She graduated
from University of Languages and International Studies (ULIS), VNU. She is at the
age of forty and has been teaching English for 15 years. She was invited to take part
in this study to help the researcher observe the classroom and fill in the observation
sheets. She has a set of checklist involving students‟ concentration on the listening
activities, their involvement in the activities and their enjoyment and persistence.
She also observed students‟ reactions to the supplementary listening activities and
their preferences for listening activities. All the information from collected from the
class observations are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the supplementary
activities.
2.2.3. The students
The students were forty 11
th
graders (18 females and 22 males) in the
researcher‟s class - Class 11A1- at Lê Lai High School in the academic year 2013-
2014. Their ages were between 16 and 17. They came from different communes of
Ngọc Lặc district. All of them had learnt English since Grade 6. However, their
English proficiency was quite low, especially listening skill. Most of them did not
pay attention to listening study as they thought that this skill was not very important
and especially it was not tested in any National Examination. In the school year

English 11 text book to identify problems and their possible causes, including new
words, pronunciation, speed, intonation, etc.
Question 3:
From the results of the research question 1 and the research question 2, I
designed supplementary activities and listening tasks to help the students address
the difficulties identified. Designing those supplementary activities and listening
tasks is to make listening tasks easier, more suitable and interesting to the students.

16
Designing supplementary activities and listening tasks to help address the
difficulties identified so that listening tasks are easier, more suitable and interesting
to the students.
2.4. Summary
To conclude, this chapter presents the methodology of the study. In other
words, it describes the aims, context, participants and instruments of the study.
Given the collected data, Chapter 3 will depict the data analysis and the study
results.