VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES VŨ QUỲNH TRANG

DIFFICULTES IN LEARNING ENGLISH LISTENING
SKILLS: THE CASE OF 10-GRADE STUDENTS AT
THANG LONG HIGH SCHOOL

(NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN TRONG VIỆC HỌC KỸ NĂNG
NGHE: TRƯỜNG HỢP CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 10
TRƯỜNG THPT THĂNG LONG)

M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field : English Language Teaching Methodology
Code : 60 14 10
HÀ NỘI- 2013 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
3. Research questions 2
4. Significance of the study 2
5. Scope of the study 3
6. Design of the study 4
PART II: DEVELOPMENT 5
CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 5
1.1 The nature of listening 5
1.1.1 Definition of listening 5
1.1.2 Classification of listening 6
1.2. Process of listening 7
1.3 Factors affecting EFL listening 8
1.3.1 Text Characteristics 9
1.3.1.1. Length and density of the text 9
1.3.1.2 Quality of the text. 10
1.3.1.3 Conceptual difficulty of the text 10
1.3.1.4 Syntactic complexity of the text 11
1.3.1.5 Complexity of tasks 11
1.3.2 Speaker Characteristics 12
1.3.3 Listener Characteristics 13
v

1.3.3.1 Background knowledge 13
1.3.3.2 Language proficiency level 15
1.3.3.3 Application of strategies 16
1.3.3.4 Knowledge of vocabulary 16
1.3.4 Listening Environment 16
1.4 Overview of listening section in the English 10 textbook “Tieng Anh 10” 17
1.4.1 Pre-listening stage 18
1.4.2 While-listening stage 18
1.4.3 Post-listening stage 19

APPENDICES I
Appendix 1: Questionnaire (English version) I
Appendix 2: Questionnaire (Vietnamese version) V

vii

LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS
Table 1: Difficulties related to Listening factors 26
Table 2: Difficulties related to Listener factors 29

viii

ABBREVIATIONS

No Number
& and
EFL English as a foreign language
TLHS Thang Long High School
GCSE General Certificate of Secondary Education

1

PART I
INTRODUCTION
1. Statement of the Problem
Recently, listening has gained more and more attention in foreign language
learning. In learning English as a foreign language (EFL), it is suggested that the
most important step should begin with an effort to listen. Rubin & Thompson


2. Objectives of the Study
The objectives of the study are:
-

To identify common difficulties 10-grade students of TLHS encounter when
studying listening skills in “Tieng Anh 10”.
-

To suggest some solutions to help students overcome their difficulties and
recommendations for teachers at TLHS to have possible measures that could
contribute to planning a lesson taking the learners‟ problems into
consideration.

3. Research questions
The study aims at finding out answers to the following questions:
1. What difficulties do 10-grade students at TLHS encounter in studying
listening skills?
2. What solutions are suggested to overcome these difficulties? 4. Significance of the Study
Awareness of the difficulties that students encounter in listening skills would
benefit both students and teachers. Hopefully, the findings of this study will
3

provide teachers knowledge of the problematic areas of listening skills, so that
they can take necessary treatment measures, which are suggested as an
implication of the study. Understanding their students‟ listening difficulties will
permit teachers to modify their teaching approaches, methods and techniques.

the theoretical background related to the topic. Chapter two includes subjects of the
study, data collection instruments, procedure, analysis of data and the results.
Part three is the Conclusion which summarizes major findings of the investigation,
provides implications and suggestions, limitations and suggestions for further
studies. 5

PART II
DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1 The nature of listening
1.1.1 Definition of listening
To define listening, theoreticians distinguish listening and hearing. Listening
involves an active process, which requires an analysis of sounds, in contrast to
hearing that only perceives sounds in a passive way. In the same way, Harmer
(1989: 16) expresses that listening is a “receptive skill” where people obtain the

basing on the types of situation where the understanding takes place. Firstly,
reciprocal or interactive listening happens when the listener is required to take
part in the interaction and alternately listens and speaks. Interactive listening
situations include face-to-face conversations and telephone calls in which the
listener has a chance to ask for clarification, repetition, or slower speech from
his/her conversation partner. The second type is non-reciprocal or non-interactive
listening which happens when the listener is engaged in listening passively to a
monologue or speech or even conversation. Some non-interactive listening
situations are listening to the radio, CDs, TV, films, lectures etc. and here the
listener doesn‟t usually have the opportunity to ask for clarification, slower speech
or repetition.
According to Derrington and Groom (2004), there are five types of listening: (i)
informative, which consists of information retained by the learner; (ii)
appreciative, when the learner listens according to his style and feels pleasure
about it; (iii) critical is based on retaining information and analyzing it deeply;
(iv) discriminative in which the listener identifies emotions and inferences through
the tone of voice, (iv) empathic consists on non-verbal behavior of the listener that
is attending to what is said.
7

1.2 Process of listening
Duzer (1997) lists the following nine activities underlying the silent learning: (1)
determining a reason for listening; (2) taking the raw speech and deposits an image
of it in short-term memory; (3) attempting to organize the information by
identifying the type of speech event (a conversation, a lecture, a radio ad) and the
function of the message (to persuade/ inform/ request); (4) predicting information
expected to be included in the message; (5) recalling background information
(schemata) to help interpret the message; (6) assigning a meaning to the message;
(7) checking that the message has been understood; (8) determining the
information to be held in long-term memory; (9) deleting the original form of the


1.3 Factors affecting EFL listeningIn Underwood‟s point of view (1994: 16), there are seven potential difficulties in
EFL listening comprehension: (1) lack of control over the speed at which speakers
speak; (2) inability to get things repeated; (3) the listener's limited vocabulary; (4)
failure to recognize the signals; (5) problems of interpretation; (6) inability to
concentrate; (7) established learning habits. Many language learners believe that
the greatest difficulty with listening is that the listener cannot control how quickly
a speaker speaks.
Rubin and Thompson (1994: 87) identify three common problems in learning to
listen to a foreign language. The first problem is that the speaker talks too fast. If
the listener cannot follow the speaker, the listener can let the speaker know about
it. He/she can ask for repetition, clarification or rephrase. The second problem is
that the listener could not understand the foreign language, for example, in TV and
movies. It is advisable for the listener to guess or predict what he/she has to listen
to by using visual clues, teachers‟ questions, warm up activities and his/her own
background knowledge. The third problem is that the listener tend to stop listening
when he/she hears a new word or phrase. As a result, he/she can miss portions of
the passage that might help clarify the unfamiliar word or segment. The listener
should concentrate on familiar parts and keep listening.
9

In addition, there are other scholars who forwarded factors that are thought to
affect foreign language listening comprehension. Rubin (1994: 216) after
reviewing “over 130 studies of which over 115 report directly on research in
listening comprehension” identified five factors which affect listening
comprehension: text characteristics such as speech rate, pause, stress and rhythm,
difference in first and second language, etc; interlocutor characteristics such as

of comprehension by reducing tiredness and lapse of concentration. With regard
to the density of the text, many writers (Ur, 2005; Underwood, 1989) claim that
information should be less dense in the spoken language than in the written
language.

1.3.1.2 Quality of the text.
It is important to pick topics that will be interesting for students of different ages.
An interesting topic generates enjoyment that leads to motivation. Thus,
learners‟ interest should be taken into consideration during selecting or
preparing listening materials. If the text is interesting, it motivates learners by
making the listening task enjoyable. Also, it catches learners‟ attention and
encourages them to actively engage in the activities. Underwood (1989: 19)
says: “If students find the topic interesting, they will find concentration easier.”
That is, when the listening topic is interesting, students find listening tasks
very enjoyable, because they are motivated to attentively follow what they
listen to. On the contrary, if the topic is not interesting, students may find the
listening activities boring, and this can interfere with their concentration which is
critical to listening activity because even “the shortest break in attention can
seriously impair comprehension” (Underwood, 1989: 19).

1.3.1.3 Conceptual difficulty of the text
Difficult concepts can negatively affect students‟ listening. According to Boyle
(1984: 35), if the concept of a listening passage is difficult “especially if the
material is abstract, abstruse, highly specialized or technical, esoteric, lengthy, or
11

poorly organized”, comprehension of that passage can be difficult. During
selecting or preparing listening materials, therefore, we should make sure that
whether the difficulty level of the concept is suitable for all students in the level.
Topics about people, daily life, environment and social issues which contain

cover all language skills other than focus on listening skills, it may be
unnecessary to employ tasks that involve reading, speaking or writing which are
tiring and difficult for students. Therefore, Ur (2005) and many authors agree that
listening tasks should requires quick simple responses and should not demand
the skills of reading, speaking and writing at the expense of listening. It is
advisable that the listening tasks should be listening- based, rather than reading-,
writing-, or speaking-based.

1.3.2 Speaker Characteristics
Speaker factors may include the language ability of the speaker (native or non-
native speaker); speaker’s production (pronunciation, accent, variation, voice,
etc); speed of delivery; prestige and personality of the speaker (Boyle 1984: 35).
Most students have had little prior exposure to authentic discourse; therefore,
listeners have imperfect control of linguistic code. Moreover, the different
pronunciations of words across versions of the same language (e.g. British, Indian,
Canadian, Australian, and regional U.S English) make it difficult to percept the
sounds. Ur (2005) realizes that many foreign language learners who are used to the
accents of their teachers feel dismayed when they cannot listen to other speakers.
They even claim that the speaker‟ accent is inferior or wrong “but there is rarely
such a thing as wrong accent” (Ur 2005: 20). Ur also advises teachers to not only
give students familiarity with the two most common English accents - English and
American varieties, but introduce them to other accents.
The other problem that makes difficult to understand the native speaker
English may be the learners past experience of learning. Let us now look at how
Yagang describes it:
13

Learners tend to be used to their teacher‟s accent or to the standard variety of
British or American English. They find it hard to understand speakers with other
accents. Spoken prose, as in news broadcasting and reading aloud written texts,

information; in other words, students try to make sense of what is new by
relating it to what is familiar using their prior knowledge and strategy. These
concepts of learning, in general, indicate that listeners' past experiences
strongly affect the way in which the listeners interpret a passage. To make
the points more clear, we will see the concept of background knowledge from
three different perspectives: topic familiarity, authentic speech and culture
familiarity.

a) Listeners’ awareness to a topic
Boyle (1984: 35) lists “knowledge of the specific topic or subject” as a factor that
affects EFL listening. Listening can be seen as an interactive process in which
the listener's knowledge is used to make sense of information provided by the
speaker. Current views on listening comprehension agree that prior knowledge of
a topic can affect listening comprehension. If communication is to take place, the
learner should have certain things in common with the subject under
discussion.
It is obvious that students will find it easier to listen to a passage on familiar
topic than on unfamiliar one. Moreover, in order to make students familiar to a
topic, scholars advise to activate learners‟ background knowledge to prepare the
students to use what they know about a topic, and to facilitate effective
comprehension.

b) Cultural awareness
Culture plays a significant role not only in comprehension but also in learning a
foreign language as a whole. It can be inferred that the student with no
background knowledge of culture in English, American or other English speaking
15

countries, is unlikely to understand Anglophone modes of thinking as expressed
in the English language. Underwood states:

1.3.3.3 Application of strategies
Harmer (1991:183) describes these strategies, which he calls “micro skills”, as
follows: predictive skills, extracting specific information, getting the general
picture, extracting detailed information, recognizing functions and discourse
patterns and deducting meaning from contexts. He says that an effective listener
is the one who is capable of employing the appropriate strategies of listening
simultaneously. He advises that EFL listeners should employ these strategies of
listening in order to be successful in listening comprehension because listeners‟
success at understanding the content of what they hear depends to a large extent
in their expertise on the micro skills.

1.3.3.4 Knowledge of vocabulary
Another area that is claimed to affect students‟ listening comprehension is the
student's limited lexical knowledge. A problem many learners have is having to
deal with the multiple meanings of words and in fact, many students know only
the most common meaning of a word. When the word is encountered in one of its
less common uses, students are confused. The other problem of listening in
relation to vocabulary is getting words which seem similar in sounds. In
English there are different words which seem similar in sounds but different in
meanings (as ship/sheep, meat/meet, fit/feet, write/right, sight/site, light/light,
etc) (Underwood, 1989: 9). When EFL listeners come across such words, they
may fail to distinguish one word from the other with similar sound.
Therefore, students should be exposed to such words and need to learn their
differences in meaning. In addition, students need to learn the expressions that
are common in spoken English.

1.3.4 Listening Environment
Some of these factors that are claimed to affect students‟ EFL listening
comprehension are those concerned with environmental distractions or associated
17

Language focus. This is an advantage of the textbook as it aims to develop all
communicative language skills for students.
18

Listening skills is a complete new section for both Vietnamese students and
teachers, who have not got used to the communicative approach. Thus, listening
skills is considered one of the most difficult skills by many Vietnamese students.
Listening lessons make up 20 % of the English 10 syllabus and each lesson consists
of 3 stages: Pre-listening stage, While-listening stage and Post-listening stage

1.4.1 Pre-listening stage
To prepare students and arouse students‟ interest in the listening text, this stage
consists of various activities such as discussing some relevant pictures, asking and
answering about relevant experience, ideas and vocabulary associated with the
topics, predicting information about the topic. It is difficult for students to listen to
a text at the beginning of the lesson without knowing about the topic, its
knowledge and related vocabulary. Even if the sounds and topics are familiar with
students, they may still get confused and miss parts of the text. There are certain
goals that must be achieved before students start listening to any text. They are
motivation, contextualization and preparation, which should be done in the pre-
listening stage. To do so, teachers should have interesting activities to introduce
the topic, give background information and pre-teach vocabulary such as games or
colorful pictures.

1.4.2 While-listening stage
This stage includes a series of listening activities for students to practice, thus it
often takes most time of the lesson. At this stage students often listen to the tape
recordings several times to do different types of tasks. The purpose of the stage is
to help students develop their listening skills and get to understand the text.
Teachers should play the role of a facilitator who introduces necessary listening