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

NGÔ THỊ HÀ
DEVELOPING LISTENING SKILLS THROUGH GAP-FILL TASKS
FOR THE FIRST YEAR NON-ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS: AN
ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT AT HANOI UNIVERSITY OF
NATURAL RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT

(NGHIÊN CỨU NÂNG CAO KỸ NĂNG NGHE QUA HOẠT ĐỘNG
NGHE ĐIỀN THÔNG TIN CÒN THIẾU CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ
NHẤT KHÔNG CHUYÊN ANH TẠI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC TÀI
NGUYÊN VÀ MÔI TRƯỜNG HÀ NỘI)
M.A. MINOR THESIS
FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE: 6014.0111


CODE: 6014.0111
SUPERVISOR: Prof. Dr. HOÀNG VĂN VÂN
HANOI - 2013
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DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis is the result of my own research and that the
substance of the thesis has not, wholly or in part, been submitted for a degree to any
other university or institution.

Hanoi, December, 2013
Ngô Thị Hà

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis has been accomplished with the help and encouragement of many
people.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to all of them.
First and for most, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor,
Prof. Dr. Hoàng Văn Vân. His profound knowledge in both linguistics and language
teaching methodology has been of great benefit to me. Without his precious
guidance, insightful comments and suggestions, and invaluable encouragement, my
thesis might not have been finished.
I would also like to send my deep thanks to the staff of the Faculty of Post-graduate
Studies for their help and to all the lecturers for their interesting lectures and

Ngô Thị Hà
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS HUNRE: Hanoi University of Natural Resources and Environment
L2: second language
TESOL: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages
GE: General English
ESP: English for Specific Purpose
NCE: New Cutting Edge
MA: Master
PhD: Doctor of Philosophy
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LIST OF CHARTS AND TABLE

CHARTS
Chart 1: Students‟ results of the first semester
Chart 2: Results of the pre-test
Chart 3: Results of the three meetings
Chart 4: Students‟ comments about vocabulary of the recordings
Chart 5: Students‟ comments about the grammar‟s difficulty of the recordings
Chart 6: Students‟ comments about the length of the recordings
Chart 7: Students‟ comments about the speed of the recordings
Chart 8: Students‟ comments about the level of tasks‟ difficulty
Chart 9: Students‟ comments about their accomplishment of the tasks
Chart 10: Results of the post test
Chart 11: Students‟ improvement through tests.

TABLES

List of abbreviations iv
List of Charts and Tables v
Table of Content vi
PART I: INTRODUCTION 1
1.Rationale of the study 2
2.Aims of the study 2
3.Research questions 2
4.Scope of the study 2
5.Methodology 2
6.Design of the study 3
PART II: DEVELOPMENT 5
CHAPTER I: LITERARUTE REVIEW 5
1.1. Listening skills 5
1.1.1. Definitions of listening and listening comprehension 5
1.1.1.1. Listening 5
1.1.1.2. Listening comprehension 5
1.1.2. Listening skills in learning a foreign language 7
1.1.3. Difficulties in learning listening skills 8
1.1.4. Listening material 9
1.1.5. Listening tasks 11
1.1.5.1. Definition of task 11
1.1.5.2. Types of listening tasks 11
1.2. Gap-fill tasks 13
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1.2.1. Gap-fills tasks in learning listening skills 13
1.2.2. Types of gap-fill exercises or tests 14
1.3. Previous studies 17
CHAPTER II: THE METHODOLOGY 18
2.1. Context of the study 18
2.1.1. An overview of teaching and learning English at HUNRE 18

3.3.1. Results of the exercises in four meetings 34
3.3.2. Results of learning diaries 35
3.3.3. Results of teaching diaries 39
3.3.4. Results of post-test 40
3.4. Action research evaluation 40
3.4.1. Students‟ improvement through tests 40
3.4.2. Students‟ involvement in listening tasks 41
3.5. Major findings and discussions 41
3.5.1. Effect of gap-fill tasks on developing students‟ listening skills from
perspective of the students 42
3.5.2. Effect of gap-fill tasks on developing students‟ listening skills from the
perspective of the teacher 42
PART III: CONCLUSION 43
3.1. Recapitulation 43
3.2. Conclusion 44
3.3. Recommendations 44
3.4. Limitation of the study 45
3.5. Suggestions for further study 46
REFERENCES 47
APPENDICES I
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PART I
INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale of the study
The role of English as “global language” has now been asserted with many
eloquent testimonies of its usefulness and contributions in many fields of life such
as science, technology, culture, education, economy, entertainment and so on.
English has helped people closer in „global village‟ (Nguyen, T. N., 2008) and
helped them broaden their knowledge as well. With its wide use as the dominant
language in media, books, etc, English has brought people many chances to get to

Resources and Environment (HUNRE). The specific objectives of the study are:
- To figure out difficulties perceived by students in learning listening skills.
- To find out effective ways to help improve students‟ listening skills.
- To investigate whether doing gap-fill listening tasks can help students improve
their listening skills from students and teacher‟s perspectives.
3. Research questions
In order to obtain the objectives of the study, the following research questions were
formulated:
1) What are the difficulties experienced by the first – year students at HUNRE
in learning listening skills?
2) What should be done to improve the students’ listening skills?
3) To what extent do gap-fill tasks help the first-year students at HUNRE
improve their listening skills, from both students’ and teacher’s perspectives?
4. Scope of the study
With the limit of a minor thesis and due to the limited knowledge and time, I
could just carry out the investigation on a small scale. This action research was
conducted for only nine weeks with three listening lessons and in the context of 45
first-year students at HUNRE in the second semester of the academic year 2012-
2013. In additions, as aforementioned, this study focuses on using gap-fill exercises
to teach listening skills to the above students. Hence, the results of this study is
limited to the above teaching context and participants.
5. Methodology
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To realize the objectives of the study, both qualitative and quantitative methods
are used. The data for the study were collected through the following instruments:
- Talks with colleagues and students: were conducted at the very beginning of
the study to identify students‟ problems in learning listening skills.
- Document analysis 1: the analysis focuses on listening tasks in the course
books to see whether they are suitable with students level and interests or not.
Then some adjustments could be made to match students‟ level and interests.


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PART II
DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1. Listening skills
1.1.1. Definitions of listening and listening comprehension
1.1.1.1. Listening
The definitions of listening vary from author to author and in fact it is not
easy to describe as well as to have a thorough view of it. Accordingly, Field (1989)
states that “listening is an invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe.
Learners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammar
structures, interpret stress and intonation, retain and interpret this within the
immediate as well as the large socio-culture context of utterance.” (Field, 1989).
Brown (1994) also shared the above view when arguing that listening is a skill in
which to identify and understand what is being said, listeners must comprehend “a
speaker‟s accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary”. To make it
easier to understand, Rost (2002) gave a clear description in which he defined
“listening, in its broad sense, is a process of receiving what the speaker actually
says (receptive orientation); constructing and representing meaning (constructive
orientation); and creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy
(transformative orientation)
It can be seen from the above views that listening is not a simple activity of hearing
things but it is a complex mental process requiring a listener to have certain
competence to understand an aural message.
1.1.1.2. Listening comprehension
As with listening, listening comprehension is defined differently by different
authors, but we can see a common view that listening comprehension is thought not
to be a single activity but a complicated process. According to Boyle (1983),
“Listening comprehension is defined as the process of understanding speech in a

have the background knowledge needed to accomplish the given tasks of such an
active process.
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1.1.2. Listening skills in learning a foreign language
For a long time in the history of language teaching, students were expected to
be structure competent. Such approaches as Grammar Translation or Audio-Lingual
focus on learner‟s imitation of dialogues or grammar and pronunciation drill and get
their little attention to listening. In addition, the syllabuses used for these
approaches also show their emphasis on learner‟s identification of language
“products”, but cursory role of listening in recognition of those products in the
syllabus. In those cases, learners were considered inactive in listening lessons and
listening was just a passive skill in language learning. In listening lessons, learners
mainly heard the message, trying to elicit the meaning from individual syntactic and
semantic components of utterances and discourses. They often paid almost no
attention on the importance of the other factors apart from words, structures of the
discourse such as background knowledge of speech, intonation, stress, and
speaker‟s intention. Following this trend, the teacher often conducted the lesson as
testing listening comprehension rather than teaching it. Students were not given
enough instructions of what to do before they listen to the tape. This brought about
a lot of challenges for students and they could not manage to get the meaning of the
utterance without support of the teacher with their own experience of success.
For the last few decades, in a number of studies, there have been changes in the
view of listening comprehension, in which it has no longer a passive skill but has
become an active skill in language learning. According to Littlewood (1981),
listening demands active involvement from the hearer. In order to construct the
message that the speaker intends, the hearer must actively contribute knowledge
from both linguistic and nonlinguistic.
Nunan & Miller (1995) define the important role of listening in learning a
foreign or second language as “listening is essential not only as a receptive skill but
also to the development spoken language proficiency.” This point of view follows

tradition are generally “better at listening than those from a reading and book-based
culture and education background” and that “student for whom the stress and
intonation which occur in English are reasonably familiar have less trouble than
those whose own language is based on different rhythms and tones”. It reveals
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students from different language system may face with lots of problems when they
learn a foreign language, especially when they listen to that language.
In Ur‟s (1996) point of view, students may have difficulties in learning listening
skills such as trouble with sounds, have to understand every word, cannot
understand fast and natural native speech, need to hear things more than once, find
it difficult to keep up, and get tired. It seems to be a complicate activity in which
students need much more than the competence of grammar and structures of the
language.
Another reason of the student‟s ineffectiveness in listening is that they receive
no supported materials such as “texts, pictures, diagrams or other visual aids”
(Lynch, 2005). Their listening activity is simply listening to the recording and doing
given exercises or tasks. Meanwhile Rost (1994) discusses the problems occurring
in listening lessons in different dimensions. In his view, these problems may be of
“motive, transfer, access to input and neurological development”. It means that,
without motivation, ability to transfer the message, ability to access the meaning of
the message, and last but not least, sufficiency of neurological development,
students could not be successful in listening.
In terms of the three stages of listening (perception, parsing and utilization), God
(2000) lists some problems that may occur:
- At the perception stage: non-recognition of familiar words (students may not
match the sounds automatically to words because of having not stored the sounds
of words efficiently in long term memory).
- At the parsing stage: students can quickly forget what is heard (students may
understand words for the gist or general meaning, but not exact meaning because
they cannot remember key words or phrases).

Buck also agues that “an unfamiliar accent can make comprehension almost
impossible for listener”.
- Students may loose their control when hearing something too fast. Speed of
speech can affect on students success in listening comprehension. Usually, students
find it difficult to keep up with the fast native speeches and they are distracted their
attention from accomplishing the given listening tasks. To help students, teachers
should ask students to catch important or key words that are necessary to complete
the tasks and encourage them to speak out as much as they can.
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- It is worth noticing that “the weak relationship between English sounds and the
way they are spelt in the written language, changes in sounds when they occur in
rapid, connected speech, the rhythm pattern of English speech, different ways of
pronouncing the “same” sound” (Rixon, 1986). These features of native speakers‟
pronunciations of English may be challenges for foreign language or L2 listeners.
Other problems perceived by students in terms of sounds and pronunciation may
come from their ability to perceive sound accurately as Ur (1991) argues that “most
learners rely mostly on context for comprehension; they are often themselves
unaware of inaccurate sound perception”. The role of teacher in this case is crucial
because students need introduction and practice of strange sounds which is essential
to get the meaning of the words and main ideas of the speech.
1.1.5. Listening tasks
1.1.5.1. Definitions of task
Definitions of task are various from author to author. Task is considered a
kind of activity which is designed to help achieve a particular learning goal.
According to Crooke (1986), task is “a piece of work or activity, usually with a
specified objective, undertaken as a part of an educational course, at work, or used
to elicit data or research”. Lee‟s (2000) even gives a full and logical definition about
task. Task in Lee‟s is defined as (1) a classroom activity or exercise that has: (a) an
objective obtainable only by interaction among participants, (b) a mechanism for
structuring and sequencing interaction, and (c) a focus on meaning exchange; (2) a

identify pictures or components as they are referred to, either naming or ordering
them in the order in which they are mentioned.
- Answering questions: based on the content of the listening, students are required
to give longer and full answer to the questions.
Continuously, Ur (1996) classifies listening tasks basing on the natures of
students‟ response.
(1). No overt response: with No overt response listeners don‟t have to do any thing
to response to the listening. However, their “real response” reveals through their
facial expression and body language which often show whether they are following
or not. It includes following a written text; listen to a familiar text; listening aided
by visual; listening to an informal talk; and listening to something entertaining.
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(2). Short Response: involves following instructions; ticking off items; true / false;
detecting mistakes; cloze; guessing definitions; skimming and scanning; pictures
identification; mapping; ground-planes; grids-filling; drawing diagram; and graph
- filling
(3). Longer Response: includes answering questions; note-taking; paraphrasing
and translating; summarizing; long gap-filling; dictation; predictions
(4). Extended Response: tasks of this kind are on the whole more demanding than
those of other kinds. Listening serves as a basis and starting point for other
activities. In other words, these skills activities are combined together. It includes
problem-solving; jigsaw listening; interpretation; evaluation stylistic analysis.
In sum, we always have a purpose for listening. We listen in different ways
and do different tasks based on our different purposes. Our listening will be more
effective with a certain purpose set.
1.2. Gap-fill tasks
1.2.1. Gap-fill tasks in listening skills
As listed in the previous part, gap-fill tasks that usually belong to listening for
specific information purpose are those of major tasks in learning listening skills. It
can be seen clearly that gap-fill exercises are widely used throughout the language

They are asked to listen to the recording and fill in the blank of the texts.
- Banked gap-filling: choose the appropriate word from a bank of alternatives
- The fixed-ratio cloze (the random cloze): Every n
th
word is deleted to be suitable
for assessing overall language abilities (Alderson, 2000; Bachman, 1985; Oller,
1979; Steinman, 2002). The following is an example of a sixth-word deletion
cloze test.
Example of fixed-ratio cloze test
People today are quite astonished by the rapid improvements in medicine.
Doctors 1)_____ becoming more specialized, and 2)_____ drugs are appearing on
the 3)______ daily. At the same time, 4)_____ are dismayed by the
inaccessibility 5)_____ doctors when they are needed. 6)_____ doctors‟ fees are
constantly on 7) _____ rise, the quality of medical 8)_____ has reached an
abysmal low. 1
The literature review presented in 1.2.2. is cited from document retrieved from
http://www.ukessays.com/dissertation/literature-review/literature-review-of-the-cloze-test-english-
language.php
I just make some small adjustments to fit the purpose of this study.
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(Adapted from Cohen, 1994: 234)
- The rational cloze: Only specific words are deleted to be appropriate for a
particular purpose, such as testing grammar, reading comprehension, and
vocabulary (Bachman, 1985). As can be seen in Example 8, a rational cloze test
where functional words are deleted to assess grammar is presented.
Example of rational cloze test
Typically, when trying to test overall understanding 1) ______ the text, a tester