VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES TRUONG THI THANH HUYEN CHALLENGES PERCEIVED BY TEACHERS IN HOW TO TEACH
AND MOTIVATE ETHNIC MINORITY STUDENTS TO LEARN
LISTENING COMPREHENSION SKILL AT LANG SON
TEACHERS’ TRAINING COLLEGE AND SOLUTIONS

(NHỮNG KHÓ KHĂN CỦA GIÁO VIÊN TRONG VIỆC GIẢNG
DẠY VÀ KHÍCH LỆ SINH VIÊN NGƯỜI DÂN TỘC THIỂU SỐ
HỌC KỸ NĂNG NGHE HIỂU TẠI TRƯỜNG CAO ĐẲNG SƯ
PHẠM LẠNG SƠN VÀ MỘT SỐ GIẢI PHÁP) MA. MINOR THESIS

FIELD: ENGLISH METHODOLOGY
CODE: 601410
SUPERVISOR: LE THE NGHIEP, M.A LANGSON, 2010

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TABLE OF CONTENTS


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CHAPTER II: METHODOLOGY 14
II.1. General description of the current course-book and participants’ background
information 14
II.1.1. General description of the current course-book 14
II.1.2. Participants’ background information 14
II.1.2.1. English Major Students 14
II.1.2.2. The teachers 15
II.2. Methods of data collection 16
II.2.1. Questionnaires 16
II.2.2. Class observation 16
CHAPTER III: DICUSSIONS AND FINDINGS 18
III.1. Questionnaires 18
III.1.1. Questionnaire for the Teachers 18
III.1.2. Questionnaire for the Students 24
III. 2. Class observations 28
III.3. Findings…………………………………………………………………….30
III.3.1. Teachers’ challenges when dealing with listening techniques and some
suggested solutions to those techniques………………………………………………… 30
III.3.2.Students’ preferences for listening techniques…….…………………………….33
III.3.3. Teachers’ and students opinions about listening activities in the course-book
‘Listen in 1’ by David Nunan they are using……………………………………………34
CHAPTER IV: SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS TO THE TEACHING
PROCEDURES 35
IV.1. For the teachers 35
IV.2. Some useful activities used for students during the class -time 38
PART III: CONCLUSION 41
I. Summary of the study 41
II. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further study 42


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LIST OF ABBRIVIATIONS - LSTTC: Langson Teachers’ Training College
- DFL: Department of Foreign Languages
- CFL: College of Foreign Languages
- VNU: Vietnam National University
- T: Teacher
- Ss: Students


Table 6: Teachers’ difficulties in post-listening techniques…………………………… 27
Table 7: Students’ preferences for pre-listening techniques…………………………… 30
Table 8: Students’ preferences for while-listening techniques………………………… 31
Chart 1: Teachers’ comments on the listening activities in the coursebook…………… 27
Chart 2: Causes that make students uninterested in listening…………………………… 28
Chart 3: Students’ preferences for post-listening techniques…………………………… 32
Chart 4: Students’ comments on the listening activities in the coursebook………………33
give some suggestions for mostly meeting and solving those challenges. Hopefully, the study
will be helpful in some way for the author and other teachers to find out most suitable
techniques to stimulate their students in listening lessons.

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2. Aims and significance of the study
The purpose of this study is to find out the most suitable teaching techniques and solutions
to the challenges perceived by the teachers, in order to teach and motivate ethnic minority
students at LSTTC to learn listening comprehension skill effectively. To be specific, the
major aims of the study are as follows:
- to find out current challenges faced by teachers and ethnic minority students at LSTTC
in their process of teaching and learning English listening comprehension skill.
- to study teaching techniques used by these teachers to teach their students listening
comprehension skill.
- to investigate students‟ attitudes and their feedbacks on the teaching techniques used by
their teachers.
- to provide some suggestions and practical recommendations to help in the process of
teaching and learning listening comprehension skills of ethnic minority students and teachers
at this college.
The study hopes to give an insight into the ways used and problems faced by teachers in
how to teach listening comprehension skill for ethnic minority students at LSTTC. The result
of the study is also useful for teachers at this college in reviewing their teaching practices,
thus paying more attention to the issue of teaching listening skills.
3. Scope of the study
The scope of this thesis is limited to the teachers‟ challenges in how to teach and motivate
ethnic minority students to learn listening comprehension skill and the recommendations to
overcome these challenges at Lang Son Teachers‟ Training College. The result from this
thesis could also be used to inform concerned educational administrators in Lang Son in
particular and in various regions throughout the country in general.
With that intention, this study is designed to cover the following issues:

of the study. 4
PART II.THE DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1.LITERATURE REVIEW
I.1. Theoretical background of listening comprehension
In language teaching, the phrase „listening skills‟ is often used to mean „listening and
understanding skills‟ or „listening comprehension skills‟. And this is the sense in which
„listening skill‟ is used in this thesis, where „listening‟ is taken as meaning trying to
understand the oral messages people are conveying.
I.1.1.What is listening?
There are different definitions of listening
“Listening is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear.
To listen successfully to spoken language, we need to be able to work out what speakers mean when
they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasions, and not simply to understand the
words themselves.”
(Mary Underwood, 1989)
The quotation above suggests that listening can be done in a narrow and limited way
or it can be done in a way that enriches communication.
Thomlison‟s (1984) definition of listening includes “active listening,” which goes

recognize language as a communicative tool, but not an isolated structure system.
Consequently the teaching of listening is not simply intended to make students hear a sound, a
word or a sentence, rather, the goal is to cultivate students‟ abilities to understand speakers‟
intentions accurately and communicate with each other effectively.
I.1.3. Significance of listening
According to Robin Wills (2005), language learning depends on listening since it
provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners
to interact in spoken communication. Listening is the first language mode that children
acquire. It provides the foundation for all aspects of language and cognitive development, and
it plays a life-long role in the process of communication. Thus language acquisition is
achieved mainly through receiving understandable input and listening ability is the critical
component in achieving understandable language input. Therefore, it is of vital importance
that students are taught to listen effectively and critically.
Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for
language teachers to help students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach
to language teaching, this means building model listening strategies and providing listening
practice in authentic situations: precisely those that learners are likely to encounter when they
use the language outside classroom.
I.2. Teaching listening skills
I.2.1. The process of listening

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With a greater understanding of language quality and the development of teaching
theory, there has been a recognition of the process of listening comprehension as needing
greater emphasis. Listening is an invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe.
However, it is recognized by Wipf (1984) that listeners must discriminate between sounds,
understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intonation, understand
intention and retain and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural
context of the utterance.
Rost (2002) defines listening, in its broadest sense, as a process of receiving what the

approach, “bottom-up”.
According to Noonan. D (1999:218) “Key strategies that can be taught in the listening
classroom include selective listening, listening for different purposes, predicting, progressive
structuring, inferencing and personalizing”. Noonan. D (1999) also introduces a list of
important strategies, along with examples.
Strategies
Examples
Listening for gist
Is the radio report about news or weather?
Listening for purposes
Are the speakers making a reservation or
ordering food?
Listening for main idea
Why is the speaker asking the man
questions?
Listening for inference
What are the speakers implying by what
they said?
Listening for specific information
How much did they say the ticket cost?
Listening for phonemic distinctions
Did the speaker say first or four?
Listening for tone pitch to identify
speaker‟s attitude
Did the speaker enjoy the wedding or not?
Listening for stress
What is more important, where he bought
the watch or when?
I.2.3. Stages of a listening lesson
The teaching of a listening text can be divided into three main stages: pre-listening,

I.2.4. Potential problems in teaching and learning to listen to English
Language learners often feel worried about problems when they first attempt to listen
to a new language. Although the problems are many and various, they are not all experienced
by all students from different backgrounds. So that in this part, I just focus on some of the
most common problems that listeners may encounter in learning to listen.
- Lack of control over the speed at which speakers speak.
Many English language learners believe the greatest difficulty of listening
comprehension is that the listener can not control how quickly a speaker speaks. They feel
that the utterances disappear before they can sort them out. This frequently means that
students who are learning to listen can not keep up. They are so busy working out the
meaning of one part of what they hear that they miss the next part. Or they simply ignore a
whole chunk because they fail to sort it all out quickly enough. Either way, they fail.
- The listener‟s limited vocabulary
We know that choice of vocabulary is in the hands of the speaker, not the listener. The
listener has to do the best he/she can to follow. For people listening to a foreign language, an
unknown word can be likely a suddenly dropped barrier causing them to stop and think about
the meaning of the word and thus making them miss the next part of the speech. It is believed
that this tendency to stop listening and concentrate on the immediate problem often results

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when learners have been taught their English in a way which has given more emphasis to
accuracy than fluency and which has been more concerned with mastery of the forms of
language rather than with how it is used. This style of teaching leads students to focus on the
language word by word, to work out its structure, and then to decide on its meaning.
- Failure to recognize the „signals‟
There are many ways in which a speaker can indicate that he/she is moving from one
point to another, or giving an example, or repeating a point, or whatever. These signals are not
immediately self-evident to a person listening to a foreign language and can easily be missed.
And when speakers show clearly that they are about to begin a new point, they may pause or
make a gesture or move slightly. They may mark a change to a new point by increased

productive way so that the students feel secure and relaxed and unthreatened by the listening
tasks. Thus, it is very essential for the teachers to plan and conduct listening sessions in a
suitable way which can help their students grow in confidence and soon begin to experience
the pleasure that listening successfully can bring them.
I.3. Motivation
I.3.1.What is motivation?
However simple and easy the word "motivation" might appear, it is in fact very
difficult to define. It seems to have been impossible for theorists to reach consensus on a
single definition but I personally pay most attention to the followings.
Motivation is a desire to achieve a goal, combined with the energy to work towards
that goal. Sometimes a distinction is made between positive and negative motivation: Positive
motivation is a response which includes enjoyment and optimism about the tasks that you are
involved in. Negative motivation involves undertaking tasks for fear that there should be
undesirable outcomes, eg, failing a subject, if tasks are not completed (Ngeow, Karen Yeok-
Hwa, 1998). Motivation is also defined as the impetus to create and sustain intentions and
goal-seeking acts (Ames & Ames, 1989). It is important because it determines the extent of
the learner's active involvement and attitude toward learning.
I.3.2.The importance of motivation in listening classes
Many researchers consider motivation as one of the main elements that determine
success in developing a second or foreign language; it determines the extent of active,
personal involvement in L2 learning. (Oxford & Shearin, 1994) Listening to English is
regarded to be hard for students who are either English majors or not. From the researcher‟s
observation and discussion with students, she has realized that many students have associated
listening courses with pain and boredom and often complain that they become tired of
listening to the tape from the beginning to the end and benefit little from listening lessons.
Therefore, it is necessary for English teachers to realize the importance of how to make
listening classes more interesting and to know how to motivate students so that they can

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develop their listening comprehension. It can be seen that the traditional way of teaching,

The cultural attitude of students is particularly influential in the way that students
address their studies. There is, in Vietnam, a long history of reverence for written text, and

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this attitude has influenced the official assessment processes. Thus students generally pay less
attention to developing listening comprehension because they recognize it gains a lower
percentage of marks in examinations, while reading and writing are highly rewarded. Students
understand they will gain high scores only if they master the prescribed knowledge of
grammar and writing.
As a direct consequence of the factors mentioned above, many students in this college
lack confidence in their oral English language capability and they frequently have a self-
defeating and defensive attitude to their engagement in it. In the listening classroom, teachers
expect students‟ active participation but, having so many students who lack confidence and
who feel nervous and anxious, makes the task of generating discussion and conversation
particularly difficult. Thus, it is unsurprising that college students, who are under pressure for
a considerable period of time, are often stressed and depressed in their efforts to improve their
English proficiency.
1.4.2. Grammar knowledge affects listening comprehension
Language knowledge is the foundation of learning English. If students‟ knowledge of
pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary is insufficient, it is probable that their English
listening comprehension will be negatively affected by lack of language knowledge.
However, the most basic outward shell of language is pronunciation. Therefore, the first step
of listening comprehension is learning how to identify and select sound signals according to
pronunciation, and pronunciation knowledge must be developed. When students‟
pronunciation knowledge is inadequate, their capacity to discriminate will be weak and will
affect listening comprehension.
For the students of English in this college, the challenge of listening poses particular
demands because there are many sentence types that are complex and very different from the
native language. For example, if the student is unable to distinguish the main clause from a
subordinate clause and is unable to understand their relationships, despite understanding the


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CHAPTER II. METHODOLOGY
II.1. General description of the current course-book and participants’
background information
II.1.1. General description of the current course-book
The course-book mainly used for first-year students of English-major to practice their
listening comprehension skill at LSTTC is the one named Listen in 1. This book is the first
volume of the three books Listen in 1,2,3 by David Nunan, which are used for developing
listening skill ranging from basic to advanced level. Each book covers 20 topics, which are
arranged from very easier to more complex ones. There is a Review Unit which is designed
after every five units with the aim of revising vocabularies and skills of the previous ones.
Objectively, this book is a good one for students to practice and improve their listening skill
in general, but some parts of the book‟s contents in each unit are rather long and difficult for
most of the first year students in LSTTC. The reasons for this problem are the students‟ poor
background knowledge, their limited reservoir of vocabulary and structures, their lack of
motivation and preparations for the task, etc. Beside the main course-book, teachers at DFL,
LSTTC sometimes use the book Tactics for Listening by Jack C Richards in their teaching

were mainly affected by the grammar translation method when they were at secondary school.
This best explains why they always try to listen to every word or sentence of the utterances
when they are asked to listen to any listening text. In addition to that, they are so busy
working out the meaning of one part of what they hear that they miss the next part. As a
result, they usually find it very difficult to catch up with the speed of recorded speech or
listening text, and they often fail to finish the listening task. Like any foreign language
learners, most of the first year students of English at DFL, LSTTC often feel worried about
problems when they first attempt to listen to a new language. Although the problems are
various, they are not all experienced by all students from different backgrounds. Thus, during
their process of practicing listening, most of these students often find the followings the most
difficult:(Lack of control over the speed at which speakers speak, Limited vocabulary and
grammar structure, Inability to concentrate, Failure to recognize the „signals‟.)
II.1.2.2.The teachers
There are twelve teachers of English at LSTTC but only nine teachers participated in
the study. The reason is that three of them are doing their post-graduate at present. Among
these three teachers, one is doing her PhD degree in Australia and two others are doing their
M.A in the CFL, VNU. Of nine teachers, four of them graduated from CFL,VNU; three from
Thai Nguyen Teachers‟ Training College, and two from in-serviced courses in some other
universities. Three teachers are in their late forties with more than 15 years of teaching
experience, two others in their late thirties with 10 years of teaching experience, two others in
their early thirties with 6 years of teaching experience, the last two aged 24 and 27 with only 3
years of teaching experience.

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The researcher selected all these teachers as the subjects of the first questionnaire
with the hope of finding out what listening techniques are currently applied, their problems of
using listening techniques in teaching listening skill, and their suggested solutions to their
existing problems.
II.2. Methods of data collection
This research is conducted by using survey questionnaires and classroom observation.

the researcher includes the teachers‟ pre, while and post-listening activities, the students‟
participation in the teachers‟ activities. The three teachers under observation are different in
terms of their ages and teaching experience. One is 49 years old, the second 42 and the last
32.
The following chapter of the thesis is the treatment of all the data collected from the
survey questionnaire conducted on 9 teachers and 90 students of the English Department at
LSTTC and from the author‟s observation in 3 classes. The collected data will be presented in
tables and charts. The scheme and coding tables and charts emerged from an examination of
the data rather than being determined beforehand and imposed on the data.
The questionnaires and class observations are represented in Appendix I and II,
respectively at the end of the study.


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c. Asking students some questions about the topic before they listen
9
d. Pre-teaching new words or difficult key words.
7
e. Making students predict the content of the text.
3
f. Give students time to read and understand the listening tasks
3
Table 1: Teacher’s pre -listening techniques
It can be seen from Table 1 that nine teachers apply the techniques of brainstorming
words, structures or ideas; and asking students some questions about the topic before they
listen. These techniques are clearly their most popular ones. Seven out of nine teachers
respond that before listening, they pre-teach new words or difficult key words so that students
would better understand the topic of the listening text and find it easier to listen. 6 out of 9
teachers confirm that they make their students discuss in pairs or groups the topic they are

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going to listen. After doing this task, their students would be able to both know more about
what they will listen and improve their speaking skill. Making students predict the content of
the text and studying the listening task appears to be used by only 3 teachers.
According to Boyle (1984), Baker and Westrupt (2000), each pre-listening techniques
has its own advantages and benefits‟ to students motivation, which can lead to the success of
listening comprehension. If the students lack motivation right from the beginning of the
lesson, their listening process may be negatively affected. For example, if the students feel
bored with the listening text, they will probably take no participation in it, or the teacher can
not make them pay attention to the lesson and so on. However, different teachers apply
different pre-listening techniques to motivate their students.
b. Teacher‟s while -listening techniques
While-listening techniques

listening stage time. The reason is very simple, the listening tasks are available in the course
book so that they do not need to prepare. It, therefore, does not take time for the teachers to
design the tasks for the students. Text completion (gap-filling) exercises are used by 5 out of 9
teachers in this stage. They explain it very confidently. This type of exercise would not be
very difficult for their students as they have been provided with important or key words
related before listening. Only 1 or 2 out of 9 teachers apply the rest activities, including
marking/ checking items in pictures, storyline picture sets, completing pictures and others.
They think these activities are very difficult because they are unfamiliar with their students.