VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
********************* ĐÀM QUANG VINH STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION OF EFFECTIVE ENGLISH LISTENING
STRATEGIES. A SURVEY AT DONG HY HIGH SCHOOL,
THAI NGUYEN

Nhận thức của học sinh về chiến lược nghe tiếng Anh hiệu quả. Một nghiên cứu tại
trường THPT Đồng Hỷ, Thái Nguyên M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE: 60140111
Ha Noi, 2014
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

STATEMENT OF THESIS ORIGINALITY

I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled
Effective English listening strategies for students at Dong Hy High school,
Thai Nguyen
submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MA in
English Linguistics.
Except where the reference is indicated, no other person’s work has been used
without due acknowledgement in the text of the thesis.

Ha Noi, 2014 Đàm Quang Vinh


end of the paper, recommendations for further studies were proposed to facilate
achieving a deeper and more convincible result supporting for language learning
enhancement. Hopefully, the findings will be of some use to those who are in favor
of the topic and who intend to do for further research in this area.

iv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

DHHS Dong Hy high school
Ls Listening skill
L1 First language
L2 Second language
SILL Strategy Inventory for Language Learning
ESL English as a second language
EFL English as a foreign language v
LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS
TABLES
Table 1. Listening problems encountered by students at Dong Hy high school. 19
Table 2. Activities needed in the three stages of a listening lesson 22
Table 3. Students‟feeling after the listening lesson 26
CHARTS
Pie-chart 1: The students‟ experience of English learning 18
Pie-chart 2: The most difficult language skill in students‟ view 18
Pie- chart 3. Students‟ opinions of using pictures in the listening lesson 27
Pie-chart 4. Studens‟ opinions of the effectiveness of using pictures 28
Pie- chart 5 : Students‟ opinions about pair work and group work 28
Pie-chart 6 : Students‟ expectations in pair work and group work 29

4. Significance of the research 2
5. Structural organization of the thesis 2
Part B: DEVELOPMENT 4
Chapter 1: Literature Review 4
1.1 Theoretical background 4
1.2. Previous studies related to the theme of this research 11
1.3. Summary 13
Chapter 2 : Methodology 14
2.1. Research – governing orientations 14
2.1.1. Research methods 14
2.1.2 Data Collecttion Instruments 15
2.1.3. Questionnaire 15
2. 2. Participants 15
2.2.1. The students 15
2.2.2. Data collection procedures 16
2.3. Questionnaire and test implementations 16
Chapter 3 : Findings & Discussions 18

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3.1. The students‟ experience of learning English. 18
3.1.1. Amount of time spent on English learning 18
3.1.2. The most difficult language skill in students‟ view 18
3.2. Findings 19
3.2.1. Listening problems encountered by students at Dong Hy high school. 19
3.2.2. Activities needed in the three stages of a listening lesson 21
3.2.3 Post–listening questionnaire 23
3.3. Findings obtained from the 1
st
experimental listening lesson 23
3.3.1 The participants 23

different fields since it is widely used as an international language. Therefore,
English learning holds an important position in the process of teaching and learning
foreign languages. It is clearly that English in general and listening in particular
play a vital role in our daily life because the need to communicate with foreigners is
increasingly rapidly. To keep up with the flow of world economic intergration, the
necesity of using English as a second language is emphasized globally. In Vietnam,
English has become the most popular foreign language and one of the compulsory
subjects in most high schools.
Having studied English for more than 7 years, my students are quite self-
confident in doing grammar exercises, they can deal with them with less difficulty.
However , their language skills are limited, listening skill seem to be the most
difficult and weakest among students‟s four language skills. The difficulties which
hinder students from developing their listening skill are various . Students in most
high schools have had listening practice in their classroom, but they have rarely
been taught or received guidance on how to listen to listening tasks effectively.
Students may find themselves bored with listening tasks. Therefore, listening skill
can easily be neglected in the language classroom while successful listening is
acquired over time and with lots of practice.
Being a teacher of English at Dong Hy high school, I am aware of the
teachers‟ important task in increasing students‟ knowledge of English, and
improving their listening skills because they have had neither much practice nor
experience in listening. Moreover, it is essential and urgent to help my students to
improve their listening ability. The wish to help the students to overcome the
obstacles in learning English encouraged the researcher to carry out this study. 2
2. Aims and Objective of the research
The purpose of this study is to find out what listening strategies the students
think as effective to them. The study is therefore designed to answer the following

second section describes the subjects. The third section presents the procedure of
the study.
+ Chapter three is Findings and Discussions. This chapter is divided into 4
sections. The first three sections present the preliminary results obtained via the
questionnaires, the interviews and the classroom observation. The last section
presents the discussion. In fact, this chapter provides the answer to the research
questions.
Part C is Conclusion. This part provides a recapitulation of the main points
raised in the thesis. Specific conclusions on each of the objectives are herein
provided. Limitations of the thesis and suggestions for future research are also
supplied in this part.
In addition to the three major parts mentioned above, at the end of the thesis
are the References and Appendices parts. 4
Part B: DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 1: Literature Review
This chapter briefly highlights exiting information related to listening in
second and foreign language, the use of aural authentic materials and the effect of
listening strategies. The terminological definitions and the findings of the previous
studies are also supplied.
1.1 Theoretical background
* Definition of listening comprehension

actively choose, use, and continually evaluate the effectiveness of their listening
strategies in order to successfully construct meaning from second language oral input.
* Types of listening strategies
Nunan (1999) suggested that until now two views of listening have dominated
language pedagogy over the last twenty years. These are the „bottom up‟ processing
view and the „top down‟ interpretation view.
The bottom-up model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the
sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units (or
phonemes) to complete texts. It means that phonetic units are decoded and linked
together to form words, words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are
linked together to form utterances, and utterances are linked together to form
complete meaningful texts.
The top-down view suggests that the listener actively constructs (or more
accurately, reconstructs) the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds
as clues. In this reconstruction process, the listener uses prior knowledge of the
context and situation within which the listening takes place to make sense of what
he or she hears.
Listening strategies, therefore, can be classified into two categories: top-down
strategies and bottom-up strategies (Hedge, 2000; Richards (1990)). And according
to Peterson (1991), it is essential for poor and good listeners to learn to use both
top-down processing and bottom-up processing effectively.

6
O‟Malley & Chamot (1990) divides language listening strategies into four
categories: management strategies, cognitive strategies, social strategies and
affective strategies. Each category can be further divided into several smaller ones:
functional planning, advanced organizers, selective attention, self-monitoring, self-
evaluating, classification, inference, note-taking, elaboration, cooperation,
questioning for, clarification, self-talk and positive attitude development.
Oxford (1990) provides the classification of direct and indirect language

listening will be done.
These activities may provide an opportunity for students to gain some
knoledge which help them to follow the listening text. Moreover, each of these
activities help students focus their mind on the topic by narrowing down the things
that students expect to hear. However, the teacher when choosing an activity should
consider the factors which Underwood (1990) mentions: the time, the material is
available or not, the interets of the class and the teacher, the place in which the work
is being carried out, the nature and the content of the listening text itself. If one of
these forgotten, the whole process of activity can be failed. She especially
emphesizes on the importance of the nature of the listening text, because each
listening text itself has an especially appropriate type of activities. When the teacher
pays attention to this factor properly, the activity chosen for students will be more
specific and effective.
Listening is an essential competence in language teaching and learning. On
account of the features of listening teaching and the role of pre-listening stage, it is
vital to design and arrange appropriate pre-listening activities in a listening lesson.
A well-planned pre-listening activity could prepare the students to deal with the
listening text smoothly. It is also helpful to build up students‟ confidence and
motivate them to listen. During the pre-listening process, teachers can take the
opportunity to introduce world knowledge and related language knowledge related
to the text. Moreover, it devotes to fulfill the whole process of a listening lesson in
making the work more effective and efficient. However, even though pre-listening

8
plays a significant role in the whole listening process, it does not mean that it needs
to occupy too much time in the classroom teaching. The length of pre-listening part
could be flexible in different circumstance.
+ While-listening
The while- listening stage consists of activities that students are asked to do.
The purpose of while listening activities is to help students develop their skill of

while-listening activities generate material or ideas which might be used for others.
+ Post-listening
Post- listening activities in this stages are done after the listening is completed.
Some post-listening activities are extentions of the work done at the pre-listening and
while-listening stage and some relate only loosely to the listening text itself.
According to Underwood (1990), the first purpose of post-listening activities
is to check how well the students understood and whether they have completed the
listening task. The teacher may give an answer orally, showing the answer on the
board or on the over – head projector or ask students to check again the answers in
the book. Students can work in pairs to check each other‟s answers or work in
groups to discuss any problems related to the listening text. The second purpose of
post-listening work is to reflect on why some students have failed to understand or
miss parts of the passage.
Another purpose of post listening activities is to expand on the topic or the
language of the listening text. Students are asked to deal with activities which are
now more or less general language learning activities. Sometimes, this does not
mean that they should not be done, but it should be recognized they do not give
practice in listening skills, although the additional language learning can well
enable students to listen more successfully in the future.
The fourth purpose is to give students opportunities to consider the manner and
attidute of the speaker in the listening text. This is also important because the
listeners can see the aims of the speaker(s) basing on his / her attidute.

10
Additionally, 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

other languge skills can arise from listening , especially in pre and post-listening
work. This characteristic will provide opportunities for listening to be intergrated
with the other part of the learners‟ work.
* Language learning strategies that are useful for listening
A variety of language learning strategies have been found to be beneficial to
all language skills or to one particular skill such as reading or writing (Oxord,
1990). Among them a large group is believed to be useful for the cause of L1 and
L2 listening development. They fall into a number of strategy groups i.e memory,
cognitive, compensation, metacognitve, affective and social.
Representing sounds in memory, for example, helps learners to store what they
hear in their mind better by “making auditory rather than visual representations of
sounds” (Oxford, 1990, p. 63). This requires associating new lexical iems with
familiar words or sounds from any language. Another example of listening supportive
strategies is formally practicing with sounds and writing systems. In studies into
language strategies aimed at developing one or more macro-skills. Strategy Inventory
for Language Learning (SILL) is often employed (Oxford, 1990).
1.2. Previous studies related to the theme of this research
There have been quite a few studies focusing on the types of listening
strategies that learners use (O‟Malley, Chamot, & Kupper, 1989; O‟Malley et al.,
1985; Thompson & Rubin, 1996; Vandergrift, 1996, 1997a, 1997b, 1998, 2003;
Wu, 2003a) and the way in which they use them (Bacon, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c;
O‟Malley et al., 1985; Rubin, 1994;).
Vandergrift (1997a) provides a very useful and thorough chart of these
listening strategies and their definitions, categorized according to O‟Malley and
Chamot‟s model (1990) of metacognitive, cognitive, and socio affective strategies.

12
Rubin (1994) classifies the strategies and shows the types of listening
strategies used by comparing the strategies that are acquired at different levels, the
use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies, the relation of the strategy use to text,

They might use tactics such as identifying words or ideas not understood, checking
current interpretation within the context of the message or prior knowledge, or
confirming that comprehension has taken place to use monitoring strategy.
Tang (2006) investigated the use of listening strategies among Non-English
Major postgraduate students. She used questionnaire based on Oxford‟s SILL, Su
Lianyun‟s Questionnaire and the theoretical framework of the study to collect data.
She found out that the cognitive strategies were the most common used strategies
whereas social and management strategies were the least used strategies. Affective
strategy usage in the study showed the learners‟ positive attitude toward English.
She suggested that strategy instruction studies need to focus on management and
social strategies.
1.3. Summary
This chapter has presented some major issues in terms of LLSs, LSs. In the
first section of this chapter, definitions and classification systems of LLSs proposed
by different researchers have been described and analyzed with critical eyes to see
both their strength and weakness. However, the definition and classification
proposed by Oxford (1990) have been chosen as the basis for the purpose of this
present study. Regarding the listening comprehension and listening strategies,
definition and classification of LSs have been discussed.

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Chapter 2 : Methodology

2.1. Research – governing orientations
As mentioned in the Introduction, this thesis seeks answers to these two
research questions:
1. What difficulties do the students report they are encoutered with while
learning listening skill?
2. What listening strategies do they think are effective to them?
In this research , thirty students in class 10a2 were involved in an

2.1.3. Questionnaire
Questionnaire is one of the most useful and efficient instruments to gather
large scale information ( Brown, 1995 ). Firstly, it is comparatively popular since it
allows the researcher to collect statistics in field setting and the data themselves are
more crediable and easy to analyze than discursive data like free-form field notes,
the transcripts of oral language ( Nunan, 1992, p.143 ). Secodly, questionaire is
efficient because it can be delivered simultaneously to numerous respondents in a
field setting and requires only one administrator. Futhermore, written questionnaire is
often designed carefully with precise content before publishing so the statistics is
relatively concise ( Brown, 1995 ). Because of these advantages, questionnaire is
preferred as one of the major techniques in data collection in order to fulfil the research.
In this research, two questionnaires were designed for 10
th
grade students to
collect data for the study. They are pre-listening questionnaire and post-listening
questionnaire. After the respondent submitted their responses to the pre-listening
questionnaire, students will be invited to join the experimental lessons. After the
experimental lessons, the same groups of respondents would respond to the post –
activity questionaire including 5 questions for evaluative information concerning the
techniques used by the teacher. Data gathering from responses of the students in the two
questionnaires was sorted and analyzed statistically to fulfil the aims of the reasearch.
2. 2. Participants
2.2.1. The students
For the student survey, 2 questionnaires (Appendices 1 & 2) were delivered to
40 students of grade 10A2 at Dong Hy High school with the help of the researcher.

16
These students have studied English at their secondary and high schools for over 7
years, but they have not focused much on listening because they do not have good
English environment and listening test in the exams. Therefore, their listening skill