MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HANOI PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY Nº. 2
=====***=====

NGUYEN THI THU HUYEN

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE FIRST-YEAR
ENGLISH MAJORS’ DIFFICULTIES IN EFL
LISTENING COMPREHENSION AND
RECOMMENDATIONS
(GRADUATION PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
OF THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS IN ENGLISH)

SUPERVISOR: TA THI THANH HOA, M.A.

Hanoi, May 2013

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For the completion of this thesis, I have received great assistance and support
from many people without whom the work could not have been fulfilled.
First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Mrs. Ta Thi
Thanh Hoa, M.A., my supervisor. This thesis could have probably not completed
without her patient, enthusiastic and instructive supervision and encouragement.
I also would like to show my profound gratitude to all the lecturers at Hanoi
Hanoi Pedagogical University N0.2, especially the lecturers in the Foreign
Language Faculty for tirelessly devoting time and efforts to enrich, broaden and
deepen my knowledge over the past four years.
My special thanks go as well as to the Foreign Languages Department of

HPU2.

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STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP
Title: An investigation into the first-year English majors’ difficulties in EFL
listening comprehension and recommendations
(Graduation paper submitted in partial fulfillment of
The Degree of Bachelor of Arts in English)

I certify that no part of this research has been copied or reproduced from any
other person’s work without acknowledgements and that the report is originally
written by me under strict guidance from my supervisor.

Dated submitted: May 2013

Student

Supervisor

Nguyen Thi Thu Huyen

Ta Thi Thanh Hoa, M.A.

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LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Students’ listening activities in classroom



TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................... i
ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................... iii
STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ....................................................................... iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS ...................................................................................... vi
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION............................................................................. 1
I. RATIONALE .................................................................................................. 1
II. RESEARCH PRESUPPOSITION .................................................................. 2
III. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES.......................................................................... 2
IV. RESEARCH SCOPE .................................................................................... 3
V. RESEARCH TASKS ..................................................................................... 3
VI. RESEARCH METHODS ............................................................................. 3
VII. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROPOSED RESEARCH................................. 4
VIII. DESIGN OF THE RESEARCH WORK .................................................... 4
PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT ............................................................................ 6
CHAPTER ONE: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ........................................... 6
1.1. Literature review in brief.............................................................................. 6
1.2. Theoretical background of listening comprehension .................................... 7
1.2.1. The general concepts of listening comprehension .................................. 7
1.2.2. Classification of listening comprehension .............................................. 9
1.2.2.1. Real-life listening .......................................................................... 10
1.2.2.1.1. Casual listening ....................................................................... 11
1.2.2.1.2. Focused listening..................................................................... 12
1.2.2.2. Classroom listening ....................................................................... 12
1.2.2.2.1. Intensive listening ................................................................... 12
1.2.2.2.2. Extensive listening .................................................................. 12
1.2.3. Process of listening comprehension ..................................................... 13
1.2.3.1. Bottom-up processing .................................................................... 13

2.1.5. Administration of the try-out
2.1.5.1. Preparations of the try-out
2.1.5.2. Try-out
2.1.6. Research methods. ............................................................................... 28
2.1.6.1. Data collection instruments ........................................................... 28
2.1.6.2. Data analysis methods ................................................................... 28
2.2. Data analysis .............................................................................................. 29
2.2.1. Students’ attitudes towards EFL listening ........................................... 29
2.2.2. Students’ learning habit of listening outside classroom and in classroom
...................................................................................................................... 30
2.2.2.1. Outside classroom ......................................................................... 30
2.2.2.2. In classroom .................................................................................. 31

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2.2.3. Students’ activities in three stages of listening: pre, while and post
listening ......................................................................................................... 31
2.2.3.1. Students’ pre –listening activities .................................................. 31
2.2.3.2. Students’ while listening activities................................................. 32
2.2.3.3. Students’ post-listening activities .................................................. 32
2.2.4. Students’ problems in listening comprehension ................................... 33
2.2.4.1. Problems from the listeners ........................................................... 33
2.2.4.2. Problems from the speakers ........................................................... 38
2.2.4.4. Problems from listening materials ................................................. 41
2.2.4.5. Problems from physical settings .................................................... 42
2.2.5. Listening strategies of fresh students at HPU2 ..................................... 43
2.2.6. Students’ expectation of their teachers’ techniques .............................. 43
2.3. Discussion of major findings ...................................................................... 44
2.3.1. Difficulties of the first year majors at HPU2 in learning to listen to



PART ONE
INTRODUCTION

I. RATIONALE
It cannot be denied that English language in the whole world has become
more and more important. It is considered the international means of
communication in many fields of our life. These days, the English language has
become the global language. It is the mother tongue of many countries over the
world. Besides, a number of countries use it as a second language. In fact, English
is the native language of more than 350 million people and it is spoken more than
any other languages. It is the international language of different fields such as
business, politics, science, technology, banking, tourism and others. Therefore, the
demand for learning English is very great. In Vietnam as well as in other countries,
there is a greater and greater need to learn English, from young to old, and from
male to female alike. It cannot be denied that English plays a vital role in Vietnam
nowadays. Therefore, English is being taught at every educational level. It has
become a compulsory subject in most schools.
In order to acquire good knowledge of English, we must master four basic
language skills namely listening, speaking, reading and writing in which listening
is the most important and challenging skill. Listening plays a crucial role in daily
life. People listen for different purposes such as entertainment, academic purposes
or obtaining necessary information. As for foreign language learning, listening is
of paramount importance since it provides the language input (Rost, 1994).
Without understanding input appropriately, learning simply cannot get any
improvement. Apart from speaking skill, listening is a key skill used in
communication. Listening skill is very important because unless you are able to
hear, you cannot understand what others mean, so you do not know how to reply.
This means that only when you can understand, you can speak. Therefore, without

1) To find out the most common difficulties in learning listening comprehension
encountered by the first-year English majors at Hanoi Pedagogical University N0.2 .
2) To identify the causes of the problems of listening comprehension faced by
the first-year English majors at Hanoi Pedagogical University N0.2.

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3) To provide some suggested solutions to minimize the difficulties and
improve efficiency in listening comprehension.
IV. RESEARCH SCOPE
Within this study, the researcher only focuses on the first-year English majors
at Hanoi Pedagogical University N0.2 to investigate the troubles that students at
this class usually encounter and then give some proposals to overcome discovered
difficulties and to improve students’ listening ability.
The population involved in the study is fifty English majors of Course 38 of Faculty
of Foreign Languages at Hanoi Pedagogical University N0.2.
V. RESEARCH TASKS
The study involves fulfilling the following tasks:
1) To study the definition, process of listening comprehension, classification
of listening comprehension, factors affecting listening comprehension, students’
listening activities as well as potential problems in learning to listen to English.
2) To investigate the most common difficulties in listening comprehension
encountered by the first-year English majors and causes.
3) Based on the major findings, possible suggestions to the problems are
proposed to minimize the student’s difficulties and enhance effectiveness in
listening comprehension.
VI. RESEARCH METHODS
1) Data collection
I have already collected documents from book in library and in the internet to

useful information on problems and proposals to the problems so that they can
have effective methods of teaching listening comprehension.
This study is also beneficial to anyone who is interested in listening comprehension.
VIII. DESIGN OF THE RESEARCH WORK
The research work has three main parts, namely: Introduction, Development
and Conclusion. The part “Development” consists three chapters.
Chapter 1 is entitled “Theoretical background”. It includes two sections.
Section one presents literature review in brief. The second one deals with things
related to the listening comprehension such as definition, classification, process
and stages in listening comprehension as well as factors affecting the process of
listening comprehension.

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Chapter 2 is named “An investigation into the first-year English majors’
difficulties in listening comprehension”. It has three sections. Section one is
devoted to the survey which focuses on the methods used to gather and analyze
data and describes the current situation of students at HPU2. The second section
presents data analysis based on the collected results of the survey. The last section
makes discussion of some common problems faced by students and possible causes
of these problems.
Chapter 3 is entitled “Major solutions and recommendations to improve
students’ listening comprehension”. It provides some recommendations for
improvement of the listening comprehension.

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PART TWO



“there are fewer insights into the process of listening and the way it is learnt”.
Similarly, Richard (1985) states that: “there is little direct research on second
language listening comprehension”. As for that, I am doing this research not only to
help students in our university with better listening but also to make a considerable
contribution to enriching the listening research which has been done so far.
1.2. Theoretical background of listening comprehension
In this chapter, I would like to provide a theoretical background to the present
study to help students know more and deeply about the listening comprehension. It
is composed of five sections. The first section presents various ways of defining
listening. The second section is about classification of listening comprehension.
The next section focuses on listening comprehension processing. The fourth
section is designed to look at the factors that make listening difficult. The coming
section mentions students’ activities in three stages of a listening lesson. The last
one deals with potential problems in listening comprehension.
1.2.1. The general concepts of listening comprehension
It is considered that listening comprehension is a fundamental and important
skill in language learning. It is also a significant and essential area of development
in a native language as well as in a foreign language; therefore, there have been
numerous definitions of listening comprehension which present different views of
scholars toward the concept.
There are two influential views: traditional view and alternative view
(Listening, 1988).
Traditional views considered listening, alongside reading skill, as a passive
language skill while speaking and writing were active skills. Learners play a passive
role in the listening learning process. Listeners were thought of as human tape
recorders: they took in a bit of information, stored it in a sort of medium-term
memory and used it in much the same way as a tape recorder. In other words, they
just listen to the messages, record and understand the meaning of the speaker’s

cues from contextual information and existing knowledge, while relying upon multiple
strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement”.
According to Richards and Schmidt (2002), “Listening comprehension is the
process of understanding speech in a first or second language. The study of listening
comprehension in second language learning focuses on the role of individual linguistic
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units e.g., phonemes, words, grammatical structures as well as the role of the listener’s
expectation, the situation and context, background knowledge and topic”.
Among the various definitions, a representative one is propounded by Clark
and Clark (1997). They give both a narrow and broad definition. Comprehension
has two common senses. In it narrow sense it denotes the mental process by which
listeners take in the sound uttered by a speaker and use them to construct an
interpretation of what they think the speaker tended to convey…comprehension in
its broad sense, however, rarely ends here, for listeners normally put the
interpretation they have built to work”.
Rubin (1995) gave a quite clear definition of listening comprehension that
“Listening is conceived of as an active process in which listeners select and
interpret information which come from auditory and visual clues in order to define
what is going on and what the speakers are trying to express”.
Listening comprehension becomes an active skill in which learners keep a
positive role of attending in what have been heard, treat, understand and interpret
the information so that they may respond to this information immediately or
remember the message to respond at a later time. This reflects exactly that listening
comprehension process consists of four steps: receiving-understand-assess-respond
in sequence given by Steil, Barker and Wakson (1983). Only when listener can
respond, listening comprehension process is completed.
In conclusion, listening comprehension is not a passive but active and
conscious process in which listeners construct and convey the meaning by using

- Attending a lesson/ seminar
- Being interviewed/ interviewing
- Watching a film/ theatre show/ television program
- Hearing a speech/ lecture
- Being tested orally in a subject of a study and so on
According to Penny Ur (1992), “there is a distinction between formal speech or
“spoken prose” and the informal speech use in most spontaneous conversation”. In
his view, informal speech is usually both spontaneous and colloquial in character;
formal speech is characteristically neither. There are some basic differences between
formal speech and informal such as redundancy, noise, colloquial language and
auditory character (Teaching listening comprehension, 1992).
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Penny Ur also indicates that there is a distinct difference between the auditory
effect of a piece of spoken prose and that of informal conversation. The former is
characterized by a fairly even pace, volume and pitch. Spontaneous conversation,
on the other hand, is jerky, has frequent pauses and overlaps, goes intermittently
faster and slower, louder and softer, higher and lower. Hesitations, interruptions,
exclamations, emotional reactions of surprise, irritation or amusement, which are
liable to occur in natural dialogues, are bound to cause an uneven and constantly
changing rhythm of speech. The overall effect of all this is perhaps more dramatic
and interesting than that of formal speech, but this does not mean that it is, all in
all, more comprehension or easier to listen to.
To summarize, we may say that most but not all of our real-life listening
activity is characterized by the following features:
- We listen for a purpose and with certain expectations
- We make an immediate response to what we hear
- We see the person we are listening to
- There are some visual or environmental clues as to the meaning of what is

applied in classroom: intensive listening and extensive listening.
1.2.2.2.1. Intensive listening
Intensive listening is careful and focused listening for detailed information,
for example: listening to the announcement or listening to the weather forecast. In
some cases, intensive listening is very important if listeners want to know some
small details. Intensive listening requires learners to listen with much attention for
specific information or full comprehension which involves finding the answers to
specific questions. This kind of listening helps learners improve their listening skill
to grasp information in detail in their effort to do exercises or other activities. The
passage should be short so that it helps listeners fell easy, interesting and
encouraging. Therefore, they often listen with great concentration.
1.2.2.2.2. Extensive listening
Extensive listening, on the other hand, is listening for general ideas, not for
particular information. This type of listening is often used when listeners just want
to know the key points without paying attention to specific information such as
listening to stories or films. Recognizing the main points of listening helps us
understand the content of the listening. The extensive listening requires listeners to
collect supporting details to find out the main idea. The purpose of extensive
listening is to develop the students’ skill in recognizing main points as well as the
general meaning of spoken text. Differ from intensive listening, extensive listening
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is an activity in which listeners are not asked to do language work on what they
hear. Therefore these types of listening allow learners to listen for pleasure without
any pressure. Further more, the language used in this sort of listening is often
within the listeners’ current ability so that students find it interesting when
listening and feel satisfied as they understand the passage well. This contributes to
motivating them to enhance their listening skill.
1.2.3. Process of listening comprehension

one’s linguistic knowledge.
1.2.3.2. Top-down processing
Top-down processing is explained as the process in which listeners employ
both background knowledge and content schema in order to comprehend the
meaning of aural message. This knowledge can be content schema (general
knowledge based on life experience and previous learning) or textual schema
(knowledge of language and content used in particular situation). In this process,
the listeners combine the new information in what he has been heard with his
previous knowledge and experience to reach full comprehension of what had been
heard. The role of this previous knowledge or background knowledge is central to
the way he understands the spoken message, whether through listening or reading
(Listening, 1988). Using this model helps listeners have a general view of the text.
We see what is going on. However, we miss a lot of details. Besides, in case the
listening topic is unfamiliar to listeners, he can not make use of his background
knowledge to construct the meaning but depend heavily on his linguistic
knowledge in comprehending. Hence, only relying on top-down processing may
lead to the failure of comprehension.
1.2.3.3. Interactive processing
The interactive processing overcomes the disadvantages of bottom-up
processing and top-down processing to augment the comprehension. In the early
1980s, it was the tendency that only top-down processing was acknowledged to
improve the second language in listening comprehension. However, it is now more
generally accepted that bottom-up and top-down processing should be combined to
enhance listening comprehension. Complex and simultaneous processing of
background knowledge information, contextual information and linguistic
information make comprehension and interpretation become easy. When the
content of the materials is familiar to the listener, he will employ his background
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language is the process of receiving, focusing attention on, and assigning meaning
to aural stimuli. It includes a listener, who brings prior knowledge of the topic,
linguistic knowledge and cognitive process to the listening task, the aural text, and
the interaction between the two.
1.2.4. Factors affecting listening comprehension
Listening skill plays an important role in learning a foreign language, yet it is
not easy to master this skill. In the eyes of many learners of English, it is regarded
as the most challenging skill. Many studies have been conducted aiming not only
at seeking the ways to teach the listening skill effectively but also try to answer the
question which factors cause difficulties in listening comprehension.
According to Yagang (1994), the problems in listening are accompanied with
the four following factors: the listeners, the speakers, the messages and the
physical settings. Brown and Yule (1983) suggest that “there are four main groups
of factors, which can cause difficulty in listening. These are speakers (that includes
the number of speakers, the speakers’ speech, and the speakers’ accents), the
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