THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

DANG THI LE THUY

FACTORS AFFECTING LISTENING COMPREHENSION
OF THE 8TH GRADE STUDENTS AT A JUNIOR
HIGH SCHOOL IN THAI NGUYEN CITY
(Những yếu tố ảnh hưởng đến khả năng nghe hiểu
của học sinh lớp 8 tại một trường Trung học cơ sở ở
Thái Nguyên)

M.A THESIS
Field: English Linguistics
Code: 8220201

THAI NGUYEN – 2019


THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

DANG THI LE THUY

FACTORS AFFECTING LISTENING COMPREHENSION
OF THE 8TH GRADE STUDENTS AT A JUNIOR
HIGH SCHOOL IN THAI NGUYEN CITY
(Những yếu tố ảnh hưởng đến khả năng nghe hiểu
của học sinh lớp 8 tại một trường Trung học cơ sở ở
Thái Nguyên)


School of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen University for their interesting lectures
and suggestions for the topic of my study.
Thanks are also due to my students grade 8 and my colleagues at a Junior
High School, Thai Nguyen City for their assistance and cooperation in completing
the questionnaires and interviews
Last but not least, I would like to give my deepest gratitude to my parents,
my husband and my friends for their moral support and encouragement throughout
my training course.


ABSTRACT
The aim of the study was to discover the factors affecting the listening
comprehension of 8th-grade students at a junior high school in Thai Nguyen. The
participants of the study included 90 grade 8 students from classes 8A1, 8A2, 8A3
and 5 teachers of English at Nha Trang junior high school in Thai Nguyen. In this
article, researchers had looked at the terms listening, listening comprehension,
factors that affect listening comprehension. After conducting the research steps, the
researcher discovered factors that more or less affected the listening comprehension
of grade 8 students such as, process, task, listener, input, affect, and context. Among
these factors, it was found that specific problems that affected students' listening
comprehension were: grammar, structure and vocabulary, accents, speaking speech,
unfamiliar topics and poor listening equipment. The finding of the research
indicated that when teachers were aware of the factors that affected students’
listening comprehension, they could help their students develop effective listening
strategies and ultimately solve those difficulties in listening and improved listening
comprehension.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
DECLARATION ........................................................................................................ i

4.1. Findings..............................................................................................................18
4.1.1. Findings of the questionnaire ..........................................................................18
4.1.2. Findings of the interview ................................................................................26
4.2. Discussion ..........................................................................................................27
4.3. Summary ............................................................................................................30
CHAPTER 5: IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION......................................31
5.1. Implications........................................................................................................32
5.1.1. For teachers .....................................................................................................32
5.1.2. For students .....................................................................................................35
5.2. Limitations of the study .....................................................................................37
5.3. Suggestions for future research ..........................................................................37
5.4. Conclusion..........................................................................................................38
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................38
APPENDIX .............................................................................................................43


LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Students' choices about factors that affected their listening
comprehension.....18
Table 2: Process factor ..............................................................................................20
Table 3: Task Factor..................................................................................................21
Table 4: Input Factor ................................................................................................22
Table 5: Listener Factor ............................................................................................23
Table 6: Affect Factor ...............................................................................................24
Table 7: Context Factor.............................................................................................25


CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale for the study
Listening is an important language skill to develop in second language learning.


Less time was spent on self-study, and fewer students could practice listening at
home from 1 to 2 hours a week. Another worry thing was that most students read
the typescript before practicing their listening skills. Hence, it was a bad habit that
made the listening process not meet the requirements and goals of the curriculum.
Therefore, identifying the factors that directly or indirectly affected the listening
skills of 8th graders was very important. These factors would help students realize
their own difficulties, and they could find the best solution to overcome these
factors, and also help teachers to look more about the factors that affect their
students' listening comprehension to give solutions and teaching listening, toward a
goal that all students can listen in the best way.
With the current situation relating to the students’ poor listening comprehension
competence at Nha Trang junior high school, the researcher conducted this study to
find out factors that affected the 8th-grade students’ listening comprehension at Nha
Trang junior high school in Thai Nguyen. It was hoped that the findings of this
paper could provide good views for the teaching and learning of listening
comprehension at school.
1.2. Aims of the study
The purpose of this study was to identify factors that affected the listening skills
of eighth graders. This helped students identify the importance of listening skills
and develop it better.
In this study, the following research question was answered:
- What factors affect the listening comprehension of the 8th-graders?
1.3. Significance of the study
The findings of this study brought a lot of meaning to teachers, students as
well as researchers. First, for English teachers, this study was able to provide more
in-depth information so that teachers could actively help students improve their
listening skills. Besides, this study was able to provide suggestions and
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Chapter 5: Implication and conclusion, pointed out the implications of the study,
some limitations and made research conclusions.

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter discussed the theory and previous research on areas that form
the basis of this research. The first section provided an overview of listening
comprehension and common listening processes. The second part provided a
definition of the factors affecting the listening process and the classification of
previous researchers on those factors. The final part was an assessment of previous
relevant studies conducted by researchers.
2.1. Listening comprehension
2.1.1. Definition
There have been different definitions of the term “listening comprehension.”
Rost (2002) and Hamouda (2013) defined listening comprehension is an
interactive process in which listeners engage in building meaning. The listener
understands oral input through sound distinction, previous knowledge, grammatical
structure, stress and intonation and other linguistic or nonverbal clues (as cited in
Pourhosein Gilak camera & Sabouri, 2016).
Listening is not a passive skill, but an active, receptive skill. It requires a lot of
attention and mental activity like speaking. And listening comprehension is an act of
understanding an oral message. Listening is an extremely complex operation (Buck,
2001) requires more than simple perception of audio signals.
It involves speech decoding and comprehending. Listening comprehension is not
something that happens because of what the speaker speaks, but follow Anderson &
Lynch(1988: 6) the listener plays an important role in the listening process, by

comprehending it. According to Steinberg (2007), listening is more complicated
than just hearing. This process consists of four stages: feeling and attending,
understanding and explaining, remembering, and answering. The stages happen in
sequence, but we often don't know them.
Schemata are instructional structures during listening comprehension. A schema
is a data structure to display common concepts stored in memory. Schema means an
abstract text structure that listeners use to understand the text. Listeners use
language signals and situations on new inputs to extract schemata. When a schema
is extracted, it becomes a guiding structure in listening comprehension. If there is a
harmony between the incoming information and the schema, the listener will
understand the text. Schema leads to three basic information processing modes:
bottom-up process, top-down process and interactive process (Pourhosein Gilak
camera & Ahmadi,
2011).
Bottom-up process

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The listener uses their knowledge of the language and their ability to process
acoustic signals to make sense of the sounds that speech presents to them.

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Top-down process



that listening difficulties are the characteristic that disturbing the listener in
comprehending the information.
Therefore, factors affecting listening comprehension might be defined as all
internal and external factors, subjective or objective, which directly affected the
perception during the listening process.
2.2.2. Taxonomy of factors affecting listening comprehension
There were various factors affected the listening comprehension in the listening
process. Alderson et al. (2006), Bridley and Slatyer (2002), Kostin (2004), Ying-hui
(2006), Wagner (2010), Rost (2011) and others have synthesized several factors that
were likely to influence performance and interpretation of test results. Rubin (1994)
was the first to classify listening factors into five categories, including text,
interlocutor, task, listener and process factors. Based on Jamieson et al.‘s (2000)
learner process models during listening tests, Rost (2011) added a number of
variables that might affect listeners‘ test performance during each stage. These
variables included the stimulus variable, listener variable, and item variable.
Kutlu and Aslanolub (2009), conducted research on the factors affecting listening
skills, and they found that “number of juvenile books at home”, “number of books at
home”, “time spent reading books”, “time spent reading newspaper” and “time spent
listening to radio” have significant effect on fifth grade students’ success in their
listening comprehension.
Unlike previous studies, Lotfi (2012) conducted a discovery factor analysis of the
answers of a sample of Iranian EFL learners and then divided into six distinct
factors: process, input, listener, task, affect, and context by designed a questionnaire
to assess EFL learners’ beliefs about the English listening comprehension problems
they may encounter in unidirectional listening.
The first factor or process factor reflected the problems that learners often have to
deal with different aspects of the listening process. The process here refers to “the
way in which learners use different kinds of signals to interpret what they hear”. In

characteristics of the learning context affecting listening comprehension. The factor
included problems about the adverse effect of distracters available in the learning
context on their listening comprehension.
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After studying the taxonomies of the factors that affected the ability of students
listening comprehension, the researcher felt that Lotfi’s taxonomy (2012) was very
relevant to this research because, among all taxonomies of listening difficulties,
Lofti’s taxonomy was one of the most comprehensive classifications. Besides, his
taxonomy showed the most specific factors that affected the listening
comprehension of the students. Therefore, the researcher chose his taxonomy as a
basic of data collection instrument in the present study.
2.3. Previous studies on factors affecting listening comprehension
In the past, there was a great deal of research on the listening area of students of
all ages and especially about the factors that affected students' listening
comprehension.
In the last decades, many studies on the effect of specific factors on the learner‘s
listening comprehension was pointed out (e.g. Boyle, 1984; Brown, 1995; Chang &
Roebl, 2011; Chiang & Dunkel, 1992; Lotfi, 2012; Rubin, 1994; Rubin &
Thompson,
1994; Teng, 2002; Yagang, 1993).
Boyle (1984) in his study has elaborated the factors that affecting listening
comprehension into two characteristics: speaker and listener. This Hong Kong study
began with a survey of the factors most frequently mentioned in the literature on
listening comprehension. Then a cross-section of teachers working at secondary and
tertiary levels was consulted. Finally, a sample of students who had just finished
their secondary education was questioned. He pointed out the speakers characteristic

Asriati

(2017)

conducted

research

about

listening

comprehension

in

Muhammadiyah University of Makassar, South Sulawesi. This research aimed to
identify the factors affecting the students' listening comprehension achievement and
to identify which factor was dominant, conducted at the Muhammadiyah University
of Makassar. This research was restricted into listener and speaker factors that
caused difficulties. The method of this research was descriptive research. The result
of this research showed that there were 25 factors from the listener and speaker that
affected the students' listening comprehension achievement. Moreover, among
those 25 factors, there were 5 factors classified to be the most dominant ones. They
were: inability to acknowledge the colloquial words and slang, inability to
understand the reduced word, inability to answer the question of which required the
long answer, focus loss resulted from looking for the answer to the question and the
speed of the speech delivery.
In Vietnam, studies on this issue had also been done a lot, including a research
about factors in learning the listening skills by Kieu Thi Thu Huong (2014).

affected the students’ listening.
According to the study, listening comprehension was very important in learning
foreign languages. The studies mentioned above explored specific factors that affect
the comprehension of students of different ages. However, there were some
limitations that existed in the studies mentioned. Although some researchers have
done their research with previous studies, but the factors affecting the 8th graders’
age were unclear while their listening comprehension could be said that limited. It
could be said that findings from previous studies had provided good evidence of the
factors that affected students' ability to listening and support the problem in this
study. To fill this gap, the researcher decided to conduct a study to discover clearly
the factors that might affect the listening comprehension of the 8th-grade students in
Nha Trang junior high school in Thai Nguyen city. The study would also highlight
the finding of factors that directly and indirectly might affect students' daily
listening comprehension. It was hoped that this research would contribute to a
better understanding of junior high schools students as well as in Vietnam to help to
teach and learning English listening better.
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2.4. Summary
Chapter 2 had described the background used as the foundation of the present
study. Firstly, listening comprehension skill in language learning was discussed.
Next, there were factors that might affect students’ listening comprehension ability.
Finally, previous studies conducted on factors affecting listening comprehension of
different ages were addressed. The review indicated that from these studies, it had
been shown that listening comprehension skills played a very important role in
learning to communicate in this language. In this regard, previous studies also
presented many different factors that affected students' ability to comprehend and