PART A: INTRODUCTION
1. The rationale of the study
The main objective of learning a language is to communicate in that
language fluently. Hence, in order to obtain that aim, the learners do not only
need language knowledge sources such as grammatical system, lexical
system, phonological system, but they also have to practice four skills:
listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among the language skills,
listening is the most important in communication in the real life. In learning
a language, listening is a useful means of providing learners with
comprehensible input, which is an essential component of the whole
language learning process. And teaching listening skill in classroom helps
learners make transition from classroom English to real- life English more
easily and effectively.
Additionally, learning listening skill is the most difficult in learning a
foreign language. Listening, like reading, is a receptive skill but it is often
the most daunting for learners. When reading, a reader usually has more
opportunities to refer back to the text to clarify understanding, which a
listener cannot do in most listening contexts such as TV programs, meetings,
discussions, lectures or conversations. What is more, in teaching and
learning English listening skill in Vietnam, teachers and learners cope with a
lot of problems and difficulties because of both objective and subjective
reasons. Therefore, I myself choose the topic “Applying
some warm-up
listening activities to attract students’ interest for 10 th form students at Le
Loi high school.” to point out the main difficulties which the beginners have
met and work out some suggestions so as to help teachers motivate their
learners to study listening skill more excited and better.
2. Aims and Objectives of the study
The study is aimed at finding some difficulties in listening learning
and teaching, also to suggest some strategies for developing listening skills.
On this basis, the students’ abilities to deal with listening will be

skills. They are:
• guessing at unknown words or phrases without panicking
• predicting what people are going to talk about
• using one’s own knowledge of the topic to help one understand
• identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information
• retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)
• recognizing discourse markers, e.g., Well; Oh, another thing is; Now,
finally; etc.
• recognizing cohesive devices, e.g., such as and which, including link
words, pronouns, references, etc.
• understanding inferred information, e.g., speakers’ attitude or intentions
• understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc., which
give clues to meaning and social setting
2. The importance of listening skill
Listening is an important skill and probably the most difficult one.
Getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different
accents and varieties apart from their teacher and that way better prepare


them for real world listening. The main method of exposing them to spoken
English other than their teacher’s is using taped material that exemplify a
wide range of topic such broadcast news, announcement, advertisement, etc.
From a theoretical perspective, teaching listening will help them
acquire the language subconsciously even when the teacher does not draw
their attention to special features. It is agreed that exposure to the target
language is a fundamental requirement for those who want to learn it. The
use of tape material will provide students with such exposure and they will
get information not only vocabulary and structure but also pronunciation,
rhythm, intonation, pitch and stress.
3. Two ways of listening

the class.
Many students complained that they became tired of listening to the
tape from beginning to the end with some mechanical exercises. Without
interest, motivation and variation in teaching and learning, students felt
bored in listening classes. As a result, the passive attitude kept students from
making much progress in listening comprehension. In this paper, what we
want to discuss is how to make listening classes more interesting and how to
develop students' listening ability.
III. Applying the warm-up activities in teaching listening skill for 10 th


form students at Le Loi high school.
Just as Broughton says, "motivation is a basic principle of all kinds of
teaching - the language student is best motivated by practice in which he
senses the language is truly communicative, that it is appropriate to its
context, that his teacher's skills are moving him forward to a fuller
competence in the foreign language." Therefore, how to keep students'
interest in learning must be focused.
III.1. Warm-up exercises.
In class, we must try to avoid boring or over-theoretical or mechanical
subjects, using as far as possible warm-up exercises we think our students
may be interested in, that seem of practical relevance, that may arouse or
stimulate them. Sometimes, a picture or a humorous story can do a great deal
towards arousing interest among students. However, during the whole
listening course, most teachers actually only have a 'while-listening' stage,
neglecting the 'pre-listening or warm-up exercise step, which acts as an
important role in arousing students' interest and as the preparation stage for
the 'while-listening' stage.
As a matter of fact, we can say that how well students had done in
class depends mostly on how well they had been warmed up. From this point

1. Where is Nairobi National park ?
2. Is Everglades National Park a sub-tropical wilderness in southeastern
United States ?
3. Are there any common features of these two national parks?
- Then, introduce the new lesson.
III.1.2. Questions and Answers
Some people might think that asking questions is a purely technical (i.
e. grammatical) matter. But in my class, it is not. As a matter of fact, no
matter how effective a technique is, listening comprehension should demand
students' participation, and the immediate feedback helps keep interest and
motivation. "Question Time" is the name I have given to those first five to
ten minutes of a lesson. Before listening to a passage, I always asked some
questions so that students would have some ideas about the topic before they
listened. In this process of doing the warm-up activity, students could build
on their prior knowledge and at the same time, use vocabulary and structures
that are connected with a particular function.
Unit 12: Music (grade 10)
For example , when teaching the students the lesson relating to music,
I encourage my students to discuss the questions below:
• Do you know Van Cao?
• What’s his job?
• When/ where was he born?
• Is he still alive?
• When did he die?
• Which of the songs were written by him?
After that I introduce the topic : Today you are going to listen to an
interview in which Lan Huong, the interviewer, asks Quang Hung, a famous
actor, about Van Cao.
In this way, students can be aware of the purpose of the exercise in
general and the nature of the specific task in particular before they listen to

- Have students play an interesting quick game, that is Jumbled word.
-Write down some jumbled words on the board. Have students to work in
groups of 4, in 15 seconds try to find out the words of meaningful correct
order.
- The groups with the most correct words within the shortest time will be the
winner.

UNIT 3: PEOPLE’S BACKGROUND
- Hang out some pictures on the board and ask students to guess the names
of sport.
- Make questions and have students to answer individually.


+ Do you like sports?
+ What types of sports do you like?
+ Can you name some sport events that you know?
Volleyball

Basketball

Swimming

Table tennis

UNIT 4: SPECIAL EDUCATION
- Tell the story about the life and career of the speaker Nick Vujicic: Nick
Vujicic is a wonder man of disability in the present world. He is a SerbianAustralian motivational speaker and Christian evangelist who was born
without arms and leg. Actually, there is no medical reason why he was born
without legs and arms. Vujicic struggled mentally and physically since
childhood. He delivers motivational speeches around the world focusing on

UNIT 10: CONSERVATION
- Hang out some pictures, and ask students to guess express their ideas about
the pictures.
- Raise some questions:
+ What do you think of our nature?
+ What should we do to save the nature?
+ Is saving the nature your responsibilities or others’ ones?
UNIT 11: NATIONAL PARKS
- Have students play the guessing game by opening every picture on the
board.
- The group with the correct guess within the shortest time will be the
winner.
UNIT 12: MUSIC
- Divide class into 4 groups.
- Have students play the game: Music crossword puzzle
- Have students choose the number of questions, then answer the questions
basing on the clues.
- Group can guess the key word will be the winner.
1. A Person watching television
2. A collection of recordings issued as a single item
3. M – TP Son Tung is
4. The type of film: Tom & Jerry
5. A person who plays a musical instrument or writes music
6. What type of music are
7. Buc Tuong band famous for?
Key word: Van Cao
UNIT 14: THE WORLD CUP
- Play a piece of music relating to the world cup.
- Ask students to guess what the piece of music is about
- Raise some questions:

This stage prepares students by getting them to think about the topic
or situation before they listen to the texts. In other words, it gives students a
purpose to listen. It also gets students to relate to what they already know
about the topic and not least important arouse their interest in listening.
There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to
listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualization, and preparation.
Motivation
It is enormously important that before listening students are
motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find
interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and
curiosity.


Contextualization
When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its
natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of
information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a
tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been
taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will
help students to contextualize the listening and access their existing
knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.
Preparation
To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific
vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It's vital that we cover this
before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be act
of listening not of understanding what they have to do.
Pre-tasks can be:
- Introducing general content of the listening passage
- Making use of pictures (if any) to present new vocabulary
- Presenting more words/phrases from tape scripts

listening. In other words, it helps students to listen better, more accurately,
thoroughly through carefully designed comprehension tasks.


When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a
reason. Students too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention.
Ideally the listening tasks that are designed should guide them through the
text. What the teacher do to facilitate students’ comprehension:
- Giving clear instructions for the listening task (rephrasing textbook
instructions if necessary)
- Playing the tape once (non-stop) for students to get general content of the
listening
- Providing other activities from textbook for slower classes
- Moving from simpler tasks (listening for getting key words/phrases,
listening for main ideas, matching, deciding on true/false information,
numbering pictures, sequencing events…) to more complicated ones
(answering MCQs, gap-filling, table/graph completing, answering
information questions …)
- Playing the tape several times (non-stop or with pauses if students need
help)
- Breaking long tapescripts into sections to facilitate the listening
V.3. Post-listening stage
The Post-stage is like the follow-up stage. After students have
practiced the target skill in the While-stage, they do an extension activity.
This helps students take the information or whatever they have produced in
the While-stage, and do something meaningful with it.
There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These
are reactions to the content of the text, and analysis of the linguistic features
used to express the content.
Reaction to the text


school. During the discussion, I give students some
What problems have you got at school?
What is / are the reason (s)?
What have you done to solve it / them?
Who helps you to solve it

VI. Result of the study and some recommendations
In order to find out the difficulties while learning listening skill, and
the effectiveness of the application of warm-up listening activities, an action
research project was carried out with the participation of 40 students in class
10A10 at Le Loi High School. The students’ improvement was estimated by
using two questionaires
VI.1. Result of the first questionaire
The forty students participating in this study were given a
questionaire in order to gather baseline data scores for the start of the
research to quantify their interest in listening skill. The students were all
tested on the same day, one day before the interventions began. The results
of the initial assessment are shown in Chart 1
Chart 1: Students’ interest in warm-up listening activities
The data showed that most students’ levels of interest were not
satisfactorily high. It proved that many of them encountered the problem
with listening skill and were not attracted by the warm-up activities in the
textbook.
VI. 2. Result of the second questionaire
•
After a d a p t i n g s o m e d e s i g n e d w a r m - u p l i s t e n i n g
a c t i v i t i e s , the students were again given another assessment to
determine if there was any improvement in their interest. Hopefully,
almost the students showed their changes in the attitudes toward listening

activities to attract students’ interest in listening skill is a precious strategy
and the students’ competence of learning listening was enhanced noticeably.
The above activities can be used as strategies for developing listening skills


that cultivate students’ interest and help students enjoy their listening course.
The activities have a positive effect on students and make them want to
listen and speak more. After one- year- practice, the students in my class had
better understanding and listening ability. Above all, the students had the
habit of listening to English after class, such as listening to radio, tapes or
TV news.
From the result of the study, there are some recommendations I wish
the headmaster as well as the whole school would take into consideration:
- Listening is a complex skill involving a number of instruments as
radio, cassette tape or even amplifier. It’s necessary that those instruments be
available for the use conveniently.
- This study is carried out mainly within a small set of warm-up
listening activities. Hopefully, every teacher should design more activities so
that students can keep their interest in listening learning with motivation.
Signature of Principle

Thanh Hoa, May 20th, 2018
Hereby, I certify that this study is the
result of my own experience and has
not been submitted by any others.
Writer

Lê Thị Thủy

REFERENCES