THUONGMAI UNIVERSITY
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
------

GRADUATION PAPER
DIFFICULTIES IN ENGLISH LISTENING SKILL EXPERIENCED BY
FIRST-YEAR ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT THUONG MAI
UNIVERSITY AND SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS
Supervisor:
Student:
Student Code:
Class:

Ms. Do Thi Bich Bao, M.A
Nguyen Thi Thu Thuong
15D170392
K51N6

HANOI, 2019


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
On completing this graduation paper, I would like to send my deepest and most
sincere gratitude to many people for their invaluable help during the conduct of the
research.
First and foremost, I would like to send my heartfelt gratitude towards my
supervisor Ms. Do Thi Bich Dao for her constructive and timely feedbacks as well as
her constant and unfailing support which were decisive factors to the completion of the
study.
HÀ NỘI
- 2015

listening skill. In general, freshmen were aware of the importance of listening skill and
most of them valued this as the most difficult skill in English skills. First-year students
face many difficulties in listening (subjective difficulties and objective difficulties).
From the research findings, the researcher offerred suggestions and recommendations
to help students solve difficulties in listening to English. The researcher hopes this
study can help first-year students improve their listening skill and support the further
studies avoid shortcomings and limitations.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.....................................................................................ii
ABSTRACT............................................................................................................. iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS........................................................................................iv
LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES, AND ABBREVIATIONS....................................vi
CHAPTER I: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY.......................................................1
1.1.

Rationale of the study...............................................................................1

1.2.

Previous studies........................................................................................3

1.3.

Aims of the study......................................................................................6

1.4.

Research subjects......................................................................................7

................................................................................................................................. 27
3.3.1. Subjecitve difficulties........................................................................................27
3.3.2. Objective difficulties.....................................................................................28
CHAPTER IV: RECOMMENDATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS......................32
4.1. Recommendations...........................................................................................32
4.1.1. For students..................................................................................................32
4.1.2. For teachers..................................................................................................34
4.2. Suggestions for further studies.......................................................................35
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
APPENDIX


LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES, AND ABBREVIATIONS
TABLES
Table 3.1: Number of students participated in the survey.........................................20
Table 3.2: The day students spent on self-studying English listening in a week.......25
Table 3.3: Students’ difficulties in self-study English listening................................27
Table 3.4: Objective difficulties in English listening................................................28
Table 3.5: Some language barriers obstructing students' English listening skill.......29
Table 3.6: Students’ solutions to improve English listening skill.............................30
FIGURES
Figure 3.1: The distribution of participants by numbers of years they have been
learning English.......................................................................................................21
Figure 3.2: The distribution of participants by the level of the listening test scores. 22
Figure 3.3: Students’ attitudes toward the level of impotance of English listening skill. .23
Figure 3.4: Students’ attitudes toward the level of difficulty of English listening skill
24
Figure 3.5: The time students spend on self-studying English listening in a day.....25
Figure 3.6: The disparities in how students listen for the first time..........................26

when listening to English. However, my study focuses on studying the listening skill of
1


first-year English major students at Thuong Mai University. There are many reasons
for me to do research on this topic.
The first reason comes from the reality of English listening skill of first-year
major students who are quite weak at this skill. Most freshmens were so familiar with
the high school curriculum. They only focus on learning grammar and vocabulary, but
are less interested in practicing language skills like practicing listening English. The
scores in the listening skill tests at the university are extremely low. Most freshmens
are afraid to learn to listen or listen to tests. Besides, according to Lewis (1993),
listening is also the most crucial medium for input in learning a foreign language and
by increasing students’ ability to perceive speech and thus aiding language learning.
Indeed, listening is an important and difficult skill. When learning a foreign language,
listening is a skill not to be missed. Listening skill plays a critical role in the remaining
other skills such as speaking, reading and writing. All skills are interrelated and used in
conjunction with each other in everyday life. Most learners will find their listening skill
difficult and choose to avoid having to listen to English. However, when being a
student in English department, first-year students need to raise awareness of the
importance of listening skills and try to overcome difficulties. Unlike students of other
faculties, students in the English Faculty need to be aware of the relationship of
listening skill with others, learners should not focus on a certain skill that you find it
easy for yourself and ignore other skills. Therefore, I want to thoroughly understand
the difficulties that new students are having then find the right solutions to help
freshmens to improve their listening skill.
The second reason that the researcher decided to study this topic was that when
being a freshman, the reseacher also had many difficulties in practicing English
listening. It was the fact that my first year listening test scores were not as expected. I
used to feel frustrated when I heard it because even though I tried, the results did not

The first previous study that the researcher refers to is “The Role of Listening in
Language Acquisition; the Challenges & Strategies in Teaching Listening” (D.
Renukadevi, 2014). D. Renukadevi was an Assistant Professor of Department of
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English in Erode Sengunthar Engineering College. His study deals with the prime
importance of listening in language acquisition and the challenges in attaining listening
competence and suggests some strategies to overcome it. D. Renukadevi declared that
“without listening skills, language learning is impossible”. The reason was “there is no
communication where there is no human interaction”. According to him, listening was
crucial not only in language learning but also for learning other subjects. Today,
learners have problems with listening with all the technological advancements in the
field of education. The study showed main reasons such as: learners spend too little
time to improve their listening skills; the inappropriate strategies tested on them in a
learning setting may be an important reason for their poor listening comprehension.
Other causes may from the listening material and physical settings. D. Renukadevi also
suggested some solutions to help langguage learners acquire high level listening skill,
such as:
 Reduce the burden of comprehension by knowing the context of a listening text
and the purpose for listening greatly.
 Both bottom-up processers (linguistic knowledge) and top-down processes
(prior knowledge) can be used by listeners to comprehend.
 Teachers should play an important role in teaching learners strategies and how
to apply them into the listening task.
 Students should be helped to develop sound strategies for comprehension
through a process approach to teach listening.
The second study that was referrd by the researcher is “Factors Affecting
Listening Comprehension and Strategies for Improvement” (Naci Yildiz and Mustafa
Albay, 2015). Their study showed three main factors from: listeners, speakers, material


message is not conveyed, the materials will not be useful. Vocabulary, grammar level
and phonological of the material influences comprehension largely.


Stress and intonation in the material.



The content of the material



The listening environment.

In the study, they suggested many solutions to help learners improve listening
skill. They affirmed that all grammatical structures and vocabulary in listening texts
must be ensured to be taught beforehand. The difficulty of listening texts must be at
learners’ level of understanding and listening texts must absorb attention of learners.
Interesting listening topics motivated learners which finally lead to achievement. Speed
of delivery must be slightly slower than normal speech. The accent of speakers in
listening texts influence comprehension so native accents should be preferred. And
finally a silent and motivating listening environment should be created.
The third study that the researcher would like to review is “Learners’ Listening
Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning” (Abbas Pourhosein
Gilakjani and Narjes Banou Sabour, 2016). In this study, the researchers reviewed the
terms of listening, listening comprehension, listening comprehension strategies, and
listening difficulties. The researchers showed 3 listening comprehension strategies.
They are cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective. They also showed main
5



What are difficulties in English listening skill experienced by first-year

English major students at Thuong Mai University?


What are some suggested solutions to help freshman at Thuongmai

University improve their listening skill?
6


1.4. Research subjects
Research subjects are freshmen, currently studying at the Faculty of English of
TMU. Most freshmen are students with the lowest English listening test scores in the
Faculty. They are almost familiar with the way they studied in high school. Before
going to college, high school students only focus on learning grammar and vocabulary
without taking time to practice language skills, especially listening practice in
particular. The goal of high school students is to achieve a high score on the university
exam. However, when they are in college, they must use the language they learn,
namely speaking and listening to English. Due to unfamiliarity with the environment
and the method of studying at the university, freshman students may face many
difficulties when listening to English.
Currently, according to the innovation program, freshmen have learned 4 skills:
listening, speacking, reading and writing as a separate subject. They have specific
subject to learn to listen to English. Compared to previous courses, freshmen have
better listening conditions, more time to listen with teachers and friends. Besides, they
also have the opportunity to learn how to listen to foreign teachers. However, this is
also a difficulty for most freshmen. English listening scores are considered a subject of

will be divided into 3 major parts (from part II to part IV). Part II contains 05
questions, understanding the attitude of students with learning to listen; Part III
includes 03 questions, find out about difficulties encountered by students, Part IV
includes 06 questions about the method of application to improve listening skill. The
researcher included questionnaires for 100 students who were selected in the scope of
the study, then retrieved the questionnaires for results. Results are transferred to
specific number data and the data are clearly analyzed.
1.7. Organization of the study
The rest of this paper has four more chapters:
In chapter two (Literature review): the researcher discusses the literature and
theory related to the research topic.
In chapter three (Research findings): the researcher has justified and described the
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research method in full detail. From the results obtained after the actual survey, the
researcher has drawn new findings and made comments and evaluations on the survey
results.
In chapter four (Recommendations and suggestion): From the actual results
obtained, the researcher offers practical and specific solutions to the topic.
Final part is the conclusion for the whole study.

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
The second chapter presents relevant theories ralated to listening and difficulties
in English listening skill. The definition or explaination of key terms in the topic is
presented along with the same previous research topics.
2.1. English listening skill

oral speech, divide sounds, classify them into lexical and syntactic units, and
comprehend the message. Listening is a process of receiving what the speaker says,
making and showing meaning, negotiating meaning with the speaker and answering,
and creating meaning by participation, creativity, and empathy”. According to Purdy
(1997), listening is the process of receiving, making meaning from, and answering to
spoken and/or nonverbal messages. Rost (2002) defined listening as a complex process
of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know.
Jafari and Hashim (2015) emphasized that listening is a channel for comprehensible
input and more than 50 percent of the time learners spend in learning a foreign
language is devoted to listening.
Listening is not a separated skill compared to other skills, because in the process
of listening, people use knowledge from other skills flexibly to comprehend the
context. According to Rivers in Hasyuni (2006, p.8), “Listening is a creative skill. It
means we comprehend the sound falling on our ears, and take the raw material of
words, arrangements of words, and the rise and fall the voice, and from this material
we creative a significance. Listeners must cope with the sender’s choice of vocabulary,
structure, and rate of delivery”. According to Oxford (1993, p.206) “Listening is a
complex problem solving skill and it is more than just perception of the sounds.
Listening includes comprehension of fundamental language skills. It is a medium
through which children, young people and adults gain a large portion of their
information, their understanding of the world and of human affairs, their ideals, sense
of values, and their appreciation”.
Vandergrift (1999, p.168), in his study, approved that “Listening is a complex and
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active process in which the listener must discriminate between sounds, understand
vocabulary and grammatical structure, interpret stress and intonation, retain the data
collected in the above processes and interpret it within the immediate as well as the
larger sociocultural context of the utterance”.

language for communicative purpose, as it helped the language learner to acquire
pronunciation, word stress, vocabulary, and syntax and the comprehension of messages
conveyed could be based solely on tone of voice, pitch and accent; and it was only
possible when we listened. D. Renukadevi also cited that “without understanding input
appropriately, learning simply cannot get any improvement. In addition, without
listening skill, no communication can be achieved”.
2.1.3. Listening process
There has also existed a large body of research studies on models of information
processing in listening based on the way listeners process and comprehend what is
heard. One such was the study of Helgesen & Brown (1994) in which listening is said
to be composed of two opposite processes, namely top-down and bottom-up processes.
2.1.3.1. Top-down process
Top- down process has been proved to have a certain role in assisting listening.
According to Flowerdew & Miller (2005), this model was employed when researchers
discovered that “experimental subjects are unable to identify truncated sounds in
isolation from the words they form a part of, whereas they are quite able to identify
truncated sounds so long as that they are presented with the surrounding context”.
According to Rubin (1994) “top-down processing is when listeners use their
knowledge of the world, real situations, and roles of human interaction to interpret or
predict the information”. Simply put, in the top- down process, listeners understand the
meaning of a message basing on their use of background knowledge to anticipate what
will come next instead of relying upon individual sounds and words. Therefore, the
role of listener in this process is indispensible.
As background knowledge is dominant feature of top-down process, “it is crucial
to provide listeners with abundant contextual cues, such as familiar topic or situations,
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predictable content or cultural background” (Richards, 1990). If the listeners failed to
make use of top-down processing or use of his/her background knowledge, an

Bottom-up process includes:



listening for specific details
recognizing cognates
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

recognizing word-order pattern

According to Richards (1990, p.10), in real world listening, both top-down and
bottom-up information processing generally occur together, the extent to which one or
the other dominates depending on “the listener’s familiarity with topic and content of a
text, the density of information in a text, the text type, and the listener’s purpose in
listening”.
2.2. Difficulties in English listening skill
After consulting the literature, books and research of many authors, the researcher
found that the difficulties in listening skill were divided into 2 categories: Subjective
difficulties and Objective difficulties.
2.2.1. Subjective difficulties
There are many experts and authors who pointed out the difficulties in listening
skills stemming from the learners themselves. After referring to previous studies, the
researcher has drawn 4 main subjective difficulties: Restricted vocabulary, poor
grammar, lack of contextual knowledge and poor concentration.
2.2.1.1. Restricted vocabulary
Listening is an important skill in communication process and vocabulary also
plays an indispensable role in communication. Therefore, vocabulary has a close

one wishes to say … While without grammar very little can be conveyed, without
vocabulary nothing can be conveyed’’. According to Naci Yildiz and Mustafa Albay
(2015), the knowledge of grammar helps learners comprehend easily. The grammatical
knowledge helps listeners to easily grasp information and determine the intention of
the speaker.
Biber (1986, p.12) cited that “Many of the devices of written language have no
spoken equivalent”. He also showed “linguistic differences between speaking and
writing have been attributed to differing processing constraints and to differing
situational characteristics”. Differences in grammar in spoken and written langguage
affect learners' ability to listen and read. Therefore, poor grammar is one of the
difficulties hindering learners in the process of listening to foreign languages.
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2.2.1.3. Lack of contextual knowledge
Vandergrift (2004) and Walker (2014) indicated that “oral passages exist in real
time and should be processed rapidly and when the passage is over, only a mental
representation remains”. Listening needs immediate processing to access the spoken
input again, making the skill more complex than reading. Students’ cultural
background knowledge can have an important role in their listening comprehension. A
general understanding of the country’s culture and its history can facilitate listening
processes.
Vandergrift (2007) and Walker (2014) also declared that “listeners can use
pragmatic knowledge to make inferences and identify speakers’ implied meaning that
these should be specifically considered by teachers when teaching listening
comprehension”. According to Seyedeh Masoumeh Ahmadi (2016), having contextual
knowledge “is to activate related background knowledge and use it to predict the ideas
the message may have”. This knowledge used to “anticipate the general content of the
message”. Skilled listening requires that listener look ahead in anticipation of what is
coming. Rivers (1981) said that “the understanding of spoken messages depend on

bring any benefit to learners. According to Seferoglu and Uzakgoren (2004), some
listening comprehension problems included the kind of listening materials.
2.2.2.2. Speed of delivery
Vandergrift (2004) and Walker (2014) indicated that “oral passages exist in real
time and should be processed rapidly and when the passage is over, only a mental
representation remains”. Hasan (2000) indicated that “unfamiliar words, difficult
grammatical structures, and the length of the spoken passages are the most important
factors that cause problems for learners’ listening comprehension”.
Fast delivery of language may lead to not understanding because learners may not
receive all messages. Underwood (1989, p.16) stressed “the negative role of fast
delivery and concludes that many English language learners believe that the greatest
difficulty with listening comprehension is that the listener cannot control how quickly a
speaker speaks”. According to Underwood (1989), there were some barriers to
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effective listening comprehension process. He cited that “listeners cannot control the
speed of speech”. The biggest problem with listening comprehension is that listeners
are not able to control how quickly speakers talk.
2.2.2.3. Listening environment
D. Renukadevi (2014, p.61) declared “distraction by the physical setting or the
environment in which listening is to be carried out. This becomes an added challenge
for an average learner and a main confront even for good listeners”. The environment
where listening activities are carried out facilitates comprehension. In a quiet learning
environment, learners focus better. This will affect their understanding. Language
learners in better-equipped schools will develop better understanding skills. In a school
where listening skills are ignored, learners will fall behind.
2.2.2.4. Accents of speakers
Bloomfield (2010) told that “regional accents can impact the spoken message that
is understood by the listeners and familiar accents are easier to understand than