PART ONE : INTRODUCTION
1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY
It can not be denied that English is the international medium in the fields of science,
technology, culture ,education , economy and so on . It is also considered a means to
promote mutual understanding and cooperation between Vietnam and other countries . It is
widely seen as the key language toll in the integrating process in the world . With the rapid
development and expansion of informational technologies , there needs to be a common
language for people of all countries to exchange information with each other and it is English
that is used as a means of international communication. Therefore, there has been an
explosion in the need of teaching and learning English all over the world.
In Vietnam in recent years the number of people who wish to know and master
English has become more and more increasing, especially since Vietnam adopted an open-
door policy , teaching and learning English have been paid much attention to. English has
been part of the general education . It becomes a compulsory subject at high schools in most
towns and cities through out the country. Moreover , each city or province there is a
specializing school for gifted students at several subjects such as maths , literature , physics,
chemistry and foreign languages especially English. Among these schools is the Foreign
Language Specializing School, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University.
However, the teaching and learning process in FLSS seems to still focus too much on
grammar, structures and vocabularies. Our students are very good at doing exercises of
written forms, these forms of exercises mostly concern grammar , reading or writing
comprehension. The consequence is that students have much difficulty in listening.
Listening skill seems to be the most difficult to our students. We all know that in
order to learn a foreign language successfully, students should be helped to develop four
skills : listening , speaking , reading and writing. These four skills are closely interrelated to
one another and they all necessary. Of the four skills, listening is regarded as a prerequisite
to understand what is being said and to pick up the general idea of what is being discussed.
In our professional and personal life there will be situations where we will hear and have to
absorb a lot of details, facts and figures and then extract some points from
1
them. In our private life we may wish to listen to talks in English about subjects we are

form to identify listening problems
2
experienced by the students, after that suggest some techniques to help them better in
learning listening.
5. METHOD OF THE STUDY
In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, quantitative method is used and the
following tasks have to be done:
- doing a survey on the learning listening to English from 200 students of 10
th
and 11
th
form at FLSS ( except for students of 12
th
form as there are no listening lessons for 12
th
form
students )
- collecting data for the analysis
- assessing the difficulties
- evaluating the best techniques that are most suitable
6. DESIGN OF THE SDTUDY
This minor thesis consists of three parts:
Part one, “INTRODUCTION”, presents the rationale, the aims , the method, subject and
design of the study. It expresses the reason why the author decided to choose this study and
the methods for the fulfillment of the study.
Part two, “DEVELOPMENT”, is divided into three chapters :
- Chapter one presents the concepts relevant to the research topic such as different point
of views of listening comprehension skill, the importance, classification of listening,
difficulties in learning listening and three stages of listening session .
- Chapter two deals with analyses on general learning situation at FLSS, learning

about. In fact the learners are not provided enough information about what they are going to
hear before the tape plays and they cope with a wide range of problems while they are
listening and the result is that they can not get any listening experience from the teacher.
1.2.2. Present point of view.
4
For the past few years some present studies on listening comprehension have to come
to another view in which the role of the listeners is thought to be active, but not passive any
more. Listening is really a receptive skill along side reading skill.
According to Littlewood (1981), listening demands active involvement from the hearer. In
order to construct the message that the speaker intends , the hearer must actively contribute
knowledge from both linguistic and nonlinguistic sources. Only by applying the knowledge
of the language , can the hearer divide the continuous stream of sound into meaningful units
and only by comparing these units with the shared knowledge between himself and the
speaker , can the hearer interpret their meaning. The nature of listening comprehension
means that the hearer should be encouraged to engage in an active process of listening for
meanings, using not only the linguistic cues but also has nonlinguistic knowledge.
From the point of view of Broughton (1978). Listening is divided into intensive and
extensive listening. Extensive listening is related to the freer, more general listening to
natural English, not necessarily under the direct guidance of the teacher whereas intensive
listening is much more concerned with just one or two specific points.
Mary Underwood (1989) divides the aural process into 3 stages and Clark (1977)
divides it into 4 stages but generally they have the same idea. There are two levels activities
of the aural process. The two levels of this activity are recognition and selection. The first
level is that the structure and the relationship between syntax and phonology of the language
are recognized. At the first stage , the sounds go into a sensory store called the “ echoic
memory”. “ Echoic memory” is just the short term memory because there is continuous
arrival of new information before the listener has opportunity to deal with it. That is why
there is the following stage which is called “selection”. In this stage, the listener selects what
he finds most interesting or important or comprehensible in the utterance. At this point,
words or groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the

p. 80 , listening is tied to the essential cognitive elements of comprehension and
understanding. In order to take part in oral communication, clearly, the first thing anyone
must have is the ability to absorb the pieces of information from the speaker by listening.
When nobody listens to a speaker or when a listener fails to understand the message,
communication is considered unsuccessful. Moreover , listening is an important way of
6
acquiring the language , a good way of picking up vocabulary and structures. Teaching
listening to spoken language is ,therefore, of primary importance .
“ Teaching the comprehension of spoken language is therefore of primary importance if the
communication aim is to be achieved.” ( Wilga.M.Rivers, Teaching Foreign Language
Skills, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1968, p. 135.)
1.3.1. Mother – tongue listening
It is assumed that people can listen in their mother-tongue with little or no effort.
From very young, we can understand at least the gist of what is heard. This is resulted by a
number of factors including our exposure to the large amount of language and to the great
number of different speakers over the years and our acquired knowledge of the context, the
speakers, the topic and so on. However , there are a lot of problems that sometimes we meet
when listening in our mother tongue. Particular accents can cause problems. For instance, in
Vietnam the accents of the three zones (the North, the Middle and the South) are quite
different. Someone from the North may find it difficult to understand a speaker from the
Middle or the North. Further more , sometimes bad conditions created by bad situations also
hinder our comprehension. For example, it may be hard for listener to follow and understand
what a quiet speaker is conveying when everything around him is noisy. In spite of these
minor problems, we can not deny that we generally listen and comprehend the speech in our
native language with ease.
1.3.2. Listening as the final goal of learning a language
According to Donoghue (1975), listening occupies the basic portion in the context of
the language arts and progress in reading, speaking and writing is directly governed by
listening ability. It is the most important of the four arts since nearly half of the adult
working day and more than half of the child’s classroom activity time is spent in listening.

where they need or want to listen to English being used in real – life for a range of purposes.
However, they feel a big gap between listening activities in the classroom and actual
situations. This is because in listening materials learners listen to dialogues , conversations
which are very grammatical and controlled in many ways. The speakers often speak at
perfectly controlled speed, with perfect voice tone , accent and correct grammar. Whereas, in
real – life conversations learners encounter various people speaking with different accent,
speed and voice tone without paying attention to grammar.
8
According to Adrian (1995), there are two ways which people often listen in real – life. They
are “ casual” listening and “ focused” listening
- “ Casual” listening : In daily life we sometimes listen with no particular purpose and often
without much concentration . This kind of listening is called ‘casual” listening. For example,
a lot of students have the habit of listening to the radio while studying or the television set is
on while we are doing something else. The typical feature is that we do not listen closely and
intentionally, therefore we may not remember much of what we hear or there may be nothing
in our mind.
- “Focused” listening : When we listen for a particular purpose to get the information we
need, it is called “focus” listening. In this case we often listen with much attention, but we do
not listen to everything we hear with equal concentration. For instance, we want to know the
answer to a question, we will ask and expect to hear a relevant response. This leads to our
“listening out” for certain key phrases or words. When we ask a question like: “ Where are
you going to be?”, we then listen out for the expectation of the place. If the answer is, for
example; “I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet, it depends on what job I get, but I expect I
shall end up in Boston.” – then we shall wait for and note the last two words. If, however,
the same answer is the response to the question: “Are you definitely going to Boston?” –
then the last two words of the answer are virtually redundant, and will pay more attention to
the first part. If we listen to the news, it is from a desire to know what is happening in the
world, and we shall expect to hear about certain subjects of current interest in a certain kind
of language. Even when listening to entertainment such as plays, jokes or songs ,we have a
definite purpose (enjoyment), we want to know what is coming next, and we expect it to

the amount of redundancy, noise and colloquialisms, and in its auditory character.
Sometimes particular situations may lack one or more of these characteristics. for example,
when watching television we are not normally expected to respond, when listening to a
lecture we may have to hear uninterrupted speech for a very long time indeed- but it is very
rare that none of them is present at all. We seldom listen to stretches of “ disembodied”
discourse of any length.
1.4.2. Class-room listening
10
According to Rixon (1986) and Hubbard, R and others (1984), there are three kinds
of listening in classroom, they are: intensive listening and extensive listening.
1.4.2.1.Intensive listening
Intensive listening is the careful, focused listening to a short passage for detailed
information or for full comprehension. For example, listening to the announcement ,
listening to the instructions or listening to the weather forecast. There may be much concrete
information for this kind of listening and learners often find it difficult to get full
comprehension in the first listening. This helps learners develop their listening skill or
knowledge of the language in their effort to do exercises or other activities. The passage
should be short so that learners have chances to get to grip with the content, , have several
tries at difficult parts and to be fitted within the time allowed of a lesson. Learners also feel it
easy, interesting and encouraging when they listen to a short passage . Therefore, they often
listen with a great concentration and stretching effort.
1.4.2.2. Extensive listening
Extensive listening is free and general listening to natural language for general
ideas, not for particular details. The listening passages for extensive listening can be long
(stories) or short ( jokes, poems). The language that is used in this type of listening is often
within the students’ current ability so that students find it pleasing and interesting when they
are listening. Students feel satisfied as they can understand the passage well. They are not
asked to do any language work and they can do their listening freely without any pressure.
Moreover the topics are various and entertaining, it ,therefore, motivates students to develop
their listening skill as well as exposes them to valuable extra contact with spoken language.

1.5.3. Inability to concentrate
It is a major problem if learners lack concentration in listening work. This can be
caused by a number of things such as : the bad quality of machines, the poor quality of
listening materials. Other reason for loss of concentration is that the topic is not interesting
or not familiar and learners find it difficult to understand. Sometimes, listeners easily lose
their concentration, as they feel tired of making a great effort to hear word by word. The
break in attention, even very short, can seriously impair the comprehension of the whole
process of listening. Concentration of the listener is considered vitally important in a
successful listening lesson.
12
1.5.4. Problems in hearing the sounds
“ As a young teacher it took me some time to realize that my students actually did not
perceive certain English sounds with any accuracy because these did not exist in their own
language.” (Penny Ur , Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge University Press,
P.11). The fact is that there are a lot of sound that do not exist in Vietnamese such as : the
sound /
θ
/ as in “ think”. A native Vietnamese speaker may very often therefore not notice as
the first that it occurs in English. Even more difficulties is caused when the new sound does
not exist in the native language. For example: / I / (as in “pit” ) and / I: / (as in “peep”) or
“ship” and “sheep” or “fit” and “feet”. Thus learners have difficulty in perceiving this
difference as significant to meaning in English and it takes a considerable amount of practice
before they get used to distinguishing between them. Sometimes learners find consonant-
clusters particularly difficult to cope with. They may get the consonants in the wrong order
(hearing “part” for “past”), or omit one of the sounds (“crips” for “crisps”) , or hear a vowel
that is not in fact pronounced (“littel” for “little”). Another reason why sounds may be
misheard is that the learner is not used to the stress and intonation patterns of English and the
way these influence both the realization of certain phonemes and the meaning of the
utterance. The number of homophones and homonyms in English is small, while the number
of words which can be confused or misunderstood by accurate perception is relatively large.

1.6. THREE STAGES OF THE LISTENING SESSION
There are often three main stages in the teaching of a listening text. They are : pre-
listening stage , while-listening stage and post-listening stage. Each stage has its own aims
and activities.
1.6.1. Pre-listening stage
1.6.1.1. The definition and purposes of pre-listening stage
It is true that learners will find it extremely difficult to do a listening lesson when they
have no idea of what they are going to hear. Even if the sounds or the words which they hear
are familiar, they may still be unable to understand because they lack certain kinds of
knowledge of the topic, setting or the relationship between the speakers. Thus the
listeners’expectation and purposes should be taken into account. These make listeners feel as
14
in real-life listening situation in their native language. Teachers can help their students to
arouse their expectations and see the purpose before a listening lesson. This kind of work is
described as “pre-listening activities”.
“ It would seem a good idea when presenting a listening passage in class to give students
some information about the content, situation and speakers before they actually start
listening.”(Penny Ur, 1992, P.4)
Another idea about pre-listening stage is said as following:
“ Pre-listening work can be done in a variety of ways and often occurs quite naturally when
listening forms part of an integrated skills course. When planning lessons, time must be
allocated for pre-listening activities and these activities should not be rushed.” ( Mary
Underwood, Teaching Listening, Longman 1989, P.31).
1.6.1.2. Types of pre-listening activities
Pre-listening work can be done in various ways and consists of several types of
activities. Therefore, teachers should select the most effective activities for each situation
and teachers need to find the most suitable way to provide considerable pre-listening support
for their students in order to help them to get the purposes that a listening lesson requires.
- The teacher introducing the listening topic, giving background information.
- The students reading something relevant

When developing the skills of listening for comprehension, while-listening activities
must be chosen carefully. They must vary at different levels and in different cases. We do
16
not test whether or not the listener has understood and producing “right/ wrong” answer will
soon discourage the enthusiasm of the learners. To help non-native listeners to improve their
listening, teacher must have listening activities which give practice in prediction, matching
and interpretation.
“Good while-listening activities help learners find their way through the listening text and
build upon the expectations raised by pre-listening activities.” ( Underwwood, Teaching
Listening, 1990, P. 46)
1.6.2.2. Characteristics of while-listening activities
1.6.2.2.1. Interest
While-listening activities should be interesting, so that students feel they want to listen
and carry out the activities. Part of interest can stem from the topic and the content of what is
said and the listening text should be chosen with the interest of the students in mind.
Many learners enjoy material with a “local” flavor rather more than texts setting in some
remote context. For this reason, even quite mundane topics should be given some local
relevance when possible in order to make them more familiar and motivating.
Another kind of interest is generated by activities which are in themselves interesting and
satisfying to do. Most learners enjoy trying to complete puzzle or solve problems and this
fact can be exploited in the design of the activities. It is important, however, that this kind of
activity is not too long and laborious and does not involve doing the same kind of thing over
and over again. For example, for most learners, three small crossword puzzles on different
occasions are far more satisfying to do than one every large one which occupies a lot of time
on just one occasion.
1.6.2.2.2. Levels of difficulty
While-listening activities should be things most people can do. Failure here very
rapidly leads to demotivation, and activities with potential “sticking point” , where students
are likely to get into difficulties, should be used very sparingly in the early stages. In time, of
course, it will be necessary to include activities which present potential “ sticking point”, so