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Luận văn tiếng Anh: The Impacts of Listening Strategy Training on 10-Grade Students’ Listening Performance at Mỹ Đức C High School: A Quasi-Experimental Study = Nghiên cứu ngụy thực nghiệm về tác động của việc rèn luyện chiến lược nghe đối với năng lực thực hành nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Mỹ Đức C. M.A Thesis Linguistics : 60 14 01 11
Nhà xuất bản: ĐHNN
Ngày: 2014
Miêu tả: 45 p. + CD-ROM
M.A Thesis English Teaching Methodology -- University of Languages and International studies. Vietnam National University, Hanoi, 2014
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to all those who have supported
me in doing this independent study.
Firstly, I would like to express my greatest appreciation to my supervisor, Dr.
Đỗ Thị Thanh Hà for her enthusiastic encouragement, valuable guidance, wise
suggestions and useful critiques towards the completion of this study.
Secondly, I am extremely grateful to the staff members of the Faculty of Post -
graduate studies for their helpful lectures.
My special thanks are also sent to my lecturers, my friends, my classmates, as
well as my colleagues for their invaluable comments and criticism and also for their
continued interest and encouragements.
Thirdly, I appreciate the assistance and cooperation given to me by teachers and
students at Mỹ Đức C high school. Without their sincere participation, this paper
would not have been possible.
Last but not least, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved people,
my parents, my husband and my children for their love, care, tolerance and
encouragement.
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phiiii
ABSTRACT
In recent years more and more studies have focused on language learning
strategies and their importance, especially learning strategies in listening skill. Sharing
the same concern, this research aims at exploring Mỹ Đức C high school 10-grade
students’ awareness of top-down and bottom-up listening strategies, from which the
researcher would like to study the impacts of listening strategy training on their
listening performance. 70 students in grade 10 and 11 were divided into two groups:
control and experimental with two research instruments – questionnaires and pretest,
posttest. After receiving 6 listening strategy training sessions, participants showed a
statistically significant improvement in listening performance. The experimental group
obtained higher mean scores in post-test in comparison with those of control group.
The study result also indicated that the students in experimental group became more
aware of when and how to apply both strategies, especially bottom-up ones, in doing
listening tasks. This study suggests that explicit listening strategy instruction should be
part of the ESL curriculum.iv
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 1: Teaching plan during implementation period
Table 2: Bottom-up strategy use of the control group
Table 3: Bottom-up strategy use of the experimental group
Table 4: Top-down strategy use of the control group
Table 5: Top-down strategy use of the experimental group
Table 6: Bottom-up strategy use of both groups
Table 7: Top-down strategy use of both groups
Table 8: Descriptive statistics for the pre-test and post-test of control group and
experimental group (Max score = 10)
Table 9: The relationship between experimental and control group’s test scores
Table 10: Pretest and posttest scores of control and experimental groups
Figure 1: The difference in gain values obtained by both groups after experiment
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phiv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Declaration ...................................................................................................................i
Acknowledgement .......................................................................................................ii
Abstract ......................................................................................................................iii
List of tables and figures.............................................................................................iv
Table of content...........................................................................................................v
PART A: INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................1
1. Rationale .................................................................................................................1
2. Research Questions..................................................................................................2
3. Objectives of the study.............................................................................................2
4. Scope of the study....................................................................................................3
5. Methodology ...........................................................................................................3
6. Significance of the study..........................................................................................3
7. Outline of the study .................................................................................................3
PART B: DEVELOPMENT......................................................................................5
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................5
I. Theoretical background ............................................................................................5
1. Definitions of listening .....................................................................................5
2. Learning strategies ............................................................................................6
2.1 .Learning strategies – definition.......................................................................6
2.2. Bottom up learning strategy............................................................................7
2.3. Top-down learning strategies ........................................................................8
3. Strategy training .............................................................................................. 11
4.Listening strategy models................................................................................. 12
II. Related studies: ..................................................................................................... 15
CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY.................................................... 17
2.1. Settings............................................................................................................... 17
2.2. Participants ......................................................................................................... 17
2.3. Research methods ............................................................................................... 17
2.4. Data collection method ....................................................................................... 18vi
2.3.1. Pre-test ....................................................................................................... 19
2.3.2. Post-test...................................................................................................... 19
2.3.3. Questionnaire for students .......................................................................... 19
2.5. Training procedure.............................................................................................. 20
2.6. Data analysis methods......................................................................................... 25
CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION.................... 26
3.1. Research question 1: How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high
school been aware of the listening strategies? ............................................................ 26
3.1.1. Bottom-up strategies ........................................................................................ 26
3.1.2. Top-down strategies......................................................................................... 28
3.1.3. Cross-comparison between the two groups ...................................................... 30
3.2. Research question 2: How did the training of listening strategies have
impact on the students’ listening performance?.......................................................... 32
3.3. Discussions on the study results.......................................................................... 35
3.4. Summary ............................................................................................................ 36
PART C: CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................... 37
1. Review of the study ............................................................................................... 37
2. Implications. ......................................................................................................... 37
3. Limitations of the study ......................................................................................... 40
4. Recommendations for further studies..................................................................... 41
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................ 42
APPENDICES ........................................................................................................... I
1.Questionnaire.............................................................................................................I
2. Pretest..................................................................................................................... II
3. Posttest ..................................................................................................................IX
4. Test results........................................................................................................... XV
5. Lesson plans .................................................................................................... XVIII
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi1
PART A. INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale:
The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has launched Vietnam’s National
Foreign Language 2020 Project (NFL2020) to build national foreign language
capacity. This project aims at establishing a proficiency framework compatible with
the CEFR (The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages),
implementing compulsory English programs beginning in grade 3 with benchmarks
of A1 for primary, A2 for lower secondary, and B1 for upper secondary, college and
university graduates. This means that by the year 2020, students are not only able to
master reading, writing skills but also speaking and listening ones. Among these
skills, listening is generally considered as the most difficult skill by language
learners. According to Nguyễn Văn Phú (2013) on Tuoitreonline, only 2-3% of
secondary teachers throughout Vietnam passed the CEFR exam, especially, the
number of teachers passing the listening skill was even smaller. British Council and
Apollo did a research on learners’ English competence in 20 countries and found out
that Vietnam rank 8th over 20 on reading and writing skills but only 19th over 20 on
listening and speaking skills. Listening skill is also considered a source of anxiety
for learners of English (Graham, 2006: 165). This anxiety become more serious if
the listeners are under the false impression that they must understand every word
they hear resulting in low self-confidence in listening. Many of English learners
attribute their problems in listening to what they perceive as their low listening
ability or difficult listening texts or tasks. Such attributions indicate a sense of
passivity and helplessness in language learners, thus easily resulting in their
becoming demotivated and fed up with listening. It is, therefore, difficult for
learners to have a clear understanding of how to go about listening in a second
language and to find ways to improve their performance. Flowerdew and Miller
(2005) argued that students should be taught how to listen by equipping them with
effective listening strategies (p.69). Chamot and O‟Malley (1989) suggested that the
description of learning strategies can hinge on the distinction between declarative2
and procedural knowledge. Learners can have declarative knowledge about learning
strategies through formal instruction. This will encourage the learners to be aware of
their existing strategies and the choices of strategies they can use with new materials.
Through verbalizing the strategies, “application and repeated applications of the
strategies with various learning materials, the learners can gradually proceduralize
the learning strategies.” (p.420).
Not much research, however, has been carried out on the effects of strategy training
on listening comprehension. Furthermore, the few studies that have been completed
in this area have produced mixed results. Some studies indicated no improvement in
students’ listening comprehension skills after strategy training (Ozeki, 2000) while
others showed slight improvement such as in the research by Flowerdew at al. (2005)
Since this is still a controversial issue, it is necessary to do more research on strategy
training. With a wide range of learning strategies to be chosen, it is difficult to cover
many strategies just in a small thesis experiment. Therefore, this study only focuses
on the training of bottom-up and top-down learning strategies for students during the
listening comprehension tasks, namely, “The impacts of listening strategy training
on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C High School: A quasiexperimemtal study”.
2. Research questions:
The aims are specified in two research questions:
1. How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school been aware of
the listening strategies?
2. How did the training of listening strategies have impacts on the students’
listening performance?
3. Objectives of the study
In order to answer the above questions, the study aims at:
- Investigating the learners’ perceptions regarding bottom-up and topdown listening strategies.
- Experimenting and investigating the effects of listening strategy
training on the 10-grade students’ listening performance at My Duc C high school.
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi3
- Formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for
improving the teaching and learning of the listening skills at My Duc C high
school.
4. Scope of the study
In this study, the investigator intended to train bottom-up and top-down
strategies for 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school. The training of these
strategies was experimented over a period of 6 weeks and applied in the three
stages of a listening lesson: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. The
sample population is 70 students from two classes: 10A3 and 10A9, who are at the
same age and have the same total years of learning English – 9 years with the
same curriculum.
5. Methodology
To fulfill the above objectives, quantitative method has been chosen for the
study. Comments, remarks, comparison, suggestions and conclusions are based on
factual research. Data for analysis in this study are gained through the following
sources:
- Pre-test and post-test.
- Survey questionnaire.
6. Significance of the study
It is hoped that this study will be a good source of reference for both
teachers and learners of English. It is conducted to provide an insight into the
current perception of the students’ listening strategies and offer a period of
strategy training in order to improve the students’ listening performance.
Therefore, it is believed that this study will raise the teachers’ awareness of the
advantages of strategy training so that they can adjust their teaching properly in
order to develop students’ listening skill.
7. Outline of the study:
This minor thesis consists of 3 parts:
Part A: Introduction, presents the rationale, research questions, objectives,
scope, methodology, significance and design of the study.4
Part B: Development, which is divided into 3 chapters:
- Chapter 1: “Literature review”, sets up theoretical background that is
relevant to the purpose of the study.
- Chapter 2: “Research methodology”, shows the setting, the subjects,
the methods, the way to collect data, the training procedure of listening strategies,
Data analysis methods.
- Chapter 3: “Data analysis, findings and discussion”. This chapter is a
detailed presentation of the major findings of the study achieved through the
questionnaires and the experiment on the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high
school. The implications of the study in which suggestions for improving listening
skill to the students at My Duc C high school are proposed at the end of this
chapter.
Part C: Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the
limitations and provides some suggestions for further study.
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi5
PART B. DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
I. Theoretical background
1. Definitions of listening:
Traditionally, listening is considered a passive language skill alongside the
reading skill. It means that learners are almost passive in practising listening
activities in the classroom. However, research has shown that listening is not a
passive process, and it requires full participation and undivided attention of the
learners. Vandergrift (1999) rejected the treatment of listening comprehension as a
passive skill and defines listening comprehension as an active process in which
learners must distinguish the differences between sounds, vocabulary, grammar
intonation, stress and context in order to interpret and respond to messages
immediately (p. 168).
According to Nunan, for language learners, listening is the basic skill that
helps learners to communicate effectively. He also stated that students spend over
50% of their time listening (p.9).
Underwood (1989:1) believed that “listening is the activity of paying
attention and trying to get meaning for something we hear”; which is a complex
process that enables the brain to construct meaning from the sounds heard and
understand spoken language.
To listen successfully, the listener must be responsible for decoding the
message and supplying information that enriches what is said in a number of ways
based on his/her knowledge of pragmatics, context, semantics or inference
(Geranpayeh and Taylor, 2013:100). Or as O’Malley & Chamot (1989:3) said the
listener must construct meaning from passages by relating what they hear to
existing knowledge.
Buck (2001:5) indicated that listening is an active process of constructing
meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound in which
“number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic knowledge
and non-linguistic knowledge”. In another word, he concluded “comprehension is6
affected by a wide range of variables, and that potentially characteristic of the
speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message”.
In short, to promote listening comprehension, teaching and learning practice
should, therefore, place more emphasis on learners by providing them with
environments or opportunities to confront with texts in their own ways and
construct their own meanings. They should be trained how to listen effectively by
teaching them some effective listening strategies.
2. Learning strategies:
2.1. Learning strategies – definition:
There are a lot of definitions proposed for learning strategies, with much
disagreement of precisely what learning strategies are or, indeed, if they really exist. In
the Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics (1999), Oxford offers this
definition: Learning strategies for second or foreign language learners are “specific
actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that students use to improve their own progress
in developing skills in a second or foreign language. These strategies can facilitate the
internalization, storage, retrieval, or use of the new language.” (p. 518)
Many researchers have attempted more simplified definitions such as the
following “Strategies are the conscious actions that learners take to improve their
language learning” (Anderson, 2005: 757). In their study, Weinstein and Mayer (1986)
defined learning strategies (LS) as "behaviors and thoughts that a learner engages in
during learning" which are "intended to influence the learner's encoding process" (p.
315). Oxford (1990:9) uses the term learning strategies to mention techniques,
behaviors, actions, thought process, problem solving, or study skills taken by the
learner to make learning easier, faster, more self-directed, more effective, and more
transferable to a new situation. These early definitions from the educational literature
reflect the roots of learning strategies in cognitive science, with its essential
assumptions that human beings process information and that learning involves such
information processing. Clearly, learning strategies are involved in all learning,
regardless of the content and context.
Learner strategies have learning facilitation as a goal and are intentional
on the part of the learner. The goal of strategy use is to “affect the learner’s
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi7
motivational or affective state, or the way in which the learner selects, acquires,
organizes, or integrates new knowledge” (Weinstein and Mayer 1986:315). In the
process of listening comprehension, there are three different types of strategies: (a)
meta-cognitive strategies, (b) cognitive strategies, and (c) socioaffective
strategies(O´Malley and Chamot, 1990:43-51). Meta-cognitive strategies, involve
planning, monitoring and evaluating comprehension. It refers to situations such as
paying attention to the main points of a lecture, for example. Cognitive strategies are
used to manipulate information, which include repetition, organising new language,
summarising meaning, guessing meaning from context, using imagery for
memorisation. All of these strategies involve deliberate manipulation of language to
improve learning. Socio- affective strategies are related to the ways that L2 learners
decide to interact with others including cooperation and self-encouragement. The
present study will focus on the cognitive strategies - bottom–up and top-down during
the listening comprehension task as Nunan (1998) suggests, we should design
activities that teach both bottom-up and top-down processing skills and teach students
strategies to control their own listening.
2.2. Bottom up learning strategies:
According to Jack and Willy (2002), “the bottom-up processing model assumes
that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion,
from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts”. According to this
view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked
together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and utterances
are form together to form complete meaningful texts. (p. 239).
Bottom-up processes describe the ways in which the linguistic competence of a
listener works to 'build' toward comprehension of a message. According to Peterson
(2001), these are the lower level processes that work to construct meaning from
recognition of sounds and words, which, when identified, are fit into larger phrasal
units and then matched with related ideas stored in long term memory. He suggested
three successive stages of Bottom-Up processing: perceptual processing, parsing, and
utilization (p. 88). Brown (2007) states that Bottom-Up processing "focuses on sounds,
in their awareness of listening strategies in both the pretest and posttest although more
students could comprehend the passage by putting the individual word meanings they
could heard together and more students could analyse the questions before listening in
the posttest. However, the students tended to use more bottom-up strategies than topdown ones. This might be explained that the students under the treatment were at preintermediate level and these students of this level tend to apply more bottom-up
strategies than the top-down ones. Therefore, it could be concluded that the students
under the strategy training became more aware of listening strategies and could apply
these strategies to listen effectively.
In summary, although both control and experimental groups made certain
improvement in their listening proficiency after the treatment, it is obvious that the
students in the experimental group, in which explicit listening strategies was taught,
progressed more considerably than those in the control group. Once more, listening
strategy training was proved to be effective to the students’ listening skill.
3.4. Summary
This chapter has presented the results of the study based on the data collected
during the program. The analysis and findings including the comparison of listening
performance in the pre-test and post-test between the control group and the
experimental one, the improvement made by the group under the experiment, their
opinions on how they process their listening with listening strategies were also
presented. On the whole, students in the experimental groups were found to make
better progress than those of the control group in the post-test. The students of the
experimental group appeared to have become more aware of the listening strategies in
their listening. In the next part, the results will be taken into consideration for further
implications.
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Nhà xuất bản: ĐHNN
Ngày: 2014
Miêu tả: 45 p. + CD-ROM
M.A Thesis English Teaching Methodology -- University of Languages and International studies. Vietnam National University, Hanoi, 2014
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to all those who have supported
me in doing this independent study.
Firstly, I would like to express my greatest appreciation to my supervisor, Dr.
Đỗ Thị Thanh Hà for her enthusiastic encouragement, valuable guidance, wise
suggestions and useful critiques towards the completion of this study.
Secondly, I am extremely grateful to the staff members of the Faculty of Post -
graduate studies for their helpful lectures.
My special thanks are also sent to my lecturers, my friends, my classmates, as
well as my colleagues for their invaluable comments and criticism and also for their
continued interest and encouragements.
Thirdly, I appreciate the assistance and cooperation given to me by teachers and
students at Mỹ Đức C high school. Without their sincere participation, this paper
would not have been possible.
Last but not least, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved people,
my parents, my husband and my children for their love, care, tolerance and
encouragement.
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phiiii
ABSTRACT
In recent years more and more studies have focused on language learning
strategies and their importance, especially learning strategies in listening skill. Sharing
the same concern, this research aims at exploring Mỹ Đức C high school 10-grade
students’ awareness of top-down and bottom-up listening strategies, from which the
researcher would like to study the impacts of listening strategy training on their
listening performance. 70 students in grade 10 and 11 were divided into two groups:
control and experimental with two research instruments – questionnaires and pretest,
posttest. After receiving 6 listening strategy training sessions, participants showed a
statistically significant improvement in listening performance. The experimental group
obtained higher mean scores in post-test in comparison with those of control group.
The study result also indicated that the students in experimental group became more
aware of when and how to apply both strategies, especially bottom-up ones, in doing
listening tasks. This study suggests that explicit listening strategy instruction should be
part of the ESL curriculum.iv
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 1: Teaching plan during implementation period
Table 2: Bottom-up strategy use of the control group
Table 3: Bottom-up strategy use of the experimental group
Table 4: Top-down strategy use of the control group
Table 5: Top-down strategy use of the experimental group
Table 6: Bottom-up strategy use of both groups
Table 7: Top-down strategy use of both groups
Table 8: Descriptive statistics for the pre-test and post-test of control group and
experimental group (Max score = 10)
Table 9: The relationship between experimental and control group’s test scores
Table 10: Pretest and posttest scores of control and experimental groups
Figure 1: The difference in gain values obtained by both groups after experiment
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phiv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Declaration ...................................................................................................................i
Acknowledgement .......................................................................................................ii
Abstract ......................................................................................................................iii
List of tables and figures.............................................................................................iv
Table of content...........................................................................................................v
PART A: INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................1
1. Rationale .................................................................................................................1
2. Research Questions..................................................................................................2
3. Objectives of the study.............................................................................................2
4. Scope of the study....................................................................................................3
5. Methodology ...........................................................................................................3
6. Significance of the study..........................................................................................3
7. Outline of the study .................................................................................................3
PART B: DEVELOPMENT......................................................................................5
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................5
I. Theoretical background ............................................................................................5
1. Definitions of listening .....................................................................................5
2. Learning strategies ............................................................................................6
2.1 .Learning strategies – definition.......................................................................6
2.2. Bottom up learning strategy............................................................................7
2.3. Top-down learning strategies ........................................................................8
3. Strategy training .............................................................................................. 11
4.Listening strategy models................................................................................. 12
II. Related studies: ..................................................................................................... 15
CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY.................................................... 17
2.1. Settings............................................................................................................... 17
2.2. Participants ......................................................................................................... 17
2.3. Research methods ............................................................................................... 17
2.4. Data collection method ....................................................................................... 18vi
2.3.1. Pre-test ....................................................................................................... 19
2.3.2. Post-test...................................................................................................... 19
2.3.3. Questionnaire for students .......................................................................... 19
2.5. Training procedure.............................................................................................. 20
2.6. Data analysis methods......................................................................................... 25
CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION.................... 26
3.1. Research question 1: How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high
school been aware of the listening strategies? ............................................................ 26
3.1.1. Bottom-up strategies ........................................................................................ 26
3.1.2. Top-down strategies......................................................................................... 28
3.1.3. Cross-comparison between the two groups ...................................................... 30
3.2. Research question 2: How did the training of listening strategies have
impact on the students’ listening performance?.......................................................... 32
3.3. Discussions on the study results.......................................................................... 35
3.4. Summary ............................................................................................................ 36
PART C: CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................... 37
1. Review of the study ............................................................................................... 37
2. Implications. ......................................................................................................... 37
3. Limitations of the study ......................................................................................... 40
4. Recommendations for further studies..................................................................... 41
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................ 42
APPENDICES ........................................................................................................... I
1.Questionnaire.............................................................................................................I
2. Pretest..................................................................................................................... II
3. Posttest ..................................................................................................................IX
4. Test results........................................................................................................... XV
5. Lesson plans .................................................................................................... XVIII
Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi Ket-noi.com kho tai lieu mien phi1
PART A. INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale:
The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has launched Vietnam’s National
Foreign Language 2020 Project (NFL2020) to build national foreign language
capacity. This project aims at establishing a proficiency framework compatible with
the CEFR (The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages),
implementing compulsory English programs beginning in grade 3 with benchmarks
of A1 for primary, A2 for lower secondary, and B1 for upper secondary, college and
university graduates. This means that by the year 2020, students are not only able to
master reading, writing skills but also speaking and listening ones. Among these
skills, listening is generally considered as the most difficult skill by language
learners. According to Nguyễn Văn Phú (2013) on Tuoitreonline, only 2-3% of
secondary teachers throughout Vietnam passed the CEFR exam, especially, the
number of teachers passing the listening skill was even smaller. British Council and
Apollo did a research on learners’ English competence in 20 countries and found out
that Vietnam rank 8th over 20 on reading and writing skills but only 19th over 20 on
listening and speaking skills. Listening skill is also considered a source of anxiety
for learners of English (Graham, 2006: 165). This anxiety become more serious if
the listeners are under the false impression that they must understand every word
they hear resulting in low self-confidence in listening. Many of English learners
attribute their problems in listening to what they perceive as their low listening
ability or difficult listening texts or tasks. Such attributions indicate a sense of
passivity and helplessness in language learners, thus easily resulting in their
becoming demotivated and fed up with listening. It is, therefore, difficult for
learners to have a clear understanding of how to go about listening in a second
language and to find ways to improve their performance. Flowerdew and Miller
(2005) argued that students should be taught how to listen by equipping them with
effective listening strategies (p.69). Chamot and O‟Malley (1989) suggested that the
description of learning strategies can hinge on the distinction between declarative2
and procedural knowledge. Learners can have declarative knowledge about learning
strategies through formal instruction. This will encourage the learners to be aware of
their existing strategies and the choices of strategies they can use with new materials.
Through verbalizing the strategies, “application and repeated applications of the
strategies with various learning materials, the learners can gradually proceduralize
the learning strategies.” (p.420).
Not much research, however, has been carried out on the effects of strategy training
on listening comprehension. Furthermore, the few studies that have been completed
in this area have produced mixed results. Some studies indicated no improvement in
students’ listening comprehension skills after strategy training (Ozeki, 2000) while
others showed slight improvement such as in the research by Flowerdew at al. (2005)
Since this is still a controversial issue, it is necessary to do more research on strategy
training. With a wide range of learning strategies to be chosen, it is difficult to cover
many strategies just in a small thesis experiment. Therefore, this study only focuses
on the training of bottom-up and top-down learning strategies for students during the
listening comprehension tasks, namely, “The impacts of listening strategy training
on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C High School: A quasiexperimemtal study”.
2. Research questions:
The aims are specified in two research questions:
1. How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school been aware of
the listening strategies?
2. How did the training of listening strategies have impacts on the students’
listening performance?
3. Objectives of the study
In order to answer the above questions, the study aims at:
- Investigating the learners’ perceptions regarding bottom-up and topdown listening strategies.
- Experimenting and investigating the effects of listening strategy
training on the 10-grade students’ listening performance at My Duc C high school.
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- Formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for
improving the teaching and learning of the listening skills at My Duc C high
school.
4. Scope of the study
In this study, the investigator intended to train bottom-up and top-down
strategies for 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school. The training of these
strategies was experimented over a period of 6 weeks and applied in the three
stages of a listening lesson: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. The
sample population is 70 students from two classes: 10A3 and 10A9, who are at the
same age and have the same total years of learning English – 9 years with the
same curriculum.
5. Methodology
To fulfill the above objectives, quantitative method has been chosen for the
study. Comments, remarks, comparison, suggestions and conclusions are based on
factual research. Data for analysis in this study are gained through the following
sources:
- Pre-test and post-test.
- Survey questionnaire.
6. Significance of the study
It is hoped that this study will be a good source of reference for both
teachers and learners of English. It is conducted to provide an insight into the
current perception of the students’ listening strategies and offer a period of
strategy training in order to improve the students’ listening performance.
Therefore, it is believed that this study will raise the teachers’ awareness of the
advantages of strategy training so that they can adjust their teaching properly in
order to develop students’ listening skill.
7. Outline of the study:
This minor thesis consists of 3 parts:
Part A: Introduction, presents the rationale, research questions, objectives,
scope, methodology, significance and design of the study.4
Part B: Development, which is divided into 3 chapters:
- Chapter 1: “Literature review”, sets up theoretical background that is
relevant to the purpose of the study.
- Chapter 2: “Research methodology”, shows the setting, the subjects,
the methods, the way to collect data, the training procedure of listening strategies,
Data analysis methods.
- Chapter 3: “Data analysis, findings and discussion”. This chapter is a
detailed presentation of the major findings of the study achieved through the
questionnaires and the experiment on the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high
school. The implications of the study in which suggestions for improving listening
skill to the students at My Duc C high school are proposed at the end of this
chapter.
Part C: Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the
limitations and provides some suggestions for further study.
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PART B. DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
I. Theoretical background
1. Definitions of listening:
Traditionally, listening is considered a passive language skill alongside the
reading skill. It means that learners are almost passive in practising listening
activities in the classroom. However, research has shown that listening is not a
passive process, and it requires full participation and undivided attention of the
learners. Vandergrift (1999) rejected the treatment of listening comprehension as a
passive skill and defines listening comprehension as an active process in which
learners must distinguish the differences between sounds, vocabulary, grammar
intonation, stress and context in order to interpret and respond to messages
immediately (p. 168).
According to Nunan, for language learners, listening is the basic skill that
helps learners to communicate effectively. He also stated that students spend over
50% of their time listening (p.9).
Underwood (1989:1) believed that “listening is the activity of paying
attention and trying to get meaning for something we hear”; which is a complex
process that enables the brain to construct meaning from the sounds heard and
understand spoken language.
To listen successfully, the listener must be responsible for decoding the
message and supplying information that enriches what is said in a number of ways
based on his/her knowledge of pragmatics, context, semantics or inference
(Geranpayeh and Taylor, 2013:100). Or as O’Malley & Chamot (1989:3) said the
listener must construct meaning from passages by relating what they hear to
existing knowledge.
Buck (2001:5) indicated that listening is an active process of constructing
meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound in which
“number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic knowledge
and non-linguistic knowledge”. In another word, he concluded “comprehension is6
affected by a wide range of variables, and that potentially characteristic of the
speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message”.
In short, to promote listening comprehension, teaching and learning practice
should, therefore, place more emphasis on learners by providing them with
environments or opportunities to confront with texts in their own ways and
construct their own meanings. They should be trained how to listen effectively by
teaching them some effective listening strategies.
2. Learning strategies:
2.1. Learning strategies – definition:
There are a lot of definitions proposed for learning strategies, with much
disagreement of precisely what learning strategies are or, indeed, if they really exist. In
the Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics (1999), Oxford offers this
definition: Learning strategies for second or foreign language learners are “specific
actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that students use to improve their own progress
in developing skills in a second or foreign language. These strategies can facilitate the
internalization, storage, retrieval, or use of the new language.” (p. 518)
Many researchers have attempted more simplified definitions such as the
following “Strategies are the conscious actions that learners take to improve their
language learning” (Anderson, 2005: 757). In their study, Weinstein and Mayer (1986)
defined learning strategies (LS) as "behaviors and thoughts that a learner engages in
during learning" which are "intended to influence the learner's encoding process" (p.
315). Oxford (1990:9) uses the term learning strategies to mention techniques,
behaviors, actions, thought process, problem solving, or study skills taken by the
learner to make learning easier, faster, more self-directed, more effective, and more
transferable to a new situation. These early definitions from the educational literature
reflect the roots of learning strategies in cognitive science, with its essential
assumptions that human beings process information and that learning involves such
information processing. Clearly, learning strategies are involved in all learning,
regardless of the content and context.
Learner strategies have learning facilitation as a goal and are intentional
on the part of the learner. The goal of strategy use is to “affect the learner’s
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motivational or affective state, or the way in which the learner selects, acquires,
organizes, or integrates new knowledge” (Weinstein and Mayer 1986:315). In the
process of listening comprehension, there are three different types of strategies: (a)
meta-cognitive strategies, (b) cognitive strategies, and (c) socioaffective
strategies(O´Malley and Chamot, 1990:43-51). Meta-cognitive strategies, involve
planning, monitoring and evaluating comprehension. It refers to situations such as
paying attention to the main points of a lecture, for example. Cognitive strategies are
used to manipulate information, which include repetition, organising new language,
summarising meaning, guessing meaning from context, using imagery for
memorisation. All of these strategies involve deliberate manipulation of language to
improve learning. Socio- affective strategies are related to the ways that L2 learners
decide to interact with others including cooperation and self-encouragement. The
present study will focus on the cognitive strategies - bottom–up and top-down during
the listening comprehension task as Nunan (1998) suggests, we should design
activities that teach both bottom-up and top-down processing skills and teach students
strategies to control their own listening.
2.2. Bottom up learning strategies:
According to Jack and Willy (2002), “the bottom-up processing model assumes
that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion,
from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts”. According to this
view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked
together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and utterances
are form together to form complete meaningful texts. (p. 239).
Bottom-up processes describe the ways in which the linguistic competence of a
listener works to 'build' toward comprehension of a message. According to Peterson
(2001), these are the lower level processes that work to construct meaning from
recognition of sounds and words, which, when identified, are fit into larger phrasal
units and then matched with related ideas stored in long term memory. He suggested
three successive stages of Bottom-Up processing: perceptual processing, parsing, and
utilization (p. 88). Brown (2007) states that Bottom-Up processing "focuses on sounds,
in their awareness of listening strategies in both the pretest and posttest although more
students could comprehend the passage by putting the individual word meanings they
could heard together and more students could analyse the questions before listening in
the posttest. However, the students tended to use more bottom-up strategies than topdown ones. This might be explained that the students under the treatment were at preintermediate level and these students of this level tend to apply more bottom-up
strategies than the top-down ones. Therefore, it could be concluded that the students
under the strategy training became more aware of listening strategies and could apply
these strategies to listen effectively.
In summary, although both control and experimental groups made certain
improvement in their listening proficiency after the treatment, it is obvious that the
students in the experimental group, in which explicit listening strategies was taught,
progressed more considerably than those in the control group. Once more, listening
strategy training was proved to be effective to the students’ listening skill.
3.4. Summary
This chapter has presented the results of the study based on the data collected
during the program. The analysis and findings including the comparison of listening
performance in the pre-test and post-test between the control group and the
experimental one, the improvement made by the group under the experiment, their
opinions on how they process their listening with listening strategies were also
presented. On the whole, students in the experimental groups were found to make
better progress than those of the control group in the post-test. The students of the
experimental group appeared to have become more aware of the listening strategies in
their listening. In the next part, the results will be taken into consideration for further
implications.
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