1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale of the study If you are a passionate teacher coming to class eagerly and enthusiastically and then are struck by sayings like these: “ Teacher, we hate listening lessons Why don’t we change it for another thing?” ; “ Teacher, we are so afraid of listening, please don’t it” or “ Teacher, I can’t catch anything from the tape I completely have no head for listening.” you will feel like falling short in your career However, this is a common problem among non-major students of English and is somehow a puzzle to many teachers of English Like many young teachers, I used to show this confusion to some experienced teachers and was advised that students would get used to the subject themselves gradually, and the only thing I could is let them have time to it However, in my opinion, the first impression is very important so if students learn listening with a fear at the beginning, this fear will bring nothing to their present listening skill as Lewis M and Hill J (1992: 20) argue: “ If you feel pressurized, afraid, or tense, even if you perform, at that moment, you will probably forget” Not stop at that point, the feeling of fear also have greater effect on the student’s later study as it can “ destroy students’ interest for the subject and spoil their creativeness” ( Sesnan, B 2001: 122) On the other hand, Lightbrown, P.M & Spada, N (1999) show that students never learn everything they are taught, they only learn what they are interested in And they even prove that students are unlikely to be very successful at learning anything unless they enjoy the process From that point of view, I think that this puzzle can only be solved by finding an answer to the question: “ How to help students change from the feeling of fear to the one of interest when they are doing listening?” However, interest is something very unstable and unpredictable because it depends on many factors such as: the content of the subject, the necessary of it, the method of the teacher, or even the weather of the day That explains the reason why it takes teachers a great effort and trial to maintain the students’ interest in the lesson and avoid the boredom also Barry Sesnan (2001) when describing a good teacher as the one who does not only use a good teaching method, but also takes into consideration of how to teach students to learn effectively by themselves and help them to involve themselves with interest in the learning process, suggests some main ways to hold students’ interest such as: audio-visual aids including objects, flash cards, pictures, overhead projector transparency, film, video, and language activities like games, songs, story-telling, projects Of all the items, songs seem to be the most available and easiest to exploit to the author She, therefore, chose them as the means to an experimental research on how to interest students in listening lessons That is the reason why this paper is made a study of using English songs as a kind of supplementary material in teaching listening skill to first year non-major students’ of English with a hope that they will have a more positive attitude to this very communicative skill 1.2 Hypothesis This study was designed to test the following hypothesis: Songs can be used to enhance students’ motivation in listening to English as well as to improve their bottom-up listening skills such as word recognition, awareness of word linking, awareness of word stress, enhancing their attention while listening as well as comprehension skills 1.3 Aims of the study Parallel with the above reasons leading to the research are some following aims: - To investigate the effectiveness of using English songs in teaching listening skill to non-major students - To discuss some suggestions of how to use English songs in teaching listening skill in classroom 1.4 Scope of the study In this study, the author intended to deal with the question of how to motivate students through English songs not taking care of other kinds of activities such as poems, stories or games They included country songs and love songs that have soft music with quite easy words and simple content These songs were experimented for the period of one term (15 weeks) They were used at the end of the lesson not at the beginning as warmers Due to the limited time, the author could not implement the research for a longer term and study on a larger population The chosen population contained 60 students from two classes at the same level The aimed teaching purpose was practicing the listening skills for students through English songs At last, the study did not mean a collection of English songs but studying the efficiency of using songs as a supplementary teaching material and also discussing an appropriate method of exploiting them in classroom effectively 1.5 Methodology The major method which was used in this study is qualitative All comments, remarks assumptions and conclusion of the study were based on the data and analysis Data collections for analysis in the study were gained through the following resources: - Survey questionnaires - Interviews - Tests for students The questionnaire was designed for the students However, sometimes interviews were also applied if the author find that the answers of respondents were not clear enough 1.6 Design of the study The paper was designed with three chapters as follows: Chapter was the introduction in which I would like to present the rationale of choosing the topic, the aim of the study, the scope of the study and the methods to be applied., Chapter was the development which composes of three main parts • Part set up some theoretical backgrounds that are relevant to the purpose of the study • Part investigated the situation of using English songs at Phuong Dong university and find out the students’ point of view about using songs in classes • Part dealt with some personal recommendations and suggestions The chapter summarized the major findings discussed in chapter II Some suggestions for further study were also included in this chapter CHAPTER 2: DEVELOPMENT PART 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 The place of listening in foreign language course According to Howatt and Dakin, listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying This involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning Defined with those characteristics, listening must surely come first in communication Actually, we start listening as a baby, and we an awful lot of it when we begin to speak Not stop at that point, listening is also the most practiced one in the second language study because it is the principal way to acquire the language as Adrian Doff (1996) states that “ Listening to spoken English is an important way of picking up the structures and vocabulary” To prove this point, he shows a situation in which learners are living in a country where English is the first language He assures that these learners have such plenty of exposure to the language- they hear it all the time, that they acquire it much more easily than the others Moreover, listening is also a condition for developing speaking skill Still Adrian Doff (1996) emphasizes that “ We cannot develop speaking skill unless we develop listening skill” In deed, a good speaker needs to be a good listener first because to have a successful conversation, students must understand what is said to them first and they can only the understanding through listening In addition to that, listening is also crucially as important as a kind of “spirit medicine” as “ students experience a degree of powerlessness when they cannot understand the language.” (Paul Bress: 2001: 42) In other word, the more learners understand the more powerful they feel and the more confidence they have in their ability to communicate This feeling of confidence is very important as it helps foster the learners’ motivation and cherish their interest in the lesson, therefore leads to the later stable progress In short, the importance of listening in language learning is undeniable It is the most communicative and practised skill and needs to be developed as much as possible 1.2 Listening Process A variety of insights into listening process have been developed in the past fifteen years, and there are two points on which most researchers and teachers continue to agree on: the first one is that listening is an active rather than a passive process and the second is that listening is both a top-down and bottom-up process We can see that listening is active because there is often a great difference between what is said and what the listener “hears” It is obvious that the listener is constructing his or own meaning, which sometimes corresponds to the speaker’s meaning and sometimes does not This happens both in our native language and the second one This state is described as an “interactive” process, in which both the activity of the listener’s mind interacts with the input to form an understanding Researchers also tend to agree that the listening process contains both bottom-up and topdown elements Bottom-up process refers to the listening process that starts with discriminating sounds, identifying words and comprehending grammatical structures and build eventually to the comprehension of meaning This is a somewhat mechanistic or “datadriven” (Brown-1994) view of processing Whereas, top-down process may be described as holistic or “conceptually driven” (Brown) in that they focus on the overall meaning of a passage, and the application of schemata Schemata are mental frameworks based on past experiences whish can be applied to help us interpret the current situation Inferring ideas, guessing word’s meaning, and identifying topics are all examples of top-down processing As such, bottom-up process sees language comprehension as a process of passing through a number of consecutive sequences or levels and the output of each sequence becomes the input for the next higher one That is the reason why Buck (2001) considers it one-way street On the contrary, in top-down process the various types of knowledge involve in understanding language are not applied in any fixed order They can be used in any order or even simultaneously, and they are all capable of interacting and influencing each other According to this process, it is quite possible to understand the meaning of a word before decoding its sound, because we have many different types of knowledge, including knowledge of the world around us In most situations we know what normally happens and so we have expectations about what we will hear These maybe either precise or vague but while we are listening, we almost always have some hypotheses about what is likely to come next In such cases it is not necessary to utilize all the information available to us- we can just take enough to confirm or reject our hypotheses To take a well-know example, if we hear the following uncompleted sentence “she was so angry, she picked up the gun, aimed and… ” We know what is going to happen and we probably need very little acoustic information to understand the final word, be it ‘fired’, ‘shot’ or whatever As we listen, we will expect a word such as fired and we will possibly process only enough of the sound to confirm our expectation, or we may not even bother to listen to the last word at all Our background knowledge about guns and what angry people with them helps us to determine what the word is It, therefore, can be seen that the two processes are both important for learners in understanding the language since both of them can offer keys to determining the meaning of spoken discourse So it is advisable to the teacher to help their students understand the importance of those listening processes, from which they would utilize suitable listening strategies for comprehension 1.2 Songs as a motivator for students to listen The importance of motivation in second language teaching and learning has been discussed for many years; teachers and researchers believe that motivation plays an important part in the process of acquiring an additional language because motivated students are usually those who participate actively in class, express interest in the subject-matter, and study a great deal But since motivation is something very personal, it is not easy to develop However, “If we can make our classrooms places where students enjoy coming because the atmosphere is supportive and non-threatening, we can make a positive contribution to students’ motivation to learn” (Lightbrown, P.M & Spada, N.,1999) For this sake, songs seem to very well Songs have a great tendency to attract the attention of students that other forms of the mass media lack According to Subramaniyan A Nambiar (1985), “ Even the person who is totally tone deaf may at times considers himself a good singer and a person who cannot understand the words of a song can still appreciate the song itself.” Songs, especially current pop songs exert a great influence over the young generation from which our students come And because songs deal with the whole realm of human emotions and experiences- from love, hate, joy, to loneliness and sadness, they really appeal to the young people Secondly, students are often willing to learn to sing a song in a foreign language even if they not fully understand or partially understand the meaning of the words This allows them a chance to relax from the pressure of the study By that way, songs blow a new fresh air into the serious and tedious routine of the class, they introduce an atmosphere of gaiety, fun and informality in the classroom which is far more conductive environment for language learning than a strictly regimented atmosphere where students are pounced upon for the least bit of deviation from grammatical norms or for making any ‘unnecessary’ noise Lo and Li (1998) states that songs provide a break from classroom routine, and that learning English through songs develops a non-threatening classroom atmosphere in which the four language skills can be enhanced Moreover, while many students find it difficult and stressful to learn a new language, songs can help wash away these feelings Each song has its own lyrics and as the lyrics comes out from the composer’s heart with tempo and rhyme, it is easy to penetrate into other’s people’s hearts That is the reason why when students mumble the words of the songs along the lyrics, they gradually get used to the language and find it easier to learn According to McDonald (1984), the use of the songs in English classroom allows the students to “hide behind the music” and then “avoids the heat of an early spotlight landing on a timid students.” By that way, “It also wraps the students’ perceptions of how difficult it is to use the new language The result is a loss of certain inhibitions, a new respect for one’s own voice and the learning of whatever vocabulary, grammar, …the song has to offer” (McDonald, 1984:35) In addition to that, when songs are played, the group spirit is really fostered, which is a great help to students in their practice of the language skill And because the students can carry the song beyond classroom doors and sing for their family and friends This, in turn, tends to reinforce the students’ interest in learning English In short, speaking like Finocchiaro (1973:174) by using songs “language learning can be combined with recreation or aesthetic appreciation for a change of pace in the classroom to enhance motivation” However, the writer of this paper would like to quote Spencer’ words as a way to conclude this point, that is “Songs provide preliminary materials to the listening exercises and also give the students a clear and concrete reason for listening” (Spencer-1994) 1.4 Aspects of listening comprehension that can be improved through songs What is listening comprehension? According to Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics: Listening comprehension is the process of understanding speech in a second or foreign language The study of listening comprehension processes in second or foreign language learning focuses on the role of individual linguistic units (e.g phonemes, words, grammatical structures) as well as the role of the listener’s expectations, the situation and context, background knowledge and the topic (Jack C Richards, John Platt, Heidi Platt, 2000) 10 According to Harmer, listening is special because listening comprehension is a process in which our mind has to complete instantly the process of receiving, processing, and interacting with the relevant linguistic knowledge This requires the listener to have a high sensibility and discerning ability in pronunciation and its connection with word meanings Especially when listening to a foreign language, it is very hard for the listener to have an immediate response to the information and catch the meaning if he/she does not possess enough linguistic and other relevant knowledge of the language That is the reason why freshmen feel anxious and confused in listening lessons However hard they try, they make little progress They also worry about how to avoid making any mistakes in order to save face They get very nervous, which slows down their normal thinking speed and distract their concentration However, songs are proved to be an effective supporter in improving listening comprehension among students without giving stress According to Stefan Chiarantano(2004), using songs is “a fun way to improve listening comprehension.” To prove this point, he divides listening for comprehension into three stages as follows: Listening and making no response (following a written text, informal teacher talk) Listening and making short responses (obeying instructions - physical movement, building models, picture dictation etc.), true- false exercises, noting specific information, etc Listening and making longer response (repetition and dictation, paraphrasing, answering questions, answering comprehension questions on texts, predictions, filling gaps, summarizing, etc) And he confirms that songs can be designed to serve all of these stages of listening comprehension Nambiaar, S.A (1985) seems to share this point with Stefan Chiarantano as he states that “using songs is one effective way to enhance students’ listening comprehension” To make it 25 the mode of seven, it takes a reverse place now As so, it can be drawn out that class A seems to overtake class B on the way to improve their listening skill -Correlation: Class A N 30 Mean 6.3667 Std Deviation 1.62912 Class B 30 5.3000 1.23596 The comparison of the mean reconfirms that class A left class B behind in the progress of listening skill Comparing with the mean of the pre-test, we can see that while class B made a little bit progress( from 5.1667 to 5.300), class A took a big pace with a raise from 5.3667 to 6.3667 This large difference in the mean scores between pre-test and post-test shows very clearly that after a term of using songs in teaching listening skill, the students’ skill is improved significantly However, there is hardly any change in the standard deviation of the two classes The standard deviation of 1.62912 and 1.23596 shows that though there is a shift in the mark range, the range of ability among students of both classes is still narrow In short, the better result of class A can be considered the means to lead to the conclusion that to some extent English songs bring some efficiency to the listening skill though it is not very much 2.9 Discussions of the findings 2.9.1 Achievements 26 From the above analysis of the data we can see statistic significance between two means In other words, the experimental group scored better than the control group This rejects the null hypothesis that “songs not enhance students’ motivation in listening to English , nor improve their bottom-up listening skills such as word recognition, awareness of word linking, awareness of word stress, enhancing their attention while listening as well as comprehension skills” And the hypothesis that “songs can be used to enhance students’ motivation in listening to English as well as to improve their bottom-up listening skills such as word recognition, awareness of word linking, awareness of word stress, enhancing their attention while listening as well as comprehension skills.” is accepted Below are some explanations for this statement Firstly, a large number of participants in classes like listening to English songs People, when doing what they like , always it whole-heartedly This fact makes songs a magic motivator for students to learn the skill and then results in their positive activities in the lesson Actually, most of them try to get involved in the songs, for example they try to take note the content of the songs or write down the key words This is the decisive factor to the success of using songs in the class Secondly, all the respondents have realized the importance of songs in teaching and learning listening skill They all approved that the lessons would be more interesting with the use of songs In this case, songs play a role of an inspirer to appeal learners to unpeel and then master the language In other words, students are highly motivated through the songs Thirdly , it is undeniable that songs bring about a lot of benefits It is easy to find in the analysis that English songs are not only used for the relaxing purpose but also for the teaching target Usually songs are considered a wonderful outlet for students when they feel tired and bored with the heavy and tedious schedule of lessons and lessons everyday With a song used at the beginning or the end of the lesson, an exciting learning environment is recreated, students, therefore, regain their interest in learning and then the listening skill better In addition to that, songs offer an effective means of improving listening skills including: word 27 recognition, awareness of word stress, enhancing their attention while listening as well as comprehension skills Last but not least, together with the blooming of our economy, everything seems to be so available that we can get them easily The tapes and records of music are not of exception Moreover, the Internet which is very common now always offer a quick and enormous information about the author of the song, the root of it and even the words of the song So there are no reasons for not making advantage of such a useful and potential source of teaching material 2.9.2.Challenges Everything has two sides: the good and the bad points It is the case with English songs Through data analysis above, it is possible to realize that songs yield a lot of good points to learners However, some difficulties go along with them The first one comes from the song itself The song with its music is sometimes so appealing to some poor students that they become passive and follow the song for fun only That is the reason why they cannot tackle the tasks and are left behind by the rest of the class Moreover, the assimilation happening so commonly in the song, makes it difficult to follow and causes a doubt of standard pronunciation among students These issues are really challenging to the teacher if he/she wants to exploit this wonderful source as a type of teaching material It requires a lot of experience, patience, and belief from the teacher Secondly, the mixed level of the class is also a big problem While most of the students are at elementary level, some of them are very excellent The reason for this contradictory state lies in the differences in schedules among high schools In some high schools especially the urban ones, English is considered one of the most important subjects whereas in others it is never taught These students, therefore, are the very beginners of English when they enter university 28 It is understandable that many of them feel shocked when they know that English is not only the compulsory subject but also taught in CLT method ( communicative language teaching) which they have never known before That is the reason why it is very difficult for the teacher to design suitable tasks for such a class as the challenging tasks that are suitable for better students are too complicated for the poor students while the simple ones for the weak are too boring for the bright ones Thirdly, it is said that songs take much time Actually, they are spiritual products so the words of the songs are sometimes too emotional and flattery So it takes a lot of time to prepare and explain to students Choosing a suitable song depending in the limited time is a big concern Last but not least, it is very crucial to select the appropriate song for our students Doing this work, it is necessary to take many factors into consideration The first requirement is that the song should satisfy students’ preference to some extent Moreover, it should be suitable to students’ language proficiency in order to create a safety environment Besides, the songs should be suitable in length in order to prevent students from the feeling of overwhelmed 29 CHAPTER 3: CONCLUSION 3.1 OBJECTIVES REVISITED After a period of five months, from February 2006 to July 2006, with great help from the supervisor, great encouragement from the colleagues and friends, this paper in the end, has completed Through this paper, the writer would like to make a strong statement that listening as the most communicative language skill, plays a very important role in the process of teaching and learning English It, therefore, needs to be taught and studied carefully And with an experimental research on using English songs as a type of supplementary materials in teaching listening skill, she wants to find out a new application of the songs in teaching English, and then offer some suggestions on how to use songs in order to enlighten the work of teaching listening skill 3.2 SUMMARY OF THE RESULT Data collected by such instruments as the questionnaire, the tests, and the informal interview revealed valuable findings which were analyzed and discussed above However, in the last words, the result can be reconfirmed and summarized as follows: Firstly, it is asserted through the study that songs can help much in motivating students in listening skill Almost all of the participant learners were activated in listening lessons They were more active, industrious, and more involved in every activity designed in the lesson The atmosphere of the class was ,therefore, full of fun and joy The students themselves agreed that they felt like listening much more than before And surprisingly, songs allowed maximum participation by every student in listening lessons, which had never happened before 30 Secondly, songs also prove themselves as an effective approach to enhance students’ some bottom-up listening skills such as word recognition, awareness of word linking, awareness of word stress, enhancing their attention while listening as well as comprehension skills Actually, students no longer listened to the tape passively but they began applying these subskills in handling the listening tasks For example, the strategy of recognizing the key words and word stress was really well applied in dealing with the close exercises such as filling in the blanks 3.3 IMPLICATION IN USING ENGLISH SONGS IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILL 3.3.1 How to use songs as supplementary materials? As said above the main purpose for using songs to supplement a lesson is to raise students’ interest in listening skill, they, therefore, are used mainly as warm-up activities or reproduction activities To use the songs effectively to get the best teaching target, there are some rules that teachers should bear in mind as follows: 1) Choosing the listening materials carefully Generally speaking, popular English songs with positive contents suit our purpose At the same time They should be typical and enjoyable as well Teachers had better choose those that will enlighten student's mind cultivate their sensibility and improve their standard of appreciation Especially, the language level of the song we choose will affect the type of listening tasks later Below are some suggestions: Difficult text, difficult to hear Rearrange the jumbled lines Difficult text, easy to hear Limited listening practice (cloze exercises: gap filling) Easy text, difficult to hear Predictive gap filling with listening to confirm Easy text, easy to hear Listening comprehension questions, partial or whole dictation 31 2) Varying the teaching method according to different time and occasion It's quite important that teachers relate teaching of listening to the real life They should catch and best use different opportunities to let the students listen to different songs For example, before the arrival of Mother's Day or Father's Day, the teacher can first play a song about parents, such as STRAW HAT, FATHER AND SON etc, then organize some discussion about parental love, the generation gap and so on; before Christmas comes, he can play and teach some Christmas songs as in CHRISTMAS CAROL, WHITE CHRISTMAS, SILENT NOGHT HOLY NIGHT etc After that, let the students talk about some topics connected with Christmas They usually can know more western cultures by comparing Christmas with Vietnamese Spring Festival; they can also contrast Christmas with other European festivals In Vietnam, students often have some chances to join in all kinds of parties and entertainment activities held in their class or school, such as the New Year party, the graduation party or other celebrations It will be very rewarding if the English teacher can play and teach some English songs, which are relevant to these activities and help the students put them into performance after class Songs like HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU, AULD LONG SYNE, YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, HAND IN HAND, RED RIVER VALLEY etc are all very suitable to these occasions Wouldn't the students become more devoted in learning English when they can display the charm of English successfully to their audience? Wouldn't the teacher feel relived when he sees his students can apply what they have learnt to their life? Changing teaching materials according to different learners Teachers should choose different levels of songs according to the learners' level For example, children's songs and some easy clear folk songs are suitable for middle school students; college students between the first and second year may listen songs of intermediate levels The subjects can focus on friendship, love, peace and nature and so on For the third and fourth year undergraduates, they can listen to various songs with higher levels 3.3.2 Tasks designed from songs 32 A, Musical dictation Songs can be a very good substitute for prose passages in dictation exercises However, songs for this task must have quite easy language and sung at a low speed such as ‘ whatever will be will be’ To carry out this task, teacher can omit some passage of the song word and then ask students to listen to the tape and write down Or he/she can ask the students to listen to the song sentence by sentence and then write down the word (see appendix – task 1) B, The Cloze or gap fill This is very popular task as it helps improve students’ listening comprehension and recall the language items also In this task, copies of the song sheets are given to students with blanks in between The word in the blank here may be a preposition, an article, a verb, an adjective Before listening to the song, students are asked to read the word once and predict what is in the blank Then when they listen to the song they have to fill in the blank with the correct word (see appendix 1-task 2) C, Correcting Mistakes In this case, the song word is photocopied with some wrong words in each line; students have to listen to the song, then find and correct the mistakes This task is really good for students to practise the homophones and homonyms in English ( see appendix 1- task 3) D, Vocabulary Learning Active vocabulary learning is an activity that is seldom paid any attention in most language classrooms It is here that songs can be of great help Numerous words that deal with a particular theme or emotion appear in a song To this task, teacher writes the name of the song on board and then ask students to write down any words they think can appear in the song, then they are required to listen to the song and identify these words and finally they can 33 form a cluster of words The song ‘love is blue’ is a very good example for this task Listen to this song, students can make a list of words of colours like this: red blue grey green colours black E, Choose the correct answer Some songs can have word like a story, which are really good to build the multiple choice task In this case, students are required to listen to the song and choose the correct answer to a question After that they are asked to base on these answer to retell the story in the song ( See appendix 1- task 4) F, Grammatical Review In some songs particular grammatical features occur with great frequency Such songs, therefore, can be used as a form of reinforcement for the particular structural item that had been taught in the previous lessons To carry out this activity, teacher ask students to listen to a song then identity the grammatical item appearing in the song (See appendix 1-task 5) G, Jumble Words In this task, copies of the song sheets are given to students with jumbled lines Students have to listen to the song and then rearrange these lines to make the song meaningful ( See appendix – Task 6) 34 H Piecing- together This approach asks the teacher to separate the lyrics according to sentences and phrases first, then write them down on each single piece of paper, at last let the students piece them together as a complete song when listening to it I suggest the teachers play the song in the following order: paragraph -sentence paragraph Do not stop until each group can basically it as required After that, teachers can ask some comprehension questions and give some time for discussion This approach demands teacher to prepare adequately before class 3.3.3 Problems to be faced Despite many benefits the use of songs in English language classroom also involves some attendant problems Below are some of problems relating to using songs Firstly, in some university, the headmaster has appointed himself as censor and decreed that no songs with the word of “love” or “make love” ought to be played, sung, heard, recorded, mentioned or used in any way whatsoever in the classroom To him, these words are taboo words or bad words for his students In the light of this situation, the teacher of English should cooperate with the headmaster at first and then make him convinced gradually Perhaps the teacher should tell him that it is better for students to learn about love in the classroom than in the streets or in the gutter The second problem is noise The neighbouring classroom may be disturbed and the teachers in these classrooms far from being colleagues may soon become enemies One way to overcome this problem is to use the language laboratory ( if there is one) or to use the library ( if it is available) Or else the teacher may have to ask the students to huddle around the tape recorder so that the volume need not be turned on too high 35 The last problem is the availability of the songs Some teachers may not have a selection of songs on tape or they may not know how to use the songs during English lessons The simple solution is to visit the website of international lyrics server (http://www.music.e.net/the_international-lyrics_server.htm) This site contains the lyrics for over 130,000 titles The songs can be accessed by titles or by artists And they can be played with music vividly or written in words This server is worthy of a bookmark as it is easy to use and includes a wide variety of songs Or another way is to record the weekly Vietnamese radio program : “MTV most wanted” It is a 15-minutes where the current pop-hits are presented 3.4 SUGGESTED FURTHER STUDY As presented above, the findings of this study have definite curricular implications Because music is a viable vehicle for second language acquisition to the same extent as other nonmusical means, then songs can no longer be regarded as recreational devices, having little instructional value In her opinion, the research does think that English songs can offer more valuable applications if we more study on them However, within the limitation of this paper, the study can only assure the role of songs as a motivator in teaching and learning listening skill and stops at proving the ability of songs in improving some bottom-up listening skills bottom-up listening skills such as word recognition, awareness of word linking, awareness of word stress, enhancing their attention while listening as well as comprehension skills It has not gone deeply into how and in what way songs can improve each of these subskills Nor does it mention the application of songs in top-down listening skills The researcher, therefore, really hopes that this paper can be a starting point evoking in the readers some idea for further study and new applications 36 References Bang, N & Ngoc, N.B (2001), course in TEFL- theory and practice, National University Press, Hanoi Baker, T & Westrup, H.(2000), The English language teacher’s handbook-how to teach large class with few resources., Continuum, New York Brown, G et al (1996), Performance and competence in second language acquisition, Cambridge university press, Cambridge Buck, G (2001), Accessing listening , Cambridge university press, Cambridge Cullen, B (1999), Song Dictation The Internet TESL Journal http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Cullen-SongDictation.html Canh, L.V.(2004), Understanding foreign language methodology, National university press, Hanoi Chiarantano, S (2004) Why I use pop music in my junior high school EFL classes? The Internet TESL Journal http://iteslj.org/Techniques/SongDictation.html Doff, A.(1988), Teach English- A training course for teachers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Eken, D K (1996), Ideas for using pop songs in the English language classroom English Teaching Forum, volume 34, p46-47 10 Finocchiaro, M (1973) English language skills, Simon and Schuster, New York 11 Grennough, M (1994), Sing it! Learn English through songs , Mc Graw-Hill, Mexico 12 Hoa, N.T.N (2002), How to teach a song Teacher’s edition Issue September 2002,p 42-43 13 Howatt, A and J Dakin (1974), Language laboratory materials, ed J P B Allen, S P B Allen, and S P Corder 14 Lewis, M & Hill, J.( 1990), Practical Techniques For Language Teaching, Commercial Colour Press, London 15 Lightbrown, P.M & Spada, N (1999), How languages are learned, Oxford University press, Oxford 37 16 Lo, R & Li, H.C (1998) Songs enhance learner involvement English Teaching Forum, volume 36,pp 8-11 17 Lynch, L.M.(1993), Using Popular Songs to Improve Language Listening Comprehension Skills, The Internet TESL Journal http://iteslj.org/Techniques/LynchSongs.html 18 Maykut and Morehouse(1994), Beginning qualitative research: a philosophic and practical guide, Palmer Press, London 19 Monreal, M E (1982) How I use songs English Teaching Forum, volume 20, pp 4445 20 McDonald, D.(1984), Singing can break the conversation barrier, English teaching Forum, volume 22, pp40-41 21 Nunan, D & Miller, L (1995), New ways in teaching Listening, English to speakers of other language institute, Virginia 22 Nambiar, S.A (1985), The use of pop songs in language learning, Guidelines- a periodical for classroom language teachers, Volume number 1, June 1985, pp79-84 23 Bress, P (2001), Listening skills- What are they and how you teach them?, MET Jounal, Volume 15 number 2006, pp42-44 24 Santos, G.D (1995), Using titles and lyrics of songs as warm-ups English Teaching Forum, 33, pp29-30 25 Saricoban, A & Metin, E (October 2000), Songs, Verse and Games for Teaching Grammar The Internet TESL Journal http://iteslj.org/Techniques/SaricobanSongs.html 26 Sesnan, B (1997), How to teach English, Oxford University Press, Oxford 27 Tedyrak, M (2000), Using music in the classroom English Teaching Forum, 38, pp30-32 28 Ur, P (1996), A course in language teaching-practice and theory.: Cambridge University press, Cambridge 29 Ur, P (1996) Teaching Listening comprehension Cambridge university press, Cambridge 38 39 ... interest students in listening lessons That is the reason why this paper is made a study of using English songs as a kind of supplementary material in teaching listening skill to first year non- major. .. OF USING SONGS AS A SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL IN TEACHING LISTENING FOR THE FIRST- YEAR NON- MAJOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH AT PHUONG DONG UNIVERSITY 2.1 Hypothesis: As presented above, this study was... such as filling in the blanks 3.3 IMPLICATION IN USING ENGLISH SONGS IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILL 3.3.1 How to use songs as supplementary materials? As said above the main purpose for using songs