Đang tải... (xem toàn văn)
thạc sỹ, luận văn, ngoại ngữ, tiếng anh, khóa luận, chuyên đề
1 PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale of the study: English has now become the most popular language in the world In Vietnam, it has been more appreciated especially after the country joined WTO Children learn the language even from kindergarten school Recently, the government has decided English to be the only foreign language for post graduation study In accordance with the trend, at Hanoi Open University, Economics Department, English has been taught as a compulsory subject for more than ten years The course books were carefully chosen out of many commercials available on the market They are “Business Basics” for first year students; “Head for Business” for second year ones and ESP course books for the third year However, both teachers and students have found various difficulties with different parts of the course book “Head for Business”, such as Reading, Listening, Speaking… for ex for example, some topics are too strange, language structures in listening and reading comprehensions are too difficult for students to understand, etc… for ex Being a listening teacher, I really find it necessary and motivating to carry out the research on “Difficulties in Teaching Listening Comprehension in course book “Head for Business” to 2nd year students at Economic Department, Hanoi Open University and some solutions” With an insight into the given matter, this thesis is expected to help me work out the most appropriate methods to improve the quality of my teaching when working with students in the listening skill 2 Aims and significance of the study: This study aims at: (1) Investigating difficulties that Listening teachers face with when teaching the Listening Comprehension part of the course book ‘Head for Business’ (2) Suggesting some solutions to improve the efficiency of the Listening comprehension The study is carried out with the hope that it will be theoretically and practically helpful to both teachers and students at Hanoi Open University, Economics Department 3 Research questions: In order to achieve the above aims, the study seeks answers to the two following research questions: 2 (1) What are difficulties that teachers face when they are working with the Listening Comprehension part of the course book ‘Head for Business’ applied to the second year students at Hanoi Open University, Economics Department? (2) What are some suggested solutions to improve the efficiency of the Listening comprehension? 4 Scope of the study: The course book ‘Head for Business’ consists of Vocabulary, Listening, Reading, Language study, Speaking, Language in Use, Writing and Case study/activity Each part has its own advantages and disadvantages for teaching and learning Due to the restraints of time and ability, this thesis only covers the difficulties facing teachers and second year students at Hanoi Open University who are working with the Listening Comprehension section of the course book ‘Head for Business’ 5 Methods of the study The study is carried out in terms of both theory and practice The theoretical background of the study mainly comes from published books and Internet Websites on Listening Comprehension and related matters Besides, the combination of both qualitative and quantitative research method is adopted in this study That is all comments, findings and suggestions given in the thesis are based on: i Analyzing the results of questionnaire obtained from second year students, Economics Department, Open University; ii Analyzing the information gathered from formal interviews with teachers from the teaching staff, Economics Department, Open University 6 Design of the study The study is organized into three parts: introduction, development and conclusion Part I presents the rationale, aims and significance, research questions, scope, methodology and design of the study 3 Part II: consists of three chapters Chapter 1 reviews the theoretical background of Listening Comprehension It also provides a brief overview of the Listening section of the course book ‘Head for Business’ and the current teaching and learning situation at HOU, Economics Department Chapter 2 describes the methodologies employed in the study, research design, research method, research procedure and information about participants involved in the research process Chapter 3 analyses data and discusses the findings of the study Major solutions and recommendations are also presented in this chapter Part III: offers conclusions and limitation of the study Moreover, it states suggestions for further study 4 PART II: DEVELOPMENT This part consists of three chapters The first chapter presents the basic theories related to Listening Comprehension and brief information about the course book “Head for Business” as well as the current teaching and learning situation at HOU, Economics Department The next chapter is about methodology which the author applies to conduct the research In chapter three, data analysis and discussion of the major findings are presented Chapter 1: LITURATURE REVIEW 1.1 The nature of Listening Comprehension (LC): Listening Comprehension plays a very important role in learning English During a lesson, learners spend most of the time listening to teachers, classmates and tape However, most students complain that they do not understand or understand the text very little Therefore, this skill receives special attention of Listening teachers who want to improve the effectiveness of their lessons In order to do this, teachers must understand the nature of listening comprehension There are different controversies on the nature of LC According to Anderson and Lynch (1988), there are two influential views: traditional view and alternative view Traditional view regarded the listeners as a tape – recorder and the listener took in and stored aural message in much the same way as a tape – recorder Anderson and Lynch criticized this view as inappropriate and inadequate This notion is not a tenable one Alternative view considered the learner as an active model builder This kind of listener could combine the new information with their own knowledge to reach full comprehension of what had been heard Both researchers agreed with this view It emphasized the active interpretation and integration on incoming information with Anderson and Lynch Many scholars supported this view O’Malley and Chamot made a conclusion by doing a research on LC in 1989: Listening Comprehension is an active and conscious process in which the listener constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and existing knowledge, which relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement” (O’Malley, J M & Chamot, A U., 1989, p 420) 5 Clark and Clark (1977, pp.43-44) defines LC as follows: Comprehension has two common senses In its narrow sense it denotes the mental processes by which listeners take in the sounds uttered by a speaker and use them to construct an interpretation of what they think the speaker intended to convey… compre comprehension in its broader sense, however, rarely ends here, for listeners normally put the interpretations they have built to work From these definitions, we can conclude that the nature of LC means that the learners should be encouraged to concentrate on an active process of listening for meaning, using not only linguistic cues but also his nonlinguistic knowledge 1.2 Characteristics of spoken English There are many difficulties facing English teachers when they teach listening The difficulties come from different sources such as students’ abilities, teachers’ methodology, teaching facilities… for ex Among them, the most troubling factor is the characteristics of spoken English In the book “Teaching by principle”, Brown summarized eight characteristics of spoken language as suggested by several authors as follows: Clustering: in teaching listening comprehension, teachers must help students to pick out manageable clusters of words These clusters will play important roles in helping students to get the idea of the whole utterance Redundancy: spoken language has a great deal of redundancy such as the rephrasing, repetitions, elaborations and little insertions of “I mean” and “you know” Such redundancy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information It is teachers’ task to help listening learners aware that not every new sentence or phrase will necessary contain new information by looking for the signals of redundancy Reduced forms: beside redundancy, reduced forms like phonological reduction (“Djeetyet? – did you eat yet?); morphological contractions (I’ll – I will); syntactic (elliptical forms like “when will you be back?” – “tomorrow, maybe”); or pragmatics (a child says, “Mum, phone!) These reductions pose significant difficulties, especially for classroom learners who may have initially been exposed to the full forms of the English language Performance variables: Hesitations, false starts, pauses and correction are variables that prevent learners from getting the correct idea Learners have to train themselves to listen for meaning in the midst of those distractions 6 Colloquial language: learners who have been exposed to standard written English and/or “textbook” language sometimes find it surprising and difficult to deal with colloquial language such as idioms, slang, reduced forms… for ex Rate of delivery: virtually every language learner initially thinks that native speakers speak too fast In facts, there are many factors help slow down the speed such as pauses, hesitation… for ex Stress, rhythm and intonation: the prosodic features of the English language are very important for comprehension Because English is a stress-timed language, English speech can be a terror for some learners as mouthfuls of syllables come spilling out between stressed points Also, intonation patterns are very significant not just for interpreting straightforward elements such as questions, statements, and emphasis but for understanding more subtle messages like sarcasm, endearment, insult, solicitation, praise, etc Interaction: interaction plays a large role in listening comprehension Conversation is especially subject to all the rules of interaction: negotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn taking, and topic nomination, maintenance, and termination So, to learn to listen is also to learn to respond and to continue a chain of listening and responding (Dunkel 1991; Richards 1983; Ur 1984; as cited in Brown, 2000, pp 252-254) Obviously, recognizing these factors during listening and taking advantages of them to understand what are spoken are very significant for any listening learners to improve their listening skills Beside characteristics of spoken language, teachers should also help students to aware of the body language the speakers use, such as gestures, eye contact … for ex Those variables are very important in comprehending 1.3 Strategies to teach listening comprehension: Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input Basing on how the listeners process the input, researchers have classified them into two types of strategies: bottom – up processing and top – down processing Bottom up processing is text based The listeners rely on the language in the message such as the combination of sounds, words and grammar to create meaning In other words (Rubin, 1994, p.210), the listeners make use of “his knowledge of words, syntax, and grammar to work 7 on form” This process is closely associated with the listeners’ linguistic knowledge If we apply this processing, we can ask students to: Listen for specific details Recognize cognates Recognize word order patterns However, bottom up processing has its own weak points Understanding a text is an interactive process between the listeners’ previous knowledge and the text Efficient comprehension that associates the textual material with listeners’ brain does not only depend on one’s linguistic knowledge Top – down processing is listener based It is evoked “from a bank of prior knowledge and global expectations” (Morley, 1991, p 87) and other information that the listeners bring to the text These strategies are more concerned with the activation of schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding and with the interpretation of a text According to Buck (2001), LC is a top down processing in the sense that the various types of knowledge involved in understanding language are not applied in any fixed – order They can be used in any order and they are all capable of interacting and influencing each other It is possible to understand the meaning of a word before decoding its sound, because we have many kind of knowledge, including knowledge of the world around us If we apply this processing, we can ask students to: listen for the main idea predict what is happening draw inferences summarize Obviously, top-down processing attaches importance to listeners’ background knowledge about the text But, if the listeners only depend on their background knowledge, they may fail to understand unfamiliar information In this case they can only depend heavily on the linguistic knowledge in LC In order to overcome the disadvantages of both processes, a combination of both strategies has been accepted since the early 1980s named the interactive processing The process means, listeners use both of his background knowledge information, contextual information and linguistic information to make comprehension and interpretation When the content of the material is familiar to the listeners, they will employ the background knowledge to make 8 predictions In contrast, if the listeners are unfamiliar with the content of the listening text and deficient in language proficiency, they can only depend on their linguistic knowledge, especially the lexical and syntactical knowledge to make sense of information Moreover, students can interact with each other before or after listening to get knowledge from each other 1.4 An overview of the course book “Head for Business” “Head for Business” is written by Jon Nauton, a freelance teacher and materials writer It is published by Oxford University Press in 2000 At Hanoi Open University, Economics Department, the course book “Head for Business” is introduced to second year students of two majors: Accounting and Business Management The book contains 15 units but only 12 units are taught to students Each unit consists of Vocabulary, Listening, Reading, Language Study, Speaking, Language in Use, Writing and Case Study/ Activity The total time for this material is 150 periods (= 10 credits) divided equally into two terms of the academic year which cover the first 12 units Each week, students have 6 periods and each one lasts 45 minutes Each unit lasts from 8 to 12 periods, depending on the length and difficulty of its content As listening is one of the four skills which receives much emphasis in the book, teaching the listening comprehension part accounts for one-fourth of the total time provided Other skills are taught in an integrative way during class contact hours 1.4.1 Objective of the course book: “Head for Business” is a tightly – structured comprehensive course for students of Business English It is particularly useful for students with little or no work experience who are intending to work in a business environment on completion of their studies, but it is also suitable for in-work professionals “Head for Business” provides students with the relevant specialist language and professional skills they will need in the work place It does not make assumptions about students’ business knowledge and presents the language relating to business and theory in lively, interesting and accessible contexts 1.4.2 Objective of the listening skill At Hanoi Open University, Economics Department, teaching and learning English have received special attention from the Department managers It is a compulsory subject lasting from Year 1 to Year 3 of the university course The department managers and teachers often sit together to decide the objective of each skill for each year For the second year, the 9 objective of the listening skill is to develop students’ ability in listening for main ideas which is expected to enable them to communicate well in similar situations 1.4.3 A brief description of the listening comprehension section The Listening Comprehension section comes the second in each unit The situations are largely drawn from or based on authentic sources such as real situations in companies, in markets or good examples of successful businessmen The chosen topics are interesting and motivating for those students with little or no exposure to the business world and easy for them to access The content of Listening comprehension section is often presented in the form of interviews, phone dialogues, conversation, lectures, meeting or mono - talk In my opinion, the LC sections are quite long with a lot of new words, phrases and structures This perhaps prevents students from comprehending the text correctly Besides, the speaking speed is quite fast and with a lot of hesitation, pauses, and redundancies… for ex This troubles students in the comprehension process The next feature is about types of exercises Each listening comprehension lesson often begins with some topic – related questions for students to brainstorm and discuss After that students will have to complete some exercises given in the book such as questions answering, True/ False, gaps filling, matching, … for ex In the end, students will have follow-up exercise which is normally pair / group discussion about the topic or related topics 1.5 Current teaching and learning situation at HOU, Economics Department 1.5.1 Teaching staff and teaching methods The English teaching staff in the Department consists of 8 teachers whose age ranges from 26 to 31 and two 44 year-old co-teachers All of the teachers are female and hold B.A degrees from different universities in Vietnam At present, 4 out of 10 teachers have MA degree, and the rest are doing an MA course at College of Foreign Language, Hanoi National University, and Hanoi University of Foreign Studies The academic background of teachers shows that all of them have been exposure to different teaching methods such as Total Physical Response, communicative method or learner-centered approach… for ex However, most teachers usually employ the traditional method of teaching listening Classes are usually conducted in the form of lectures, with most of the time the teachers playing the key role in the classroom, being the main speakers working through the text The teachers explain new words, terms or structure and then guide students to answer 10 warm up questions Then, they play the tape and check answers from students or correct them Discussions are rarely held due to limitation of time 1.5.2 Students and their background: The second year students, aged between 18-22, mostly come from cities/ provinces in the North of Vietnam Most of them are female (79%) The class size is about 30 – 35 students each Most of students had learnt English for at least 3 years at high school before they entered university Some have studies for nine years and only few of them one year However, they are often doing better at Writing and doing Grammar exercises than other skills Even so, they are well aware of their purpose of learning, they become hard working and patient In terms of learning needs, each student sets up his/ her own need Most of them learn English to enhance their specialized knowledge which is required in their future jobs Some have strong pressure to pass exams with high marks However, a problem on the part of students is that, many students do not have the habit of learning independently and tend to depend largely on the given course book and the teachers They become passive in English class This urges teachers to consult students with suitable learning methods at tertiary level 1.5.3 Teaching and learning facilities: As presented in the previous part, the class size for an English lesson is about 30 to 35 each but the class rooms, though being well equipped with a projector, a computer, a cassette player and two loud speakers at the corner of the room, are designed for 100 student classes which are actually too big for an English class of a much smaller size This causes certain problems such as the sounds and the tape quality It is often very noisy and the sounds are unclear, too Another problem is that all students and four of the six teachers who are teaching the course book “head for business” have to use unclear, black and white photocopied books This fact prevents them from exploiting color, photographs and pictures for learning and teaching Because of these matters, teachers sometime have to resort to another Listen task from another book or format the type of exercises ... opinions on the exercises in the LC and requirements for learning /teaching listening Regarding students’ opinion on the exercises in the LC and requirements for learning /teaching listening, the. .. up the right orientation of teaching Listening Therefore, the objective satisfies the students’ demand for learning listening 3.1.1.2 Students’ opinion on the Listening Comprehension of the course. .. aimed at investigating teachers’ perception on the LC of the course book “Head for Business” Questions aims at investigating difficulties the teachers are coping with in teaching Listening Comprehension