VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ********************* LÊ VĂN BẰNG “DESIGNING SUPPLEMENTARY ACTIVITIES TO ENHANCE LISTENING SKILL FOR 11th GRADERS AT LÊ LAI HIGH SCHOOL, THANH HÓA PROVINCE” “Thiết kế hoạt động bổ trợ nhằm nâng cao kỹ nghe học sinh lớp 11 trường THPT Lê Lai, Thanh Hóa” M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY CODE: 60140111 Hanoi, 2014 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ********************* LÊ VĂN BẰNG “DESIGNING SUPPLEMENTARY ACTIVITIES TO ENHANCE LISTENING SKILL FOR 11th GRADERS AT LÊ LAI HIGH SCHOOL, THANH HÓA PROVINCE” “Thiết kế hoạt động bổ trợ nhằm nâng cao kỹ nghe học sinh lớp 11 trường THPT Lê Lai, Thanh Hóa” M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY CODE: 60140111 SUPERVISOR: LÂM QUANG ĐÔNG, Assoc PhD Hanoi, 2014 CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT I hereby certify that the thesis entitled “Designing supplementary activities to enhance listening skill for 11th graders at Lê Lai High School, Thanh Hoá” is the result of my own research for the Degree of Master of Arts at University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi and that this thesis has not been submitted for any degree at any other university or tertiary institution Signature Lê Văn Bằng i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to express my sincere thankfulness to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr Lâm Quang Đông, for his thorough reading, critical comments, invaluable suggestions and precious corrections on my writing Furthermore, I am grateful to his close guidance and generous help, which have been great encouragement to me during the process of writing and completion of the thesis I also would like to express my sincere thanks to all the lecturers and the staff of the Faculty of Post-Graduate Studies at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi for their interesting lectures and suggestions for the topic of my study I truly wish to thank all my colleagues and my students at Lê Lai High School for their assistance and co-operation in completing the questionnaires and interviews Last but not least, my thanks go to my dear family and friends who are always supporting me with their consideration and encouragement ii ABSTRACT It is a common knowledge that listening is an important language skill However, in the reality, the teaching and learning English listening skill in Lê Lai high school, Thanh Hóa province is somehow troublesome This study is to design supplementary activities to enhance the students‟ listening skill after investigating problems of teaching English listening skills by two survey questionnaires for 40 eleventh-form students and the observation sheet for teachers of English English tests and teaching diaries are also carried out to elicit hidden reasons behind participants‟ answers in the questionnaires and to help the researcher draw a vivid picture of a listening lesson as well From the results inferred in the analysis, the researcher designed supplementary activities to make teaching and learning English listening skills more effective iii LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS Tables: Table 1: Results of the pre-test Table 2: Frequency of listening tasks in listening lessons Table 3: Students‟ feeling when doing listening tasks in English 11 Table 4: Students‟ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks Table 5: Students‟ preferences for listening tasks Table 6: Students‟ opinions about the way their teachers treat listening tasks Table 7: Types of listening task in English 11 Table 8: Students‟ involvement in the tasks Table 9: Students‟ involvement in the supplementary activities Charts: Chart 1: The frequency of using language games in warm-up activities Chart 2: The effectiveness of language games in warm-up activities in listening lessons iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS iv TABLE OF CONTENTS iv PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale Purposes and significance of the study Research questions, methods and instruments Structure of the thesis PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Teaching Listening 1.1.1 Definition of Listening 1.1.2 Three stages of the listening lesson 1.2 Material adaptation 1.2.1 Definition of material adaptation 1.2.2 Reasons for adapting materials 1.2.3 Principles for adapting materials 1.2.4 Techniques for adapting materials 10 1.3 Relevant studies on the same topic 11 CHAPTER TWO: THE STUDY 13 2.1 Research questions re-stated 13 2.2 Participants 13 v 2.2.1 The teacher/ researcher 14 2.2.2 The non-participant observer 14 2.3 Data collection instruments 15 2.4 Summary 16 CHAPTER THREE: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 17 3.1 Findings from the pre-listening test and the survey questionnaire with 11th graders 17 3.1.1 Results from pre-listening test 17 3.1.2.3 Students‟ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11 18 3.1.2.4 Students‟ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks to their listening competence 19 3.1.2.5 Students‟ preferences for listening tasks 19 3.1.2.6 Students‟ opinions about the way their teachers treat listening tasks 20 3.1.2.7 The fact of using language games in warm-up activities 21 3.1.2.8 Effectiveness of language games in warm-up activities in listening lessons 22 3.2 Findings from the discussion with English teachers 22 3.3 Findings from the textbook analysis 24 3.4 Findings from classroom observation and teaching diaries 26 3.4.1 Classroom observation 26 3.4.2 Teaching diaries 29 3.5 Summary 30 CHAPTER FOUR: SUGGESTED SUPPLEMENTARY ACTIVITIES 31 Conclusions 36 Limitations of the study 36 Suggestions for further studies 37 REFERENCES 38 vi APPENDICES I APPENDIX I APPENDIX II APPENDIX VI APPENDIX VII APPENDIX IX APPENDIX XI APPENDIX XII APPENDIX XIII APPENDIX XIV APPENDIX 10 XV APPENDIX 11 XVI APPENDIX 12 XVII APPENDIX 13 XVIII vii PART I: INTRODUCTION Rationale For some recent years, English has played more and more important part in Vietnam; therefore, it has been taught in Vietnamese secondary schools as a compulsory subject So far, there have been remarkable changes in the way of teaching and learning English However, English teaching in general and teaching listening in particular still is far from satisfactory How to motivate students to listen is really necessary, and is a big question to most teachers in Vietnam now On the other hand, each student has different language learning capacity Especially, in my high school in a mountainous area, students have quite low levels of English So it is important for me to find effective ways to increase my students‟ interest in listening and hence improve their listening skill In reading relevant literature, I can see that students find listening extremely difficult and boring due to different reasons For instance, the listening tasks may be monotonous, repetitive and beyond their language level, or there could be too many new words in the listening records; the pronunciation of several words in the record may be unfamiliar to students who are used to pronouncing them wrongly; or the speakers may speak too fast for them to hear, as they are used to hear each word separately in the Vietnamese language rather than focusing merely on stressed syllables and essential key words in English, etc Supplementary activities before listening, while listening and after listening, especially language games, are highly needed in order to ease the listening tasks for them while they may add fun to the listening lesson and hence help them improve their listening skill There may have been a good number of interesting materials for use by English teachers in their listening lessons, but which of them can be suitable to the particular students at my school remains a question to answer, since each group of students may have their own problems and capacity, as discussed earlier ... TO ENHANCE LISTENING SKILL FOR 11th GRADERS AT LÊ LAI HIGH SCHOOL, THANH HÓA PROVINCE” ? ?Thiết kế hoạt động bổ trợ nhằm nâng cao kỹ nghe học sinh lớp 11 trường THPT Lê Lai, Thanh Hóa” M.A MINOR... Hanoi, 2014 CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT I hereby certify that the thesis entitled ? ?Designing supplementary activities to enhance listening skill for 11th graders at Lê Lai High School, Thanh Hoá? ?? is the... the task of designing supplementary activities to enhance listening skill for the 11th graders at Lê Lai High School, Thanh Hóa Purposes and significance of the study The study aims at the following: