Improving listening skills for third-Year students at Hong Duc University through portfolio

Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. Rationale In English teaching, the main objective is to prepare students for communication in the real world and it is very important for a learner to efficiently equip himself with four skills, together with relatively sufficient background knowledge. However, obtaining a good command of English communication is not easy for all students; it needs a great effort from them which emphasizes much practice, especially self-study. Of the four language skills-Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing-that all language learners are supposed to acquire. Listening is believed to be the most challenging due to the complex and subtle nature of listening comprehension in a second or foreign language. Teaching listening is not an easy job at all when we, the English teachers, face the fact that learners have met many difficulties in comprehending the information due to unfamiliarity with the pronunciation of the target language and a lack of listening skills. To overcome those difficulties, it is necessary for students to keep on practice overtime, and one of the ways to make students practice is by using portfolios to learn at home. This means of study is rather effective for students to improve their listening skills as portfolios are systematic, purposeful, and meaningful collections of students' works in one or more subject areas and they reflect the actual day-to-day learning activities of students. For the third year English major students at Hong Duc University, they can not avoid common problems related to listening. When dealing with a listening lesson, they often experience a lack of background knowledge and cultural understanding, poor ability to understand spoken language, irrelevant teaching materials etc. Besides, two periods (45 minutes each period) of listening every week is not enough for students to be good listeners if they do not spend much more time than that on their self-study. Clearly, portfolios which reflect what has been done at home are an important element in language teaching and learning, which on one hand helps the teachers to assess what their students have done at home and on the other hand keeps students continuously learning. Hence, they need a lot of modifications for the sake of perfection. To enhance students’ listening skill development, it’s the teacher’s job to create more opportunities for the students to learn from their own strengths and weaknesses as well as their peers' weaknesses and strengths. It is, therefore, necessary to bring them opportunities to overcome those difficulties and among the suggested solutions, listening portfolios are of great help. Good portfolios with carefully prepared contents are a useful means to help students keep on their self-studies effectively. It is obvious that portfolios can improve students’ listening skills as well as encourage them to work on their own, which is the useful factor for their success. It is undeniable that exploiting portfolios effectively is challenging for teachers because they have to take many things into consideration, such as the objectives, the instructional skills, the criteria, the students’ needs, etc when giving out the contents of a portfolio. However, for the benefit one can gain from them, it is worth doing so. For the above reasons, we decided to choose the thesis entitled “Improving listening skills for third-year students at Hong Duc University through portfolio". The study emphasizes the importance of portfolios to the students' self- study in general and the listening skills in particular. Pedagogically, the findings of the study are believed to be useful for teachers to be aware of the essential role of portfolios to the students' self- study in the listening skills. Moreover, we would like to investigate the effectiveness of the listening portfolios currently used and from that finding out the strong and weak points of them in order to establish the most relevant one in terms of the contents. From the results obtained, the suggestions for portfolio contents, which are based on the theoretical background and the present use of them at the Foreign Language Department, HDU, are thoughtfully given, with the hope that they would help students to enhance their listening skills as well as the teachers to improve their teaching methodologies in relation with the process of renovation for teaching at the Foreign Language Department, HDU currently. 1.2. Aims of the study Our research focuses specifically on the investigation of portfolio contents used by the teachers at Division of Language skills Development and give some suggestions for applying the portfolios to enhance the students' self - learning for improvements in their listening skills. The specific aims of the research are as follows: To investigate the teachers' and students' attitudes towards the application of listening portfolios in self-learning. To find out the most common portfolio contents exploited by the teachers at Division of Language skills Development To examine the students’ preferences for the portfolios. To give some suggestions for using the portfolios to enhance students' self-listening learning. 1.3. Research questions As a basis for my investigation, the following research questions were formulated: 1. What are the teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards the application of listening portfolios in self-learning? 2. What are the teachers’ and students’ opinions of the current portfolio contents? 3. How can portfolio contents be improved to help students develop their self-listening study? 1.4. Methods of the study To seek answers to the research questions, the data are analyzed from material collection and were collected from survey questionnaires. First of all, for the theoretical basis, a lot of reference materials on listening skills and portfolios have been collected, analyzed and synthesized carefully with the due consideration for the teachers’ and students’ teaching and learning situations. Secondly, the questionnaires are carried out with the teachers and the students to collect the most reliable data for the study. 1.5. Design of the study The thesis is divided into five chapters: Chapter I: Introduction; Chapter II: Literature review; Chapter III: The study; Chapter IV: Major findings and Discussions and Chapter V: Conclusion. Chapter I: Introduction This chapter provides an overview of the study such as the rationale, the scope, the aims, research questions, significance and methods of the study. Chapter II: Literature review This chapter conceptualizes the nature of the listening comprehension, the importance of listening and the importance of students' self-access listening, definitions of the portfolio, portfolio based learning, the content of portfolio, principles in using portfolio, portfolio assessment, stages of portfolio implementation and the importance of portfolio in learning listening. Chapter III: The study The chapter presents the methodology used in the study including the setting, sample, instrumentation, data collection and data analysis. It also points out the detailed results of the surveys and covers a comprehensive analysis on the data collected from the questionnaires. Chapter IV: Major findings and Discussions The chapter shows some major findings, suggestions for using the portfolios. Chapter V: Conclusion The chapter revisits the main points discussed in the paper and some limitations of the study and future research will be presented. Chapter 2: Literature review 2.1. Introduction This chapter discusses a variety of issues in the theories of the listening skills and portfolios. Three main features will be presented: theoretical background of listening skills, theoretical background of portfolio and its importance in learning the listening skills. 2.2. Theoretical background of listening skills 2.2.1. What is Listening Comprehension? 2.2.1.1. Definitions Listening is believed to be a key and essential area of the development in a native language and in a second or foreign language as well; hence, there have been varieties of definitions of listening by Bulletin (1952); Bentley & Bacon (1996); Grey Buck (2001); Scarcella and Oxford (1992) which hold different views towards the concept. According to Bulletin (1952), listening is one of the fundamental language skills. It's a medium through which children, young people and adults gain a large portion of their education-their information, their understanding of the world and of human affairs, their ideals, sense of values, and their appreciation. In the day of mass communication (much of it oral), "it is of vital importance that our pupils be taught to listen effectively and critically" he says. Bentley & Bacon (1996) state that listening, an important part of the second language learning process has also been defined as an active process during which the listener constructs meaning from oral input. Grey Buck (2001: 31) shares the idea that " listening comprehension is an active process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sounds" in which " number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge". In another expression, Grey Buck (2001: 31) points out "comprehension is affected by a wide range of variables, and that potentially any characteristic of the speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message." Scarcely and Oxford (1992) also point out that comprehension of a spoken message can either through isolated word recognition within the sound stream, phrase or formulae recognition, clause or sentence, and extended speech comprehension. Woven and Coakley (1985) hold the different idea. They see listening as "the process of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli". This definition indicates that listening is a complex process which students have to deal with. The task of listening is not only perception of sound, but it also requires comprehension of meaning. This definition is the same with second language theory which regards listening to spoken language as an active and complex process in which listeners pay much attention to aspects of aural input, generate meaning, and link what they hear to existing knowledge (O'Malley & Chabot, 1989; Byrnes, 1984; Richards, 1985; Howard, 1983). Scott Shelton (2008) thinks that listening effectively is a demanding and involved process. One must be able to deal with different accents or pronunciation, unfamiliar lexical items and syntactic structures, competing background noise, and also make a conscious effort to not 'switch off' or become distracted while listening. All of this must be achieved and dealt with more or less simultaneously in order to identify and understand the meaning in any given message. To sum up, the issue of whether which view is the best is controversial. However, in the final analysis, the definition of Wolvin and Coakley (1985) which considers listening as the process of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli; that is, message transmitted through the medium of sound is highly appreciated. 2.2.1.2. The listening Comprehension process It can't be denied that listening is the least explicit of the four language skills, namely, listening, speaking, reading and writing, making it the hardest skill for English learners. It involves physiological and cognitive processes at different levels (Field, 2002; Lynch, 2002; Rost, 2002) along with the attention to contextual and "socially coded acoustic clues" (Swaffar & Bacon, 1993). Listening comprehension is a primary process in understanding the words of the speaker.  It is a complex communication process which requires instant thought and individual ability to construct the meaning.  The development of listening comprehension varies depending on the personal, social, and cultural experiences of the student. Effective listeners are able to recognize the speaker’s main points or ideas and identify the supporting details and examples.  Comprehensive listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying.  This involves understanding a speaker’s accent, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and meaning (Howatt and Dakin 1974). Listening comprehension is influenced by the listener’s world knowledge, linguistic knowledge, text structure knowledge, and met cognitive knowledge. The following figure shows that the listening comprehension process is established through the relationship between the two main sources of information which Widowson (1983) refers to as (1) systematic or linguistic knowledge (knowledge of phonological, syntactic, and semantic components of the language system) and (2) schematic or non-linguistic information. In fact, it is hard to differentiate between what was actually said and what we have constructed by integrating the spoken words with students' own knowledge and experience. Background knowledge C O M P R E H E N S I O N Systematic knowledge - factual - social Procedural knowledge - how language is used in discourse Knowledge of situation - physical setting, participants, etc Knowledge of co-text context - what has been/ will be said (written) Knowledge of the language system - semantic - syntactic systematic knowledge - phonological Figure 1. Information sources in comprehension (Adapted from Anne Anderson & Tony Lynch, 1988, p.13) According to Mendelson (1994: 94, cited by Vandergrift, 1999: 176), the performance checklist for listening comprehension process is to be used during learner's listening process: Name: ___________________________ Date: ____________________ Question: After first listening Before second listening Guess? Reason(s) V Other possibilities? Where? (setting?) When? (time? time of day? season?) Who? (speakers? their relationship?) How? (tone? mood?) What? (what is it about?) Why? (goal? particular circumstances?) Figure 2. Performance Checklist for Listening Comprehension (Adapted from Mendelson (1994: 94, cited by Vandergrift, 1999: 176) V= Verification (check in this column when your guess has been verified) What I found easy: What I found difficult: What I will do the next time: A number of researches in L2 listening instruction have been done by different authors such as Rost (2002); Lynch (1988, 2002); Rubin (1994); Mendelsohn (1988); Richards (1990). All focus on the critical role of both bottom-up and top-down processes in comprehension. Listeners use top-down process when they use context and prior knowledge (topic, genre, background knowledge, and other schema knowledge in long-term memory) to construct framework for comprehension. Listeners use bottom-up process when they build meaning by accretion, gradually combining increasingly larger units of meaning from the phoneme-level up to discourse-level features. Richards (1990:50) breaks down the process used in listening comprehension into two distinct types, referring to them as 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' processing. The former is described in Cook's Discourse (1989) as: 'Interpreting the lowest-level units first, and then proceeding to an interpretation of the rank above, and so on upwards.' In other words, we sometimes need to rely on our knowledge of grammar, syntax, and lexis, and apply that knowledge when confronted with an incoming message in order to achieve comprehension. On the other hand, we might apply a top-down approach to aid comprehension. This is defined as: 'Interpreting discourse by hypothesizing about the most general units first, then moving downwards through the ranks below.' This means applying our background knowledge to aid in understanding the meaning of a message. Richards (1990:51) explains that:" This may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, it may be situational or contextual knowledge, or it may be knowledge stored in long-term memory in the form of 'schemata' and 'scripts' - plans about the overall structure of events and the relationships between them." Anderson and Lynch (1988:22) argue that research has shown that the assumptions in the 'bottom-up' model are incorrect. They state that: "Listeners would not be able to perceive speech as successfully as they do if they were in fact engaged in a process of building up the recognition of words solely by attempting to identify their constituent phonemes." In teaching listening skills, we need to be aware of how these processes work and guide our students, through the use of different tasks if we are to aid them in improving their listening comprehension. I believe we can help advanced learners by drawing attention to these strategies and overtly practicing these listening skills in the classroom. 2.2.2. The importance of Listening Listening is getting more and more important in many foreign language contexts, which have until relatively recently focused their efforts on the development of other language skills such as writing skills. This growing importance is reflected in the proliferation of commercial listening courses. The importance of listening in second and foreign language learning is admirably summarized in a recent publication by Rost (1994): 'Listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learners. Without understanding input at the right level, any learning simply cannot begin'. Brett (1997: 39) also states that "listening is a key language skill. It has a vital role in the language acquisition process". In comparison with other language skills, some researches on listening suggests that on average people can expect to listen "twice as much as we speak, four times more than what we read and five times more than we usually write" (Morley, 2001). More importantly, there are more and more studies indicating the sheer importance of listening in communication and language learning (Anderson and Lynch, 1988; Dunkel, 1991). What's more, Michael Lewis (1993: 32) highlights "Almost all the world's natural language output is spoken rather written". Being an essential skill for almost interaction, listening is therefore the most primary medium for input in language learning process and by speeding up the students' ability to perceive speech, the amount of input they get will increase and thus aid students' language acquisition. It is obvious that we listen for many different purposes in and out of the classroom; this has an effect on the way we listen. Yule and Brown (1983) make a useful distinction between interactional and transactional communication. McCarthy, (1991) in Discourse, defines transactional talk (and listening) as communication for getting business done. Interactional communication, on the other hand, has to do with lubricating the social wheels. In listening (1988) Anderson and Lynch describe them as (transactional) listening when the main purpose is to achieve a successful transfer of information, while interactional listening is defined as listening for social reasons, and to establish or maintain friendly relations between interlocutors. In short, listening is essential not only as receptive skill but also to the development of spoken language prophecy. 2.2.3. Teaching listening skills 2.2.3.1. Listening Skills 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 (Howatt and Dakin). An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously. Willis (1981:134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which she calls enabling skills. They are: (1) predicting what people are going to talk about, (2) guessing at unknown words or phrases without panic, (3) using one's own knowledge of the subject