The Effects of Bottom-Up Techniques in Teaching Listening Skills to First Year Students at the University of Fire Fighting and Prevention

Part A Introduction 1. Rationale It is undeniable that English is a means of international communication in the fields of science, technology, culture, education, economy and so on. It is not only the native language of about 300 million of speakers around the world but also the official language in many countries as well as second / foreign language in many nations in the world. In Vietnam, where people are carrying out the modernization and industrialization, English becomes more important. That is the reason why it has been made a compulsory subject in the curriculum of almost all universities in Vietnam. In UFFP, English is taught in 270 lesson periods which constitutes a major of the whole curriculum. However, English teaching is strongly influenced by the traditional methodology. Emphasis has been placed on the mastery of forms and vocabulary, rather than the language in use. Start a new line in learning English, listening seems to be the most difficult skill for first year students of UFFP. There are a number of possible reasons for this. First, this might be due to the fact that most students lack necessary strategies to fulfill the listening tasks. Next, they often have difficulties in catching the meaning from the tape. Besides, they are afraid of listening and have no head for it. These are among the problems concerning non-major students of English as Brown (1994; p101) states: “Teaching beginners is considered by many to be the most challenging level of language instruction. Since students at this level have little or no prior knowledge of English on which to build, the teacher and accompanying techniques and materials become a central determiner in whether or not students accomplish their goals”. Therefore, it is essential for teachers to find out some ways to help students overcome their difficulties, and make them feel more comfortable when practicing listening to English so as to assist them in approving their skills as well. It is also essential to note that listening, as an efficient channel to provide comprehensible input for learners, its teachers should be paid due attention to from the very beginning. All in all, the above has encouraged the writer of the thesis to carry out the study entitled: “The Effects of Bottom-up Techniques in Teaching Listening Skills to First Year Students at the University of Fire Fighting and Prevention” 2. Hypothesis This study is designed to test the following hypothesis: “Bottom-up techniques help to enhance UFFP first-year English learners’ listening comprehension”. 3. Aims of the study In order to test the above-named hypothesis, this study is aimed at: - Identifying the difficulties encountered by first year students at UFFP in learning listening skills and the possibility of applying bottom-up techniques to teach these skills at the university; - Investigating the effects of using bottom-up techniques in teaching listening to first-year students; and - Formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of the listening skills at UFFP. 4. Scope of the study In this study, the investigator intended to use bottom-up techniques to help first year students at UFFP overcome their listening difficulties, not taking the other kind of techniques, i.e. top-down ones. These techniques were experimented over a period of one term and were applied in the three stages of a listening lesson. Due to the limited time, the investigator could not implement the research for a longer time and study on a larger population. The sample population is 70 freshmen from two classes of the same English proficiency level. 5. Methodology To fulfill the above aims, qualitative methods have been chosen for the study. Comments, remarks, comparison, suggestions and conclusions are based on factual research, observation, experience and discussion. Data for analysis in this study are gained through the following sources: - Survey questionnaire; - Pre-test and post-test; - Interviews, observation and discussion. 6. Design of the study This minor thesis consists of three parts: Part A, Introduction, presents the rationale, hypothesis, aims, scope, methodology and design of the study. Part B, Development which is divided into 3 chapters: Chapter 1 sets up theoretical background that is relevant to the purpose of the study. Chapter 2 deals with analysis of the general learning situation at UFFP, learners’ difficulties in teaching and learning listening skills and the effects of using bottom-up strategies in teaching listening skill to freshmen at UFFP. Chapter 3 emphasizes the implications of the study in which suggestions for improving listening skills to the students at UFFP are proposed. Part C, Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the limitations and provides some suggestions for further study. Part B Development Chapter 1: Literature review To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to the reexamination of the concepts most relevant to the thesis’s topic. Firstly, an account of the theory on listening is made. Secondly, the teaching of listening skills is discussed. Finally, the listening difficulties for foreign language learners are referred to. 1. 1. Theory on listening 1.1.1. Definitions of listening It is believed that listening is a significant and essential area of development in a native language and in a second language. Therefore, there have been numerous definitions of listening (by O’Malley, Chamost and Kupper (1989); Buck (2001)) which present different views of scholars towards the concept. Listening comprehension is viewed theoretically as a process in which individuals focus on selected aspect of aural input, construct meaning from passages, and relate what they hear to existing knowledge (O’Malley, Chamost and Kupper (1989)). According to Rost (1994), listening is referred to a complex process that enables us to understand spoken language. Harmer (2001, p197) categorizes listening into receptive skill, the way in which people extract meaning form the discourse they hear or see. Buck (2001, p31) indicates 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 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”. Anderson and Lynch (1988) pointed out that listening is really a receptive skill along side with reading skills and the role of the listeners is no longer passive but active. After a period of listening the learners are exposed to be able to talk or write about what they have heard, that is the objectives of listening comprehension. Moreover, he uses the term “active model builder” to refer to the listeners’ language; listeners have to build their own “coherent interpretation” of the spoken message. Both parts of this term are important. First, it needs to be coherent both in what we believe has just been said and with what we already know about the speaker, the context and the word in general. Second, it is an interpretation, in the sense that it is our version of what the speaker meant, as far as we are able to assess that meaning. The two authors use the term “mental model” to refer the listener’s “coherent interpretation”. This emphasizes the active and personal nature of successful listening. The mental model that we build as a representation of a spoken of a message is the result of our combining the new information in what we just heard with our previous knowledge and experience. In short, in order to be successful in listening, it is advisable that “listening comprehension is not a skill which can be mastered once and for all and than ignored while other skills are developed. There must be regular practice with increasingly difficult materials” (Wilga, 1986, p157). 1.1.2. Types of listening There are many different types of listening. We can classify these according to a number of variables, including listening purposes, the role of the listener and the types of text being listened to. Real-life listening Many students feel a big gap between listening activities in the classroom and actual situation. This is because most listening materials including dialogues in text books are very grammar-oriented and controlled in many ways. The speakers often speak with perfectly controlled speech, voice, tone, accent and correct grammar. Whereas, in real-life conversations learners encounter various people with different gender, age, accent, speed, voice, tone. There may be improper grammar usage, incomplete sentences, redundancy, contractions, overlap and so forth. There are two ways which people often listen in real-life, they are “casual” and “focus” listening. “Casual” listening A lot of students have a habit of listening to a radio while studying or the television is on while we are doing something else. We listen with no particular purpose. This kind of listening is called “casual” listening, the typical feature is that we do not listen closely and intentionally, thus we may not remember much of what we hear or nothing is left in our mind. “Focus” listening “Focus” listening happens when listening for a particular purpose to get the information we need to know or to study the language. In this case we often listen with much attention, but we do not listen to every thing with equal concentration. There is an association between listener expectation and purpose and his comprehension. If the listener expects and needs are intentional, his listening is likely accurately perceived and understood than that which is expected, irrelevant or helpful. Characteristics of real-life listening In real-life listening, we depend largely on visual information, including speaker’s facial expression, posture, movement and appearance. When a listener engages in listening, vocal massage filters through the short-term memory system first, and at this time the listener focuses on auditory or visual stimulus and concentration on the message received. Therefore, visual stimuli play a very important role in listening. As for Ur (1984), it would seem reasonable to say that classroom practice should usually incorporate such characteristics of real-life listening as: We listen for a purpose and with certain expectations, We make an immediate response to what we hear, We see the person we are listening to, There are some visual or environmental clues as to the meaning of what is heard. Stretch of heard discourse come in short chunks. Most heard discourse is spontaneous and therefore differs from formal spoken prose in the amount of redundancy, “noise” and colloquialisms, and in its auditory characters. Sometimes particular situations may lack one or more of these characteristics. For example, when watching television we are not normally expected to respond, when listen to a lecture we may have to hear uninterrupted speech a very long time indeed, but it is very rare that none of them is present at all. To sum up, it is obvious that mastering the nature of real-life classroom can help teachers as well as learners gain success in teaching and learning listening skill. Classroom listening Class-room listening may be divided into intensive listening and extensive listening. Intensive listening Intensive listening is the careful, focused listening to a short passage for detailed information or full comprehension, for example, listening to a dialogue on the tape to study its structures, intonation patterns in an English class. Extensive listening Extensive listening is freer and more general listening to natural language for general ideas, not for a particular detail and not necessary under the teacher’s direct guidance. The listening passage for extensive listening can be long or short. The language that is used in the type of listening is often within the students’ current ability so that they find it pleasing and interesting when they are listening. With this type of listening, students are not reinforcing a structure or practicing a grammar point linked to the rest of the course. 1.1.3. Listening process A variety insights into the listening process have been developed in the past 40 years by Richards (1983); Anderson (1983; 1985); Wolvin and Coalky (1985); Underwood (1989); Buck (2000). Listening to spoken language has been acknowledged in second language theory to consist of active and complex process that determines the content and level of what is comprehended. These processes use utterance as the basis for constructing meaning based propositional presentations that are identified initially in short term memory and stored in long term memory. Anderson (1983; 1985) differentiates comprehension into three interrelated and recursive process: perceptual processing, parsing and utilizing. During a single listening event the processes may flow one into the other, recycle and may be modified based on what occurred in prior or subsequent processes. Bang and Ngoc (2001, p38-39) divided the listening process into three stages namely perception-cracking the code, decoding-making sense of the message, prediction and selection. In the second stage of decoding-making sense of the message they describe listening process the following model. 1 Perception of sounds, words shapes 2 Initial recognition of meaning of short 3 Material held in STM and… 4 Related to materials already held in STM 5 Related materials arriving in STM 6 Meaning extracted from message and retained in LTM Gist recalled later Figure 1.1: Model of the process of listening comprehension (Bang and Ngoc, 2001, p38) They argued that stages 1 to 6 follow each other very quickly and that the processing time available within STM may be very short indeed. Stages 2, 3, 4 and 5 involve not only the recognition of lexical meaning but also the perception of grammatical relationships as signaled by such things as words orders, tense markers, intonations and so on. Underwood (1989) divides the aural process into three stages: at the first stage the sounds go into sensory store often called the "echoic" memory and are organized into meaningful units, according to the knowledge of the language the listener already has. Unfortunately, the sounds remain in the echoic memory for a very short time. The listener does not have very long in which to sort out what is heard and might make errors. The second stage is processing of the information already held in long term memory. This again is a very brief stage amounting to no more than a few second. At this point words or groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the long term memory and the meaning is extracted from them. When the meaning is grasped the actual words of the spoken discourse are generally forgotten and only the meaning retained. Therefore, the listeners usually remember the meaning rather than the exact words spoken when he has to recall what has been said. The basis of listening comprehension is the ability to recognize and select the specific details in the discourse. It, of course, needs a certain time for the learners to become used to listening and process some familiar utterances more automatically. On the other hand, the conceptions of bottom-up and top-down processes in comprehension are mentioned by some authors such as Lynch (1988), Rubin (1994), Nunan (1999). According to them, bottom-up process refers to the listening process that starts with discriminating sounds, identifying words and comprehending grammatical structures and build eventually to comprehension of meaning. This is a somewhat mechanistic or "data-given" (Brown, 1994) view of processing and has been the focus in some styles of teaching. Top-down process may be described as holistic or "conceptual driven" in that they focus on the overall meaning of the passage and the application of schemata. Schemata are mental frameworks based on past experiences which can be applied to help us interpret the current situation. Inferring ideas, guessing words’ meaning and identify 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 out put of each sequence becomes the input for the next higher one. That is the reason why Buck (2001) considers it one way street. From these ideas, it is useful for students to recognize the importance of both these types of processing and for teacher to arrange opportunities to work on both aspects. Generally, bottom-up exercises are more useful for beginners because at this level they have limited language knowledge, thus, little of what they hear can be automatically processed. They need to focus on details of what they hear and given limitation of working memory and speed of speech which affects comprehension and top-down exercises are more necessary for intermediate and advanced students. 1.2. Teaching listening skills 1.2.1. Common methods of teaching listening In the article about teaching listening, Underwood (1989, p90-109) pointed out that there are at least four common methods of teaching second or foreign language listening: grammar-translation, grammar-method, audio-lingual method and task-based method. Grammar- translation method: By this method, students listen to a description of the rules of the second language in the first language. As a result, when the second language is used, the focus of any listening is on translation of lexical items or grammar structures. Grammar method: to follow this method, the teacher requires students to look at a written text while they listen to a recording. This forces them to do several things: identify words by their position in the sentence, work out the relationship between words and phrases, use forward and backward inferencing cues, and make intelligent guesses based on textual cues. Audio-lingual method: Audio-lingual method of listening emphasizes first listening to pronunciation and grammar forms and then imitating those forms by way of drills and exercises. Dialogues and drill are the basis of classroom practice with this method. Students are encouraged to listen carefully either to the taped recording, or a teacher reading out, a dialogue, or a drill. They then record their own version or respond to cues from the teachers to repeat parts of the dialogue or drill. Basically, the more the students repeat a correct phrase or sentence, the stronger of their memory of the structure will be. Task-based method: this method places stress on activities or tasks that learners do in class in order to develop their communicative competence. A task-based syllabus should be constructed according to the difficulty of the tasks required of the learners at different stages in a course. In short, the four methods of the teaching listening are not mutually exclusive and in reality, they may be mixed in any particular course or class. However, nowadays, with the appearance of Communicative Language Teaching, teaching listening seems to be more of meaningful to students due to the fact that they have chance to develop their listening skills and other language skills as well. 1.2.2. Bottom-up techniques in teaching listening Techniques are defined as the specific activities, exercises or devices used in the language classroom for realizing lesson objectives (Bang and Ngoc (2002)). They are characterized by the resources in terms of time, space, equipments used by the teacher; interactional patterns observed in lessons; tactics an