USING SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS TO IMPROVE EFL STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILLS

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY

LUU THI KHANH VINH

USING SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS TO IMPROVE EFL
STUDENTS’ LISTENING SKILLS

Major: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
Code: 60.14.01.11
MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION

Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. NGO DINH PHUONG

Nghe An, 2017


1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Ngo Dinh
Phuong, who directly supported and encouraged me during the preparation of
this study. I am truly grateful to him for his professional advice, invaluable
support and guidance he offered to help me carry out the study.
I wish to express my sincere thanks to the students of the two classes I
worked with in order to gather data for my study.
I would also like to thank my friends for their friendship and proofreading
in the preparation of my thesis.
Last but not least, I owe special heartfelt appreciation to my parents
without whose unceasing support, patience and understanding I could not have
been able to complete my study.

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ABSTRACT
The main goal in this study is to investigate the current situation teaching
and learning listening skill to find out the effects of supplementary materials in
improving listening comprehension skill
In order to achieve the mentioned goal, the study was carried out among
80 students at Go Cong Polytechnic School. The participants have studied the
same textbook and 80 students were divided into two groups: control group and
treatment group. Both groups were asked to complete a pre-test at the beginning
of the second semester to test their level of listening. Then, both groups were
asked to take a post-test at the end of the semester which aimed to see some
different results between two groups (treatment group was taught with
supplementary materials). The collected data were analyzed according to points
of each test, four levels (good, pretty good, average and weak). The research
findings indicated that using supplementary materials in listening tasks helped
students improve listening comprehension skill in some ways.
The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1, the introduction - gives
rationale for the study and sets up the aims, scopes, research questions,
significance and organization of the study. Chapter 2 provides theoretical
background about the important of listening comprehension, definition of
supplementary materials and how to develop listening skill. And this part will
also provide a review in key concepts relating to the research topic as well as the
literature in the field. Chapter 3 is about methodology, the current situation of
teaching and learning listening. The research methods which cover interviews
(for teachers), survey questionnaires (for students) and class observations, the
setting of the study, participants, instruments, and procedures of the research are
presented in this chapter. Chapter 4 deals with the data results. The results

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obtained are also analyzed and interpreted in this part, so that major findings are
revealed and discussed. The last chapter, chapter 5 presents a summary of the
study, gives recommendations based on the results to make the more
effectiveness in using supplementary materials in listening at this case and
provides limitations and suggestions for further research.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................i
ABSTRACT........................................................................................................ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS...................................................................................iv
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION........................................................................1
1.1. Rationale..................................................................................................1
1.2. Aim of the study.......................................................................................3
1.3. Scope of the study....................................................................................3
1.4. Methods of the study...............................................................................4
1.5. Design of the thesis..................................................................................4
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW.............................................................5
2.1. Listening comprehension........................................................................5
2.1.1. Definitions of listening comprehension...........................................5
2.1.2. Characteristics of listening comprehension.....................................7
2.1.3. The process of listening comprehension..........................................8
2.1.4. Types of listening comprehension..................................................11
2.1.5. Potential listening comprehension problems.................................13
2.1.6. Principle for teaching listening skill.............................................15
2.2. Supplementary materials:....................................................................17
2.2.1. Definition of supplementary materials...........................................17

2.2.2. Kinds of supplementary materials..................................................18
2.2.3. How supplementary materials have been used in language teaching
...............................................................................................................20


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2.2.4. Reasons for using supplementary materials in teaching listening
skills......................................................................................................21
2.3. How to develop listening skill...............................................................22
2.3.1. Common methods of teaching listening.........................................22
2.3.2. Listening strategies........................................................................23
2.3.3. Stages of a listening lesson............................................................24
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY.....................................................................28
3.1. Research questions...........................................................................28
3.2. Participants............................................................................................28
3.2.1. Students..........................................................................................28
3.2.2. Teachers.........................................................................................29
3.3. Setting of the study................................................................................30
3.4. Procedures..............................................................................................30
3.5. Research methods..................................................................................34
3.5.1. Data collection instrument.............................................................35
3.5.2. Procedures of data collection.........................................................37
CHAPTER 4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS.............................................38
4.1. The attitudes of teachers and students toward using supplementary
materials in listening lessons:......................................................................38
4.2. Analysis of the questionnaire results.....................................................38
4.2.1 Students’ attitude of listening skills...............................................38
4.2.2. Students’ interest in listening tasks from supplementary materials
...............................................................................................................39
4.2.3. How often students have listening lessons in classroom............40

4.2.4. The number of listening tasks in the textbook.............................41


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4.2.5. Students’ difficulties in listening lessons......................................41
4.2.6. The content between supplementary materials and the textbook 43
4.2.7. Some essential characteristics of supplementary materials.........43
4.2.8. How to develop listening skills......................................................44
4.3. Tests’ result analysis...............................................................................45
4.3.1. The pre-test....................................................................................46
4.3.2. The post-test...................................................................................48
4.4. Discussion of the main findings............................................................50
4.5. Summary................................................................................................51
CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS.....................53
5.1. Conclusions............................................................................................54
5.2. Recommendations in teaching and learning listening skills with
supplementary materials.............................................................................55
5.2.1. Raising awareness of using supplementary materials in listening 56
5.2.2. Raising awareness of top-down and bottom-up strategies.............56
REFERENCES..................................................................................................59
APPENDIX A...................................................................................................63
APPENDIX B...................................................................................................65
APPENDIX C....................................................................................................67
APPENDIX D...................................................................................................69
APPENDIX E....................................................................................................71
APPENDIX F....................................................................................................73


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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1. EFL: English as Foreign Language
2. Ls: Learners
3. L1: First language
4. L2: Second language
5. Ts: Teachers


1

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale
In today’s global world, nobody can deny the importance of English as well
as its existence in our daily life since it has become an international language.
With the help of technology development, English has been playing a key role in
many fields such as: medicine, science, tourism, engineering . . . and education,
which is the most important area where English is needed. In Vietnam, it has
become one of the major and compulsory subjects at school and colleges.
In the light of communicative approach, “communicative competence” is
the ultimate aim of foreign language teaching and learning or in other words, it
is the “goal” of the teaching and learning process (Richards & Rodgers,
1995:67). In order to obtain the communicative competence, foreign language
learners are supposed to focus on all the four skills, namely listening, speaking,
reading, and writing. Among these four skills, listening is often considered to be
the most important skill to be acquired as “in the foreign language environment,
the ability to make sense of these messages is often crucial for survival” (Hood,
1994:65). As a result, listening has been paid much attention to by language
researchers and teachers
According to Saricoban (1991), listening is the ability to identify and
understand a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, the grammatical and vocabulary
item used and also in grasping the meaning of what the speaker is saying.

Bulletin (1952) as cited in Saricoban (ibid) stated that listening is one of the
“fundamental language skill” and that it is of vital importance that listening be
taught for the students in order for them to listen effectively and critically.
However, listening is often described as the “neglected” (Fauziah, 2000)
or “taken for granted” (Anderson and Lynch, 1988) skill as other language


2
skills such as Speaking. Reading and Writing are given more emphasized
especially in the EFL classroom. In the teaching of listening skill, teachers
should be able to expose students to be “real-life situations” as they need to
teach students to listen with a purpose. Besides that, teachers should be able to
introduce the students with the processes involved in the listening skills.
According to Rost (1994), there are two types of processes involved in listening
skill; top-down and bottom-up processing.
Listening is the first prerequisite skill in language learning and learners
listen before they are able to speak, read or write a particular language (Bulletin
1952 as cited in Saricoban, 1991). The reason is that a learner has to be familiar
with the language before he / she can speak, read or write in the language
concerned. Listening to a particular language serves as a platform for any
learners in mastering any languages. It is undoubtedly that in acquiring a
language, listening is one that is very significant and crucial skill which a learner
has to processes in order to successfully learn the language at hand. Rivers &
Temperley (1978) believes that listening is “...used nearly twice as much as
speaking and four or five times more than reading and writing...”.
According to Rost (1994), listening “...serves as a basis for the
development of other language skills...”. In a language classroom this would
mean listening skills provide the learner with the grounds to comprehend
language learned. Rost (ibid) also pointed that “...listening skill is deemed vital
in the language classroom as it provides input for the learners...”. Through

listening, the learners will be able to successfully speak, read and write in the
language that they are learning in the classroom.
Communicative approach to teaching and learning English has been a
significant development; at present, it is used worldwide in teaching and
learning English, especially, in EFL and ESL situations. The aim of


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communicative approach is to develop four skills : listening, speaking, reading
and writing. However, teachers often focus on reading and writing skills because
students seem to master them more easily than listening and speaking. Actually,
students at Go Cong Polytechnic school are not good at listening skill, they seem
to be passive in listening lessons because they lack of vocabulary or they are not
able to understand what they are hearing or the listening tasks are not attractive
enough or not suitable for their abilities. These things can affect their attitudes
towards listening skill lessons as well as the quality of teaching and learning.
To develop an effective listener among the students, it is essential for
teachers to design their own supplementary materials for the betterment of their
students and their teaching-learning process. Teachers should take the initative
to design their own supplementary materials for listening lessons and thus, they
should refer the textbook as an “aid” to vary the activities and tasks to be used in
the classroom.
For all of these reasons, it would be necessary to have a research titled
“Using supplementary materials to improve EFL students’ listening skills”. I
hoped that this study will help teachers understand more about the role of
supplementary materials and help students develop their listening skill which
leads to their learning successfully.
1.2. Aim of the study
This study is intended to address the following issues:
- To investigate the attitudes towards the use of supplementary materials

in listening by the first year students at Go Cong Polytechnic School.
- To investigate the effects of supplementary materials in improving
listening comprehension skill for the first year students at Go Cong Polytechnic
School


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- To propose some recommendations when using supplementary materials
in listening for English teachers and students at Go Cong Polytechnic School.
1.3. Scope of the study
There are a lot of English language learning strategies that teachers can
employ, and the new kind of English textbook covers four skills namely reading,
speaking, listening and writing. This study, however, focuses on using
supplementary materials in listening for vocational school students. Besides, the
research will be carried out only with first year students not specializing in
English and the teachers Go Cong Polytechnic School due to the time limitation
and some purposes.
1.4. Methods of the study
First of all, intensive and extensive reading helps equip the author with
sufficient background knowledge and also obtain data for the literature review.
Secondly, survey, questionnaires, observation, interview as well as pre-test and
post-test would be made among the first year students and some teachers at Go
Cong Polytechnic School. Collected data, then, would be processed and
analyzed.
1.5. Design of the thesis
This research comprises five chapters as follow.
Chapter 1: Introduction – This chapter provides the rationale of the problem
tackling with the topic, the aims of the study, the scope of the study, methods of the
study and design of the study.
Chapter 2: Literature review - This chapter presents the previous studies

related to the thesis and some concepts as theoretical basis for the study.
Chapter 3: Research methodology - This chapter introduces research
methodology of the study. It provides information about the materials,


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participants, instrument for data collection, research procedures and data
analysis.
Chapter 4: Findings and discussions - This chapter presents the results and
discussions developed after the impacts analyzed.
Chapter 5: Conclusion - This chapter summarizes the main issues touched
upon in the research, the limitations of the research and some suggestions for
further studies. Following the chapters are the references and appendices.


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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. Listening comprehension
2.1.1. Definitions of listening comprehension
Language skills are often integrated with each other in language use.
Listening is not merely hearing words. In learning English as a foreign language,
students cannot develop speaking skills unless they develop listening skills. To
have a successful conversation, they must understand what is said to them. So,
the ability to understand or comprehension is considered to be the first- order
goal of listening and the highest priority of the listener.
The importance of listening skills in foreign language teaching and
learning has been reflected in a 30-year shift towards interaction-based
acquisition (Krashen, 1981; Pica et al.., 1987; Swain, 1985), rather than learning
through the translation of written texts and through formal grammar learning.

Though regarded as a receptive skill, listening actually requires an active
process in which listeners have to activate all their knowledge of different fields
such as phonology, vocabulary, culture and their life experience in selecting and
interpreting information (Richards, 1983; Rubin, 1995 quoted from Duzer,
).
According

to

O’Malley

and

Chamot

(1989:

420),

“Listening

comprehension is an active and conscious process in which the listener
constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and existing
knowledge, while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task
requirement”. Relevant to this view, Emmert, (1994) considers listening as an
active process by which students receive, construct meaning from, and respond
to spoken and or nonverbal messages.


7

From the point of view of Littlewood (1981), listening demands active
involvement from the listener. In order to construct the message that the speaker
intends, the listener must actively contribute knowledge from both linguistic and
nonlinguistic sources. The listener can divide the continuous stream of sound
into meaningful units by applying the knowledge of the language and by
comparing these units with the shared knowledge between himself and the
speaker, the listener can interpret the meaning. The nature of listening
comprehension means that the listener should be encouraged to take part in an
active process of listening for meanings, using not only the linguistic clues but
also nonlinguistic knowledge.
Rubin (1995: 7) emphasized the role of the listener, who is seen as an
active participant in listening. He sees listening as an “active process in which
listeners select and interpret information which comes from auditory and visual
cues in order to define what is going on and what the speakers are trying to
express”.
According to Anderson and Lynch (1988), there are two influential
views: traditional view and alternative view. They thought that traditional view
was inappropriate and inadequate because the listener was regarded as a taperecorder and the listener took in and stored aural messages in much the same
way as a tape-recorder. While the listener was considered as an active model
builder in alternative view. Anderson and Lynch agreed with the second view.
In this view, listener could combine the new information with his previous
knowledge and experience to reach full comprehension of what had been
heard. It emphasized the active interpretation and integration of incoming
information with prior knowledge and experience.
Vandergrift (1999:168) considered listening as a complex, active process.
The listener must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and


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grammatical structures, interpret stress and intonation, retain what was gathered

in all of the above, and interpret it within the immediate as well as the larger
socio-cultural context of the utterance.
Rost (2002) defined listening as a process of receiving what the speaker
actually says (receptive orientation); constructing and representing meaning
(constructive orientation); negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding
(collaborative orientation); and, creating meaning through involvement,
imagination and empathy (transformative orientation).
Howatt and Dakin (1974) suggested that 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. An able listener is a person who is capable of doing these four things
simultaneously.
In Nunan’s point of view, listening is a fundamental and vital skill in the
acquisition of languages (Nunan, 2002).
From the different views above, listening is not a passive but a complex,
active process of interpretation in which listeners must construct and convey
meaning by using the linguistic knowledge such as phonology, lexis, syntax,
semantics, discourse structure and using their non-linguistic knowledge as the
context, background knowledge.
2.1.2. Characteristics of listening comprehension
Most linguists and educators share the similar opinion of the
characteristics of listening. According to Winkinson, Stratta, Dudley (1974) and
Brubridge (1986) and Penny Urr (1996), they all agree upon the common
characteristics of listening as follows:
First of all, looking at the characteristics of listening is actually looking at
those of spoken language. Spoken language is normally disorganized due to the


9
fact that it is spontaneous. The speaker talks impulsively rather than reading

aloud something written beforehand. As a result, the speech is full of incomplete
sentences, paraphrases, hesitation, repetition and interruptions. This is also the
explanation to the fact that the students who are good at listening tasks with
artificial dialogues are not necessarily good at real - life listening situations.
The understanding of spoken language could be facilitated a great deal by
non-verbal clues. It is said that people listen more effectively when they can see
the speaker’s facial expression, gestures or especially be directly involved in the
context in which the speech is happening. In turn speakers may rely on such
hints to interpret listeners’ implication so that they can adapt their speech
accordingly to attain a successful communication. These non-verbal cues could
reveal what the speaker means better than just listening to the speech alone
because both listeners and speakers are put in a certain context.
In real-life listening, listeners often know in advance some information to
aid their understanding such as to whom they are listening, what they are going
to listen and why they are listening. Therefore, teachers of listening should
always bear in mind this characteristic so that they can have suitable prelistening activities to prepare students for what they are to listen. Penny Urr
additionally thinks that listening is an interactive process. Listeners do not
passively just listen to what speakers say. They take turns to speak. Both sides
actively involve in the communication because they do it for a purpose.
Brown (2000) states that: “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”.


10
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.
2.1.3. The process of listening comprehension
Listening is considered as an active skill that involves many processes.
According to Brown (2000), listening comprehension is not only the
process of sending and receiving sounds but also the conscious process to send
and transmit the message to the brain which will influence the process of
communication.
Anderson (1983, cited in Fang, 2008) elaborated that listening
comprehension process consisted of three stages: the perceptual, parsing, and
utilization. In the perceptional process, listeners focused their attention on the
oral text and stored the sound in echoic memory. Unfortunately, the sounds
remain in the echoic memory for a very short time. Listeners do not have very
long in which to sort out what is heard and might make errors. They transferred
quickly the selective information in echoic memory to short-term memory to
process the sounds for meaning. In the parsing process, listeners used words and
messages to construct meaningful mental representations. They reorganized the
information into a meaningful unit that could be preserved in short-term
memory. In the final process, listeners used long-term memory to link the
incoming message to their original knowledge. Comprehension occurred when
the new information could link with existing knowledge.


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Fischer and Farris (1995) viewed listening comprehension as a process by
which students actively form a mental representation of an aural text according
to prior knowledge of the topic and information found within.
There has been much debate about the listening comprehension process

though, the two most important views that are widely agreed by many
researchers such as Rumelhart (1977), Brown (1994), Nunan (2001), Flowerder
and Miller (2005), etc are bottom-up and top-down processing.
Bottom-up processing considers listening comprehension as a process of
acquiring the meaning of the message based on the incoming language data
from sounds, to words, to grammatical relationships, and ultimately to the
meaning. Schemata are hierarchically formed. This acknowledges listening is
the process of decoding the sounds, from the smallest meaningful units
(phonemes) to complete texts. In other words, listeners use their linguistic
knowledge (sound, words, intonation, grammatical relationships, lexical
meaning) to form final message. However, this processing has its weak points.
Bottom-up processing fails to see that understanding a text is an interactive
process between the listener’s previous knowledge and the text. And efficient
comprehension does not only depend on one’s linguistic knowledge.
Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to utilizing schemata
which listeners use their background knowledge and global understanding to
comprehend the meaning of a message. As Nauman (2002: 25) sees that topdown process “focus on the overall meaning of a passage and the application of
schemata. Schemata are metal frameworks based on past experiences which can
be applied to and help us interpret the current situation.” Inferring ideas,
guessing words’ meaning and identify topics are all examples of top-down
processing. However, if listeners are unfamiliar to the incoming information,
top-down processing cannot evoke listener’s schemata and they can only depend


12
on their linguistic knowledge in listening comprehension. Moreover, though
listeners can trigger a schema, they might not have appropriate schema expected
by the speaker. Thus, if listeners only depend on top-down process, they may get
the failure of comprehension.
Both

bottom-up

and

top-down

processing

are

insufficient

for

comprehension. The first view bases on linguistic knowledge whereas the
second focuses on background knowledge. From previous remarks one general
point becomes very clear: listening is an interactive and interpretive process
because listeners do not just passively receive the information but clarify the
messages, identify the input and organize the meanings. The accurate listening
comprehension is possibly gained with the interactive model.
From these ideas, it is helpful for listeners to recognize the importance of
both these types of processing to enhance listening comprehension and for
teacher to arrange opportunities to work on both aspects.
Combining bottom-up and top-down listening in a listening lesson
In real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing
generally occur together. The extent to which one or the other dominates
depends on the listener’s familiarity with the topic and content of a text, the
density of information in a text, the text type, and the listener’s purpose in
listening. For example, an experienced cook might listen to a radio chef

describing a recipe for cooking chicken to compare the chef’s recipe with her
own. She has a precise schema to apply to the task and listens to register
similarities and differences. She makes more use of top-down processing.
However, a novice cook listening to the same program might listen with much
greater attention trying to identify each step in order to write down the recipe.
Here, far more bottom-up processing is needed.


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A typical lesson in current teaching materials involves a three-part
sequence consisting of pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening and
contains activities that link bottom-up and top-down listening (Field, 1998). The
pre-listening phase prepares students for both top-down and bottom-up
processing through activities involving activating prior knowledge, making predictions, and reviewing key vocabulary. The while-listening phase focuses on
comprehension through exercises that require selective listening, gist listening,
sequencing, etc. The post-listening phase typically involves a response to
comprehension and may require students to give opinions about a topic.
However, it can also include a bottom-up focus if the teacher and the listeners
examine the texts or parts of the text in detail, focusing on sections that students
could not follow. This may involve a microanalysis of sections of the text to
enable students to recognize such features as blends, reduced words, ellipsis, and
other features of spoken discourse that they were unable to process or recognize.
2.1.4. Types of listening comprehension
Additionally, listening can be realized according to the space where it
occurs. In general, listening may be divided into real-life listening and
classroom listening:
Real-life listening
This is what we have to do in our daily life. We hear music, radio, the
noise and people talking, etc. Sometimes, people just listen without paying much
attention to. People may listen and do something else at the same time. This kind

of listening is called Casual listening (cited in Bang Nguyen, Ngoc Nguyen,
2002). On the other hand, people listen with a certain purpose in mind, hence,
they really concentrate on getting the content of what is said, which constitutes
another type if real-life listening, called Focused listening (cited in Bang
Nguyen, Ngoc Nguyen, 2002).


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Classroom listening
Penny Urr argues that classroom listening should be addressed accurately
as real-life listening in the classroom. Though a paradox can be sensed in this
way of addressing, it is not only true that classroom listening is not real-life
listening; but a clear envision of the notion “classroom listening” is also created.
All the listening activities in the classroom aim at equipping students with skills
to deal with real-life listening. Even in classroom listening, it can be subdivided
into intensive and extensive listening as collected and classified by Bang
Nguyen, Ngoc Nguyen (2002).
According to Broughton et al (1987) extensive listening is concerned with
the more general listening to natural English. It serves the function of letting the
students hear the vocabulary items and structures which are unfamiliar to them.
Rixon (1986) added that extensive listening is listening for pleasure and interest
without having to pay a lot of attention to content and language.
Extensive listening keeps students’ motivation and interest high, as well
as gives valuable contact with English in its spoken form.
In contrast, intensive listening is much more controlled, with one or two
specific points. Intensive listening can be primarily for language items as part of
the language teaching program or it can be for general comprehension and
understanding (Broughton et al. 1978). Rixon (1986) also stated that intensive
listening is the more widely used form in the classroom. In intensive listening,
students have to collect or organize information. The listening passages used

usually contain more concrete information and may be quite densely packed.
On Allen’s stand, listening is categorized as follows (1976):
 Simple listening – hearing sounds without any particular meaning to the
sounds


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 Discriminative listening - listening to hear and identify the likenesses and
differences in sounds
 Listening for specific information
 Listening for organizing ideas
 Listening for main points
 Listening for varied points of view
 Critical listening
 Creative listening
Meanwhile, Burn and Lowe (1966) categorized listening into three types:
 Appreciational listening (enjoying the development of s story; listening
for pleasing rhythm; reacting to the mood set by the author).
 Informational listening (listening for the answer to a specific question;
listening to follow directions; following sequence; listening for main
ideas).
 Critical listening (discriminating between fact and opinion; detecting
prejudice and bias; sensing the speaker’s purpose).
According to Burn and Lowe (1966) some authors have also suggested
levels of listening such as little conscious listening, half listening, listening
passively, listening and expressing some reaction and listening with a real
meeting of the minds. However, Burn and Lowe (1966) pointed out that there is
no research evidence to indicate such levels.
2.1.5. Potential listening comprehension problems
It can be seen that second language learners regard listening skill as the

most difficult one to master in second language acquisition. From the point of
view of listeners, there are some difficulties with different aspects.
Underwood (1989) points out the seven listening problems as follows:


16
First, listeners cannot control the speed at which speakers speak. She
makes it clear that “they are so busy working out the meaning of one part of
what they hear that they miss the next part. Or they simply ignore a whole chunk
because they fail to sort it all out quickly enough.”(1989:16).
Second, they are not able to get thing repeated. When student practice
listening in the class they may ask the teacher to repeat the recording.
Unfortunately, in many cases it is in the teacher’s hands and on his decision and
not in hands of the learner whether or not to play the recording again. Despite
the fact that it is almost impossible for the teacher to judge whether or not the
students have understood any particular section of what they have heard.
The next problem is the listeners’ limited vocabulary. The unknown word
in listening comprehension might be a barrier causing students of foreign
language to stop and think about the meaning of the word and thus making them
miss the next part of the speech. This often happens when listeners focus on
accuracy than fluency.
Another problem is about listeners’ interpretation. Students who are
unfamiliar with the context may get difficulty in interpreting the words even if
they can understand the surface meaning.
Underwood also indicates listeners’ inability to concentrate when
listening. This can be caused by a number of things. Students may find the
listening work uninteresting, tiring or too demanding. In addition, the poor
quality of recording and a bad acoustics of the classroom may as well cause the
concentration to drop.
And listeners’ established learning habit is the last problem. Teachers aim

to teach their students to understand everything in the lesson. This can make
students become worried if they fail to understand a particular word while
listening.


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In addition, Rubin (1994) attributes five factors which affect listening
comprehension: text characteristics such as speech rate, pause phenomena and
hesitation, level of perception, stress and rhythmic patterning perception, native
language/second language difference, syntactic modifications, redundancy,
morphological complexity, word order, discourse markers, and visual support for
texts; interlocutor characteristics such as gender and language proficiency; task
characteristics such as task type; listener characteristics

such as language

proficiency level, memory, attention, affect, age, gender, learning disability in
native language, and background knowledge; and process characteristics such
as top-down, bottom-up, and parallel processing, listening strategies, and
negotiation of comprehensible input.
A number of other potential difficulties are also identified by different
authors. Yagang (1994) states that the difficulties of listening comprehension
were accompanied with the four factors: the message, the speaker, the listener
and the physical setting. As for Higgins (1995), the speech rate, vocabulary and
pronunciation caused major problems in listening. Similarly, Flowerdew &
Miller (1996) also assumed that the problems of the students were for the speed
of delivery, new terminology and concept, difficulty in focusing and the physical
environment.
It is a common fact that research available on second language listening
comprehension is insufficient although problems in listening comprehension are

various. Comparing with other skills, Goh (1997:161) said that “there are fewer
insights about the process of listening and the way it is learnt”. Richards
(1985:189) also stated that: “there is little direct research on second language
listening comprehension”. As for that, I am doing this research not only to help
students in our school to find out appropriate language learning strategies with