ANIMATED FILMS AS a LISTENING SUPPLEMENT FOR EFL LEARNERS a STUDY AT a HIGH SCHOOL IN THANH HOA

ABSTRACT
Audio-visual aids, including animated films, have been considered a great tool in
language teaching, yet past research in Vietnam has not paid attention to the use of
animated films in English language teaching. This research was carried out with the
aim to see whether using animated films for EFL learners at high school has any
impacts on their listening comprehension development. In the experiment, two groups,
one control and one treatment, were set up. Before and after the six week experiment,
both groups were asked to do the pre-test/post-test and to answer a pre-treatment and
post-treatment motivation questionnaire. During the treatment, the treatment group
received four animated films based lessons while the control group did not. The results
showed that the treatment group achieve higher level of listening comprehension and
gained greater motivation to study English.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Tran Thi Ngoc Yen, who I
believe is the most wonderful supervisor, for her valuable direction, keen insight,
precious orientation, warm encouragement, and continuous support throughout this
project. Her enthusiasm and positive attitudes were sparkling in such a way that it
helped to make my research a serious yet fun task to fulfill.
I also wish to thank my Principal, Vu Tien Ca, who approved of my research, my
colleagues who would come along during the project right from the first days I began
it. Without that, it would have been harder for me to finish the project.
I would also like to thank the board, teachers, and students at Tinh Gia2 High School
for their cooperation and help.
Finally, I would like to delicate this work to my parents and family, who have been
always supporting me with love and sympathy.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................................i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................................ii
LIST OF TABLES..................................................................................................................vi
LIST OF FIGURES.............................................................................................................viii
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION............................................................................................1
1.1 Rationale............................................................................................................................1
1.2 Aims of the study...............................................................................................................4
1.3 Research questions............................................................................................................4
1.4 Scope of the study.............................................................................................................4
1.5 Thesis organization............................................................................................................5
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW................................................................................6
2.1 Listening process...............................................................................................................6
2.1.1 Definition.......................................................................................................................6
2.1.2 The nature of listening....................................................................................................7
2.1.3 Listening in foreign language.........................................................................................7
2.2 Listening comprehension..................................................................................................9
2.3 Assessing listening ability...............................................................................................11
2.3.1 Indicators of listening ability........................................................................................11
2.3.2 Methods to assess listening ability...............................................................................11
2.4 Teaching the listening skill..............................................................................................13
2.4.1 Factors affecting EFL learners’ listening ability..........................................................13
2.4.2 Difficulties EFL learners have when learning listening...............................................14
2.4.3 Principles for teaching EFL listening...........................................................................14

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2.4.4 Techniques for teaching EFL listening.........................................................................16
2.5 Animated films in English language teaching.................................................................16
2.5.1 Kinds of audio-visual aids............................................................................................16
2.5.2 The importance of audio-visual aids in language teaching..........................................17
2.5.3 Principles for selecting animated films for EFL learners.............................................18
2.5.4 The benefits of animated films for EFL learners..........................................................19
CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY....................................................................................22
3.1 Research questions..........................................................................................................22
3.2 Study setting....................................................................................................................22
3.3 Participants......................................................................................................................22
3.4 Materials and instruments...............................................................................................23
3.4.1 Materials.......................................................................................................................23
3.4.2 Instruments...................................................................................................................25
3.5 Procedure.........................................................................................................................25
3.6 Pilot testing......................................................................................................................26
CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION..................................................................29
4.1 Results.............................................................................................................................29
4.1.1 General English test results..........................................................................................29
4.1.2 Pre-test and post-test results.........................................................................................31
4.1.2.1 Results of pre-test......................................................................................................31
4.1.2.2 Results of post-test....................................................................................................33
4.1.3 Comprehension increases in the comprehension listening course...............................35
4. 2 Conclusion......................................................................................................................41

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CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSIONS.........................................................................................42

5.1 Summary of the main findings........................................................................................42
5.2 Pedagogical implications.................................................................................................43
5.3 Limitations......................................................................................................................45
5.4 Suggestions for further research.....................................................................................46
REFERENCES......................................................................................................................47
APPENDIX ..........................................................................................................................52

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APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
APPENDIX C
APPENDIX D
APPENDIX E
APPENDIX F

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: The focuses of pilot testing
Table 2.1: Minimum and maximum of general test
Table 2.2: Means and standard deviations of the general test of the two groups
Table 3: Statistical mark rate to two groups on the general test
Table 4.1: Statistical mark rate of pre-tests to two groups
Table 4.2: Statistical mark rate of post-tests to two groups
Table 5.1: Statistical results of pre-and post-tests to group 1

Table 5.2: Statistical results of pre-and post-tests to group 2
Table 5.3: Within-group comparison results for the experimental and control groups
Table 6. Experimental group’s reaction to the multiple-choice questions of survey

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Frame grab of TiengAnh123
Figure 2: Pie charts for general test parallel of group 1
Figure 3: Pie charts for general test parallel of group 2
Figure 4: Pie chart for pre-tests of group 1
Figure 5: Pie chart for pre-tests of group 2
Figure 6: Pie chart for post-tests of group 1
Figure 7: Pie chart for post-tests of group 2
Figure 8: The bar chart for the improvement after the treatment for the experimental
group

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Rationale
It goes without saying that English has developed into a world language. It is
considered international because of its significance in cultural aspects in not only
former British colonies but also in other countries due to integration. Besides, English
is regarded as global thanks to the dominance of the language in this information
technology age. It is a common knowledge that any modern citizen of this rapidly
growing twenty-first century mastering the English language is determined to

overpower those who do not. Still, there remain some opponents of this trend who
decide to go against the flow to probably avoid the domination of the language and its
culture. Notwithstanding, any practical and serious thinking individual could easily tell
how that conservative idea is hardly working at this point now that English has been
deeply rooted and undoubtedly here-to-stay in our society. In other words, one,
needless to say, greatly depends on English to survive and thrive in this contemporary
world.
The teaching and learning of English; therefore, has been immensely concentrated
around the globe. English language is even separated into four distinctive skills to be
easily taught to non-native speakers of English. As a child, we learn to listen before we
speak, so it is fairly clear that input should come first before output. As a result,
Reading and Listening are supposed to be taught before Writing and Speaking. Novel
movements in teaching English language also share the same opinion on placing more
attention to the communicative purpose of the language by focusing on Listening and
Speaking. Yet, reality has showed inconsiderable improvement in learners’ listening
skills accompanied by a bitter truth of listening remaining a struggle for English
learners.
Listening is considered the most frequently used skill in everyday life.
According to Burley-Allen (1995), more than forty percent of our daily communication
time is spent on listening, thirty five percent on speaking, sixteen percent on reading,

1


and only nine percent on writing (cited in Miller, 2003). In fact, listening can help
students build vocabulary, develop language proficiency, and improve language usage,
improve pronunciation and develop speaking skills (Bacon, 1998). Therefore, listening
is a very essential element in successful communication.
Despite the acknowledged value of listening in language acquisition/learning
and its complexity, the skill is still not receiving the attention it deserves in the ELT

world as compared to literacy skills (Thanajaro, 2000). In Vietnam, many students
have difficulty understanding spoken English when communicating with native
speakers in spite of a long time studying at schools, which leads to communication
breakdown. Moreover, some students often panic when they hear the English language
on television, radio, or in situations in which speech is fast and nothing is repeated.
This results from students’ lack of exposure to such real language listening. Thus, there
is an increase in the need of using authentic materials to teach listening. According to
Martinez (2002), authentic materials help learners improve English communicative
proficiency. Authentic materials refer to teaching resources that are not purposely
produced for language teaching such as newspaper articles, movies advertisements,
maps and comic books (Nunan, 1989). Therefore, the researcher decided to use movies
in listening lessons.
According to Garcia (2011), using movies is the best way to learn English, improves
the learners’ listening skills, and increases their vocabulary and English language
expressions. Besides, watching movies helps the learners to improve pronunciation.
As a teacher at a High School District, the researcher finds that the first-year high
school students encounter a lot of listening problems. They complained that they had
had few chances to listen to English frequently in class at lower-secondary school and
their listening skills had been scarcely developed, leading to the frustration and
pressure about listening examination. Exposed to real English through movies, the
students are believed to learn English in a natural and effective way as they learned
their mother tongue. To some extent, it makes students more interested in listening

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English when they acquired the language for the purpose of entertainment, not merely
for completing a compulsory subject.
The apparently undesirable situation of teaching and learning listening skills has
triggered a passionate need in every teacher or instructor of English language to invent

new ideas to combat the problem. As one myself, I have been concerned enough to
conduct a study on the effectiveness of using animated cartoons as supplementary
materials in enhancing students’ listening skills at Tinh Gia 2 High School in Thanh
Hoa province.
A number of studies have shown the positive influence of comprehensive listening
courses on students’ listening comprehension but there has not been any research on
what supplements of a comprehensive listening course will cause the greatest increase
and how comprehension increases will affect on English learners.
This thesis explores the effects of the use of supplements of nominated films to
schedule comprehensive listening skill. A group of participants followed the
comprehensive listening course with one, two, three, and four sessions in a week.
Another group of participants allowed with the same period of time without any
supplement of animated films. The results were compared to see which group gained
the greatest increase.
It is essential for language teachers to help our students become effective active
listeners. It has been proved that By providing further active listening practice such as
supplements of animated films can learners improve their comprehensive listening.
I have realized that animated films have not only humorous actions, funny context us
also communicative contents usefully and easy imitation. The lively images and
fascinating sound of animated films will attract student’s interest to pay attention to
listening while watching. With real and natural voices in conversations, students will
listen to characters’ intonation and can guess the meaning of vocabulary through
watching. That will make them enjoy and take an interest in learning to listen. The

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animated films are suitable for low-level students and curriculum communication
English.
The quality of teaching English should be enhanced much more than before because of

the available equipment of technology and teaching aids such as internet, computers,
projectors. Teaching listening skill is not a most difficult task, so each teacher finds
effective methods to teach. For these reasons I was encouraged to take the course
leading to Master of TESOL and to undertake the innovation.
A more detailed description of the program is specifically elaborated in the
Methodology chapter.
According to Edisto (2012), learning materials could be regarded as information or
knowledge contained in various different media and formats to support the purpose of
learning and they should strictly follow the objectives or requirements of educational
curricula. Materials can also be informally and briefly defined as things needed in
order to do a peculiar activity. In every syllabus of any subject learned at school, a set
of fixed materials called textbooks or course books is compulsory since it plays the
key role in focusing on the primary goals of the course. Teachers need to refer to the
textbooks to ensure that the important knowledge is properly covered. Similarly,
course books are necessary for students to be aware and keep track of their own intake
of information.
Ideally, learning materials are supposed to support, not to restrict students and
teachers. Thus, when teachers discover that the provided materials are only partially
helpful, they are allowed to determine how and to what extent a book or other learning
materials should be used in the classroom. It is little wonder that supplementary
materials can be considered as equally important as textbooks. Supplementary
materials are defined as any materials used addition to textbook (Spratt, Paleness, and
Williams, 2005: 114). They act as extra materials to supplement the fixed course books
when there is a lack of suitability and variety. In order to boost the motivation in

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listening classroom, supplementary materials should be audio-visual. Moreover, to
achieve the practical purpose of listening class, supplementary materials had better

have a strong relation with the real world.
Possessing the two aforementioned characteristics of being audio-visual and authentic,
some animated cartoons are obviously the leading candidate for the ideal
supplementary materials for listening classes. It is also noteworthy that cartoons
should be maintained as supplementary materials since they help illustrate as well as
improve the natural or real use of English. However, they should not replace
pedagogically simplified materials as these guarantee the accuracy of language use.
Moreover, teachers should pay attention to the level of difficulty while selecting
supplementary materials as both super-easy and over-challenging materials may either
discourage or demotivate learners. Consequently, students might not work as diligently
and fail to adequately meet the learning goals. In short, appropriate level of difficulty
in supplementary materials helps enable students to do wonders in their English
classes.
1.2 Aims of the study
The researcher primarily aims to figure out how the use of animated films in EFL
classroom increases students’ motivation and their listening comprehension. As a
result, recommendations are made to further improve the effectiveness of the use of
animated films in EFL classes at Tinh Gia 2 High School, Thanh Hoa.
1.3 Research questions
In order to reach the aforementioned aim, the study focuses on finding the answers to
the two primary questions:
- Does the use of animated films have any effect on EFL high school students' listening
comprehension?
- Will the use of animated films help to increase EFL high school students' motivation
to study English?

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1.4 Scope of the study

The focuses of the study are levels of motivation, students’ attitudes to the use of
movies in classroom and positive changes in their listening comprehension. The
researcher used only 1 grade 10-class at the same age and of elementary and
intermediate level of English, and four animated films to carry out an action research
study on the topic of using animated films as a teaching aid instrument in EFL
classroom for six-week period.
1.5 Thesis organization
The thesis consists of five chapters.
Chapter 1 is the introduction, which provides a brief introduction, rationale, and an
overview of the thesis
Chapter 2 is the literature review, in which previous research about the nature of
listening,

the

nature

of

listening

comprehension,

importance

of

listening

comprehension, difficulties of listening skill, and comprehension listening materials as

a supplement will be discussed.
Chapter 3 presents the methodological method of the experiment.
Chapter 4 deals with the findings and discussion about the result analysis, which is a
replication study of two issues in the research questions, and is also extended in order
to explore other effects and motivation of listening comprehension materials.
Chapter 5 contains the summary of the main findings, implications, limitations, and
some suggestions for further research.

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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Listening process
There are two distinct processes involved in listening comprehension. Listeners use
‘top-down’ processes when they use prior knowledge to understand the meaning of a
message. Prior knowledge can be knowledge of the topic, the listening context, the
text-type, the culture or other information stored in long-term memory as schemata
(typical sequences or common situations around which world knowledge is
organized).
Listeners use content words and contextual clues to form hypotheses in an exploratory
fashion. On the other hand, listeners also use ‘bottom-up’ processes when they use
linguistic knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. They build meaning
from lower level sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings in
order to arrive at the final message.
2.1.1 Definition
Listening is not simply hearing and perceiving spoken sounds but a multi-stage process

in which listeners actively grasp the facts and feelings by attending to what the speaker
says, to how the speaker says it, and to the context in which the message is delivered.
Listening is an invisible metal process, making it difficult to describe. Listeners must
discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammar structures, interpret
stress and intention, retain and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger
socio-cultural context of utterance (Wife, 1984). Roost (2002) defines listening, in its
broadest sense, as a process of receiving what the speakers 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).

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2.1.2 The nature of listening
Listening is assuming greater and greater importance in foreign language classrooms.
There are several reasons for this growth in popularity. By emphasizing the role of
comprehensible input, second language acquisition research has given a major boost to
listening. As Roost (1994, p.141-142) poets out, 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. Listening is thus fundamental to
speaking.
Specifically, listening theory is about an active process in which individuals focus on
selected aspects of aural input, construct meaning form passages, and relate what they
hear to existing knowledge (O’Malley, Chabot, Kipper, 1989: 418.) During the process
of interpreting aural input, listeners extensively deploy both linguistic knowledge
(phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics and discourse) and non-linguistic knowledge
(knowledge about the topic and about the context, and general knowledge about the
world and real life.)

River and Temporally (1978: 63) defined listening as a complex operation integrating
the distinct components of perception and linguistic knowledge. It is not a passive but
an active process of constructing a message from a stream of sound with what one
knows of the phonological, semantic, syntactic potentialities of the language.
All in all, listening has been conceptualized in different ways and from different points
of view. However, the role of context-based listening is also found and highlighted in
many definitions.
2.1.3 Listening in foreign language
Listening is a complex, active process of interpretation, in which listeners match what
they with what they already know.

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Listening comprehension as a separate component of language learning and instruction
came into its own only after long and significant debate regarding its validity. A large
volume of research has demonstrated the critical role of input, and particular
‘comprehensible input’ in language acquisition, underlining the primacy of the role
played by listening comprehension in second language teaching.
Until recently, listening comprehension activity in foreign or second language
classroom was limited to testing listening comprehension. The underlying rationale
was that if students are successfully learning the target language, they should
automatically be able to decode the aural version of structures and vocabulary they
learn in their textbooks. Success at this decoding was typically measured by correct
response to WH (information) questions. Responses to such questions tagged
successful retrieval of information from an aural text. Knowledge of target language
syntax and lexis was deemed sufficient to enable this retrieval and was ultimately the
way how students were tested. Listening is now treated as a much more complex
activity and one that is the cornerstone of language acquisition (Krashen, 1994)
Recognition of listening’s critical role in the language acquisition process has greatly

influenced contemporary language teaching practice. The view that listening is an
active and interactive process has, for example, cast the learners in a role rather than
the passive receiver of aural input (Rost, 1993). Classroom emphasis is now on aural
intake through active negotiation of meaning. In face to face interaction, the listener,
not just the speaker, engages in the active making of meaning. It is believed that this
mutual negotiation of meaning between speakers activates the cognitive and sociocognitive processes necessary for language acquisition to occur (Breen and candling,
1980; Pica and Doughty, 1985)
Listeners use meta-cognitive, cognitive and socio-affective strategies to facilitate
comprehension and to make their learning more effective. Meta-cognitive strategies
are important because they oversee, regulate or direct the language learning process.

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Cognitive strategies manipulate the material to be learned or apply a specific technique
to a listening task. Socio-affective strategies describe the techniques listeners use to
collaborate with others, to verify understanding or to lower anxiety. Research shows
that skilled listeners used more meta-cognitive strategies than their less-skilled
counterparts (O’Malley & Chamot, 1990, Vandergrift, 1997a). When listeners know
how to
 analyze the requirements of a listening task;
 activate the appropriate listening process required;
 make appropriate predictions;
 monitor their comprehension;
 evaluate the success of their approach
they are using meta-cognitive knowledge for successful listening comprehension,
which is critical to the development of self-regulated learning.
Listening requires not only hearing and perception of sounds but also understanding of
the speaker’s intended message. Listening comprehension is also described as an
interactive, interpretive process in which listeners engage in a dynamic construction of

meaning with the involvement of linguistic knowledge, background knowledge,
meaning construction and responding. The background knowledge, discourse
competence as well as guessing ability facilitate effective listening.
2.2 Listening comprehension
Research has demonstrated that learners spend 40-50% of communication time
listening (Gilman & Moody, 1984), but the importance of listening in language
learning has only been recognized relatively recently (Oxford, 1993). Since the role of
listening comprehension in language learning was taken for granted, it merited little
research and pedagogical attention. Although listening played an important in audiolingual methods, students only listened to repeat and develop a better pronunciation
(for speaking). The role of listening has been considered as a tool for understanding
and a key factor in facilitating language learning. Listening has emerged as an
important component in the process of second language acquisition (Fey ten, 1991).

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Listening comprehension is not either top-down or bottom-up processing, but an
interactive, interpretive process in which listeners use both prior knowledge and
linguistic knowledge in understanding messages. The degree to which listeners use the
one process or the other will depend on their knowledge of the language, familiarity
with the topic or the purpose of listening. For example, listening for gist involves
primarily top-down processing, whereas listening for specific information, as in a
weather broadcast, involves primarily bottom-up processing to comprehend all the
desired details.
On one hand, research from cognitive psychology has shown that listening
comprehension is more than extracting meaning from incoming speech. It is a process
of matching speech with what listeners already know about the topic. Therefore, when
listeners know the context of a text or an utterance, the process is facilitated
considerably because listeners can activate prior knowledge and make the appropriate
inferences essential to comprehend the message (Byrnes, 1984). Therefore, teachers

need to help students organize their thought, to activate appropriate background
knowledge for understanding and to make predictions, to prepare for listening. This
significantly reduces the burden of comprehension for the listeners.
On the other hand, listeners do not pay attention to everything; they listen selectively,
according to the purpose of the task. This, in turn, determines the type of listening
required and the way in which listeners will approach a task. Richards (1990)
differentiates between an interactional and a transactional purpose for communication.
Interactional use of language is socially oriented, existing largely to satisfy the social
needs of the participants; eg., small talk and casual conversations. Therefore,
interactional listening is highly contextualized and two-way, involving interaction with
a speaker. A transactional use of language, on the other hand, is more massage-oriented
and is used primarily to communicate information; e.g., news broadcasts and lectures.
In contrast with interactional listening, transactional listening requires accurate
comprehension of a message with no opportunity for clarification with a speaker (one-

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way listening). Knowing the communicative purpose of a text or utterance will help
the listeners determine what to listen and, therefore, which process to activate. As with
the advantages of knowing the context, knowing the purpose for listening also greatly
reduces the burden of comprehension since listeners know what they need to listen for
something very specific, instead of trying to understand every word.
In short, second language (L2) listening comprehension is a complex process, crucial
in the development of second language competence. Listeners may use all of the above
processes to comprehend. Guiding students through the process of listening not only
provides them with the knowledge by which they can successfully complete a listening
task; it also motivates them and puts them in control of their learning. Therefore,
teachers can help students develop their listening comprehension skill through these
processes by designing appropriate listening tasks and activities.

2.3 Assessing listening ability
For the two last decades, listening comprehension skills have begun to receive a lot
more systematic attention in language teaching classrooms. A wide range of books,
articles, and materials aimed at assisting teachers to develop learners’ listening skills
are now available, and a variety of comprehension-based methodologies have been
proposed. However, although many of the tasks used for teaching listening are
virtually identical to those which appear in tests, assessment of listening ability has
received relatively limited coverage in the language testing literature.
2.3.1 Indicators of listening ability
Communicating orally (ability to learn oral language) addresses the necessary skills
and their prerequisites for the acquisition of oral language.
Purposes of communication addresses the use of oral language within our social
communications.
Conventions of language addresses the rules governing the sounds, sentences and
genres of oral language.

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Ideas communicated addresses the meanings of words, sentences, discourse and topics
of language.
2.3.2 Methods to assess listening ability
The method used for assessing oral communication skills, including listening ability
depends on the purpose of the assessment. A method that is appropriate for giving
feedback to students who are learning a new skill is not appropriate for evaluating
students at the end of a course. However, any assessment method should adhere to the
measurement principles of reliability, validity, and fairness. The instrument must be
accurate and consistent, it must represent the abilities we wish to measure, and it must
operate in the same way with a wide range of students.
Listening is usually defined as a receptive skill comprising both a physical process and

an interpretive, analytical process (Lundsteen, 1979). However, this definition is often
expanded to include critical listening skills (higher-order skills such as analysis and
synthesis) and non-verbal listening (comprehending the meaning of tone of voice,
facial expressions, gestures, and other nonverbal cues).
Listening tests typically resemble reading comprehension tests except that the student
listens to a passage instead of reading it. The student then answers multiple-choice
questions that address various levels of literal and inferential comprehension.
Important elements in all listening tests are (1) the listening stimuli, (2) the questions,
and (3) the test environment.
The listening stimuli should represent typical oral language, and not consist of simply
the oral reading of passages designed to be written material. The material should
model the language that students might typically be expected to hear in the classroom,
in various media, or in conversations. Since listening performance is strongly
influenced by motivation and memory, the passages should be interesting and
relatively short. To ensure fairness, topics should be grounded in experience common

14


to all students, irrespective of sex and geographic, socioeconomic, racial, or ethnic
background.
In regard to questions, multiple-choice items should focus on the most important
aspects of the passage - not trivial details - and should measure skills from a particular
domain. Answers designated as correct should be derived from the passage, without
reliance on the student's prior knowledge or experience. Questions and response
choices should meet accepted psychometric standards for multiple-choice questions.
An alternative to the multiple-choice test is a performance test that requires students to
select a picture or actually perform a task based on oral instruction. For example,
students might hear a description of several geometric figures and choose pictures that
match the description, or they might be given a map and instructed to trace a route that

is described orally.
The testing environment for listening assessment should be free of external
distractions. If stimuli are presented from a tape, the sound quality should be excellent.
If stimuli are presented by a test administrator, the material should be presented
clearly, with appropriate volume and rate of speaking.
2.4 Teaching the listening skill
According to Underwood (1989, p.90), 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.
2.4.1 Factors affecting EFL learners’ listening ability
Of the four basic language English language skills, listening skill seems to be the most
complex skill to be acquired by students. Many authors have mentioned this problem
such as Underwood (1989), Ur (1996), Rost (1994) or Lynch (2005) in their
researches.

15


According to Underwood (1989), there are seven problems relating to listening
aptitude that students may come across: (1) lack of control over the speakers’ speaking
speed; (2) inability to get information repeated; (3) the listener’s narrow vocabulary;
(4) failure to catch the signals; (5) issues of interpretation; (6) inability to concentrate
and (7) established fixed learning habit. She explained that these frustrating issues
relate to students’ different educational and cultural backgrounds. Students whose
“culture and education includes a strong storytelling and oral communication
tradition are generally ‘better’ at listening than those from a reading and book-based
culture and education background”. Furthermore, “students for whom the stress and
cadence which occur in English are logically more familiar and have less trouble than
those whose own language is based on different rhythms and tones” (Underwood,
1989). From that point of view, students in Vietnam whose language is made of

different tones encounter a great deal of difficulties in learning listening skills. Despite
the consequences, when teaching listening, teachers should be able to expose students
to “real-life situations” as they need to teach students to listen with a purpose. One
more pain lies in the lack of a variety of listening materials which causes dullness and
boredom in the classrooms. Conventional textbooks and constructed audio files are not
only repetitive but also counter-productive when it comes to the long-term purpose of
learning listening skills. Learners need to develop certain interest in order to obtain the
integrative motivation to successfully master the skills. Inadequate audio visual
materials are mostly to blame in this situation.
2.4.2 Difficulties EFL learners have when learning listening
It can be seen second language learners at beginning level have to deal with a great
deal of difficulties in listening comprehension as listening is a receptive. Considering
various aspects of listening comprehension, Underwood( 1989) points out the seven
listening problems Goh (2002) investigates listening comprehension problems in
students in college EFL studies. Findings include ten listening comprehension
problems in relation to three cognitive processing phases.

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2.4.3 Principles for teaching EFL listening
Expose students to different ways of processing information: bottom-up vs. top-down.
To understand how people make sense of the stream of sound we all hear, it is helpful
to think about how we process the input. A useful metaphor often used to explain
reading but equally applicable to listening is “bottom-up vs. top-down processing,”
proposed by Rumelhart and Ortony (1977) and expanded upon by Chaudron and
Richards (1986), Richards (1990), and others. The distinction is based on the way
learners attempt to understand what they read or hear. With bottom-up processing,
students start with the component parts: words, grammar, and the like. Top-down
processing is the opposite. Learners start from their background knowledge, either

content schema (general information based on previous learning and life experience)
or textual schema (awareness of the kinds of information used in a given situation)
Expose students to different types of listening. There’s an adage in teaching listening
that says: It’s not just what they are listening to. It’s what they are listening for.
Listeners need to consider their purpose. They also need to experience listening for
different reasons. Any discussion of listening tasks has to include a consideration of
types of listening. We will consider tasks as well as texts. When discussing listening,
text refers to whatever the students are listening to, often a recording.
Teach a variety of tasks. If learners need experience with different types of listening
texts, they also need to work with a variety of tasks. Since learners do the tasks as they
listen, it is important that the task itself doesn’t demand too much production of the
learner. If, for example, a beginning level learner hears a story and is asked to write a
summary in English, it could well be that the learner understood the story but is not yet
at the level to be able to write the summary. Tasks that require too much production
can’t be done or can’t be done in real time -and if students get the answer wrong, you
don’t know if they really didn’t understand, or if they did understand but didn’t know
how to respond, or if they understood at the time but forgot by the time they got to the
exercise.

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