A study of using english songs as a type of supplementary material in teaching listening for first year non major students of english at phuong dong university

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale of the study.

If you are a passionate teacher coming to class eagerly and enthusiastically and then are struck
by sayings like these: “ Teacher, we hate listening lessons. Why don’t we change it for another
thing?” ; “ Teacher, we are so afraid of listening, please don’t do it” or “ Teacher, I can’t
catch anything from the tape. I completely have no head for listening.” you will feel like
falling short in your career. However, this is a common problem among non-major students of
English and is somehow a puzzle to many teachers of English.

Like many young teachers, I used to show this confusion to some experienced teachers and
was advised that students would get used to the subject themselves gradually, and the only
thing I could do is let them have time to do it. However, in my opinion, the first impression is
very important so if students learn listening with a fear at the beginning, this fear will bring
nothing to their present listening skill as Lewis. M and Hill. J (1992: 20) argue: “ If you feel
pressurized, afraid, or tense, even if you perform, at that moment, you will probably forget”.
Not stop at that point, the feeling of fear also have greater effect on the student’s later study as
it can “ destroy students’ interest for the subject and spoil their creativeness” ( Sesnan, B.
2001: 122). On the other hand, Lightbrown, P.M & Spada, N (1999) show that students never
learn everything they are taught, they only learn what they are interested in. And they even
prove that students are unlikely to be very successful at learning anything unless they enjoy
the process.

From that point of view, I think that this puzzle can only be solved by finding an answer to the
question: “ How to help students change from the feeling of fear to the one of interest when
they are doing listening?” However, interest is something very unstable and unpredictable
because it depends on many factors such as: the content of the subject, the necessary of it, the
method of the teacher, or even the weather of the day. That explains the reason why it takes

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teachers a great effort and trial to maintain the students’ interest in the lesson and avoid the
boredom also. Barry Sesnan (2001) when describing a good teacher as the one who does not
only use a good teaching method, but also takes into consideration of how to teach students to
learn effectively by themselves and help them to involve themselves with interest in the
learning process, suggests some main ways to hold students’ interest such as: audio-visual
aids including objects, flash cards, pictures, overhead projector transparency, film, video, and
language activities like games, songs, story-telling, projects. Of all the items, songs seem to
be the most available and easiest to exploit to the author. She, therefore, chose them as the
means to do an experimental research on how to interest students in listening lessons. That is
the reason why this paper is made a study of using English songs as a kind of supplementary
material in teaching listening skill to first year non-major students’ of English with a hope
that they will have a more positive attitude to this very communicative skill.

1.2 .Hypothesis
This study was designed to test the following hypothesis:
Songs can be used to enhance students’ motivation in listening to English as well as to
improve their bottom-up listening skills such as word recognition, awareness of word
linking, awareness of word stress, enhancing their attention while listening as well as
comprehension skills.

1.3. Aims of the study.

Parallel with the above reasons leading to the research are some following aims:
-

To investigate the effectiveness of using English songs in teaching listening skill to
non-major students.

-

To discuss some suggestions of how to use English songs in teaching listening skill in
classroom.


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1.4. Scope of the study.

In this study, the author intended to deal with the question of how to motivate students through
English songs not taking care of other kinds of activities such as poems, stories or games.
They included country songs and love songs that have soft music with quite easy words and
simple content. These songs were experimented for the period of one term (15 weeks).
They were used at the end of the lesson not at the beginning as warmers.
Due to the limited time, the author could not implement the research for a longer term and
study on a larger population. The chosen population contained 60 students from two classes at
the same level. The aimed teaching purpose was practicing the listening skills for students
through English songs.

At last, the study did not mean a collection of English songs but studying the efficiency of
using songs as a supplementary teaching material and also discussing an appropriate method
of exploiting them in classroom effectively.

1.5. Methodology.

The major method which was used in this study is qualitative. All comments, remarks
assumptions and conclusion of the study were based on the data and analysis. Data collections
for

analysis

in

the

study

were

gained

through

the

following

resources:

- Survey questionnaires.
- Interviews.
- Tests for students.
The questionnaire was designed for the students. However, sometimes interviews were also
applied if the author find that the answers of respondents were not clear enough.

1.6. Design of the study

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The paper was designed with three chapters as follows:
Chapter 1 was the introduction in which I would like to present the rationale of choosing the
topic, the aim of the study, the scope of the study and the methods to be applied.,
Chapter 2 was the development which composes of three main parts.
•

Part 1 set up some theoretical backgrounds that are relevant to the purpose of the study

•

Part 2 investigated the situation of using English songs at Phuong Dong university and
find out the students’ point of view about using songs in classes.

•

Part 3 dealt with some personal recommendations and suggestions.

The chapter 3 summarized the major findings discussed in chapter II. Some suggestions for
further study were also included in this chapter.


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CHAPTER 2: DEVELOPMENT
PART 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1 The place of listening in foreign language course.

According to Howatt and Dakin, 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. Defined with those characteristics, listening must
surely come first in communication. Actually, we start listening as a baby, and we do an awful
lot of it when we begin to speak. Not stop at that point, listening is also the most practiced one
in the second language study because it is the principal way to acquire the language as Adrian
Doff (1996) states that “ Listening to spoken English is an important way of picking up the
structures and vocabulary”. To prove this point, he shows a situation in which learners are
living in a country where English is the first language. He assures that these learners have such
plenty of exposure to the language- they hear it all the time, that they acquire it much more
easily than the others.

Moreover, listening is also a condition for developing speaking skill. Still Adrian Doff (1996)
emphasizes that “ We cannot develop speaking skill unless we develop listening skill”. In
deed, a good speaker needs to be a good listener first

because to have a successful

conversation, students must understand what is said to them first and they can only do the
understanding through listening.

In addition to that, listening is also crucially as important as a kind of “spirit medicine” as “
students experience a degree of powerlessness when they cannot understand the language.”
(Paul Bress: 2001: 42). In other word, the more learners understand the more powerful they
feel and the more confidence they have in their ability to communicate. This feeling of


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confidence is very important as it helps foster the learners’ motivation and cherish their
interest in the lesson, therefore leads to the later stable progress.

In short, the importance of listening in language learning is undeniable.

It is the most

communicative and practised skill and needs to be developed as much as possible.

1.2. Listening Process

A variety of insights into listening process have been developed in the past fifteen years, and
there are two points on which most researchers and teachers continue to agree on: the first one
is that listening is an active rather than a passive process and the second is that listening is
both a top-down and bottom-up process.

We can see that listening is active because there is often a great difference between what is
said and what the listener “hears”. It is obvious that the listener is constructing his or own
meaning, which sometimes corresponds to the speaker’s meaning and sometimes does not.
This happens both in our native language and the second one. This state is described as an
“interactive” process, in which both the activity of the listener’s mind interacts with the input
to form an understanding.

Researchers also tend to agree that the listening process contains both bottom-up and topdown elements. Bottom-up process refers to the listening process that starts with
discriminating sounds, identifying words and comprehending grammatical structures and build
eventually to the comprehension of meaning. This is a somewhat mechanistic or “datadriven” (Brown-1994) view of processing. Whereas, top-down process may be described as
holistic or “conceptually driven” (Brown) in that they focus on the overall meaning of a
passage, and the application of schemata. Schemata are mental frameworks based on past
experiences whish can be applied to help us interpret the current situation. Inferring ideas,
guessing word’s meaning, and identifying topics are all examples of top-down processing. As
such, bottom-up process sees language comprehension as a process of passing through a

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number of consecutive sequences or levels and the output of each sequence becomes the input
for the next higher one. That is the reason why Buck (2001) considers it one-way street. On
the contrary, in top-down process the various types of knowledge involve in understanding
language are not applied in any fixed order. They can be used in any order or even
simultaneously, and they are all capable of interacting and influencing each other. According
to this process, it is quite possible to understand the meaning of a word before decoding its
sound, because we have many different types of knowledge, including knowledge of the world
around us. In most situations we know what normally happens and so we have expectations
about what we will hear. These maybe either precise or vague but while we are listening, we
almost always have some hypotheses about what is likely to come next. In such cases it is not
necessary to utilize all the information available to us- we can just take enough to confirm or
reject our hypotheses. To take a well-know example, if we hear the following uncompleted
sentence “she was so angry, she picked up the gun, aimed and…..” We know what is going to
happen and we probably need very little acoustic information to understand the final word, be
it ‘fired’, ‘shot’ or whatever. As we listen, we will expect a word such as fired and we will
possibly process only enough of the sound to confirm our expectation, or we may not even
bother to listen to the last word at all. Our background knowledge about guns and what angry
people do with them helps us to determine what the word is.

It, therefore, can be seen that the two processes are both important for learners in
understanding the language since both of them can offer keys to determining the meaning of
spoken discourse. So it is advisable to the teacher to help their students understand the
importance of those listening processes, from which they would utilize suitable listening
strategies for comprehension.

1.2 Songs as a motivator for students to listen.

The importance of motivation in second language teaching and learning has been discussed for

many years; teachers and researchers believe that motivation plays an important part in the


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process of acquiring an additional language because motivated students are usually those who
participate actively in class, express interest in the subject-matter, and study a great deal. But
since motivation is something very personal, it is not easy to develop. However, “If we can
make our classrooms places where students enjoy coming because the atmosphere is
supportive and non-threatening, we can make a positive contribution to students’ motivation to
learn” (Lightbrown, P.M & Spada, N.,1999). For this sake, songs seem to do very well.

Songs have a great tendency to attract the attention of students that other forms of the mass
media lack. According to Subramaniyan A. Nambiar (1985), “ Even the person who is totally
tone deaf may at times considers himself a good singer and a person who cannot understand
the words of a song can still appreciate the song itself.” Songs, especially current pop songs
exert a great influence over the young generation from which our students come. And because
songs deal with the whole realm of human emotions and experiences- from love, hate, joy, to
loneliness and sadness, they really appeal to the young people.

Secondly, students are often willing to learn to sing a song in a foreign language even if they
do not fully understand or partially understand the meaning of the words. This allows them a
chance to relax from the pressure of the study. By that way, songs blow a new fresh air into
the serious and tedious routine of the class, they introduce an atmosphere of gaiety, fun and
informality in the classroom which is far more conductive environment for language learning
than a strictly regimented atmosphere where students are pounced upon for the least bit of
deviation

from

grammatical

norms

or

for

making

any

‘unnecessary’

noise.

Lo and Li (1998) states that songs provide a break from classroom routine, and that learning
English through songs develops a non-threatening classroom atmosphere in which the four
language skills can be enhanced.

Moreover, while many students find it difficult and stressful to learn a new language, songs
can help wash away these feelings. Each song has its own lyrics and as the lyrics comes out
from the composer’s heart with tempo and rhyme, it is easy to penetrate into other’s people’s


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hearts. That is the reason why when students mumble the words of the songs along the lyrics,
they gradually get used to the language and find it easier to learn. According to McDonald
(1984), the use of the songs in English classroom allows the students to “hide behind the

music” and then “avoids the heat of an early spotlight landing on a timid students.” By that
way, “It also wraps the students’ perceptions of how difficult it is to use the new language.
The result is ..a loss of certain inhibitions, a new respect for one’s own voice and the learning
of whatever vocabulary, grammar, …the song has to offer” (McDonald, 1984:35)

In addition to that, when songs are played, the group spirit is really fostered, which is a great
help to students in their practice of the language skill. And because the students can carry the
song beyond classroom doors and sing for their family and friends. This, in turn, tends to
reinforce the students’ interest in learning English.

In short, speaking like Finocchiaro (1973:174) by using songs “language learning can be
combined with recreation or aesthetic appreciation for a change of pace in the classroom to
enhance motivation” . However, the writer of this paper would like to quote Spencer’ words as
a way to conclude this point, that is “Songs provide preliminary materials to the listening
exercises and also give the students a clear and concrete reason for listening” (Spencer-1994)

1.4. Aspects of listening comprehension that can be improved through songs.

What is listening comprehension? According to Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching &
Applied Linguistics:
Listening comprehension is the process of understanding speech in a second or
foreign language. The study of listening comprehension processes in second or
foreign language learning focuses on the role of individual linguistic units (e.g.
phonemes, words, grammatical structures) as well as the role of the listener’s
expectations, the situation and context, background knowledge and the topic. (Jack
C. Richards, John Platt, Heidi Platt, 2000).


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According to Harmer, listening is special because listening comprehension is a process in
which our mind has to complete instantly the process of receiving, processing, and interacting
with the relevant linguistic knowledge. This requires the listener to have a high sensibility and
discerning ability in pronunciation and its connection with word meanings. Especially when
listening to a foreign language, it is very hard for the listener to have an immediate response to
the information and catch the meaning if he/she does not possess enough linguistic and other
relevant knowledge of the language. That is the reason why freshmen feel anxious and
confused in listening lessons. However hard they try, they make little progress. They also
worry about how to avoid making any mistakes in order to save face. They get very nervous,
which slows down their normal thinking speed and distract their concentration.

However, songs are proved to be an effective supporter in improving listening comprehension
among students without giving stress. According to Stefan Chiarantano(2004), using songs is
“a fun way to improve listening comprehension.” To prove this point, he divides listening for
comprehension into three stages as follows:
1. Listening and making no response (following a written text, informal teacher talk)
2. Listening and making short responses (obeying instructions - physical movement,
building models, picture dictation. etc.), true- false exercises, noting specific
information, etc.
3. Listening and making longer response (repetition and dictation, paraphrasing,
answering questions, answering comprehension questions on texts, predictions, filling
gaps, summarizing, etc)
And he confirms that songs can be designed to serve all of these stages of listening
comprehension.
Nambiaar, S.A (1985) seems to share this point with Stefan Chiarantano as he states that
“using songs is one effective way to enhance students’ listening comprehension” . To make it


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clearer, he mentions three main aspects that enhance students’ comprehension: grammar,
vocabulary, and phonology and he proves that songs can do well on all of these fields.
Grammatically, songs can be used as a form of reinforcement for the particular structural item
that had been taught in the previous lessons, and alternatively songs could also be used as an
introduction to the particular grammatical item. For this point, he mention the song ‘Living on
a jet plane’ as an example of the present continuous tense and the song ‘ Where have all the
flowers gone” as an example of the present perfect tense. About vocabulary, he argues that
songs can offer an active vocabulary learning as “numerous words that deal with a particular
theme or emotion abound in the songs” For example, the song ‘Love is blue’ can be used to
teach students about words of colours. Phonologically, songs can also be used to introduce
some particular phonological features as “ the words of songs are from the authentic language
so they are very rich in phonological forms such as: ‘wanna’ for ‘want to’ or ‘gonna’ for
‘going to’”. Moreover, while listening to the songs, students can also foster the pronunciation
of the words.
Lynch, L.M (1993) adds the point that “ the use of songs can also help develop skill for
details” To do it, songs must be designed into cloze or linking activities in which some words
or linking words are omitted from the songs and students’ duty is to listen to the songs and
then complete them. These activities allow students an opportunity to study the sentence
structures as well as the meaning of the lyrics, which, therefore “develops students’ listening
comprehension” (Lynch, L.M 1993: 23)
In conclusion, as songs provide an enjoyable way to introduce or review vocabulary, teach
pronunciation, present structures and sentence patterns in a novel way, “it's an innovative and
efficient method to use English songs to improve students' listening and speaking also”.
(Lynch, L.M. 1993:23)


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PART 2: A STUDY OF USING SONGS AS A SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL IN
TEACHING LISTENING FOR THE FIRST-YEAR NON-MAJOR STUDENTS OF

ENGLISH AT PHUONG DONG UNIVERSITY.
2.1. Hypothesis:
As presented above, this study was designed with the aim of testing the following hypothesis:
Songs can be used to enhance students’ motivation in listening to English as well as to
improve their bottom-up listening skills such as word recognition, awareness of word
linking, awareness of word stress, enhancing their attention while listening as well as
comprehension skills.

2.2 Method orientation.

This research was conducted as a qualitative study, using questionnaire and interview, along
with the test to collect data. Maykut and Morehouse (1994) define qualitative research as
generally examining people’s words, actions in narrative or descriptive ways more closely
representing the situation as experienced by the participants. The aim of qualitative research is
to discover meanings that emerge after close observation, careful documentation and
thoughtful analysis.

qualitative

2.3Subject Profile
The research was carried out at Phuong Dong university with the participation of sixty firstyear non-major students. They all were in the second term and from two different classes of


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Bio-technology department. To those students, English was not their major but a compulsory
subject in the schedule. Being technical students, English to them was really an impossible
subject as they always complained that “it has so many rules, it is so complicated” and that
they “have no head for English”. However, as English was taught and examined through four
skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, it is became more indigestible to them. Of the

four skills, listening was always the most horrible to the students as it was the first time they
learn English via skills so they could not get used to listening to English. That was the reason
why many of them either often played truant or did their private things during listening
lessons. That state resulted in their very low marks or even failure in the examination of
English.

That was the reason why the author would like to conduct this research of using

songs as a type of supplementary material in teaching listening skill in order to erase their
prejudice against listening skill, evoke their like for this very communicative skill and then
help improve this bad state among the students.
2.4 Procedures and methods of data collection

•
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•
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The questionnaire and the test

&

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To obtain the above objectives, the questionnaire was designed with five questions which
focused on five main aspects that the researcher would like to investigate as follows:
Question 1 aimed at finding out the students’ attitude toward English songs in general.
Question 2 and 3 worked out the favourite activities that students often do when they listen to
English songs .
Question 4 clarified students’ awareness of effectiveness of English songs in teaching
listening skill.
Question 5, in the end, brought about the failure of using songs in teaching listening skill.
Along with the questionnaire, two tests of listening (pre-test and post-test) were designed in
the model of the achievement test which is being used to assess students’ listening skill every
term.
2.6. The use of the songs in the lessons.
In this study, songs were mainly designed in the form of tasks for students to solve at the end
of the lesson as an extra activity. They were commonly taught in about ten to fifteen minutes
at the end of each lesson via three steps as follows:
At the first step, the teacher presented the background of the song ( including the composer,
the singer or the circumstance in which it was written), taught some important new words and
then explained to the students what they were expected to do while listening ( for example:
putting song lines in the order, filling in the missing words, or correcting the mistakes.. see
appendix 1)
Secondly, when students prepared to listen, the teacher put them in pairs and asked them to
skim through the handout to make some guesses about lines order or missing words.
Finally, teacher played the song, allowing students first to listen once from the beginning to
the end. Then she played the tape more slowly, pausing after each verse so that students had
time to do the task. After three times, teacher asked for students’ work and then corrected
them. In the end, students could either sing along or discuss the content of the songs.

2.7.


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The aim of the questionnaire was to explore students’ attitudes toward the use of English
songs in learning process in class. What the students thought about the use of English songs
and to what extent they got engaged in listening skill in the classroom would provethe use of
songs in teaching and learning listening skill effective or not. All the survey questions were
handed out to students who had access to English songs in class. And below are what they
revealed.
a. Students’ attitude toward English songs

Attitude
like very much
like a bit

10% 3%
37%

50%

no idea
dislike

Chart 1: The students’ attitude toward English songs
This pie chart illustrates vividly the students’ attitude toward English songs. From the chart, it
can be seen that most of the students held their interest in English songs. Of 87% who showed
their keenness on English songs, as much as half of them expressed their great love for these
“wonderful chants” ( as they said). However, there were still ten percent having no concern

about the songs and even three percent of them even frankly showed their dislike to English
songs. These people, when discussing with the survey-conductor said that in their opinion
English songs are too difficult to listen and too complicated to understand and that they would
prefer to listen to Vietnamese songs. These illustrations are very important as they relate to the
students’ later performance in all listening lessons. Though it used to be supposed to get


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negative reaction as the subjects were all non-major of English, these meaningful numbers are
really a good start for the later study.
b Students’ manner of listening to English songs and their favourite activities while listening
to songs.

Students' manner of listening to songs
6.70%

13.30%

30%
50%

try to take note.
Listen attentively and remember the content.
Try to catch the words of the song.
Just relaxed and listen for fun.

Chart 2: Students’ manner of listening to songs.
Mentioning students’ manner of listening to English songs, the survey resulted in quite
surprising numbers. There were only 6.7% of the students listening to the songs for fun. The

rest all tried to link it with pratising their listening skill. As much as half of them tried to catch
the key words of the songs and 30% of them tried to remember the content of the songs during
the time they were listening to them. Especially, there were13.3% of them trying to write
down the main ideas of the songs though they knew it is not easy at all to do that task. As so, it
can be seen that along with their great love for English songs, most students showed their very
positive manner of approaching English songs.


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To link the songs with the listening skill, the teacher did design some tasks for the students to
do while they were listening to English songs. The below table demonstrates which task or
activity is more appealing to students.
Table 1: Students’ favourite activities while they are listening to songs

interest

1

2

3

4

5

20%

20%

13.3% 13.3%

20%

13.3% 20%

23.3%

20%

13.3% 20%

30%

choices
Answering the comprehensive 33.3%
questions.
Summarizing the content of the 23.3%
songs
Gap-filling

16.6%

Discussing about the meaning of 20%

23.3% 23.3% 16.6% 16.6%

the song.
Dictation

30%

20%

30%

13.3% 6.6%

Arrange jumbled lines.

10 %

23.3% 13.3% 20%

33.3%

Note:1. The least interest and 5. The most interest
From the table it can be said that students’ interest for the activities differs greatly. The most
favourite activity to them is to arrange jumble lines. As much as 53.3% of them considered it
the interest and the most interest one. When discussing about the reason, they all stated that
this task is quite easy to do and it does not require much attention. Gap-filling is at the second
position with half of the tickets. Many students who liked this activity claimed that they felt
engrossed in the task as it is both challenging and amazing. “My curiosity is always raised


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utmost when I do this task. It is wonderful feeling when I can fill in a right word. It feels like
catching a fish after a long time of waiting” (Le Hoai Thuong)

Surprisingly, summarizing the content of the song is the third of the most favourite activities.
Nearly half of the students (43%) chose it the interest one. When asked for the reason, they all
argued that because they were always curious about the content of the songs, this task is really
helpful as it enables them to have a full understanding of the song.
It is quite unexpected that dictation is at the bottom of the list. Of 19.9% of the students who
expressed their love for this activity, only 6.6% of them said that they liked it very much. The
rest all claimed that they did not have much interest in this task as it is either boring or timeconsuming. Together with dictation is answering the comprehensive questions. Not many of
the students showed their like for this activity (26.6%). This is understandable as this task
seems to be the most difficult one and requires a lot of sub-skill to fulfill.
c. The effectiveness of English songs in teaching listening skill.
Involved in those activities, students unconsciously became interested in listening lessons.
This fact is proved through the table below:
Table 2: The effectiveness of English songs in teaching listening skill.
Choices

Agreement

1

2

3

4

5

Makes the listening lesson more relaxing.

6.6

6.6

6.6

33.3 46.6

Make the listening lesson more enjoyable

0

10

6.6

33.3 50

Develops my confidence in listening to English.

10

20

20

30

20

Helps me to listen to English better

3.3

10

16.6 50

20

Helps me to recognize key words while listening

3.3

0

36.6 43.3 16.6

Helps me pay greater attention to word stress

3.3

3.3

36.6 46.6 10

Develops my guessing skill

0

13.3

23.3 30

Helps me to discriminate English sounds better.

13.3

23.3

40

33.3

13.3 10


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Note: 1.Strongly disagree 2. Disagree 3. Don’t know 4. Agree 5. Strongly agree
These numbers speak volume for the students’ awareness of the effectiveness of English songs
to their listening lessons. Firstly, it can be seen clearly that most of the students agreed that
English songs help make their lessons both more relaxing and more enjoyable Of 79.9 % of
the students who were consent to the first choice, as much as 46.6 % expressed their strong
agreement. The number for the second choice is 50%. This is really important as it means the
class is no longer covered with the feeling of anxiety and unwillingness but joy and fun. This
marks a raise in students’ motivation for the skill as when they find the lesson enjoyable, they
will like to learn it more and more and when they feel relaxed in it , they will do it better and
better: “I can’t speak out exactly when I did start liking listening lessons but I am sure that
listening lessons are not as horrible as I used to expect”( Nguyen Thi To-503301 classBiology department)
Especially, most of the students approved that they felt much more confident in doing

listening skill, which never happened before. As much as 50% of them stated strongly that
they were no longer nervous or stressed when doing listening task but calm and confident : “It
is like a magic because I am not afraid of listening skill anymore but I feel like doing it as I
want to learn and sing English songs” ( Tong Thanh Mai-503301 class- Biology department).
This positive result reassures that English songs do a great help in raising students’ motivation
in learning listening skill.
However, there still exist 20% of them showing no concern about this question. When being
asked for reasons, they explained that they felt excited to solve the tasks with songs but this
excitement could not erase the feeling of nervousness when they dealt with the real listening
exercises: “ I don’t know how to express this state but however eager I am to do tasks with
the songs, I can’t stay calm when doing the real listening tasks” ( Hoang Giang-503301 classBiology department)


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In addition to that, English songs also help improve students’ listening skill. This point is
supported by 70% respondents, who claimed that their listening skill is better than before. OF
the rest, 16.6% made no decisions, and 13.3% found no progress in their study of the skill.
However, this state will be made clearer by the analysis of the following choices about some
sub-skills of listening such as word recognition, awareness of word stress, guessing skill and
enhancing their attention.. Firstly, it can be seen from the table that guessing skill seems to be
the most progressive one as 63.3 % students said that their guessing skill was improved
through songs. Word recognition stands at the second place with the number of 59.9% and it is
followed by the skill of awareness of word stress which is illustrated by 56.6%. Surprisingly,
sound discrimination skill is put at the bottom of the list with only 23.3% of the learners who
claimed that songs helped them discriminate sounds better. Most of the students found this
sub-skill quite difficult to do, so they either showed no concern for it (40), or disagreed with
the statement (36.6).

The thing should be noted here is that the number of students who had no idea on these poins

seems to be high. 36.6 is the number of students who did not know whether songs help them to
recognize key words while listening or pay greater attention to word stress. For guessing skill
it is 23.3%. These people, perhaps, neither saw any progress in their skills nor paid much
attention to them. Regardless these things, it can be concluded that songs can help students
improve some bottom-up listening skills such as word recognition, awareness of word stress,
enhancing their attention while listening as well as comprehension skills.

d. Some disadvantages of using songs in teaching listening skill.

Question 5 in the survey is very important as it helps to find out the disadvantages of using
songs in teaching listening skill. Answering this question, students spoke out any things of the
songs that made them fail to improve their listening skill. According the feedback from the
students, there are two main things that prevent the songs from developing their listening skill
as follows:


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The first thing is the music of the songs. This seems quite absurd but it is the music of the
song that distracted students from the words, as the music was so beautiful, it attracted
students’ mind so much that they followed it and then could not focus on the task with the
words of the songs. This state is common among 20% respondents who are all poor students.

The second thing is that in the songs the assimilation happened so commonly that many
students especially the ones with poor pronunciation found it very difficult to recognize the
words of the songs. About 30% of the students complained that they sometimes could not
catch the words although they are easy and already-learned words. “Some words sound so
strange in the song that I cannot recognize them even though I know it already.” ( Tran Van
Thanh-503301 class- Biology department)
In short, it can be drawn out that though songs offer a lot of help in improving students’

listening skill, they have some drawbacks which should be noted when they are applied as a
type of teaching materials.
2.8. Tests’ result analysis.

The aim of the listening tests was to answer the question what progress the songs help
students to make in their skill. The time for the test was within fifteen minutes. During the test,
the teacher worked as a cassette player and examiner. The marking was done with the same
way of assessment and then was analyzed in turn. The class with English songs in teaching
process was called class A, the other was B. The same test design was delivered to students in
two different periods of time : at the beginning and at the end of the term.

After the tests were collected and marked, the author then analyzed the test scores in terms of
Frequency distribution to find out the range of marks each class reach and measures of
central tendency to clarify the progress tendency of each class. In the same way, the results of


22

the post test were interpreted and compared with those of pre-test. And then the standard
deviation (s.d) was taken into consideration as a very powerful measure of dispersion,. These
data helped the author explore the degree to which the group of test scores deviated from the
mean, then finding out what effects the using of English songs in teaching listening have on
students.

* At the beginning of the term : Pre-test.
-Frequency distribution
Class A
Score
Number of testees

%

Class B
Score Number of testees

%

1

0

0

1

0

0

2

1

3.3

2

2

6.7

3

2

6.7

3

3

10

4

7

23.3

4

4

13.3

5

7

23.3

5

7

26.7

6

5

16.7

6

8

23.3

7

5

16.7

7

4

13.3

8

3

10

8

2

6.7

9

0

0

0

0

0

10

0

0

0

0

0

The mode: 5

The mode: 6

The median: 5

The median: 5
Raw marks in listening (Pre-test)

Percentage of testees

30
20
class A

10

class B

0
1 2

3 4

5 6

Score s

7 8


23

The

data

and

the

table

above

show

that

the

marks

are

ranged from two to eight, in which mark five and six are the most common and students in
class B seem to be of more uniform level whereas class A has more excellent individuals. This
is shown in the table where the column of marks five and six is higher in class B whereas the
column of marks seven and eight is higher in class A.. However, the comparison of the modes
reveal that the class B seems to be better than class A as its modes of six is higher than the one
of class A which is five.
-Correlation:

N
Class A
Class B

30
30

Mean
5.3667
5.1667

Std.
Deviation
1.56433
1.59921

Median
5
5

The mean of 5.3667 says that class A is a little bit better than class B whose mean is 5.1667.
The means also show that in general the students are only at average level. However, the two
class both have the median of five which is fairly corresponding to the mean. The standard
deviation of 1.56433 and 1.59921 shows a very small spread of scores which implies a narrow
range of ability in students of both classes.
* At the end of the term: Post-test
-Frequency distribution


24

Class A
Score
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Class B
Number of testees
0
0
2
2

4
7
9
3
3
0

%
0
0
6.7
6.7
13.3
23.3
30
10
10
0

Score
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0

Number of testees
0
0
3
3
4
8
7
3
2
0

The mode:7

The mode:6

The median: 6

%
0
0
10
10
13.3
26.7
23.3
10
6.7
0

The median: 6
Raw marks in listening (Post-test)

Percentage of
testees

40
30
20
Class A

10
0

Class B

1 2 34 5 67 8 9
S c o re s

Overlooking through the data and the table, we can see that there is a shift in the mark range of
the two class, in which the lowest mark is not two any more but three and the highest one
climbs to nine. This positive sign of six shows a raise in progress of the two class in their
listening skill. This argument is proved more strongly by the median which is one point higher
than the one of the pre-test. However, the full mark (mark 10) is still untouched, which
indicates an average level of difficulty of the test. From the table, it can be seen that class A is
inferior to class B in the below average marks but it outnumbers class B in the above average
marks. In addition, if in the pre-test mode, class A is at the second position to class B, with

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the mode of seven, it takes a reverse place now. As so, it can be drawn out that class A seems
to overtake class B on the way to improve their listening skill.

-Correlation:

Class A

N
30

Mean
6.3667

Std. Deviation
1.62912

Class B

30

5.3000

1.23596

The comparison of the mean reconfirms that class A left class B behind in the progress of
listening skill. Comparing with the mean of the pre-test, we can see that while class B made a
little bit progress( from 5.1667 to 5.300), class A took a big pace with a raise from 5.3667 to
6.3667. This large difference in the mean scores between pre-test and post-test shows very

clearly that after a term of using songs in teaching listening skill, the students’ skill is
improved significantly.

However, there is hardly any change in the standard deviation of the two classes. The standard
deviation of 1.62912 and 1.23596 shows that though there is a shift in the mark range, the
range of ability among students of both classes is still narrow.

In short, the better result of class A can be considered the means to lead to the conclusion that
to some extent English songs bring some efficiency to the listening skill though it is not very
much.

2.9. Discussions of the findings

2.9.1. Achievements