The effects of bottom up techniques in teaching listening skills to first year students at the university of fire fighting and prevention

1

Part A Introduction
1. Rationale
It is undeniable that English is a means of international communication in the fields
of science, technology, culture, education, economy and so on. It is not only the native
language of about 300 million of speakers around the world but also the official language
in many countries as well as second / foreign language in many nations in the world. In
Vietnam, where people are carrying out the modernization and industrialization, English
becomes more important. That is the reason why it has been made a compulsory subject in
the curriculum of almost all universities in Vietnam. In UFFP, English is taught in 270
lesson periods which constitutes a major of the whole curriculum. However, English
teaching is strongly influenced by the traditional methodology. Emphasis has been placed
on the mastery of forms and vocabulary, rather than the language in use. Start a new line in
learning English, listening seems to be the most difficult skill for first year students of
UFFP. There are a number of possible reasons for this.
First, this might be due to the fact that most students lack necessary strategies to
fulfill the listening tasks. Next, they often have difficulties in catching the meaning from
the tape. Besides, they are afraid of listening and have no head for it. These are among the
problems concerning non-major students of English as Brown (1994; p101) states:
“Teaching beginners is considered by many to be the most challenging level of language
instruction. Since students at this level have little or no prior knowledge of English on
which to build, the teacher and accompanying techniques and materials become a central
determiner in whether or not students accomplish their goals”.
Therefore, it is essential for teachers to find out some ways to help students
overcome their difficulties, and make them feel more comfortable when practicing
listening to English so as to assist them in approving their skills as well.
It is also essential to note that listening, as an efficient channel to provide
comprehensible input for learners, its teachers should be paid due attention to from the
very beginning.
All in all, the above has encouraged the writer of the thesis to carry out the study

entitled:


2

“The Effects of Bottom-up Techniques in Teaching Listening Skills to First Year
Students at the University of Fire Fighting and Prevention”
2. Hypothesis
This study is designed to test the following hypothesis:
“Bottom-up techniques help to enhance UFFP first-year English learners’ listening
comprehension”.
3. Aims of the study
In order to test the above-named hypothesis, this study is aimed at:
- Identifying the difficulties encountered by first year students at UFFP in learning
listening skills and the possibility of applying bottom-up techniques to teach these
skills at the university;
- Investigating the effects of using bottom-up techniques in teaching listening to
first-year students; and
- Formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for improving the
teaching and learning of the listening skills at UFFP.
4. Scope of the study
In this study, the investigator intended to use bottom-up techniques to help first
year students at UFFP overcome their listening difficulties, not taking the other kind of
techniques, i.e. top-down ones. These techniques were experimented over a period of one
term and were applied in the three stages of a listening lesson. Due to the limited time, the
investigator could not implement the research for a longer time and study on a larger
population. The sample population is 70 freshmen from two classes of the same English
proficiency level.
5. Methodology
To fulfill the above aims, qualitative methods have been chosen for the study.

Comments, remarks, comparison, suggestions and conclusions are based on factual
research, observation, experience and discussion. Data for analysis in this study are gained
through the following sources:
- Survey questionnaire;


3

- Pre-test and post-test;
- Interviews, observation and discussion.
6. Design of the study
This minor thesis consists of three parts:
Part A, Introduction, presents the rationale, hypothesis, aims, scope, methodology
and design of the study.
Part B, Development which is divided into 3 chapters:
Chapter 1 sets up theoretical background that is relevant to the purpose of the study.
Chapter 2 deals with analysis of the general learning situation at UFFP, learners’
difficulties in teaching and learning listening skills and the effects of using bottom-up
strategies in teaching listening skill to freshmen at UFFP.
Chapter 3 emphasizes the implications of the study in which suggestions for
improving listening skills to the students at UFFP are proposed.
Part C, Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the limitations
and provides some suggestions for further study.


4

Part B Development

Chapter 1: Literature review

To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to the
reexamination of the concepts most relevant to the thesis’s topic. Firstly, an account of the
theory on listening is made. Secondly, the teaching of listening skills is discussed. Finally,
the listening difficulties for foreign language learners are referred to.
1. 1. Theory on listening
1.1.1. Definitions of listening
It is believed that listening is a significant and essential area of development in a
native language and in a second language. Therefore, there have been numerous definitions
of listening (by O’Malley, Chamost and Kupper (1989); Buck (2001)) which present
different views of scholars towards the concept.
Listening comprehension is viewed theoretically as a process in which individuals
focus on selected aspect of aural input, construct meaning from passages, and relate what
they hear to existing knowledge (O’Malley, Chamost and Kupper (1989)).
According to Rost (1994), listening is referred to a complex process that enables us
to understand spoken language. Harmer (2001, p197) categorizes listening into receptive
skill, the way in which people extract meaning form the discourse they hear or see.
Buck (2001, p31) indicates that listening is an active process of constructing meaning
and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound in which “number of
different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic
knowledge”. In another word, he concluded “comprehension is affected by a wide range of
variables, and that potentially any characteristic of the speaker, the situation or the listener
can affect the comprehension of the message”.
Anderson and Lynch (1988) pointed out that listening is really a receptive skill along
side with reading skills and the role of the listeners is no longer passive but active. After a
period of listening the learners are exposed to be able to talk or write about what they have
heard, that is the objectives of listening comprehension. Moreover, he uses the term
“active model builder” to refer to the listeners’ language; listeners have to build their own
“coherent interpretation” of the spoken message. Both parts of this term are important.

5

First, it needs to be coherent both in what we believe has just been said and with what we
already know about the speaker, the context and the word in general. Second, it is an
interpretation, in the sense that it is our version of what the speaker meant, as far as we are
able to assess that meaning. The two authors use the term “mental model” to refer the
listener’s “coherent interpretation”. This emphasizes the active and personal nature of
successful listening. The mental model that we build as a representation of a spoken of a
message is the result of our combining the new information in what we just heard with our
previous knowledge and experience.
In short, in order to be successful in listening, it is advisable that “listening
comprehension is not a skill which can be mastered once and for all and than ignored while
other skills are developed. There must be regular practice with increasingly difficult
materials” (Wilga, 1986, p157).
1.1.2. Types of listening
There are many different types of listening. We can classify these according to a
number of variables, including listening purposes, the role of the listener and the types of
text being listened to.
Real-life listening
Many students feel a big gap between listening activities in the classroom and actual
situation. This is because most listening materials including dialogues in text books are
very grammar-oriented and controlled in many ways. The speakers often speak with
perfectly controlled speech, voice, tone, accent and correct grammar. Whereas, in real-life
conversations learners encounter various people with different gender, age, accent, speed,
voice, tone. There may be improper grammar usage, incomplete sentences, redundancy,
contractions, overlap and so forth.
There are two ways which people often listen in real-life, they are “casual” and
“focus” listening.
“Casual” listening
A lot of students have a habit of listening to a radio while studying or the television

is on while we are doing something else. We listen with no particular purpose. This kind of
listening is called “casual” listening, the typical feature is that we do not listen closely and


6

intentionally, thus we may not remember much of what we hear or nothing is left in our
mind.
“Focus” listening
“Focus” listening happens when listening for a particular purpose to get the
information we need to know or to study the language. In this case we often listen with
much attention, but we do not listen to every thing with equal concentration. There is an
association between listener expectation and purpose and his comprehension. If the listener
expects and needs are intentional, his listening is likely accurately perceived and
understood than that which is expected, irrelevant or helpful.
Characteristics of real-life listening
In real-life listening, we depend largely on visual information, including speaker’s
facial expression, posture, movement and appearance. When a listener engages in listening,
vocal massage filters through the short-term memory system first, and at this time the
listener focuses on auditory or visual stimulus and concentration on the message received.
Therefore, visual stimuli play a very important role in listening.
As for Ur (1984), it would seem reasonable to say that classroom practice should
usually incorporate such characteristics of real-life listening as:


We listen for a purpose and with certain expectations,



We make an immediate response to what we hear,



We see the person we are listening to,



There are some visual or environmental clues as to the meaning of what is
heard.



Stretch of heard discourse come in short chunks.



Most heard discourse is spontaneous and therefore differs from formal
spoken prose in the amount of redundancy, “noise” and colloquialisms, and in
its auditory characters.

Sometimes particular situations may lack one or more of these characteristics. For
example, when watching television we are not normally expected to respond, when listen
to a lecture we may have to hear uninterrupted speech a very long time indeed, but it is
very rare that none of them is present at all.


7

To sum up, it is obvious that mastering the nature of real-life classroom can help
teachers as well as learners gain success in teaching and learning listening skill.

Classroom listening
Class-room listening may be divided into intensive listening and extensive listening.
Intensive listening
Intensive listening is the careful, focused listening to a short passage for detailed
information or full comprehension, for example, listening to a dialogue on the tape to study
its structures, intonation patterns in an English class.
Extensive listening
Extensive listening is freer and more general listening to natural language for general
ideas, not for a particular detail and not necessary under the teacher’s direct guidance. The
listening passage for extensive listening can be long or short. The language that is used in
the type of listening is often within the students’ current ability so that they find it pleasing
and interesting when they are listening. With this type of listening, students are not
reinforcing a structure or practicing a grammar point linked to the rest of the course.
1.1.3. Listening process
A variety insights into the listening process have been developed in the past 40
years by Richards (1983); Anderson (1983; 1985); Wolvin and Coalky (1985); Underwood
(1989); Buck (2000). Listening to spoken language has been acknowledged in second
language theory to consist of active and complex process that determines the content and
level of what is comprehended. These processes use utterance as the basis for constructing
meaning based propositional presentations that are identified initially in short term
memory and stored in long term memory. Anderson (1983; 1985) differentiates
comprehension into three interrelated and recursive process: perceptual processing, parsing
and utilizing. During a single listening event the processes may flow one into the other,
recycle and may be modified based on what occurred in prior or subsequent processes.
Bang and Ngoc (2001, p38-39) divided the listening process into three stages
namely perception-cracking the code, decoding-making sense of the message, prediction


8

and selection. In the second stage of decoding-making sense of the message they describe
listening process the following model.
1
Perception of
sounds, words
shapes

2
Initial recognition
of meaning of

short

3
Material held in STM
and…

4
Related to materials
already held in STM

5
Related materials
arriving in STM

6
Meaning extracted from message and retained
in LTM

Gist recalled later

Figure 1.1: Model of the process of listening comprehension (Bang and Ngoc, 2001,
p38)
They argued that stages 1 to 6 follow each other very quickly and that the processing
time available within STM may be very short indeed. Stages 2, 3, 4 and 5 involve not only
the recognition of lexical meaning but also the perception of grammatical relationships as
signaled by such things as words orders, tense markers, intonations and so on.
Underwood (1989) divides the aural process into three stages: at the first stage the
sounds go into sensory store often called the "echoic" memory and are organized into
meaningful units, according to the knowledge of the language the listener already has.
Unfortunately, the sounds remain in the echoic memory for a very short time. The listener
does not have very long in which to sort out what is heard and might make errors. The
second stage is processing of the information already held in long term memory. This
again is a very brief stage amounting to no more than a few second. At this point words or
groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the long term
memory and the meaning is extracted from them. When the meaning is grasped the actual


9

words of the spoken discourse are generally forgotten and only the meaning retained.
Therefore, the listeners usually remember the meaning rather than the exact words spoken
when he has to recall what has been said. The basis of listening comprehension is the
ability to recognize and select the specific details in the discourse. It, of course, needs a
certain time for the learners to become used to listening and process some familiar
utterances more automatically.
On the other hand, the conceptions of bottom-up and top-down processes in
comprehension are mentioned by some authors such as Lynch (1988), Rubin (1994),
Nunan (1999). According to them, bottom-up process refers to the listening process that
starts with discriminating sounds, identifying words and comprehending grammatical
structures and build eventually to comprehension of meaning. This is a somewhat

mechanistic or "data-given" (Brown, 1994) view of processing and has been the focus in
some styles of teaching.
Top-down process may be described as holistic or "conceptual driven" in that they
focus on the overall meaning of the passage and the application of schemata. Schemata are
mental frameworks based on past experiences which can be applied to help us interpret the
current situation. Inferring ideas, guessing words’ meaning and identify topics are all
examples of top-down processing. As such, bottom-up process sees language
comprehension as a process of passing through a number of consecutive sequences or
levels and the out put of each sequence becomes the input for the next higher one. That is
the reason why Buck (2001) considers it one way street.
From these ideas, it is useful for students to recognize the importance of both these
types of processing and for teacher to arrange opportunities to work on both aspects.
Generally, bottom-up exercises are more useful for beginners because at this level they
have limited language knowledge, thus, little of what they hear can be automatically
processed. They need to focus on details of what they hear and given limitation of working
memory and speed of speech which affects comprehension and top-down exercises are
more necessary for intermediate and advanced students.
1.2. Teaching listening skills
1.2.1. Common methods of teaching listening


10

In the article about teaching listening, Underwood (1989, p90-109) pointed out that
there are at least four common methods of teaching second or foreign language listening:
grammar-translation, grammar-method, audio-lingual method and task-based method.
Grammar- translation method: By this method, students listen to a description of the
rules of the second language in the first language. As a result, when the second language is
used, the focus of any listening is on translation of lexical items or grammar structures.
Grammar method: to follow this method, the teacher requires students to look at a

written text while they listen to a recording. This forces them to do several things: identify
words by their position in the sentence, work out the relationship between words and
phrases, use forward and backward inferencing cues, and make intelligent guesses based
on textual cues.
Audio-lingual method: Audio-lingual method of listening emphasizes first listening
to pronunciation and grammar forms and then imitating those forms by way of drills and
exercises. Dialogues and drill are the basis of classroom practice with this method.
Students are encouraged to listen carefully either to the taped recording, or a teacher
reading out, a dialogue, or a drill. They then record their own version or respond to cues
from the teachers to repeat parts of the dialogue or drill. Basically, the more the students
repeat a correct phrase or sentence, the stronger of their memory of the structure will be.
Task-based method: this method places stress on activities or tasks that learners do in
class in order to develop their communicative competence. A task-based syllabus should
be constructed according to the difficulty of the tasks required of the learners at different
stages in a course.
In short, the four methods of the teaching listening are not mutually exclusive and in
reality, they may be mixed in any particular course or class. However, nowadays, with the
appearance of Communicative Language Teaching, teaching listening seems to be more of
meaningful to students due to the fact that they have chance to develop their listening skills
and other language skills as well.
1.2.2. Bottom-up techniques in teaching listening
Techniques are defined as the specific activities, exercises or devices used in the
language classroom for realizing lesson objectives (Bang and Ngoc (2002)). They are


11

characterized by the resources in terms of time, space, equipments used by the teacher;
interactional patterns observed in lessons; tactics and strategies used by teachers and
learners.

Bottom-up is the language learning that proceeds from the most basic blocks of
language, such as words, and then proceeding to more complex structures and finally to
meaning. Listening for exact phrases or words would be considered a bottom-up listening.
Studying individual grammatical structures or sentence structures would be bottom-up.
Brown (1994, p260) emphasized that bottom-up techniques typically focus on sounds,
words, intonation, grammar structures, and other components of spoken language.
Generally, bottom-up exercise will be more useful for beginners.
Peterson (1991, p114-121) suggested several techniques for teaching listening
comprehension. Below are some kinds of bottom-up exercises for beginners.
Goal

Example

Discriminating
between

Listen to a sequence of sentence patterns with either rising

intonation

contour in sentences
Discriminating

or falling intonation. Place a check in column 1 (rising) or
column (falling), depending on the pattern you hear.
Listening to pairs of words. Some pairs differ in their final

between phonemes

consonant, and some pairs are the same. Circle the word “same”

or “different”, depending on what you hear.

Selective listening for
morphological endings

Listen to a series of sentences. Circle “yes” if the verb has
an –ed ending, and circle “no” if it does not.

Selecting details from

Match a word that you hear with its picture.

the

Listen to a weather report. Look at a list of words and

text

Recognition)

(Word

circle the words that you hear.
Listen to a sentence that contains clock time. Circle the
clock time that you hear, among three choices (5:30, 5:45, 6:15).
Listen to an advertisement, select the price of an item, and
write the amount on a price tag.


12

Listen to a series of recorded telephone messages from an
answering machine. Fill in a chart with the following
information from each caller: name, number, time, and message.
Listening for normal
sentence word order

Listen to a short dialogue and fill in the missing words that
have been deleted in partial transcript.

1.2.3. Stages of a listening lesson
The teaching of a listening text can be divided in to 3 main stages: Pre-listening,
while-listening, post-listening. Each stage has its own aims and activities.
Pre-listening
Pre-listening stage is of great paramount importance as it leads students to the
listening passage they are going to listen, arouses students’ interest and provides students
with the purposes of listening.
Underwood (1989, p.30) defined pre-listening stage as follows: “Before listening,
students should be "turn in" so that they know what to expect, both in general and
particular tasks. This kind of preparatory work is generally described as “Pre-listening
work” or just “Pre- listening” ”.
As for her, pre-listening work can consist of a whole range of activities, including:
the teacher giving background information, the students reading something relevant, the
students looking at pictures, discussion of the topic/situation, a question and answer
session, written exercises, following the instructions for the while listening activity and
consideration of how the while-listening will be done.
These activities may provide an opportunity for students to gain some knowledge
which help them to follow the listening text. Moreover, each of these activities help
students focus their mind on the topic by narrowing down the things that students expect to
hear. However, the teacher when choosing an activity should consider the factors which

Underwood (1989) mentions: The time, the material is available or not, the interest of the
class and the teacher, the place in which the work is being carried out, the nature and the
content of the listening text itself. If one of these is forgotten, the whole process of activity
can be failed. She especially emphasizes on the importance of the nature of the listening


13

text, because each listening text itself has an especially appropriate type of activities. When
the teacher pays attention to this factor properly, the activity chosen for students will be
more specific and effective.
While-listening
The while-listening stage involves of activities that students are asked to do during
the time they are listening to the text. The purpose of while listening activities is to help
students develop their skills of eliciting messages from spoken language. Rixon (1986)
pointed out the purposes of while-listening stage is to challenge and guide students to
handle the information and the message from the listening text. Activities of this stage
must be interesting and carefully chosen. They must vary at different levels and in different
cases.
At the early stage, students need to learn how the language sounds, how to
distinguish or be aware of the relationship between written words and their spoken forms.
As students listen, they usually apply the skills, the same uses in listening in their mother
tongue, predict what they will hear and try to match them with the things they actually
hear. Therefore, in teaching listening, the teacher should try to give practice in interpreting,
matching and predicting to help students fulfill their listening task less complicatedly.
The topic and the content of the listening text plus the students' interest decide the
success of the while-listening activities. Students may get bored if they have to do the same
kind of work over and over again. Thus, for each purpose and on different occasions,
various activities are needed. Moreover, it is advisable to have activities which are locally
relevant, of the common interest and not too long or laborious.

Activities of this stage should be suitable with students' ability. This means that
while-listening activities can be done by most students, from the slow students to the best
ones. Because failure can quickly discourage students to listen, in the early stage, activities
which are tricky should be used sparingly, but sometimes it is necessary to give students
some challenges.
Post-listening


14

Post-listening activities in post-listening stage are done after the listening is
completed. Some post-listening activities are extensions of the work done at the prelistening and while-listening stage and some relate only loosely to the listening text itself.
According to Underwood (1989), the first purpose of post-listening activities is to
check how well the students understood and whether they have completed the listening
task. The teacher may give an answer orally, showing the answer on the board or on the
over-head projector or ask students to check again the answer in the book. Students can
work in pairs to check each other’s answer or work in group to discuss any problem related
to the listening text. The second purpose of the post-listening work is to reflect on why
some students have failed to understand or miss parts of the passage.
Another purpose of post listening activities is to expand the topic or the language of
the listening text. Students are asked to deal with activities which are more or less general
language learning activities. Sometimes, this does not mean that they should not be done,
but it should be recognized they do not give practice in listening skill, although the
additional language learning can well enable students to listen more successfully in the
future.
The fourth purpose is to give students opportunity to consider the manner and
attitude of the speaker in the listening text. This is also important because the listeners can
see the aims of the speakers based on his/her attitude.
Additionally, the general factors listed in pre-listening and while-listening,
Underwood (1989) indicates that the attention should be given to the following factors in

selecting post-listening activities:


the amount of language work the teacher wish to do in relation to the particular
listening text.



the time which is allowed to do post-listening



the speaking, reading or writing skills should be included in the post-listening
work.



the students should work in pairs or in groups.



the chosen activity should be make motivating.
It can be seen that the learning language programme consists four skills: listening,

speaking, reading, and writing. In fact, speaking, writing and reading can arise from


15

listening, especially from post-listening work. The order and organization of a language

lesson are usually not decided at the same time integrating these into other language skill
work. For instance, the students listen and respond in writing, the teacher ask students to
answer orally. Therefore, listening exercises always involve in the rest three skills.
1.2.4. Teacher’s role in teaching listening
As many students feel afraid of listening, teachers should be a guide to help them and
encourage them.
According to Gardner and Lambert (1972), the way teacher presents the contents
must be dynamics and interesting to get students’ attention. Besides, teachers should have
to look for activities and employ different techniques. Brown (1994) also shared his view
that before the class, teacher should help students think about a schema for what they will
listen to. Rost, M (1994) stated that “language teachers need to provide various types of
support to their learners to help them develop listening skill. This includes talking to
learner in the target language, raising learners’ awareness of their listening styles and
strategies and introducing a range of materials, speaking styles and listening situations”
Underwood (1989, p22) indicates that teacher needs to provide planned and
systematic opportunities for their students to learn how to:


determine what an utterance or conversation is about



establish who is talking and to whom



recondite the mood and attitude of the speakers

Part of the teacher’s role is to ensure that the lesson proceeds in an orderly and
productive way so that the students feel secure and relaxed and unthreatened by the

listening tasks.
1.3. Listening difficulties for foreign language learners
The problems learners may face in learning listening are various. According to
Underwood (1990); Goh (2002), Thompson and Rubin (1996), the problem with foreign
language listening are either listening problem or language problem, depending on the
listeners’ listening abilities and skills. However, these problems are not encountered by all
students, nor are they experienced to the same degree by learners from different
backgrounds.


16

1.3.1. Listening problems
It can be seen that L2 learners at beginning level have to deal with a great deal of
difficulties in listening comprehension as listening is a receptive skill. Considering various
aspects of listening comprehension, Underwood (1989) pointed out the seven listening
problems as follows: (1) lack of control over speech at which speakers speak; (2) not
being able to get thing repeated; (3) the listeners’ limited vocabulary; (4) failure to
recognize the “signal”; (5) problem of interpretation; (6) inability to concentrate; (7)
established learning habits. She saw these problems as being related to learner’s different
backgrounds; such as their culture and education. She pointed out that students whose
culture and education included a strong story telling and oral communication tradition are
generally better as listening comprehension than those from a reading and book-based
cultural and educational background. Moreover, learners whose native language possesses
the stress and intonation feature similar to those of English are likely to have less trouble
than the learners who L1 is based on different rhythms and tones.
Under these assumptions, Vietnamese learners appear to operate under the leastoptimal English language learning circumstances and therefore face many difficulties in
listening comprehension.
Goh (2002) investigated listening comprehension problems in students in college
EFL studies. Findings include ten listening comprehension problems in relation to three

cognitive processing phases: perceptions, parsing and utilization proposed by Anderson
(1983; 1985). First, in the perception stage, learners revealed that their most difficulties as
“do not recognize words they know”; “neglect the next part when thinking about meaning”;
“can not chunk streams of speech”; “miss the beginning of the texts”; and “unable to
concentrate”. In parsing stage, Goh (2002) found that listener complained of problems
such as “quickly forget what’s heard”, “unable to form a mental representation from
words heard”, and “do not understand subsequent part of input because of early problem”.
Third in the utilization stage, “understand the words but not the intended message” and
“confused about the key ideas in the message” were mentioned. These reported difficulties
partially reflect Underwood’s view on L2/FL listening problems.
Yagang (1994) attributed the difficulties of listening comprehension to four sources:
(1) the message; (2) the speaker; (3) the listener and (4) the physical setting. Higgins


17

(1995) studies Omani students’ problems in listening comprehension and find the factors
which hinder listening are: speech rate, vocabulary and pronunciation.
Investigating learners’ strategies and difficulties in listening to academic lectures,
Miller (1996) found that students’ problems were speed of delivery, new terminology and
concepts, problem related to physical environment.
1.3.2. Language problems
Anderson and Lynch (1988, p 37) argued that the L2 learners will still face problems
in listening comprehension created by primarily linguistic knowledge though language
system may not always be the principle cause of comprehension difficulty. They explain
that one seemingly obvious way in which input can be more or less complex is in terms of
its syntactic structure for ESL learners. It is understandable as learners adopt a target
language that possesses certain characteristics far different from their native one in terms
of grammatical structures, lexicon, vocabulary and its mechanism meanwhile listening is
most closely related to mechanics which refer to basic sounds letters and syllables,

pronunciation of words, intonation and stress. Thus, if a beginner can not understand how
words are stressed in particular ways to convey meaning, then he will find it hard to
understand the meaning of the message.
Scarcella and Oxford (1992) pointed out that listeners comprehend the spoken
message either through isolated word recognition within the sound stream, phrase or
formula recognition, clause or sentence and extended speech comprehension. That means
ESL learners operate simultaneously in one or two these areas depending on many factors,
one of which is proficiency level.
On the second level of comprehension, learners can recognize whole phrases and
simple routine expressions but they hardly operate on the third level understanding clause
or sentences, it is challenging and difficult for L2 learners to operate the fourth level,
understanding discourse. Moreover, earlier discussion and examinations of listening as
discrete component of language learning focused mainly on classifying and grading
listening tasks in terms of difficulty (Nunan, 1989; Richards, 1983; Ur, 1984). The
perception of difficulty usually lies in the difficulty of the material used as the content for
the comprehension activities, and was often borrowed from the reability measures for


18

written text. Other measures of difficulty in listening comprehension relied on some
undefined and unspecified inherent qualities of the tasks.
The listening passages, thus should be modified, or simplified for teaching purpose,
and the determination of levels of difficulties was often arbitrary or subjective (Lynch,
1988: 178).
1.4. Summary
The chapter has presented the relevant literature, which has helped to form the
theoretical and conceptual framework for the study.
Firstly, a number of concepts about listening comprehension are given according to
some leading scholars and then the types of listening, listening process are presented.

Secondly, the teaching of listening is discussed which includes some common
methods of teaching listening, three stages of a listening lesson and the teacher’s role. In
the listening stage, each stage plays a different role and carries certain activities to
complete the listening task in an effective way. However, the activities in three stages
should not be isolated in a listening lesson; they always have close relationship with one
another.
Lastly, the common problems faced by learners in learning listening should be
taken into consideration which can be the foundation for investigating listening difficulties
of the participants in the study.


19

Chapter 2: The study
The study attempts to investigate the difficulties encountered by first year students as
well as their needs in learning listening to English and evaluate to what extent the bottomup techniques can help first year students at UFFP to improve their listening skills. In order
to achieve the mentioned aims, a survey questionnaire and two tests were conducted to
collect data for the study. In addition, interviews and discussion with teachers and students
were also carried out.
2.1. The setting of the study
2.1.1. Subjects’ background information
UFFP belongs to the Ministry of Public Security. The majority of its students are
male, female students count a few percent out of the total number. They come from every
part of the country. Thus, their language background varies a lot. Some students did not
study English at school while others studying English from the sixth grade. This causes a
lot of difficulty for both teachers and students in teaching and learning English. Besides,
students learn spoken English in almost isolated environment from English speaking
people so they hardly get any chance to communicate with foreigner in both classroom and
outside classroom. Consequently, their ability to speak and listen to English can not be
improved and motivated. In addition, almost all students are quite passive in learning. They

tend to prefer written work and reading rather than listening and speaking. Among the four
skills, listening is regarded to be the hardest for them. From the writer’s classroom
observation and discussion with the participants, many of them have associated listening
lessons with pain and boredom and claim that they benefit very little from them. In short,
they did not seem to have any motivation for learning listening at all.
The overall curriculum of the university lasts for five years and teaching English is
divided into two stages. During the first stage students study GE focusing on four language
skills which accounts for 180 periods (45 minutes each). Students are taught GE in the first
and the second year. The second stage is 90 periods for ESP which is taught in their third
academic year. At the end of each term students have to sit for a written exam which
includes mainly grammar and vocabulary exercises.
2.1.2. The teachers and teaching methods


20

Up to now, there are totally five teachers of English at the University. All of them
graduated from College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University. None of the
teachers has been trained in an English speaking country. The oldest one has over ten years
of teaching experience, and the youngest just has over two years. Most of the teachers at
UFFP are aware of the important role of the ability to listen to spoken English. Therefore,
they have done much to improve the method of teaching listening and help the students to
overcome the difficulties.
The fact is that not all the teacher uses the same techniques and strategies to teach
listening skills. Some of them choose to use “giving background information and new
words” as the most effective techniques, other may take some other techniques such as
“choose authentic and suitable listening texts” as the most effective one. Some teachers
said that teaching students how to listen is also an important factor because they see that
most of students lack needed strategies for listening. The teachers have tried to choose the
activities that are suitable for their students. It is good for students to get used to as many

types of activities as possible.
2.1.3. Resources and materials
As far as the materials are concerned, Lifelines textbooks, workbooks and CDs
(Elementary and Pre-intermediate) are chosen for teaching GE. In this series of book, four
basic language skills are equally developed. The teaching of English lessons takes place in
two language laboratories which are well-equipped with personal headphones, computers,
projectors, televisions, DVD players. It is a good place for teaching a foreign language.
Besides using the tape in the textbooks, teachers often choose the listening task for
extra practice from other sources. The most commonly used references for extra practice
are Listen Carefully, Listen to this, Let’s Listen, New Headway (Elementary and Preintermediate). Teachers also adopt listening tasks from website for students to practice
their pronunciation, word recognition.
In their first year, students will finish Lifelines Elementary in 90 periods. The book
consists of 14 units. Each unit has one listening session. These listening sessions are under
the tendency of theme-based and task-based approaches. The book provides different wide
rage of different listening texts and tasks at each stage. Generally, the topic of the listening