Applying some warm up listening activities to attract students’ interest for 10th form students at le loi high school

PART A: INTRODUCTION
1. The rationale of the study
The main objective of learning a language is to communicate in that
language fluently. Hence, in order to obtain that aim, the learners do not only
need language knowledge sources such as grammatical system, lexical
system, phonological system, but they also have to practice four skills:
listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among the language skills,
listening is the most important in communication in the real life. In learning
a language, listening is a useful means of providing learners with
comprehensible input, which is an essential component of the whole
language learning process. And teaching listening skill in classroom helps
learners make transition from classroom English to real- life English more
easily and effectively.
Additionally, learning listening skill is the most difficult in learning a
foreign language. Listening, like reading, is a receptive skill but it is often
the most daunting for learners. When reading, a reader usually has more
opportunities to refer back to the text to clarify understanding, which a
listener cannot do in most listening contexts such as TV programs, meetings,
discussions, lectures or conversations. What is more, in teaching and
learning English listening skill in Vietnam, teachers and learners cope with a
lot of problems and difficulties because of both objective and subjective
reasons. Therefore, I myself choose the topic “Applying
some warm-up
listening activities to attract students’ interest for 10 th form students at Le
Loi high school.” to point out the main difficulties which the beginners have
met and work out some suggestions so as to help teachers motivate their
learners to study listening skill more excited and better.
2. Aims and Objectives of the study
The study is aimed at finding some difficulties in listening learning
and teaching, also to suggest some strategies for developing listening skills.
On this basis, the students’ abilities to deal with listening will be

considerably improved.
3. Objects of the study.
Focusing on finding out some difficulties that students at 10 th form
class are facing, from that point, the study pays attention to the application
of warm-up listening activities to improve students’ abilities in learning
listening skill.
4. Methods of the study
With reference to its characteristics, this study can be categorized as
an action research. The following instruments are applied to collect data for
this study:
Two questionaires were used to measure whether students could
improve their listening skill.
Tests were also used to measure the development of the students
during the time the study was being carried out.
5. Remarkable points of the study
The study tends to help students deal with how to enhance students’
interest in speaking learninng. By using the warm-up listening activities,
students can have the motivation to learning listening skill effectively, thus
will enhance their listening ability, consequently, help improve their
understanding of English.


PART B: DEVELOPMENT
I. Theoretical background of listening skill in language learning.
I. What is listening?
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 (Goh, 2002). An able
listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously. Willis (1981,
p.134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which she calls enabling

skills. They are:
• guessing at unknown words or phrases without panicking
• predicting what people are going to talk about
• using one’s own knowledge of the topic to help one understand
• identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information
• retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)
• recognizing discourse markers, e.g., Well; Oh, another thing is; Now,
finally; etc.
• recognizing cohesive devices, e.g., such as and which, including link
words, pronouns, references, etc.
• understanding inferred information, e.g., speakers’ attitude or intentions
• understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc., which
give clues to meaning and social setting
2. The importance of listening skill
Listening is an important skill and probably the most difficult one.
Getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different
accents and varieties apart from their teacher and that way better prepare


them for real world listening. The main method of exposing them to spoken
English other than their teacher’s is using taped material that exemplify a
wide range of topic such broadcast news, announcement, advertisement, etc.
From a theoretical perspective, teaching listening will help them
acquire the language subconsciously even when the teacher does not draw
their attention to special features. It is agreed that exposure to the target
language is a fundamental requirement for those who want to learn it. The
use of tape material will provide students with such exposure and they will
get information not only vocabulary and structure but also pronunciation,
rhythm, intonation, pitch and stress.
3. Two ways of listening

In real life, there are two ways in which we often listen:
* ‘Casual’ listening: Sometimes we listen with no particular purpose
in mind, and often without much concentration. Examples of this kind of
listening are : listening to the radio while doing some homework; chatting to
a friend. Usually we do not listen very closely, unless we hear something
that particularly interests us, and afterwards we may not remember much of
what we hear.
*‘Focussed’ listening: At other times we listen for a particular
purpose, to find out information we need to know. Examples of this kind of
listening are: listening to a piece of information news on the radio; listening
to someone explaining how to operate a machine. In these situations, we
listen much more closely; but we do not listen to everything we hear with
equal concentration – we listen for the most important points or for
particular information. Usually, we know beforehand what we are listening
for (the things we want to know), and this helps us to listen.
II. The reality of learning and teaching listening skill.
In class, we are usually concerned with the second kind of listening:
we expect the students to listen closely and remember afterwards what they
heard. But if we just ask the class to ‘listen’ and we ask questions
afterwards, we are giving them a very difficult task. We can make it easier
by telling them beforehand what to expect and what to listen for - this will
help them to focus their listening.
The traditional way of teaching, such as, introducing some new
difficult words, listening to the tape again and again and then giving correct
answers, still prevails. It is not difficult for us to see how detrimental such a
listening class is to learners. Such an approach to "teaching" listening is
more like "testing" listening, because listeners are simply exposed to a
succession of listening texts on a tape, and then are tested how much they
have understood in terms of a lot of comprehension exercises rather than
being taught how to listen and how to cope with their listening problems in

the class.
Many students complained that they became tired of listening to the
tape from beginning to the end with some mechanical exercises. Without
interest, motivation and variation in teaching and learning, students felt
bored in listening classes. As a result, the passive attitude kept students from
making much progress in listening comprehension. In this paper, what we
want to discuss is how to make listening classes more interesting and how to
develop students' listening ability.
III. Applying the warm-up activities in teaching listening skill for 10 th


form students at Le Loi high school.
Just as Broughton says, "motivation is a basic principle of all kinds of
teaching - the language student is best motivated by practice in which he
senses the language is truly communicative, that it is appropriate to its
context, that his teacher's skills are moving him forward to a fuller
competence in the foreign language." Therefore, how to keep students'
interest in learning must be focused.
III.1. Warm-up exercises.
In class, we must try to avoid boring or over-theoretical or mechanical
subjects, using as far as possible warm-up exercises we think our students
may be interested in, that seem of practical relevance, that may arouse or
stimulate them. Sometimes, a picture or a humorous story can do a great deal
towards arousing interest among students. However, during the whole
listening course, most teachers actually only have a 'while-listening' stage,
neglecting the 'pre-listening or warm-up exercise step, which acts as an
important role in arousing students' interest and as the preparation stage for
the 'while-listening' stage.
As a matter of fact, we can say that how well students had done in
class depends mostly on how well they had been warmed up. From this point

of view, English teachers should start taking concrete measures to reconsider
the methodology they can apply in their listening courses and try to improve
their teaching of listening from a new approach. We should use some
techniques that are effective and interesting in teaching listening courses,
thinking as much as possible about the needs of students concerned.
III.1.1. Using Pictures
I often use pictures in listening class. Pictures have the advantages of
being easy to prepare, easy to organize, being interesting, meaningful and
authentic. Pictures can bring images of reality into the unnatural world of the
language classroom. Pictures are useful in developing students' listening
comprehension, particularly “directed listening”. They not only help to
guide the student' listening, they can provide a general background and
context. They especially contribute to interest and motivation. For example,
try this "spot the similarity" activity.
•

Ask the students to get into pairs, give each student or pair of students
a picture that the other(s) must not see.

•

Tell them that they have pictures that are very different from each
other, and ask them to describe these pictures to each other with the
aim of finding as many similarities as they can.

•

After several minutes, ask them to look at the two pictures and see
what other similarities they can find.

Sometimes, I read descriptions of faces, maps, diagrams for students
to draw. No matter how well or badly they had done, students were so happy
to have the chance to listen, speak, and do something interesting in the
listening class which they once considered a 'sleeping course'.
Unit 11: National Parks ( Grade 10 )
- Stick 2 pictures and ask my students to look at these pictures and discuss


the questions :
1. Where is Nairobi National park ?
2. Is Everglades National Park a sub-tropical wilderness in southeastern
United States ?
3. Are there any common features of these two national parks?
- Then, introduce the new lesson.
III.1.2. Questions and Answers
Some people might think that asking questions is a purely technical (i.
e. grammatical) matter. But in my class, it is not. As a matter of fact, no
matter how effective a technique is, listening comprehension should demand
students' participation, and the immediate feedback helps keep interest and
motivation. "Question Time" is the name I have given to those first five to
ten minutes of a lesson. Before listening to a passage, I always asked some
questions so that students would have some ideas about the topic before they
listened. In this process of doing the warm-up activity, students could build
on their prior knowledge and at the same time, use vocabulary and structures
that are connected with a particular function.
Unit 12: Music (grade 10)
For example , when teaching the students the lesson relating to music,
I encourage my students to discuss the questions below:
• Do you know Van Cao?
• What’s his job?

• When/ where was he born?
• Is he still alive?
• When did he die?
• Which of the songs were written by him?
After that I introduce the topic : Today you are going to listen to an
interview in which Lan Huong, the interviewer, asks Quang Hung, a famous
actor, about Van Cao.
In this way, students can be aware of the purpose of the exercise in
general and the nature of the specific task in particular before they listen to
the passage. The "Question Time" activity can do much in listening classes,
such as creating a friendly atmosphere between the teacher and the students,
building the students' confidence and having the thrill of something
spontaneous. Above all, it makes students feel interested and gets them
involved in the listening activities.
III.1.3.Brainstorm
- Give a topic and ask learners to think of anything related to it.
- Write the responses for all to see, or ask a volunteer to do the writing. I can
use this to elicit vocabulary related to your lesson.
Unit 16: Historical Places ( Grade 10 )


III.1.4. Describe the Picture
I show a picture and have learners take turns saying one descriptive
thing about it. Beginners can make simple observations like "three cats"
while advanced students can make up a story to go with the picture. They
aren't allowed to repeat what someone else said, so they need to pay
attention when each person speaks.
Unit 8 : The story of my village ( Grade 10 )
- Hang out the picture on the board.
- Ask students to work in groups of 4 or 5.

- Each student has to give one word to describe about the picture of the
village in Vietnam. (no repetition)
- Listen and take note the words.
IV. Designing the warm-up listening activities in textbook 10th form.
In reality, some of the warm-up listening activities in the textbook
are not really suitable for the students’ levels of our school in particular.
Therefore, I myself desire to design some listening activities to attract
students’ interest in learning listening skill.
UNIT 1: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF………..
- Have students play an interesting quick game, that is Jumbled word.
-Write down some jumbled words on the board. Have students to work in
groups of 4, in 15 seconds try to find out the words of meaningful correct
order.
- The groups with the most correct words within the shortest time will be the
winner.

UNIT 3: PEOPLE’S BACKGROUND
- Hang out some pictures on the board and ask students to guess the names
of sport.
- Make questions and have students to answer individually.


+ Do you like sports?
+ What types of sports do you like?
+ Can you name some sport events that you know?
Volleyball

Basketball

Swimming

Table tennis

UNIT 4: SPECIAL EDUCATION
- Tell the story about the life and career of the speaker Nick Vujicic: Nick
Vujicic is a wonder man of disability in the present world. He is a SerbianAustralian motivational speaker and Christian evangelist who was born
without arms and leg. Actually, there is no medical reason why he was born
without legs and arms. Vujicic struggled mentally and physically since
childhood. He delivers motivational speeches around the world focusing on
human disability and finding hope and meaning of life.
- Ask some questions.
+ What do you think of this man?
+ Do you think that disabled people have their career as other ordinary
people?
UNIT 5: TECHNOLOGY AND YOU
- Draw the mindmap, relating to modern devices. Ask students to give the
names of any modern devices they know.
- Ask students in pairs to ask and answer the questions, then take notes on
the table.
UNIT 6: AN EXCURSION
- Hang out some pictures and ask students to guess what the topic is about.

PICNIC
- Make the questions and have students answer the questions.
+ When is the best time for a picnic?
+ What do people often do at picnic?
UNIT 7: THE MASS MEDIA
- Divide class into 4 groups.
- Have students play the game: Guessing game
- Give the clues, groups with the correct answer in the shortest time will be

the winner.


+ It is one of the radio programmes
+ It broadcasts daily and live from the radio station
+ It updates you with the latest information, current affairs/ events
domestically and internationally.
+ What is the programme?

UNIT 10: CONSERVATION
- Hang out some pictures, and ask students to guess express their ideas about
the pictures.
- Raise some questions:
+ What do you think of our nature?
+ What should we do to save the nature?
+ Is saving the nature your responsibilities or others’ ones?
UNIT 11: NATIONAL PARKS
- Have students play the guessing game by opening every picture on the
board.
- The group with the correct guess within the shortest time will be the
winner.
UNIT 12: MUSIC
- Divide class into 4 groups.
- Have students play the game: Music crossword puzzle
- Have students choose the number of questions, then answer the questions
basing on the clues.
- Group can guess the key word will be the winner.
1. A Person watching television
2. A collection of recordings issued as a single item
3. M – TP Son Tung is

4. The type of film: Tom & Jerry
5. A person who plays a musical instrument or writes music
6. What type of music are
7. Buc Tuong band famous for?
Key word: Van Cao
UNIT 14: THE WORLD CUP
- Play a piece of music relating to the world cup.
- Ask students to guess what the piece of music is about
- Raise some questions:


+ Do you like football?
+ Can you name some of the most famous football players in the world?
+ Who is your favourite football player? Why do you like him?
PELE- A famous Brazilian football player
UNIT 16: HISTORICAL PLACES
- Hand out some pictures and the information on the back of the pictures.
- Have students to work in pairs, one read out the clues, the other tries to
guess where the place in the picture is.
- After guessing correctly, some hang out the pictures on the board
- Have one student to guess what the lesson is about.
- Listed as a World Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 1993.
- Located in the Central City of Vietnam
- Famous for the Royal construction.
- Famous for historical and cultural site
- Located in the capital city of Vietnam
- Educating thousands of talented men for the country
- The first university in Vietnam
- The capital of Vietnam from 1398 to 1407
- Famous for its construction of large limestone blocks

- Consist of the Inner Citadel, La Thanh Outer Wall and the Nam Giao altar
- Located in Vinh Loc district, Thanh Hoa province

- Famous for historical attraction of Hanoi
- Built over 2 years from 1973 to 1975.
- Known for honoring the national hero: Uncle Ho
- The resting place of Uncle Ho
V. Procedure of listening lesson.
V.1. Pre-listening stage
This stage prepares students by getting them to think about the topic
or situation before they listen to the texts. In other words, it gives students a
purpose to listen. It also gets students to relate to what they already know
about the topic and not least important arouse their interest in listening.
There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to
listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualization, and preparation.
Motivation
It is enormously important that before listening students are
motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find
interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and
curiosity.


Contextualization
When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its
natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of
information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a
tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been
taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will
help students to contextualize the listening and access their existing
knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.

Preparation
To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific
vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It's vital that we cover this
before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be act
of listening not of understanding what they have to do.
Pre-tasks can be:
- Introducing general content of the listening passage
- Making use of pictures (if any) to present new vocabulary
- Presenting more words/phrases from tape scripts
- Getting students to pronounce words/phrases carefully
- Reviewing already-presented grammatical patterns
- Presenting new grammatical patterns (if any)
- Asking students to predict content of the listening
Unit 1: A day in the life of......(Grade 10)
- Hang the picture of a man who drives a cyclo and give some clues:
He has a cyclo.
He works in the streets.
He drives people from one place to another.
- Then raise a question: Who is he?
After that I lead to the new lesson: Mr. Lam is a cyclo driver. He is working
in HCM city. Let’s guess his routine. What does he do in his job?
- Ask students to work in pairs to ask and answer questions in page 16
Answer the questions:
1.Have you ever travelled by cyclo?
2.When was it?
3.Is it interesting to travel by cyclo?
4.Which do you prefer, going by cyclo or by bicycle?
5.Give reasons?
- Teach some new words.
+ district(n) ): an administrative division, smaller than a province

+ passengers (n): people who travel on a train, bus..
+ routine(n)
+ pedal(n)
+ food stall(n) : small booth, compartment or kiosk in / near a market where
food is sold
+ drop (v)
Then, instruct students to do the tasks in the textbook.
V.2. While-listening stage
This stage gives students a 'guide' or framework to help them practice
listening. In other words, it helps students to listen better, more accurately,
thoroughly through carefully designed comprehension tasks.
•
•
•


When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a
reason. Students too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention.
Ideally the listening tasks that are designed should guide them through the
text. What the teacher do to facilitate students’ comprehension:
- Giving clear instructions for the listening task (rephrasing textbook
instructions if necessary)
- Playing the tape once (non-stop) for students to get general content of the
listening
- Providing other activities from textbook for slower classes
- Moving from simpler tasks (listening for getting key words/phrases,
listening for main ideas, matching, deciding on true/false information,
numbering pictures, sequencing events…) to more complicated ones
(answering MCQs, gap-filling, table/graph completing, answering
information questions …)

- Playing the tape several times (non-stop or with pauses if students need
help)
- Breaking long tapescripts into sections to facilitate the listening
V.3. Post-listening stage
The Post-stage is like the follow-up stage. After students have
practiced the target skill in the While-stage, they do an extension activity.
This helps students take the information or whatever they have produced in
the While-stage, and do something meaningful with it.
There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These
are reactions to the content of the text, and analysis of the linguistic features
used to express the content.
Reaction to the text
Of these two I find that tasks that focus students reaction to the
content are most important. Again, this is something that we naturally do in
our everyday lives. Because we listen for a reason, there is generally a
following reaction. This could be discussion as a response to what we have
heard - do they agree or disagree or even believe what they have heard? - or
it could be some kind of reuse of the information they have heard.
Analysis of language
The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing
students on linguistic features of the text. This is important in terms of
developing their knowledge of language, but less so in terms of developing
students' listening skills. It could take the form of an analysis of verb forms
from a script of the listening text or vocabulary or collocation work. This is a
good time to do form focused work as the students have already developed
an understanding of the text and so will find dealing with the forms that
express those meanings much easier.
For example , when teaching the students Unit 2 School Talks, I
suggest some common problems at school:
• Getting bad marks

• Having difficulty in making friends
• Coming to class late
• Be slow at learning…
I ask students to work in groups, discuss the problems they have


experienced at school. During the discussion, I give students some
questions:
• What problems have you got at school?
• What is / are the reason (s)?
• What have you done to solve it / them?
• Who helps you to solve it
VI. Result of the study and some recommendations
In order to find out the difficulties while learning listening skill, and
the effectiveness of the application of warm-up listening activities, an action
research project was carried out with the participation of 40 students in class
10A10 at Le Loi High School. The students’ improvement was estimated by
using two questionaires
VI.1. Result of the first questionaire
The forty students participating in this study were given a
questionaire in order to gather baseline data scores for the start of the
research to quantify their interest in listening skill. The students were all
tested on the same day, one day before the interventions began. The results
of the initial assessment are shown in Chart 1
Chart 1: Students’ interest in warm-up listening activities
The data showed that most students’ levels of interest were not
satisfactorily high. It proved that many of them encountered the problem
with listening skill and were not attracted by the warm-up activities in the
textbook.
VI. 2. Result of the second questionaire

• After a d a p t i n g s o m e d e s i g n e d w a r m - u p l i s t e n i n g
a c t i v i t i e s , the students were again given another assessment to
determine if there was any improvement in their interest.
Hopefully, almost the students showed their changes in the attitudes
toward listening skill.
•
•
•
•
• Chart 2: The changes in students’s interest in warm-up activities
•
•

VI.3. Result of the tests
Also, the results of the final test in the comparison with the one of the
first test were much obviously improved.
Chart 3: The average result of the second semester


•

Obviously, the data illustrated above have shown that the examined
teaching strategy can lead t o t h e c h a n g e s i n a t t i t u d e s
towards students’listening learning.
The data
collection instruments used to gather information about the students
involved, monitor the progress of the students, and assess the
students, both prior to the intervention as well as after its
conclusion, have been extremely useful in this research. It can be said
that using warm-up listening activities is a realistic practice to

enhance students’ interest in learning listening skill, a very vital part in
the English communicative world.

PART 3- CONCLUSION
The results of the study clearly show that the implementation of this
action research project and its results were fairly effective. Using warm-up
activities to attract students’ interest in listening skill is a precious strategy
and the students’ competence of learning listening was enhanced noticeably.


The above activities can be used as strategies for developing listening skills
that cultivate students’ interest and help students enjoy their listening course.
The activities have a positive effect on students and make them want to
listen and speak more. After one- year- practice, the students in my class had
better understanding and listening ability. Above all, the students had the
habit of listening to English after class, such as listening to radio, tapes or
TV news.
From the result of the study, there are some recommendations I wish
the headmaster as well as the whole school would take into consideration:
- Listening is a complex skill involving a number of instruments as
radio, cassette tape or even amplifier. It’s necessary that those instruments be
available for the use conveniently.
- This study is carried out mainly within a small set of warm-up
listening activities. Hopefully, every teacher should design more activities so
that students can keep their interest in listening learning with motivation.
Signature of Principle

Thanh Hoa, May 20th, 2018
Hereby, I certify that this study is the
result of my own experience and has

not been submitted by any others.
Writer

Lê Thị Thủy

REFERENCES
[1]Goh, C. (2002). A Cognitive Perspective on Language Learners’
Listening Comprehension Problems. System, 28, 55-75.
/>[2] Willis, J. (1981) Teaching English through English. England, Longman