the difficulties of english listening skill encountered by employees in the cennos company in viet nam

ABSTRACT

This study of “An investigation into the difficulties in English listening skills
encountered by employees in the Cennos Company” was conducted to analyze
specific listening English skills required by the employees, to investigate the needs
of the employees on English communication in their careers. And it is special on
English listening skills and their difficulties of English listening, then to
determining the English training needs to improve listening skills.
The research instrument used in the survey is a questionnaire consisting of five
parts: background information of the respondent, English background of the
respondent, the necessity of using English listening skills in their career, the needs
of listening skills for English communication skills improvement, the difficulties
when learning the listening skills and the respondent’s opinions and suggestions.
The sample group used in this research consisted of 50 Vietnamese employees
working in Competitive Intelligence English team at the Phuong Chi software
limited company (PCSC), which is the agency of Cennos company in Viet Nam.
The questionnaire was distributed to the employees of the team that were the most
relevant to this study during February 2018, and the data were collected and
analyzed by using SPSS.
The results of the study indicated that English listening skills and the
difficulties of the listening skills were problems faced by Vietnamese employees at
the Cennos, individually the listening skills in English communications situation at
workplace. Therefore, the respondents need to improve all communication skills,
particularly in the listening skills. The organization should give the employees the
training courses focusing on all communication skills, especially the listening skills
and the content of the subject that makes them more efficient, productive, and
incentive to improving listening skills of the employees by themselves.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study could not have been accomplished without the encouragement and
assistance of many help of many people. I would like to take this opportunity to
express my deepest gratitude to all who have made great contributions to this study.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to my teacher MA Pham Thi To
Loan for her guidance, enthusiastic encouragement and useful critiques of this
research work. I would also like to thank my roommate for her advice and
assistance in keeping my progress on schedule.
I wish to thank various people for their contribution to this study.
Special thanks should be given to member of Competitive Intelligence English
(CIE) team who help in collecting the data all the technicians who helped in
handing the instruments. I would also like to thank them who were the respondents
in my study, for their kind cooperation in answering the questionnaires.
To my Quality Assurance - M.s Hue and my leader- M.s My, thanks for all of
their whole-hearted support, and encouragement.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................i
TABLE OF CONTENTS.......................................................................................iii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS..................................................................................v
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES......................................................................vi
CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY......................................................1
1.1. Rationale...........................................................................................................1
1.2. Previous studies................................................................................................2
1.3. Aims of the study..............................................................................................5
1.4. Scope of the study.............................................................................................5

1.5. Research methodology.......................................................................................5
1.6. Organization of the study.................................................................................6
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW...............................................................7
2.1. Overview of listening skill................................................................................7
2.1.1. Definition of listening skill............................................................................7
2.1.2. The relationship between listening and other language skills in
International English Language..............................................................................8
2.1.3. The importance of listening skill..................................................................9
2.1.4. The importance of English and listening in English at workplace...........12
2.1.5. Types of listening skills................................................................................13
2.2. The difficulties of English listening skill.......................................................15
2.2.1. The difficulties of using English listening strategies.................................15
2.2.2. Factors that affect learning English listening skills....................................18
CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH FINDINGS..............................................................21
3.1. Data collection instruments............................................................................21
3.1.2. Data collection procedures..........................................................................21
3.2. Data analysis and discussion..........................................................................22
3.2.1. Employees’ real situations of learning English listening skill in working
environment............................................................................................................22
CHAPTER 4. SUGGESTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS........................30
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CONCLUSION......................................................................................................33
REFERENCE
QUESTIONNAIRE IN ENGLISH

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
CIE

Competitive Intelligence English

QAS

Quality Assurance Specialist

SPSS

the Statistical Package for Social Sciences

ESL

English as a Second language

EFL

English as a Foreign Language.

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LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

CHARTS
Table 1. Gender.......................................................................................................22
Chart 1. Age............................................................................................................. 23
Chart 2. Level of education.....................................................................................23

Chart 3. Working position........................................................................................24
Chart 4. Period of working in the company.............................................................24
Chart 5. English proficiency....................................................................................25
Chart 6. Point for what necessity of listening English Skills...................................27
Chart 7. The frequency of some common problems................................................28

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CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY
1.1. Rationale
Language is a communication tool that is important and necessary, especially
English. Nowadays, English is the most popular language tool in the world. As a
global language, English is used in many countries like their mother tongue and
their second or foreign language. Communication by English is very important to
all organizations or business as well as Cennos Company in Viet Nam. A business
cannot offer a good service if it does not communicate efficiently in English. And
absolutely, everything is meaningless when they could not understand what their
customer are saying, and do not understand their needs.
When learning English, most people learn reading and writing first. Then
learning listening and speaking skills are so difficult, especially employees who
have big used communicate skills necessary but without time to learns. In Cennos,
it is a limited software company which situated in Dublin, California, USA and the
agency in 22- Thanh Cong- Ba Dinh -Ha Noi. Cennos provides a complete solution
for customer’s e- commerce business, including management and analytics of their
pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Co-operate with the foreign customer,
example is some shopping online web in USA, the EU, or in the world, like
Wayfair.com, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, etc. It is the most important thing for
employees to fluently use English, especially listening skills to communicate with
them.

Having three-month internship in Competitive Intelligence English (CIE)
team, the author realized that the biggest problem of practicing English in the
workplace is listening skills. Because employees cannot understand the customers,
they cannot speak anything to introduce about the products for them understand.
Employees have good email writing skills but the face- to- face communication is
not able to do. They show their confusion, shyness. This is the reason why the
company misses many opportunities in business. And the author chose the topic:
“the difficulties of English listening skill encountered by employees in the Cennos
company in Viet Nam”. Up to this point, the author hopes that this study can help

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deal with problems that employees have with listening and improve their listening
skill as well as communication skill in English.
1.2. Previous studies
“A study of needs of staff’s English communication skills: a case study of an
electronic company” by Chiyanasit from Srinakharinwirot University Thailand.
Following this study, those in the roles of Buyer, Planner, and Program
Administration Management frequently use English communication skills in their
workplace, when interacting with both staff in other departments and Englishspeaking customers. The most common deficits they had noticed in terms of English
communication skill were listening problems, especially understanding foreign
accents; speaking problems, particularly the use of broken English and word-forword translations, etc. The staff in production office agreed that the most difficulties
skill to learning was listening. Listening skill is listened what customers’ needs. In
addition, they also revealed their lacks of English communication skills that the
most lack English communication was listening skills. For lack of listening skills,
they encountered with listening English conversation via phone. They could not
understand so speaking is difficult.
This study showed that the similarities between staffs’ and managers’
perception for English communication lack understanding English conversation via

phone, negotiating for mutual understanding, understanding customer forecasts, and
writing business letters in appropriate formats in English. In term the differences
between staff’s and managers’ perception among necessities, lacks, and learning
needs, staffs proposed that the English course should be emphasized on
conversation, while mangers believed that the English course should be the equally
emphasized on four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
With study: “Many Malaysians difficulty communicating in English in the
workplace, especially when it comes to business-related matters” (Aniza-2016). He
pointed out that perception on oral communication skills play a crucial role at the
workplace in Malaysia. And the perception of the workers clearly reported that they
often face problems speaking fluently and speaking in front of an audience.
Moreover, he said that the ability to listen was the most important of all
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communication skills in any organization and states. It is problems involving the
listening skill at workplaces. All of that because of tendency at times for same
executives, supervisors and workers to talk more and fail to listen and not
comprehend the notions of listening and hearing is. That’s all right in Viet Nam. We
are ESL worker together. And he suggested that when it came to business-related
matter, as a worker we had to face and overcome a few obstacles within ourselves
which is called insecurity in believing one’s ability, it improve the difficulty
communicating in English in the workplace.
“Needs analysis for English communication skills of employees at HSBC in
Thailand” by Sirikanya Luankanokrat of Thammasat University Bangkok, Thailand
(March 2011)
The results of the study indicated that every language skill: listening,
speaking, reading, and writing were problems faced by Thai employees at HSBC,
especially the listening skills. The most necessary skill that the respondents used in
their career was reading and the least essential skill was listening and speaking.

Therefore, the respondents need to improve all communication skills. Over a billion
people speak English at least a basic level. In Thailand, English has been accepted
as an international or foreign language. And Viet Nam is too. The success in careers
depends more or less on the capacity of English. Differences in background may be
one of the most difficult communication barriers to overcome. Age, gender,
education, social status, economic position, temperament, religion, popularity and
political belief can separate one person from another and make understanding
difficult. According to the study, most of the respondents thought their listening
skill is the most serious problem (40%), followed by speaking (30%), writing
(26,7%) and reading (3,3). And the causes of their listening problems were the most
serious problem in listening in their career (61,3%), followed by the inability to
understand technical terms (45,3%), the inability to remember the entire
information (46,6%), the inability to understand slang, idiomatic expressions, or
colloquialisms (44%) and the incapability of translating words or sentences (20%).
And the authors showed that the level of listening skills necessary is 89 %,
very necessary level, talking with customers and meeting in English is moderately

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necessary. About 50.7% of the respondents would like to improve their listening
skill in pronunciation, followed by 47.3% in comprehension. The rest of
respondents would like to improve in vocabulary (45.3%) and grammar (30%)
respectively. From the finding, the author showed that unfamiliarity with foreign
accents and pronunciation was the major difficulty that caused their English
listening problems. The second problem was that were unable to understand
technical terms and unable to remember the entire information. The respondents
thought that they were incapable of translating words and sentences.
A competitive employment market requires good communication skills in
workplaces. Workplaces need good communication skills especially in English

language as it plays an essential role in all over the world. Competence in the
English language often becomes as a decisive factor in securing a wellpaid job
(Casale & Posel, 2011). Carliner (2000) and Leslie and Lindley (2001) reveal that
weak grasp in the language may lead to loss in an organization. Thus, it is apparent
that good proficiency is needed for one to secure a job, especially in the
management team.
Needs Analysis on the Importance of English Language Skills for Workplace:
Trainee Architects (P. Thivilojana, 2015). Proficiency in English therefore, is vital
for future employees in order to move forward in both local and international
companies and to develop their technical knowledge and skills. It offers a
foundation for problem-solving and critical thinking skills that are essential to cope
with the swiftly changing environment of the global workplace, one where English
plays a vital role as highlighted by Ornstein & Hunkins (1993). One interesting
finding of this study is that it highlights the discrepancy between students’
perception of their language competency and of their instructor. However, the
students also mentioned the importance of English language, particularly speaking
and listening, in their daily communication and workplace tasks. These skills can
specifically assist them in writing reports, giving presentations confidently, avoiding
miscommunication, making them more eligible for jobs, socializing with others and
getting more friends. Thus, language courses should put more emphasis on oral and
aural skills in order for the university to be able to make these trainees more

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marketable. Based on observations and instructors’ feedback, it can be concluded
that these architect trainees require English language proficiency to carry out their
official tasks efficiently. As reflected in the findings, English is indisputably the
medium of communication in the field of architecture. These results appear to be an
echo of the architect trainees at a private higher learning institution have accepted

about their abilities and lacks. They are not only conscious of their proficiency in
the language, but they are also capable to identify necessary outcomes about their
capability of usage of English language at work place. Therefore, we are in a
position to claim that the Architect trainees are still to be in need for more training
in the language so as to improve their ability in speaking, writing and listening. The
architect trainees consequently must heighten their language abilities and skills not
only to provide excellent service but also be able to compete globally as English is
an international language.
1.3. Aims of the study
The study aims to help employees of the competitive intelligence English
(CIE) team in Cennos company improving their English listening skills, having
better English communication skills. The author shows difficulties in English
listening skills encountered by employees in the CIE team.
In this study, the author suggested some solutions to help the employees have
better listening skills and more confidence in the workplace. Moreover, the author
hopes that the employees will have more promotion opportunities in their career by
English skills fluently.
1.4. Scope of the study
This study focuses on finding the difficulties in English listening skills
encountered by 50 employees in Competitive Intelligence English team who work
on 5th floor the first facility in 22 Thanh Cong-Ba Dinh - Ha Noi of the Cennos
company.
1.5. Research methodology
To get the finally findings for this study, the author used some following
research methors:

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- The questionnaire: included 23 questions about some personal information

and their difficulties when learning and using English listening skills in the
workplace.
- The research object: 50 members of CIE team of Cennos company
- The research subject: the difficulties of English listening skills encountered
by 50 employees in CIE team.
- The researchers distribute questionnaire for staff and leader team. After that,
the questionnaires were revised based on comments and suggestions from experts in
English. Then the results from questionnaires were checked for reliability utilizing.
The questionnaires were edited to fit the actual test before used.
1.6. Organization of the study
The study consists of four parts: Overview of the study, Literature review,
Research findings, Recommendations and Suggestions.
- Chapter I: Overview of the study: Included introduce the rationale, Previous
studies, Arms of the study, Scope of the study, Research methodology and
organization of the study.
- Chapter II: Literature review: Some literature knowledge about listening
skills and difficulty of English listening skills:
- Chapter III: Research findings: Finding out the difficulties of listening skills
encountered by employees in working and communicate with the customers and
their American supervisors. This chapter presents the results of the study. The
section reports the findings of the questionnaire of listening difficulties.
- Chapter IV: Recommendations and Suggestions: Give out some suggestions
to help improve listening skills for employees in CIE team, and more are all
employees in the Cennos company.

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. Overview of listening skill

2.1.1. Definition of listening skill
Listening is the act of hearing attentively. In workplace, we spend 45% of our
time on listening, after reading and before speaking, writing skills. Thomlison
(1984) defined as, “Active listening, which is very important for effective
communication”, “More than just hearing and to understand and interpret the
meaning of a conversation”. Listening skill get you a successful in workplace,
family and in the society. Good listening skill is the main factor to get into a
profession in communications, management, planning, sales, etc. Listening skill is
the understanding ability and good body language.
Followed L.Worthington , we know that listening is to give one’s attention to
sound or action. Listening involves complex affective, cognitive, and behavioral
include the motivation to attend to others; cognitive processes include attending to,
understanding, receiving, and interpreting content and relational messages; and
behavioral processes include responding with verbal and nonverbal feedback.” And
we can see that listening differs from obeying. A person who receives and
understands information or an instruction, and then chooses not to comply with it or
to agree to it, has listening to the speaker, even though the result is not what the
speaker wanted. Listening is a term in which the listener listens to the one who
produced the sound to the listened.
And from Tuck (1925), an analysis of the impressions results from
concentration where an effort of will is required. Rankin (1926) said that listening is
the ability to understand spoken language. And Bostrom (1989) showed that the
process of receiving, attending to, and assigning meaning to aural stimuli was his
listening definitions.
According to Stephen, Lucas, listening doesn’t mean we do not hearing, they
said that: “It involves the vibration of sound ware on our eardrums and the firing of
electro-chemical impulses from the inner ear to the central auditory system of the

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brain, but listening involves paying close attention to, and making sense of, what we
hear.” (Stephen, Lucas, 1998,56)
With Hamilton, 1999, he said that: “Hearing is with the ears, listening is with
the mind”. Hearing is just hear the sound by your ears, but listening is understood
the meaning of sense through words and contexts.
The early history of the listening field and the drive to develop a single,
mutually agreeable definition influenced the nature and type of research that was
conducted by scholars.
Individuals’ views about listening and their barriers to attending to others can
have profound effects on comprehension and understanding as well as successes for
personal, professional, and relational success. Listening behaviors are actions such
as eye contact and asking questions that it pay attention and interest to others.
2.1.2. The relationship between listening and other language skills in
International English Language.
Listening is the basic bricks and mortar of a language acquisition. The
correlation between audio skill with other language systems – speaking, reading and
writing as well as overall test of 4 skills performance is significant. Despite a close
relationship between aural/oral skills in nature, the correlation between listening
and reading, however, was stronger than listening and speaking skill performance.
Writing is the last skill learned by first and second language learners. However, the
correlation between listening and writing performance is very close to that of the
correlation between listening and speaking. Thus, reading, due to its common
comprehension features with listening had the highest correlation score.
Given that I found many studies showing the multiple influences of listening
in primary and secondary language learning, the outcome of this study points out
that listening performance have a large correlation with EFL proficiency.
Emphasizing the relationship between listening and writing skill – one starts
acquiring listening at birth but writing acquisition starts at school age in first
language, the EFL test result confirms the core of a study discussion about the

impact of listening skill instruction on writing development. The multiple
correlations in the current study focused on one dependent variable – listening and

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three independent variables – speaking, reading and writing as well as overall
performance accounting for interrelationship of the independent variables. This
result is remarkably high to consider the importance of listening skill in EFL
classrooms. Researcher suggested three essential roles listening plays to improve
speaking skill. Rost maintained that spoken language provides a means of
interaction for the learner. This is because learners must interact to achieve
understanding, and access to speakers of the language is essential.
Totally, we have the relationship between listening and other EFL skills –
speaking, reading and writing as well as overall performance in the International
English Language Testing System. The significant positive correlations I found
between listening and other language skills are particularly strong within the
context of EFL providing evidence that listening skill matters even in situation
where English is not the primary language. Closely aligned with the finding, there is
a very strong body of support for syllabus designers and English language
instructors to frame the domain of listening skill attention in the classroom
instruction. Even though this study provided a focus on EFL listening relationship
with other language skills without examining the impact of EFL listening skill
instruction, the results are strong enough to guarantee further research looking at the
impact of learning strategy on EFL language proficiency.
2.1.3. The importance of listening skill
Listening skill is a technique used for understanding, what is being said, how
is showed by body language, what is it meaning. A person who controls is mind and
practices attentive listening will be successful in life and his career. It is a skill that
everyone needs to work at harder than others skills. To have a fluently English

speaker, you need to develop strong listening skills. Good listening skill is not only
helpful to you understand what people are saying, but also help you to speak clearly
like native speaker. And it helps you learn how to pronounce words properly, how to
use intonation, where to place stress in words and sentences, and whatever you
learn in reading, writing skills. After that, using all of what you learned into
speaking action. Listening is ability to identify and understand the sentences

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through understanding your accent, pronunciation, grammar and meeting its
meaning.
According to Rost (1994), he showed a particular list of components to master
when dealing with listening skill: discriminating between sounds, recognizing
words, identifying stressed words and grouping of words, identifying functions
(such as apologizing ) in conversations, connecting linguistic cues to paralinguistic
cues (intonation and stress) and to non-linguistic cues (gestures and relevant objects
in the situation) in order to construct meaning, using background knowledge and
context to predict and then to confirm meaning, giving appropriate feed back to the
speaker, reformulate what the speaker has said.
Listening is one of the most fundamental pieces of learning and teaching
English. In order to be successful in listening, learners should come up with some
strategies such as taking notes during listening, making practice, or having methods
for feeling themselves relaxed during listening. Some reports that listening comes
through four variables; the message, the speaker, the listener and the physical
setting. That’s why when there is listening in problems, we may seem hard to find
out the real factors as there are a lot of factors which can easily affect the
performance of listening.
Listening is vital not only in language learning but also in daily
communication. You know that listening skill is very important but you do not

know the reason why it is. The first reason, listening is an active process. Even you
do not say anything, you are so tired when you go home after a social event in
another language. One solution is to employ active listening techniques, to remind
yourself and others that you are involved in the conversation even if you do not
speak so much. In every time when you make eye contact with the person who’s
talking, lean forward slightly to show interest, nod your head slightly to show you
are understanding, make agreeing noise and nod your head if you agree with
something you are heard, and do not look distracted by fidgeting, playing with your
phone or looking off into the distance, it is show that you are actively listening.
And the second reason, do you know about the “Silent Period”? The problem
with trying to speak from the beginning is that a period of silent listening can

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actually the huge beneficial. As beginners, we are thinking so much about what we
should say next that we do not fully experience what the other person has said.
Allowing yourself to be silent lets you get the most from listening. With silent
period, we can benefit both the motivation of speaking and the listening benefits.
The third reason, our brain is a foreign language goldfish. Reports said that
“When we listen to someone talking, our brain starts processing the information by
“segmenting” it into small chunks to store in our short-term memory. It splits them
up based on our knowledge of the “rules” for how the language is spoken. Instead
of storing the actual words “a green goldfish,” our brain would maybe convert those
words into an image of a green goldfish for storage”. Therefor listening helps us
become familiar with those segmentation rules and improve our speaking in the
language. It will be easier to learn them when we get lots of listening practice.
The fourth reason, our listening strategies are upside-down. When beginning
to learn a language, we often listened to a tape and then translated what we had
heard. It is called a bottom-up listening strategy. When learning by bottom-up

listening, we carefully listen to each word, pronoun and sentence structure to work
out what has been said. But in real situation in workplace, it is very difficult to do.
And we have top-down listening strategies focus on concepts. By top-down
listening, we just need understand of what’s being said.
Top-down listening strategies focus on concepts. Bottom-up listening
strategies focus on words. Both are necessary to be an effective listener.
It basically means that you learn a little about the spoken topic beforehand.
Here are a few suggestions for implementing a top-down listening strategy for some
common activities:
If you’re going to see a movie or theater played in a foreign language, read the
story first. Read up on the topic before going to see a presentation. Try reading
about or predicting the content of an audio passage before you listen to it. This will
get your brain focusing on concepts and not just specific words. Hang about with a
friend who repeats the same anecdote when with different people. You already
know the story, so your comprehension will go up dramatically. It’s also a great way
to make a potentially annoying situation into a useful learning exercise.

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2.1.4. The importance of English and listening in English at workplace.
Advances in technology, including vastly improved telecommunications and
the rapid expansion of online resources, have cemented the unique role of English
as an international language. Even where nonnative speakers of English outnumber
native speakers, English is most often used as an efficient means to communicate.
Furthermore, in the global workplace, English has become an essential
communication tool in conducting business transactions.
Good communication, of course, involves both give and take or in the words
of language experts both productive and receptive language skills. Today, languageteaching approaches focus on building the learner’s ability to engage in real-life
situations and tasks in the target language. The English speaker must be able to both

take a phone call and answer the speaker; to write an e-mail and understand the
reply; to conduct research and recommend a course of action; in short, to integrate
listening, reading, speaking and writing, in any combination, in order to
communicate successfully. It is time for us to look more closely at the day-to-day
needs of our English-language learners the need to understand and use English in
everyday activities, to carry out routine social interactions, and to develop careerrelated communication skills.
In some cases, the situation may require only two language skills one
receptive (listening or reading) and one productive (speaking or writing). In most
others, the English user must integrate all four skills of speaking, listening, writing
and reading. Only rarely are skills used in isolation.
The manual explicitly remarks that graduate engineers should be equipped
with “the ability to communicate effectively” thus showing that communication is
one of the key attributes to be attained by engineering undergraduates in order to
become successful engineers.
And in his opinion, this is especially important in spelling. Vocabulary should
be consistent, but with the influence of television and varied sources of learning
English, it can be forgiven if you’re writing in British English and you say
‘highway’ instead of ‘motorway’. However, spelling is a bit more important and
noticeable, so don’t go mixing ‘colours’ and ‘colors’, or ‘analysing’ and ‘analyzing’.

12


He suggested that it would come across as unsure and unchecked. If you’re unsure,
a very quick internet search will iron out any doubts. But you should not do it any
times, the better thing is which listening an example of words and spelling followed
it. After that, let try to use more and more as you can in communication.
2.1.5. Types of listening skills
In our daily lives we are faced with many different situations which require
different types of listening skills. Then, we have so many different ways to classify

listening into different types of listening practice. Following to ESOL teachers, we
have intensive listening, extensive listening, selective listening, interactive listening,
responsive listening, and autonomous listening. Another person, Evdokia Karavas,
Copyright National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, thought that having 2
types of listening: participatory listening, non-participatory listening. Participatory
listening is included interactional (for the purpose of engaging in social rituals), and
transactional (for the purpose exchanging information). Another type of listening is
non-participatory listening. It includes listening to live conversations without taking
part, listening to announcements to extract information, listening to or watching
films, plays, radio and songs where the purpose is enjoyment, following instructions
in order to carry out a task efficiently, attending a lecture or following a lesson,
listening to someone give a public address.
And more details, Target study Education Knowledge Career, the researchers
divided into 12 types of listening. Firstly, active listening, it is a type of listening
wherein the listener is attentive towards what the speaker is saying. It helps the
listener understand the emotions, which the words are expressing. Active listening
is not only listening to what is being said, but also listening to what is unspoken.
When the speaker is not comfortable in taking a direct manner, active listening
helps us understand some cues without words.
Next, appreciative listening is a type of listening where one accepts and
appreciates the other person through what they say. For examples, you are listening
to something for pleasure, such as music.
Then, casual listening is listening without showing much attention. This type
is not to particular purpose. We do not pay much attention to the information, not

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listen carefully. Everything that we hear is very hard to remember for details all of
the content. We just remember a part which is interested us. And comprehension of

listening, or some other names are content listening, informative listening or full
listening. In this type, listeners just remember important words and remove less
important words from a long speech.
With critical listening, a listening performed to evaluate, judge, form opinion
about what is being said. The key is to try to understand the person before
evaluating.
And dialogic listening, a type of listening where a listener hears a conversation
and engages in interchange of ideas and information in order to learn more about
the person and how they think.
About discriminative listening, when the listener discriminates between
different sound and sights, it is a type of listening skill that listener is trying to hear
something specific. As a person from one country finds out that it is difficult to
speak another language perfectly. The learner can see the changes of speaker’s rate,
volume, force, pitch, and emphasis, and even nuances of difference in meaning.
Another type is empathetic listening. It is a type of listening where listener
understands the speaker’s concern or loss with a rational approach. This kind of
listening is often used in customer service where profits for the business and
acknowledge the customer’s emotions is noticed.
Sympathetic listening and listening skill used to show care for the speaker and
acknowledging his sorrows in a sympathetic way. This type of listening skill is used
in sympathetic conversations, and police communicate situation. It is the important
social skills.
Last, it is therapeutic listening. Therapeutic listening means that the listener
has a purpose of not only empathizing with the speaker but also to use this deep
connection in order to help the speaker understand, change or develop in some way.
We can meet this kind of listening be used by sellers, marketing sellers, medical
personnel, coaches, the psychologist, and when we listen to our friends or other
relationships.

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Listening skill have many types. We use a different type of listening in a
situation which it is needed.
2.2. The difficulties of English listening skill.
2.2.1. The difficulties of using English listening strategies.
Listening ability is one of the important skills in foreign language learning.
Among four language skills, researches show that listening skill is employed most
frequently. Therefore, strategies for listening and the ability to use them effectively
are particularly significant in language learning.
The findings indicated that most learners were still unable to apply the
strategies properly in EFL listening and needed guidance from instructors.
About pre-listening planning Strategies, well-prepared pre-listening strategies
can help build up confidence and facilitate listening comprehension. And
previewing the questions before the text was helpful to the learner’s comprehension.
However, for learners, their lack of knowledge of grammar and vocabulary would
definitely affect their listening comprehension, and thus reduced their confidence.
You need list the new vocabulary on the board and offered the pictures to help the
learners predict the listing questions. Nevertheless, researchers considered that preteaching vocabulary before listening might negatively influenced the learner’s
strategy using because the learners might focus on clues and not pay attention to
understand the whole content.
And while listening, most learners were aware that they did not concentrate on
listening, and correct it immediately. However, the speakers’ accent, stress and
speed would influence their mind. Most of the listeners confused about what they
heard because of speakers’ accents. There were 66.25% of learners influenced by
the contents. In Vietnam, majority of the listening materials are recorded in
American accents; however, as English is an international language used by variety
of nations around the world .Comparatively, learners showed low interests if they
were willing to check the parts they didn’t understand and did not often check
again their answers when they finished the test

either. As different types of

materials can cause different barriers for variety of listeners, 87.5% of learners
thought news was the most difficult listening materials while 85% of learners

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suppose short conversation was somewhat easier. In this statement, learners were
not used to look over their answers again. Some possible explanation might result
from their losing patience, out of time etc. Yet, researchers suggested that teachers
should provide “a variety of text, tasks, strategies, and overt practices in order to
help listeners develop that unique compound that is most effective for them as
individuals.”
In the post-listening Evaluation Strategies, the results demonstrated that most
learners found out the problems by checking the key words and contents. They
didn’t understand. However, for the further study of looking up the words in the
dictionary, we found that learners showed their conservative attitude in it.
For, post-listening evaluation strategies, having a large lexicon could help
EFL learners improve their listening comprehension. Most of the listeners had
problems of poor vocabulary. When they heard some words they could not figure
out, they would feel confused. How to expand the vocabulary was an important
issue in language learning. In research, it indicated that most subjects looked up the
unknown vocabulary in the dictionary. Yet, almost half of the subjects did not look
up the unknown vocabulary in the dictionary. Actually, many people are used to the
ways of acquiring information from teachers instead of self-searching. It is essential
for instructors to stimulate learners’ learning autonomy in problem-solving while
designing instruction.
Cognitive formal practicing strategies, in this category of evaluating learners’

cognitive translation, most learners can utilize the new words, phrases, or grammar
to comprehend the content in the article and they like to translate words or
sentences into Vietnamese in order to understand. However, while asking learnerts
if they will practice actively in daily lives, not so many persons show their strong
motivation in learning listening comprehension. The data indicated that 86.4% of
them accessed their listening ability by their teachers’ pronunciation of vocabulary,
and phrases or oral reading of sentences and passages, and only 28.7% of the
learners practiced listening through audiotapes. The result illustrated that most
learners only studied in the English classroom, and were lack of passion to utilize
any facilities around them to improve their listening comprehension. Learners could

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use the authentic text to practice their listening skill, and build their confidence in
future real conversation with foreigners. Nevertheless, the authentic materials such
as the real dialogues in videos are different from reading textbooks used in the
classroom. They usually talk in faster speed, linking sounds, different accents and
full of words with different meanings. Learners tended to be panic in listened the
real materials since authentic materials were faster in speaking speed. After all,
instead of giving listening tests, the instructor might consider to create an authentic
and friendly listening environment for promoting learners’ learning motivation.
And, the bottom-up strategies tend to understand the details such as words or
phrases of the content. It seems that listeners like to put details together to
understand what the sentences mean, especially notice the information of who, how,
when, where, and what , piece things together from the details , try to understand
each word , judge the meaning based on the speaker’s stress, intonation and pitch .
However, the skills of repeating words or phrases softly or mentally are
comparatively not used by most learners. Actually, for applying of bottom-up
processing, it is necessary to learn how to break the content down into its

components and combine together. However, learners need a large vocabulary and
good working knowledge of sentence structure to process texts bottom-up.
Traditionally, the exercises of dictation, cloze listening, the use of multiple-choice
questions after the texts etc. are applied to process the bottom-up strategy. Richards
(2008) pointed out that the recognition of key words, transition in a discourse,
grammatical relationships between elements in sentences, and use stress, intonation
to identify word and sentence functions were the essential elements in processing
bottom-up strategy.
Moreover, about top-down strategies, top-down skills are also essential
strategies in listening comprehension. The results indicated that most learners were
good at applying guessing the meaning based on the context but not familiar with
trying to think in English instead of Vietnamese. Other top-down skills were applied
by learners in improving their listening comprehension. For example, predicting or
making hypotheses on texts by titles, listening for main ideas first and then details
and collecting the contents of listening to my personal experiences. Generally

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speaking, it is concluded that learners still need more guidance in developing topdown strategies.
As top-down processing went from meaning to language, the background
knowledge required for top-down processing might be previous knowledge about
the topic of discourse, situational or contextual knowledge, or knowledge in the
form of “schemata” or “scripts”-plans about the overall structure of events and
relationships between them . It is quite natural for learners to choose their familiar
ways to process the information in terms of “trying to think in English instead of
Vietnamese”. However, some exercises were also suggested by Richard (2008) in
developing top-down strategies: use key words to construct the schema of a
discourse, infer the setting for the text, role of the participants and their goals,
causes or effects, unstated details, and anticipate questions related to the topic or

situation.
2.2.2. Factors that affect learning English listening skills.
According to Underwood (1989,14, 16), the English learner is Foreign often
face seven difficulties implicitly follows: uncontrollable speed the degree of the
speaker, not repeatable what listened to, limited vocabulary of listeners, not
recognizing the suggestive signal, not understanding information, not focused, and
not available study habits.
Rubin and Thompson (1997, 1, 87) also claimed three problems and suggested
solutions. First, the speaker says too fast. If the listener cannot keep up the speed of
the speaker, they need ask the speaker to repeat, more clearly, lauder or express the
same idea but according to other easier to understand ways. Secondly, the listener
cannot understand the target language on TV or in movie. Listeners should learn
how to guess or predict what they will hear next, based on visual cues, questions of
teachers, warm-up activities and their knowledge background. Thirdly, listeners
often have the tendency to stop listening, when heard a new word, or a new phrase.
As a result, they lose information sections what can help explain unfamiliar words
or phrases. Listener should focus on familiar parts and keep listening for complete
information.

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According to Hasan (2000) the learner sometimes is not aware of their
mistakes found the cause of their problems. They often use of hearing ineffective
strategies and try to listen and try to understand each word, any detail of context.
Trying to listen and trying to understand each word what you heart is wrong,
because even native speakers do not listen to this way. Good listeners usually only
hear the keyword to understand the main idea of the message and always try to
guess the meaning of the new word in context.
Rubin (1994) pointed out five possible factors affect listening comprehension.

It is characteristics of hearing as spoken speed, stop, stress and rhyme, the
difference between the begin language and the target language and so on,
characteristics of dialogue as gender and level of language proficiency;
characteristics of listener such as level of language proficiency, memory,
concentration, age, gender, ability to use the first language, background
acknowledges and characteristics of information processing listening like using topdown processes, bottom up, parallel processing, listening strategies.
Yagang (1994) assessed the difficulty of listening comprehension based on
four factors: listening message, the speaker, the listener, and the listening context.
Rubin also shared the view that when the learned a foreign language, the listening
and understanding unfamiliar sounds in long time is very tired. In addition, if the
message contains much information cannot be stored easily in short-term memory,
the listening strategies will not be feasible. The short list is usually more effective,
as it helps reduce the complexity of message. It also helps the listener get tired and
shorten the time of highly concentrate. Background knowledge has big impact to
understanding the topic heard. Learners make the meaning of hearing by the way
that they drive what they hear (or read) into meaningful units, then put them
together based on social knowledge and their available language, then speculate
logic fill in the blanks. Learners with the amount background knowledge on a topic
at other different levels will understand and interpret new information according to
the different ways when they decode new information. By the use of available
knowledge and their strategies, the learner tries to solve new information means
through association with the familiar information.

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