Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre listening activities

SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO THANH HÓA

TRƯỜNG THPT NGA SƠN

SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM

TÊN ĐỀ TÀI
HELP GRADE 11 STUDENTS TO SUCCEED IN A
LISTENING LESSON BY PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES

Người thực hiện: Tạ Thị Nga
Chức vụ: Giáo viên
SKKN thuộc môn: Tiếng Anh

THANH HÓA, NĂM 2017


Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
PART I: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………….3
1. Reasons for choosing the research…………………………………………...3
2. Aims of the research………………………………………………………….3
3. Object of the research………………………………………………………...3
4. Research methods………………………………………………………….....3
PART II. CONTENTS………………………………………………………… 4
1. Rationale……………………………………………………………………...4
2. Practical basis………………………………………………………………...4
3. Pre-listening activities help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening Lesson.
………………………………………………………………………….4

3.1. Set up the context……………………………………………………...........4
3.2. Activate existing knowledge………………………………………………..6
3.3. Build knowledge…………………………………………………………....9
3.4. Pe-teach vocabulary and structures………………………………………...10
3.5. Make predictions…………………………………………………….......... 11
4. Research achievement……………………………………………….............13
PART III : CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION …………………...15
1. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………....15
2. Recommendation……………………………………………………………..15

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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

PART I. INTRODUCTION
1. Reasons for choosing the research.
Listening is vital not only in language learning but also in daily communication.
Because, If you can not hear well you will find it hard to communicate. However,
listening skill seems to be ignored by most students. “Many students are fearful of
listening, and can be disheartened when they listen to something but feel they
understand very little” (Gareth Rees 2003). It is also harder to concentrate on listening
if you have little interest in a topic or situation. The challenges of listening in another
language are great. Our students have to deal with unfamiliar sounds, new vocabulary,
and complex sentences. They may not be familiar with the setting, know nothing about
the speakers, and have little knowledge of the topic being discussed. And they’re
expected to listen and understand a text in real time, with no control of the discourse,

in a classroom setting. Being a teacher, I thought a lot of this problem and I applied
some strategies that help students in my school to improve their listening skill. Among
strategies I used, pre-listening activities help me achieve good result in listening
lessons. It is true that pre-listening plays a very important role in helping students to
learn how to listen in the foreign language. Thanks to pre-listening activities, my
students are more active, more confident and more excited in listening lessons. I hope
that “Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening
activities” can help students to upgrade the listening skill and take more interested in
listening.
2. Aims of the research.
This research aims to prepare grade 11 students for listening, to ensure students
success, and to get them excited about listening by pre-listening activities, which
help teachers find out about what students already know about the topic, prepare
them for the vocabulary and language structures in the listening text, mitigate the
anxiety which comes from listening in a foreign language and offer opportunities
for class discussion and more interaction among students.
3. Object of the research.
This research focuses on pre-listening activities for grade 11 students in a
listening lesson in order to help them to deal with the listening text more easily.
4. Research methods.
- Find out difficulties students have in listening process.
- Read reference books.
- Discuss with my colleagues.
- Apply pre-listening activities in teaching
- Observe and draw out experience.

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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

PART II. CONTENTS
1. Rationale.
“It would not be fair towards students to draw them straight into the listening
without introducing the topic or the type of activity they are going to work on,
since in the real life there are not many situations when people are supposed to
listen with having no idea what they are going to hear so that is why students
should be given a substantial pre-listening support. This pre-listening support will
help them to become more confident and successful.” Eva Macháčková (2009).
Pre-listening can be recognized as a stage of preparation and warming up of the
whole process of listening. A good pre-listening activities enable the learners to
deal with the following listening text smoothly and strategically, such as to generate
interest, build up confidence and facilitate comprehension. About 170 students
from different classes at Nga Son high school participated in this research, which
shows that pre-listening activities are indispensable in listening process.
2. Practical basis.
According to Ene Peterson (2015), “listening comprehension still remains one of
the least understood processes and learners often regard listening as the most
difficult language skill to acquire and evaluate”. In fact, students are quite passive
in listening lessons. Because listening activities often create high levels of anxiety
and stress among learners that can interfere with comprehension. They even
listening and can’t concentrate on the listening text. Therefore, low scores in
listening are unavoidable. This is also the teachers’ biggest difficulty. Since
addressing listening in the language classroom poses some challenges. It is these
problems that urge me to find out the solutions to hepl students get over the
challenges and succeed in listening.
3. Pre-listening activities help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening
lesson.

3.1. Set up the context.
The teacher can help provide the background information to activate learners'
schema, so they will be better prepared to understand what they hear. Whether the
teacher can effectively set up the scene depends on what he or she knows about the
topic in question, what he or she has in hand, and also how well he or she knows
about the language level of the students he or she is teaching. Setting up the context
is what your textbooks often does for you. A good direction line may be just a line
or two, but it can give key information – the speakers, their relationship, their
location, and the topic. The direction line contains the basics. As a teacher, be sure
to draw their students’s attention to this, but feel free to elaborate and to add further
information to help orient students to what they’ll hear.
Examples:
Example 1 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 2 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

- The teacher asks students to look at the picture in the book and ask them some
questions
+ What do you see in the
picture? + What is happening?
+ What are people doing?
- After looking at the picture, students give the
answers Expected answer: In the picture, we see:
+ A house is on fire.
+ The fire brigade is fighting to put out the fire:
+ And people are running away with the firemen’s help.

-> By setting up the context, Teacher provide the background information- an
experience in a fire to encourage students to listen attentively, so they will be
better prepared to make sense of what they hear.
Example 2
Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 7. WORLD POPULATION
-The teacher ask students to look at the part: before you listen and the guidance in
while you listen. And then, teacher catches their attention to the key words in this
part.
Before you listen
Work in pairs. Discuss the following questions.
1. Do you think that our world is overpopulated?
2: What continent has the largest population?
While you listen
You will hear Dr. Brown, a world population expert, talk about the world
population. Listen to the interview and do the tasks that follow.

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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

-> Thanks to the keys words underlined: a world population, overpopulated,
continent, expert students easily realize that they will hear an expert talk about the
world population in which, he might compare the population among continents as
well as the population explosion. Thus, these suggestions remind students of
knowledge they acquired in geography and fell more confident in while listening.
3.2. Activate existing knowledge.
After setting up the context, if you go straight in to the listening, the students

have had no time to transfer or activate their knowledge (which may have been
learnt in their first language) in the second language. And students have difficulty
in finding informations in while-listening part. It is known that “each student brings
something different to the class – his or her own knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and,
biases. It’s up to the teacher to activate their prior knowledge, or schema” (Pearson
2014). What do the students already know about the topic? Ask questions, Give a
short quiz, Find out, Keep in mind, however, that background knowledge is not
limited to content schemata. It also includes rhetorical schemata – the learners’
understanding of the structure and organization of the discourse . Here are some
examples about activating current knowledge of grade 11 students in listening part:
Examples:
Example 1
Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 6.COMPETITION

After looking at these pictures, students understand that the will hear some
information about Boston marathon. Then teacher should ask students some
questions such as:
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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

1. What is the Boston Marathon?
2. When did it begin?
3. Where do you think the Boston Marathon might take place?
4. How often is it held?
5. Who do you think can take part in the Boston race?
These questions help students activate their existing knowledge about Boston

Marathon
Expected answer

In 1897
one of the
world's
best-known
road racing
events.

BOSTON

MARATHON

in the USA
Every year
amateur and
professional
runners
-> The important information related runnerstocanBostontake marathon students
part
in
provide helps not only raise their interest but
also easily catch the details
mentioned in while-listening.
Example 2 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 16 . THE WONDERS OF THE
WORLD

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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

Students know that It is The Great Wall of China. So teacher should ask some
questions to guide students to the main content they are going to hear.
Questions
1. Where do you think it is?
2. When do you think it was built?
3. How long did it take to complete it?
4. How many provinces does the wall cover ?
5. How many kilometres does the wall stretch ?
6. When was it listed as World Heritage by UNESCO?

The Great Wall of China

In China

In 1987
in 1368

200 years

6,000km
5 provinces

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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

Information sharing among students makes them be familiar with the listening
task, which will bring them into the topic, and make them more willing to listen.
3.3. Build knowledge.
When you activate existing knowledge, you may find that students may have
limited general knowledge about a topic. Learners can build knowledge through the
listening itself, but you may choose to build upon that knowledge before they
listen. This then acts as a bridge to new concepts. There are many ways to do this.
For example, you can have students read a short text, look at a photo or graph, or
expose them to experiences they have never had before.
Here is an examples to build up knowledge for grade 11students.
Example : Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 15: SPACE CONQUEST
Many students don’t know much about the subject – first moon conquest. So, in
this lesson, the teacher can have students watch a Video which shows the first steps
of humain beings in conquering the Moon. Thanks to this video, students can
understand the important details in that historic moment and they will pay more
attention to “while-listening”
Here are some photos from the Video I provide my students with.

->The video created a positive
atmosphere to listen the passage and
help students imagine the contents of
the listening text.
3. 4. Pre-teach
structures.

vocabulary

and

Included in building knowledge is
exposing learners to the basic
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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

vocabulary and structures needed for comprehension while listening, as well as
cultural information. An overly demanding vocabulary load can be demotivating
and cause listeners to shut down. You may choose to elicit or remind learners of
vocabulary or structures they already know, or explicitly teach the key words and
phrases needed for comprehension. There are, of course, valid reasons for not preteaching, such as when focusing on listening for the meaning of vocabulary in
context, or when teaching listeners to tolerate unknown words. It’s therefore up to
the teacher to decide what (and whether) to pre-teach. In general, the new words
are mentioned in “listen and repeat”. However, some words are unnecessary while
some keys words or important structures are ignored. Make sure that your students
can understand what they will hear, you have to provide them with these key
words. Here are some examples.
Examples:
Example 1 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 1 FRIENDSHIP In
the text book
. Listen and repeat.
apartment building
guitarist
motobike

sense of humour
favourite
around
some words such as guitarist, motobike, favourite are very familiar with students
while some difficult words and important structures are not mentioned. So the
vocabulary should be:
Vocabulary
1. Apartment building
2 .Sense of humour
3. Have a lot of things in common
4. Help somebody through hard time
5. Give somebody a ring
These words and structures help students can understand the questions in task 1
of “while listening” (They have a lot of things in common or Minh always helped
Long out of difficulties) and catch the information in the passage easily
Example 2
Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 13 HOBBIES
In This unit, the vocabulary in “listen and repeat” is quite enough. But the
words “magazines” or “available” are mentioned in Unit 9 and Unit 11. Therefore,
the teacher can add some important structures to the vocabulary such as : get fed
up with, enable , cope with to help average and below average students can
understand the lesson. The vocabulary of listening part in unit 11 may be:
Vocabulary
1. get fed up with
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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

2. continually (n)
3. enable somebody to do something
4. bygone (adj)
5. gigantic (adj)
6. cope with
7. otherwise
8. ignorantly(adv)
-> The structure “get fed up with” will help students to give the answer to the
question 2 in Task 1 “his parents were interested in reading fairy tails and other
stories to him”. The structure “enable somebody to do something” is also a
suggestion for students to the statement “reading helps the writer to know many
things”. Other words and structures play an important role in guiding students to
the passage.
By having the time to think about the language needs of a situation, students
will be excellently prepared to cope with the listening.
3. 5. Make predictions.
Predicting is one of the most effective pre-listening tasks because it creates a
real, focused purpose for listening. It is very motivating for students to see whether
their predictions were correct. There are a lot of things that can be predicted and
checked. With the teacher’s help, students can predict what words will be in the
script, what topics the speakers might discuss, the order of events, or the answers to
general content questions. These are usually done at the beginning, before listening,
and then checked during the initial, gist listening. Then while listening you can stop
from time to time to check their predictions. This works especially well with stories
or reports such as unit 2, unit 3, unit 12, unit 13, unit 15.
If there is a picture with the listening passage, the students can be asked to
predict what the passage will contain before they listen.
Example 1 Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 12- THE ASIAN GAMES
Teacher asks students to look at the pictures in the text book and predict what

sports will be mentioned in the passage. Students can easily guess that there are
four sports in the report: high jump, long jump, swimming and gymnastics.
So students can predict the answer to the question 5 in task 1
Question 5. Which of the following sports events was NOT mentioned in the
report?
A. swimming
C. long and high jumps
D. weightlifting
B. gymnastics.

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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

Another type of predicting task is to let students read the listening
comprehension questions before they listen. In this way, they can guess the topic of
the listening text. Sometimes, the teacher can even ask the students to guess the
answers to the questions before they listen. Acoording to Berman(2003), “the
answers to the questions you form during this pre-listening step will often
correspond to the actual main ideas of the lecture; in this way, these questions
actually improve comprehension by helping you to identify main ideas and
discriminate them from less important details”. Even though it may be impossible
to predict the correct answers, the students will be more motivated to listen to the
passage to see if their predictions are correct or not.
In question 2, students can predict the answer by analyzing the situation: An
presentative athlete mentioned in the report has a high point and A. 9.5 might be the
answer after comparing the choices in this question

Question 2. Lily got an average of……………points in her gymnastics event.
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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

A. 9.5

B. 5.9

C. 15

D. 5

Example 2: Part C-Listening English 11: Unit 10- NATURE IN DANGER.
After activating existing knowledge about national parks in Viet Nam as well as
in national parks in the word among students, students can understand the purposes
and the common state of national parks and thus they have enough knowledge to
predict if these statements are true or false.
1. National parks protect and preserve the natural beauty of the land.
2. They usually contain a variety of scenic features.
3. All national parks are in danger of being destroyed.
4. Large areas of national parks can be destroyed by fire.
5. Visitors do not help to preserve and protect national parks.
“Research in listening has shown that good listeners are good predictors”.(unit
8:teaching listening skill- A course in English language teaching). By helping our
students become better predictors, we are helping them become better listeners. In
the beginning, the students may have difficulty predicting. So if the teacher can

help them by asking leading questions, they are more interested in listening lesson
and certainly will achieve surprising results.
4. Research achievement.
“Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening
activities” has become rather effective for my students, who are generally
struggling with listening work. After applying these pre-listening activities to the
listening lessons, my students are more interested in listening lessons and work
more effectively. Real numbers are shown by the two following tables.
The result in listening before applying new pre-listening activities
Total
Grade
11B
11C
11D
11E
11H

students
31
33
36
41
34

Excellent grade
number
1
0
2
2

0

%
3.2%
0%
5.5%
4.9%
0%

Good grade
number
3
2
4
3
1

Average grade

%
number
9.7%
10
6%
12
11%
20
7.3%
15
2.9%

7

%
32%
36%
55%
36.6%
20.6%

Below average
grade
number
%
17
55.1%
19
58%
10
28.5%
21
51.2%
26
76.5%

The result in listening after applying new pre-listening activities
Grad
e

Total
students

Excellent grade

By Tạ Thị Nga - Nga Son high school

Good grade

Average grade

Below average
grade
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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

11B
11C
11D
11E
11H

31
33
36
41
34

number
3

2
5
4
2

%
9.7%
6%
14%
9.8%
5.9%

number
8
7
9
9
7

%
26%
21%
25%
22%
20.5%

number
16
19
17

20
20

%
52%
58%
47%
49%
59%

number
4
5
5
8
5

%
12.3%
15%
14%
19.2
14.6%

As can be seen from the tables, the number of students achieving excellent and
good grade increases considerably while the ones having below average grade
decrease dramatically. It means that these pre-listening activities are very helpful to
the teacher as well as students in a listening lesson.

PART III: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

1. Conclusion.
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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

The old saying goes; "Well begun is half done". Truly, a good pre-listening
activity may help the teacher to stimulate students' motivation and expectations for
the listening text, furthermore facilitate the listening teaching and more importantly
improve listening skill for students. On account of the features of listening teaching
and the role of pre-listening stage, it is necessary to design and arrange appropriate
pre-listening activities in a listening lesson. A well-planned pre-listening activity
could prepare the students to deal with the listening text smoothly. It is also helpful
to build up students' confidence and motivate them to listen. During the prelistening process, teachers can take the opportunity to introduce world knowledge
and related language knowledge related to the text. Moreover, it devotes to fulfill
the whole process of a listening lesson in making the work more effective and
efficient. However, even though pre-listening plays a significant role in the whole
listening process, it does not mean that it needs to occupy too much time in the
classroom teaching. The length of pre-listening part could be flexible in different
circumstance.
Because I can not avoid some mistakes in my writing, your opinions will be
useful for me to perfect it.
2. Recommendation.
To confirm what have been written above and my ideas about the pre-listening
activities to improve the listening skill of the students, I conclude with these ideas:
Firstly to the students, they should spend much more time at home on acquiring
knowledge concerning the listening topics and enrich their vocabulary regularly.
Secondly to the teachers, they should show his students the ways in the first stage

of listening comprehension by each lesson.
Thirdly to high schools, they should be equiped with modern devices such as
projector, audiovisual room ect.
Finally, Department of Education and Training should provide high schools with
more educational equipment such as tapes, interactional pictures ect.
I would like to thank.

The confirmation of the principle

Thanh Hoa, May 25th 2017
I promise not to have copied
Signature

Tạ Thị Nga
REFERENCES

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Help grade 11 students to succeed in a listening lesson by pre-listening activities

1. Listening strategy guide. (2003). Berman
2. Preparing Students for Success with Pre-Listening Tasks.(2014). Pearson
3.Teaching and studying online: best practices, resources and activities for
developing listening skills.(2015).Ene Peterson
4. Engish 11-teacher book(2010). Viet Nam Education Publisher.
5. Teaching Listening. (2009).Eva Macháčková.
6. Pre-listening activities.(2003).Gareth Rees.

7. A course in English language teaching. On the internet.
8. Planning a listening activity.(2011) Sarah Sahr.

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