The Impacts of Listening Strategy Training on 10-Grade Students’ Listening Performance at Mỹ Đức C High School: A Quasi-Experimental Study

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
*************************

LÊ THỊ BÍCH HẠNH

THE IMPACTS OF LISTENING STRATEGY TRAINING ON 10GRADE STUDENTS’ LISTENING PERFORMANCE AT MỸ ĐỨC C
HIGH SCHOOL: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
Nghiên cứu ngụy thực nghiệm về tác động của việc rèn luyện chiến lược
nghe đối với năng lực thực hành nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10 trường
THPT Mỹ Đức C

M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field

: English Teaching Methodology

Code

: 60.140.111

Hanoi – 2014


VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
*************************

LÊ THỊ BÍCH HẠNH

THE IMPACTS OF LISTENING STRATEGY TRAINING ON 10GRADE STUDENTS’ LISTENING PERFORMANCE AT MỸ ĐỨC C
HIGH SCHOOL: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
Nghiên cứu ngụy thực nghiệm về tác động của việc rèn luyện chiến lược
nghe đối với năng lực thực hành nghe hiểu của học sinh lớp 10 trường
THPT Mỹ Đức C

M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field

: English Teaching Methodology

Code

: 60.140.111

Supervisor: Dr. Đỗ Thị Thanh Hà

Hanoi – 2014


DECLARATION

I, hereby, certify the thesis entitled “The impacts of listening strategy training
on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C high school: a quasiexperimental study” is the result of my own research for the Minor Degree of Master
of Arts at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National
University, Hanoi, and this thesis has not, wholly or partially, been submitted for any
degree at any other universities or institutions.

Hanoi, 10th March 2015

Lê Thị Bích Hạnh

i


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to all those who have supported
me in doing this independent study.
Firstly, I would like to express my greatest appreciation to my supervisor, Dr.
Đỗ Thị Thanh Hà for her enthusiastic encouragement, valuable guidance, wise
suggestions and useful critiques towards the completion of this study.
Secondly, I am extremely grateful to the staff members of the Faculty of Post graduate studies for their helpful lectures.
My special thanks are also sent to my lecturers, my friends, my classmates, as
well as my colleagues for their invaluable comments and criticism and also for their
continued interest and encouragements.
Thirdly, I appreciate the assistance and cooperation given to me by teachers and
students at Mỹ Đức C high school. Without their sincere participation, this paper
would not have been possible.
Last but not least, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved people,
my parents, my husband and my children for their love, care, tolerance and
encouragement.

ii


ABSTRACT
In recent years more and more studies have focused on language learning
strategies and their importance, especially learning strategies in listening skill. Sharing

the same concern, this research aims at exploring Mỹ Đức C high school 10-grade
students’ awareness of top-down and bottom-up listening strategies, from which the
researcher would like to study the impacts of listening strategy training on their
listening performance. 70 students in grade 10 and 11 were divided into two groups:
control and experimental with two research instruments – questionnaires and pretest,
posttest. After receiving 6 listening strategy training sessions, participants showed a
statistically significant improvement in listening performance. The experimental group
obtained higher mean scores in post-test in comparison with those of control group.
The study result also indicated that the students in experimental group became more
aware of when and how to apply both strategies, especially bottom-up ones, in doing
listening tasks. This study suggests that explicit listening strategy instruction should be
part of the ESL curriculum.

iii


LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 1: Teaching plan during implementation period
Table 2: Bottom-up strategy use of the control group
Table 3: Bottom-up strategy use of the experimental group
Table 4: Top-down strategy use of the control group
Table 5: Top-down strategy use of the experimental group
Table 6: Bottom-up strategy use of both groups
Table 7: Top-down strategy use of both groups
Table 8: Descriptive statistics for the pre-test and post-test of control group and
experimental group (Max score = 10)
Table 9: The relationship between experimental and control group’s test scores
Table 10: Pretest and posttest scores of control and experimental groups
Figure 1: The difference in gain values obtained by both groups after experiment

iv


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Declaration ................................................................................................................... i
Acknowledgement ....................................................................................................... ii
Abstract ...................................................................................................................... iii
List of tables and figures ............................................................................................. iv
Table of content ........................................................................................................... v
PART A: INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1
1. Rationale ................................................................................................................. 1
2. Research Questions .................................................................................................. 2
3. Objectives of the study............................................................................................. 2
4. Scope of the study.................................................................................................... 3
5. Methodology ........................................................................................................... 3
6. Significance of the study .......................................................................................... 3
7. Outline of the study ................................................................................................. 3
PART B: DEVELOPMENT...................................................................................... 5
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................. 5
I. Theoretical background ............................................................................................ 5
1. Definitions of listening ..................................................................................... 5
2. Learning strategies ............................................................................................ 6
2.1 .Learning strategies – definition ....................................................................... 6
2.2. Bottom up learning strategy ............................................................................ 7
2.3. Top-down learning strategies ........................................................................ 8
3. Strategy training .............................................................................................. 11
4.Listening strategy models ................................................................................. 12
II. Related studies: ..................................................................................................... 15

CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .................................................... 17
2.1. Settings ............................................................................................................... 17
2.2. Participants ......................................................................................................... 17
2.3. Research methods ............................................................................................... 17
2.4. Data collection method ....................................................................................... 18
v


2.3.1. Pre-test ....................................................................................................... 19
2.3.2. Post-test ...................................................................................................... 19
2.3.3. Questionnaire for students .......................................................................... 19
2.5. Training procedure .............................................................................................. 20
2.6. Data analysis methods......................................................................................... 25
CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .................... 26
3.1. Research question 1: How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high
school been aware of the listening strategies? ............................................................ 26
3.1.1. Bottom-up strategies ........................................................................................ 26
3.1.2. Top-down strategies ......................................................................................... 28
3.1.3. Cross-comparison between the two groups ...................................................... 30
3.2. Research question 2: How did the training of listening strategies have
impact on the students’ listening performance? .......................................................... 32
3.3. Discussions on the study results .......................................................................... 35
3.4. Summary ............................................................................................................ 36
PART C: CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................... 37
1. Review of the study ............................................................................................... 37
2. Implications. ......................................................................................................... 37
3. Limitations of the study ......................................................................................... 40
4. Recommendations for further studies ..................................................................... 41
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................ 42
APPENDICES ........................................................................................................... I

1.Questionnaire .............................................................................................................I
2. Pretest ..................................................................................................................... II
3. Posttest .................................................................................................................. IX
4. Test results........................................................................................................... XV
5. Lesson plans .................................................................................................... XVIII

vi


PART A. INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale:
The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has launched Vietnam’s National
Foreign Language 2020 Project (NFL2020) to build national foreign language
capacity. This project aims at establishing a proficiency framework compatible with
the CEFR (The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages),
implementing compulsory English programs beginning in grade 3 with benchmarks
of A1 for primary, A2 for lower secondary, and B1 for upper secondary, college and
university graduates. This means that by the year 2020, students are not only able to
master reading, writing skills but also speaking and listening ones. Among these
skills, listening is generally considered as the most difficult skill by language
learners. According to Nguyễn Văn Phú (2013) on Tuoitreonline, only 2-3% of
secondary teachers throughout Vietnam passed the CEFR exam, especially, the
number of teachers passing the listening skill was even smaller. British Council and
Apollo did a research on learners’ English competence in 20 countries and found out
that Vietnam rank 8th over 20 on reading and writing skills but only 19th over 20 on
listening and speaking skills. Listening skill is also considered a source of anxiety
for learners of English (Graham, 2006: 165). This anxiety become more serious if
the listeners are under the false impression that they must understand every word
they hear resulting in low self-confidence in listening. Many of English learners
attribute their problems in listening to what they perceive as their low listening

ability or difficult listening texts or tasks. Such attributions indicate a sense of
passivity and helplessness in language learners, thus easily resulting in their
becoming demotivated and fed up with listening.

It is, therefore, difficult for

learners to have a clear understanding of how to go about listening in a second
language and to find ways to improve their performance. Flowerdew and Miller
(2005) argued that students should be taught how to listen by equipping them with
effective listening strategies (p.69). Chamot and O‟Malley (1989) suggested that the
description of learning strategies can hinge on the distinction between declarative
1


and procedural knowledge. Learners can have declarative knowledge about learning
strategies through formal instruction. This will encourage the learners to be aware of
their existing strategies and the choices of strategies they can use with new materials.
Through verbalizing the strategies, “application and repeated applications of the
strategies with various learning materials, the learners can gradually proceduralize
the learning strategies.” (p.420).
Not much research, however, has been carried out on the effects of strategy training
on listening comprehension. Furthermore, the few studies that have been completed
in this area have produced mixed results. Some studies indicated no improvement in
students’ listening comprehension skills after strategy training (Ozeki, 2000) while
others showed slight improvement such as in the research by Flowerdew at al. (2005)
Since this is still a controversial issue, it is necessary to do more research on strategy
training. With a wide range of learning strategies to be chosen, it is difficult to cover
many strategies just in a small thesis experiment. Therefore, this study only focuses
on the training of bottom-up and top-down learning strategies for students during the
listening comprehension tasks, namely, “The impacts of listening strategy training

on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C High School: A quasiexperimemtal study”.
2.

Research questions:

The aims are specified in two research questions:
1. How far have the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school been aware of
the listening strategies?
2. How did the training of listening strategies have impacts on the students’
listening performance?
3.

Objectives of the study

In order to answer the above questions, the study aims at:
-

Investigating the learners’ perceptions regarding bottom-up and top-

down listening strategies.
-

Experimenting and investigating the effects of listening strategy

training on the 10-grade students’ listening performance at My Duc C high school.
2


-

Formulating pedagogical implications and making suggestions for

improving the teaching and learning of the listening skills at My Duc C high
school.
4.

Scope of the study

In this study, the investigator intended to train bottom-up and top-down
strategies for 10th-grade students at My Duc C high school. The training of these
strategies was experimented over a period of 6 weeks and applied in the three
stages of a listening lesson: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. The
sample population is 70 students from two classes: 10A3 and 10A9, who are at the
same age and have the same total years of learning English – 9 years with the
same curriculum.
5.

Methodology

To fulfill the above objectives, quantitative method has been chosen for the
study. Comments, remarks, comparison, suggestions and conclusions are based on
factual research. Data for analysis in this study are gained through the following
sources:
- Pre-test and post-test.
- Survey questionnaire.
6.

Significance of the study

It is hoped that this study will be a good source of reference for both

teachers and learners of English. It is conducted to provide an insight into the
current perception of the students’ listening strategies and offer a period of
strategy training in order to improve the students’ listening performance.
Therefore, it is believed that this study will raise the teachers’ awareness of the
advantages of strategy training so that they can adjust their teaching properly in
order to develop students’ listening skill.
7.

Outline of the study:

This minor thesis consists of 3 parts:
Part A: Introduction, presents the rationale, research questions, objectives,
scope, methodology, significance and design of the study.
3


Part B: Development, which is divided into 3 chapters:
-

Chapter 1: “Literature review”, sets up theoretical background that is

relevant to the purpose of the study.
-

Chapter 2: “Research methodology”, shows the setting, the subjects,

the methods, the way to collect data, the training procedure of listening strategies,
Data analysis methods.
-

Chapter 3: “Data analysis, findings and discussion”. This chapter is a

detailed presentation of the major findings of the study achieved through the
questionnaires and the experiment on the 10th-grade students at My Duc C high
school. The implications of the study in which suggestions for improving listening
skill to the students at My Duc C high school are proposed at the end of this
chapter.
Part C: Conclusion, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the
limitations and provides some suggestions for further study.

4


PART B. DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
I.

Theoretical background
1. Definitions of listening:
Traditionally, listening is considered a passive language skill alongside the

reading skill. It means that learners are almost passive in practising listening
activities in the classroom. However, research has shown that listening is not a
passive process, and it requires full participation and undivided attention of the
learners. Vandergrift (1999) rejected the treatment of listening comprehension as a
passive skill and defines listening comprehension as an active process in which
learners must distinguish the differences between sounds, vocabulary, grammar
intonation, stress and context in order to interpret and respond to messages
immediately (p. 168).
According to Nunan, for language learners, listening is the basic skill that

helps learners to communicate effectively. He also stated that students spend over
50% of their time listening (p.9).
Underwood (1989:1) believed that “listening is the activity of paying
attention and trying to get meaning for something we hear”; which is a complex
process that enables the brain to construct meaning from the sounds heard and
understand spoken language.
To listen successfully, the listener must be responsible for decoding the
message and supplying information that enriches what is said in a number of ways
based on his/her knowledge of pragmatics, context, semantics or inference
(Geranpayeh and Taylor, 2013:100). Or as O’Malley & Chamot (1989:3) said the
listener must construct meaning from passages by relating what they hear to
existing knowledge.
Buck (2001:5) indicated that listening is an active process of constructing
meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming sound in which
“number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic knowledge
and non-linguistic knowledge”. In another word, he concluded “comprehension is
5


affected by a wide range of variables, and that potentially characteristic of the
speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the comprehension of the message”.
In short, to promote listening comprehension, teaching and learning practice
should, therefore, place more emphasis on learners by providing them with
environments or opportunities to confront with texts in their own ways and
construct their own meanings. They should be trained how to listen effectively by
teaching them some effective listening strategies.
2. Learning strategies:
2.1. Learning strategies – definition:
There are a lot of definitions proposed for learning strategies, with much
disagreement of precisely what learning strategies are or, indeed, if they really exist. In

the Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics (1999), Oxford offers this
definition: Learning strategies for second or foreign language learners are “specific
actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that students use to improve their own progress
in developing skills in a second or foreign language. These strategies can facilitate the
internalization, storage, retrieval, or use of the new language.” (p. 518)
Many researchers have attempted more simplified definitions such as the
following “Strategies are the conscious actions that learners take to improve their
language learning” (Anderson, 2005: 757). In their study, Weinstein and Mayer (1986)
defined learning strategies (LS) as "behaviors and thoughts that a learner engages in
during learning" which are "intended to influence the learner's encoding process" (p.
315). Oxford (1990:9) uses the term learning strategies to mention techniques,
behaviors, actions, thought process, problem solving, or study skills taken by the
learner to make learning easier, faster, more self-directed, more effective, and more
transferable to a new situation. These early definitions from the educational literature
reflect the roots of learning strategies in cognitive science, with its essential
assumptions that human beings process information and that learning involves such
information processing. Clearly, learning strategies are involved in all learning,
regardless of the content and context.
Learner strategies have learning facilitation as a goal and are intentional
on the part of the learner. The goal of strategy use is to “affect the learner’s
6


motivational or affective state, or the way in which the learner selects, acquires,
organizes, or integrates new knowledge” (Weinstein and Mayer 1986:315). In the
process of listening comprehension, there are three different types of strategies: (a)
meta-cognitive

strategies,

(b)

cognitive

strategies,

and

(c)

socioaffective

strategies(O´Malley and Chamot, 1990:43-51). Meta-cognitive strategies, involve
planning, monitoring and evaluating comprehension. It refers to situations such as
paying attention to the main points of a lecture, for example. Cognitive strategies are
used to manipulate information, which include repetition, organising new language,
summarising meaning, guessing meaning from context, using imagery for
memorisation. All of these strategies involve deliberate manipulation of language to
improve learning. Socio- affective strategies are related to the ways that L2 learners
decide to interact with others including cooperation and self-encouragement. The
present study will focus on the cognitive strategies - bottom–up and top-down during
the listening comprehension task as Nunan (1998) suggests, we should design
activities that teach both bottom-up and top-down processing skills and teach students
strategies to control their own listening.
2.2. Bottom up learning strategies:
According to Jack and Willy (2002), “the bottom-up processing model assumes
that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion,
from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts”. According to this
view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked
together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and utterances

are form together to form complete meaningful texts. (p. 239).
Bottom-up processes describe the ways in which the linguistic competence of a
listener works to 'build' toward comprehension of a message. According to Peterson
(2001), these are the lower level processes that work to construct meaning from
recognition of sounds and words, which, when identified, are fit into larger phrasal
units and then matched with related ideas stored in long term memory. He suggested
three successive stages of Bottom-Up processing: perceptual processing, parsing, and
utilization (p. 88). Brown (2007) states that Bottom-Up processing "focuses on sounds,
7


words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other components of spoken language”
(p. 312). At lower levels of language proficiency, the activation of Bottom-Up
processing is thought to impose a great strain on conscious attention and therefore,
working memory.
The listener uses this process to assemble the message piece-by-piece from the
speech stream, going from the parts to the whole. Bottom-up processing involves
perceiving and parsing the speech stream at increasingly larger levels beginning with
auditory-phonetic, phonemic, syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, propositional,
pragmatic and interpretive (Field, 2003:326). Richard (2008:4) stated that bottom-up
processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the
message. Comprehension begins with the data that has been received which is
analysed as successive levels of organization – sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts
– until meaning is arrived at. Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding, to
find the meaning of something.
Many traditional classroom listening activities focus primarily on bottom-up
processing. For examples, exercises such as dictation, cloze listening, the use of
multiple choice questions after a text and similar activities which require close and
detailed recognition and processing of the input and which assume that everything the
listener needs to understand is contained in the input

To sum up, in bottom up the listener is supposed to pay attention to every detail
of the spoken text. In the bottom up process the listener reaches understanding
following a sequence that goes from sounds to words to grammatical relations to
lexical meaning to finally arrive at the message.
2.3. Top-down learning strategies
Jack and Willy (2002) stated that in top-down process, “the listener uses
previous knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening takes place
to make sense of what he or she hears. Context and situation includes such things as
knowledge of the topic at hand, the speaker or speakers and the relationship to the
situation, as well as to each other and prior events.” (p. 239)
8


According to Peterson (2001:94), top-down processes work in the opposite
direction of bottom-up strategy, drawing on the listener's own prior knowledge and
expectations to help decode the message. The listener's repository of background
information (sometimes called schemata) can relate to the context, the topic, the type
of text, conventions of rhetoric and discourse organization. This knowledge becomes
useful in decoding a message, even when a message hasn't been heard in its entirety.
Knowledge of facts, propositions and expectations allow prediction and differencing
that enable the listener or reader to bypass some aspects of bottom-up processing. This
allows listeners to "fill in the gaps" which are often present in spontaneous
unrehearsed speech, helping them arrive at global meanings and interpretation that
don't rely on comprehension of every subsection of the message. Without paying
attention to grammatical form, listeners can often assemble a meaning just from the
context and their knowledge of key words (Newton, 2009). Top-down requires the
ability of bringing prior information that is used to understand the topic the speaker is
talking about. In top-down the listener is able to make predictions about what is going
to be said by the speaker, it means that the listener can deduce or anticipate the final
message. The listener can do it by using his prior knowledge and global expectations

about the language and the world.
Meanwhile, Richards (2008:6) suggested that top-down process refers to the
use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. While
bottom-up processing goes from language to meaning, top-down processing goes from
meaning to language. It may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, it
may be situational or contextual knowledge, or it may be knowledge in the form of
“schemata” or “scripts” – plans about the overall structure of events and the
relationships between them. The following activities develop top-down listening skills
as mentioned by Richard :
-

Students generate a set of questions they expect to hear about a

topic and listen to see if they are answered.
-

Students generate a list of things they already know about a topic

and things they would like to learn more about. Then listen and compare.
9


-

Students read one speaker’s part in a conversation, predict the

other speaker’s part, then listen and compare.
-

Students read a list of key points to be covered in a talk, then

listen to see which ones were mentioned.
-

Students listen to part of a story, complete the rest of it, then listen

and compare endings.
-

Students read news headlines, guess what happened, then listen to

the news items and compare
Peterson (2001:93-94) presented a quantity of activities illustrating the
difference between bottom-up and top-down processes.
Exercises for beginning level listeners.
Bottom-Up
1.

Discriminating between intonation contours in sentences.

2.

Discriminating between phonemes.

3.

Selective listening for morphological endings.

4.

Selecting details from the text (word recognition)

5.

Listening for normal sentence. (word order)

Top-down
1.

Getting the gist of a sentence.

2.

Recognize the topic.

3.

Following directions.

4.

Discrimination between emotional reactions.

For intermediate level listeners
Bottom-up

10


1.

Recognizing fast speech forms.

2.

Finding the stressed syllable.

3.

Recognizing words with reduced syllables.

Top-down
1.

Analyze discourse structure to suggest effective listening strategies.

2.

Listen to identify the speaker or the topic.

3.

Finding main ideas and supporting details.

4.

Making inferences.

In conclusion, strategies are necessary for raising students' awareness on
listening as a skill that requires active engagement, by explicitly teaching listening

strategies, learners are provided with

tools needed to cope with

listening

comprehension tasks and to develop the skills, abilities and the confidence to handle
communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom. In this way,
learning strategies are giving the students the foundation for communicative
competence in the new language.
3. Strategy training:
Traditionally, language curricula have tended to concentrate on teaching
knowledge and skills, and have neglected to teach learners how to learn. Learner
training in second or foreign language teaching is a new way of teaching learners
explicitly the techniques of learning, and an awareness of how and when to use
strategies to enable them to become self-directed (Williams and Burden 1997). Learner
training integrated in second or foreign language teaching subsumes explicit or
implicit strategies training, and language teaching.
According to social interactionist theory, learner’s knowledge of strategies can
be developed through the process of scaffolding (Chamot and O‟Malley 1994:153).
Through scaffolding, the teacher avoids giving direct instruction but facilitates learners
to choose the strategies in learning and using a second language. Oxford (1990)
suggested that even in ordinary language classrooms, it is possible for teachers to help
11


their students learn strategies that will make learning more effective and often more
fun. In response to the criticisms about the effectiveness of the strategies training,
Chamot and Rubin (1994, cited Cohen 2003) pointed out that it is not a particular
strategy that leads to improved performance, but rather the effective management of a

repertoire of strategies.
Strategy training aims to provide learners with the tools to do the following:
1.

Self-diagnose their strengths and weaknesses in language learning

2.

Become aware of what helps them to learn the target language most

efficiently
3.

Develop a broad range of problem-solving skills

4.

Experiment with familiar and unfamiliar learning strategies

5.

Make decisions about how to approach a language task

6.

Monitor and self-evaluate their performance

7.

Transfer successful strategies to new learning contexts (Cohen, 2003:1)

Therefore, the strategies training should provide the learners with a repertoire of
strategies which they can choose the strategies that they feel comfortable to use with a
specific task. The training program should also train the learners how to select
strategies that match their needs and goals, and the nature of the task.
4. Listening strategy models:
A number of models for teaching learning strategies in both first and second
language contexts have been developed (see, for example, Chamot et al., 1999; Cohen,
2003;; O’ Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990). These instructional models share
many features. All agree on the importance of developing students’ metacognitive
understanding of the value of learning strategies and suggest that this is facilitated
through teacher demonstration and modeling. All emphasize the importance of
providing multiple practice opportunities with the strategies so that students can use
them autonomously. All suggest that students should evaluate how well a strategy has
worked, choose strategies for a task, and actively transfer strategies to new tasks.
Although no empirical evidence has yet been provided to determine a single
best method for conducting strategy training, at least three different instructional
models have been identified. Each has been designed to raise student awareness of the
12


purpose and rationale of strategy use, give students opportunities to practice the
strategies they are being taught, and help them use the strategies in new learning
contexts.
One model, proposed by Cohen (2003) with reference to first language learning
but applicable to the study of a second language as well, targets isolated strategies by
including explicit modeling and explanation of the benefits of applying a specific
strategy, extensive functional practice with the strategy, and an opportunity to transfer
the strategy to new learning contexts. The sequence includes the following steps:
1. Teacher as diagnostician: Helps students identify current strategies

and learning styles.
2. Teacher as language learner: Shares own learning experiences and
thinking processes.
3. Teacher as learner trainer: Trains students how to use learning
strategies.
4. Teacher as coordinator: Supervises students’ study plans and monitors
difficulties.
5. Teacher as coach: Provides ongoing guidance on students’ progress.

In the second model , Oxford et al. (1990) outlines a useful sequence for the
introduction of strategies that emphasizes
1. Explicit strategy awareness;
2. Discussion of the benefits of strategy use;
3. Functional and contextualized practice with the strategies;
4. Self-evaluation and monitoring of language performance;
5. Suggestions for or demonstrations of the transferability of the
strategies to new tasks.
This sequence is not prescriptive of strategies that the learners are supposed to
use, but rather descriptive of the various strategies that they could use for a broad
range of learning tasks.

13


The third model, developed by Chamot and O’Malley (1990) called CALLA
(Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach), is especially useful after students
have already had practice in applying a broad range of strategies in a variety of
contexts. This model has five instruction phases as explained below (Chamot and
O’Malley, 1990, 201 - 203):
1. Preparation: Students prepare for strategies instruction by identifying their

prior knowledge about and the use of specific strategies.
2. Presentation: The teacher demonstrates the new learning strategy and
explains how and when to use it.
3. Practice: Students practice using the strategy with regular class activities.
4. Evaluation: Students self-evaluate their use of the learning strategy and how
well the strategy is working for them.
5. Expansion: Students extend the usefulness of the learning strategy by
applying it to new situations or leaning for them.
All three models begin by identifying students’ current learning strategies
through activities such as completing questionnaires, engaging in discussions about
familiar tasks, and reflecting on strategies used immediately after performing a task.
These models all suggest that the teacher should model the new strategy, thus making
the instruction explicit. The CALLA model is recursive rather than linear so that
teachers and students always have the option of revisiting prior instructional phases as
needed (Chamot, 2005). The Oxford (1999) model, on the other hand, has students
work through a cycle of five steps, then begin a new cycle. The Cohen (2003) model
has the teacher take on a variety of roles in order to help students learn to use learning
strategies appropriate to their own learning styles. The Oxford model provides initial
familiarization with the new strategies, then has students make personal action plans to
improve their own learning, whereas the CALLA model builds in a self-evaluation
phase for students to reflect on their use of strategies before going on to transfer the
strategies to new tasks.

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Strategies-based instruction (SBI) seems to have an advantage over the others,
since it is the model that integrates strategies training into foreign language
classrooms. SBI was introduced by Andrew Cohen (Cohen, 2003). It is a learnercentered approach to teaching that extends strategies training to include both explicit
and implicit integration of language learning and language use strategies into a foreign

language classroom. (Cohen 2003) suggested that in a typical SBI classroom, teachers
do the following:
Describe, model, and give examples of potential useful strategies.
Elicit additional examples from students, based on students ‟own
learning experiences”.
Lead small-group and whole-class discussions about strategies.
Encourage students to experiment with a broad range of strategies.
Integrate strategies into everyday class materials, explicitly and
implicitly embedding them into the language tasks to provide for
contextualized strategy practice. (page 4)
In summary, current models of language learning strategy instruction are
solidly based on developing students’ knowledge about their own thinking and
strategic processes and encouraging them to adopt strategies that will improve their
language learning and proficiency.
II.

Related studies:

There have been a number of studies that look into listening strategies in general
and the training of listening strategies in particular. Until recently, most research
focused on discovering and categorizing the types of learning strategies used in
language learning or the differences between strategy uses in successful language
learners as compared to those of less successful learners (Oxford,1990; Vandergrift,
1997; Goh ,2002; Carrier, 2003; Vandergrift, 2003; Chamot, 2005; Graham and
Macaro , 2008; Coşkun A., 2010; Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari, 2010; Eftekhary &
Gharib, 2013). The focus has shifted to finding ways to teach effective strategy use.
Researchers disagree on whether or not listening strategies should be actively taught to
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L2 learners. The study by Thomson & Rubin (1996) did not show a positive
correlation between strategy instruction and learner performance. Ozeki (2000) found
out no improvement in students’ listening comprehension skills after strategy training.
However, other studies have shown that intervention, the training of strategies, has
been beneficial for L2 learners (Mc Gruddy, 1998; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Ross &
Rost, 1991; Thompson & Rubin, 1996; Cohen, 2003; Flowerdew and Miller, 2005;
Eftekhary & Gharib, 2013). Even among those researchers who believe strategies
should be taught, there is disagreement about in what context that should occur. Is it
better to teach strategies as part of the ESL or foreign language curriculum, or might it
be better to provide a course of strategy instruction in isolation? Chamot (2004)
proposed that “teachers should opt for explicit instruction and should probably
integrate the instruction into their regular course work, rather than providing a separate
learning strategies course” (p.19).
In Vietnam, many studies about listening focus on the difficulties learners
encounter in listening comprehension and the solutions for them like the ones by
Phùng Nguyễn Quỳnh Nga (2009); Phùng Thị Hoài Thu (2008); Phạm Thành Vinh
(2002); Lê Thị Xuân Anh (2001); .
However,

very few researchers have tried explicit training on listening

strategies for students, especially on both top-down and bottom-up strategies. The
study by Duong Thi Thao (2012) only focuses on investigating the effects of bottomup techniques in teaching and learning listening skill to the first-year non-major
students of English at Thai Nguyen University of Technology. The researcher
concluded that bottom-up techniques brought certain positive effects in teaching
listening to first year students at TNUT. However, the study only focused on bottomup techniques and the overall effects of listening strategies were not covered.
It is necessary that the training of listening strategies should be further looked
into. Therefore, this small thesis tries to explore “The impact of listening strategy
training on 10-grade students’ listening performance at Mỹ Đức C High School”

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CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
2.1. Settings:
This quasi-experimental study was conducted at Mỹ Đức C high school in the
southern suburb of Hanoi, which was founded 34 years ago. It is a public school with
30 classes from grade 10 to grade 12, 35 to 40 students each. The students here have
three English lessons a week. The textbook used for teaching is the new Tieng Anh 10,
11, 12 at basic level.
The students come from Mỹ Đức district, which is 60 kilometers from the
centre of Hanoi. They are chosen to the school by passing the 10th grade entrance exam
with the score of around 24, which is considered the lowest in comparison with other
schools in Hanoi. Therefore, most of the students are not good at and uninterested in
learning, especially learning English, one of the most difficult subjects as they
consider.
There are 9 teachers of English at the school ranging from 30 to 52 years old.
Most of the teachers are enthusiastic and very responsible in teaching. They all
complain about the difficult current curricula at school, which is inappropriate for the
students’ level, especially with listening skill. So they all try to find the way to
improve the students’ skills and knowledge.
2.2. Participants:
This quasi-experimental study was carried on 70 students from 2 classes 10A3
and 10A9 within 6 weeks of the summer extra course of the school year 2013-2014.
They are all at the age of 16 and all have studied English since they were at grade 6. 36
students in class 10A3 are chosen as the control group and the others in class 10A9 the
experimental one.
2.3. Research method:
The quasi-experimental research method was chosen for this study for some
reasons.

First, it could “explore the strength of the relationships between variables” and
it is “an appropriate way of gathering data” (Nunan, 1992:25). Second, the study was
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