A survey of listening comprehension problems of first year efl students at nguyen tat thanh college submitted to the faculty of english linguistics literature in partial fulfillment of the master

VIET NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HOCHIMINH CITY
UNIVERISTY OF SOCIAL SIENCES AND HUMANITIES
FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE

A SURVEY OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION
PROBLEMS OF FIRST-YEAR EFL STUDENTS AT
NGUYEN TAT THANH COLLEGE

Submitted to the
Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature
in partial fulfillment of the Master‟s degree in TESOL

By

VO THI MINH HANH

Supervised by

NGUYEN THU HUONG, PhD

HO CHI MINH CITY, DECEMBER 2013


VIET NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HOCHIMINH CITY
UNIVERISTY OF SOCIAL SIENCES AND HUMANITIES
FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE

A SURVEY OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS
OF FIRST-YEAR EFL STUDENTS AT NGUYEN TAT THANH
COLLEGE

Submitted to the
Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature
in partial fulfillment of the Master‟s degree in TESOL

By
VO THI MINH HANH

Supervised by
NGUYEN THU HUONG, PhD

HO CHI MINH CITY, DECEMBER 2013

i


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Nguyen
Thu Huong for his encouragement and support during my study. I appreciate his great
help in reading my drafts of the thesis and suggesting valuable ideas during our
discussion. Without his guidance and support during the study this research could not
have been completed.
My thousands thanks also go to all teachers who taught me in the 2008TESOL course.
I am indebted to the teachers and students at Nguyen Tat Thanh College for
their cooperation and assistance in the process of data collection.
I am very happy to acknowledge my debt to my classmates such as Nguyen Thi
Nhu An, Tran Quoc Thao, Roan Dinh Dong, Mai Thai Son, Tran Ngoc Minh for their
support and encouragement during my study.
Finally I am deeply grateful to my parents who always encouraged and helped
me during this study. They are the strongest motivation for me to pursue my degree.

Without the supports from my family members, I would not have finished my study at
University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

ii


STATEMENT OF ORGINIALITY

I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:

A SURVEY OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS OF
FIRST-YEAR EFL STUDENTS AT NGUYEN TAT THANH COLLEGE

in terms of the statement of the Requirements for the Theses in Master‟s program
issued by the Higher Degree Committee. The thesis has not been submitted for the
award of any degree or diploma in any other institutions.

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2013

VO THI MINH HANH

iii


RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS

I hereby state that I, Vo Thi Minh Hanh, being the candidate for the degree of
Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention
and use of Mater‟s Theses deposited in the Library.

In terms of conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the
Library with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or
reproduction of theses.

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2013

VO THI MINH HANH

iv


TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................ ii
STATEMENT OF ORGINIALITY .......................................................................... iii
RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS ............................................................. iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................ v
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .................................................................................... ix
LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................... x
LIST OF CHARTS ..................................................................................................... xi
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ xii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 1
1.1.

Background to the study .................................................................................. 1

1.2.

The statement of the problem .......................................................................... 3

1.3.

Aims of the study ............................................................................................. 4

1.4.

Research questions ........................................................................................... 4

1.5.

The significance of the study ........................................................................... 5

1.6.

The organization of the thesis .......................................................................... 5

CHAPTER 2 : LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................. 6
2.1.

Definition of listening comprehension............................................................. 6

2.2.

The nature of listening comprehension ............................................................ 7

2.2.1.

Bottom-up process .................................................................................................... 8

2.2.2.

Top-down process ..................................................................................................... 9

2.3.

Stages of listening instruction .......................................................................... 9

2.3.1 The pre-listening stage ................................................................................................ 10
2.3.2 The while-listening stage ........................................................................................... 11
2.3.3 The post-listening stage .............................................................................................. 12
2.4.

The roles of teachers and learners .................................................................. 13

2.4.1 Teachers‟ role ................................................................................................................ 13
2.4.2 Learners‟ role ................................................................................................................ 14
2.5.

Listening tasks in a TOEIC test ..................................................................... 15
v


2.5.1 The general feature of a TOEIC listening test ...................................................... 15
2.5.2 The characteristic and strategies used in each part ............................................. 16
2.6.

Potential problems students encounter in the TOEIC test ............................. 18

2.6.1 Problems rooted from listeners ................................................................................. 18
2.6.2 Problems related to such external factors as listening text and task, and

environment and equipment ................................................................................................. 24
2.6.4 Problems related to teaching and learning environment and equipment ...... 33
2.7. Previous studies on listening comprehension problems that students
encountered in learning process ............................................................................... 34
2.8.

Conceptual framework ................................................................................... 36

2.9.

Summary ........................................................................................................ 37

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .................................................... 39
3.1. Research questions ......................................................................................... 39
3.2. Subjects ........................................................................................................... 39
3.2.1. Learners‟ subject ....................................................................................................... 39
3.2.2. Teachers‟ subject ...................................................................................................... 41
3.3.

Research design.............................................................................................. 42

3.4.

Instrument ...................................................................................................... 43

3.4.1. Questionnaires for learner subjects ....................................................................... 44
3.4.2 Reliability of questionnaires...................................................................................... 45
3.4.3 Questionnaires for teacher subjects ......................................................................... 46
3.5.

Procedures of the survey ................................................................................ 47

3.6.

Method of analysis ......................................................................................... 47

3.7.

Summary ........................................................................................................ 48

CHAPTER 4: FINDING ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION…………… .............. 49
4.1. Learners‟ questionnaire results ........................................................................ 49
4.1.1. Learners‟ self-assessment of their major English skills .................................. 49
4.1.2. Have you attended a TOEIC course before learning at NTT College? ....... 50
4.1.3. What language skills and knowledge of language are provided to students
when taking the TOEIC listening test ............................................................................... 52
4.1.3.1. Language skills ................................................................................................... 52
vi


4.1.3.2. Knowledge of language .................................................................................... 52
4.1.4. The percentage of practicing listening comprehension in TOEIC test that
teacher gave to students in comparison with other skills in class. ............................ 53
4.1.5. The percentage of time spent practicing listening comprehension at home54
4.1.6. Learners‟ self-assessment of the current material ............................................. 55
4.2. Teachers‟ questionnaire results ........................................................................ 56
4.2.1. What do teachers frequently provide their students in TOEIC learning
process? ..................................................................................................................................... 56
4.2.2. Teachers‟ self-assessment of material .................................................................. 58
4.2.3. What activities are often taught within TOEIC listening setting? ................ 59

4.2.4. Teachers‟ perception of difficulties that students encounter while listening.
...................................................................................................................................... 61

4.3. The results of difficulties that students encountered when taking the TOEIC
listening test. ............................................................................................................ 63
4.3.1. Problems students reported when taking the TOEIC listening test .............. 64
4.3.1.1. Problems rooted from external factors .......................................................... 65
4.3.1.1.1. The most salient external factors students encountered ................... 65
4.3.1.1.2. The least salient external factors students encountered .................... 66
4.3.1..2. Difficulties rooted from internal factor (learners themselves) .............. 67
4.3.1.2.1. The most salient internal factors ............................................................. 67
4.3.1.2.2. The least salient internal factors ............................................................. 69
4.3.2. The relationship between length of English study and difficulties that
students encounter when taking the TOEIC listening test ........................................... 70
4.4. Discussion ........................................................................................................ 72
4.5. Summary .......................................................................................................... 74

CHAPTER 5: CONLUSION AND RECOMEMDATION .................................... 75
5.1. Summary of chapter ......................................................................................... 75
5.2. Pedagogical implications ................................................................................. 76
5.3. Limitations of the study ................................................................................... 78
5.4. Recommendations for further research ............................................................ 78
5.5. Summary of the study ....................................................................................... 79
vii


REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 80
APPENDIX 1A ........................................................................................................... 87
APPENDIX 1B ........................................................................................................... 91
APPENDIX 2 A .......................................................................................................... 95

APPENDIX 2 B .......................................................................................................... 98
APPENDIX 3A ......................................................................................................... 101

viii


LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CUP

: Cambridge University Press

EFL

: English as a Foreign Language

L2

: Second language

NTT

: Nguyen Tat Thanh

OUP

: Oxford University Press

P

: significance (two-sided)

Sig. (2-sided) : significance (two-sided)
SD

: Standard Deviation

SPSS

: Statistics Package for the Social Sciences

TOEIC

:Test of English for International Communication

ix


LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.2.1 The description of learners‟ background information ......................... 40
Table 3.2.2 The description of teachers‟ background information ........................ 41
Table 3.4.1 Structure and aims of the questionnaire .............................................. 45
Table 3.4.2 Description of Reliability Statistics of the Questionnaires ................. 45
Table 3.4.3 5Structure and aims of the questionnaire ........................................... 46
Table 4.1 Learners‟ self-assessment of their major English skills ....................... 49
Table 4.2 A TOEIC course students ever attended .............................................. 51
Table 4.3 The result of language skills .................................................................. 52
Table 4.4 The result of knowledge of language .................................................... 52
Table 4.5 The percentage of time spent in listening comprehension in class ....... 53
Table 4.6 The percentage of time spent in listening comprehension at home ...... 54

Table 4.7 Learners‟ self-assessment of the current material ................................. 55
Table 4.8 What is frequently taught to learners in TOEIC listening process? ...... 57
Table 4.9 Teachers‟ self-assessment of material ................................................... 58
Table 4.10 Activities are often used in the TOEIC listening process .................... 59
Table 4.11 Teachers‟ perception of difficulties that students encounter while listening
................................................................................................................................ 61
Table 4.12 The result of One-sample T-test of problems that students encounter when
taking the listening TOEIC test .............................................................................. 63
Table 4.13 Difficulties that students encountered the most ................................... 64
Table 4.14 The result of the most salient external factors ...................................... 65
Table 4.15 The result of the least salient external factors ...................................... 66
Table 4.16 The result of the most salient internal factor ........................................ 67
Table 4.17 The result of the least salient internal factor ...................................... 69
Table 4.18 The result of Sig. (2-sided) ................................................................... 70
Table 4.19 The relationship between length of English study and internal factor . 71
Table 4.20 The relationship between length of English study and external factors71
x


LIST OF CHARTS

Chart 4.1 The result of attending a TOEIC course before learning at NTT College.51
Chart 4.2 The percentage of time spent in listening comprehension in class .............54
Chart 4.3 The percentage of time spent in listening comprehension at home ............55
Chart 4.4 The results of mean scores of strategy use, internal factor, and external
factors ..........................................................................................................................64

xi

ABSTRACT
This study mainly focused on investigating listening comprehension problems
that Nguyen Tat Thanh students encountered within TOEIC setting.
The study was carried out with 120 First-year EFL Financial Banking students.
Four main questions were examined in related to these issues: (1) Do Nguyen Tat
Thanh College report encountering problems when taking the TOEIC listening test?
(2) What are the problems in terms of internal and external factors on listening
comprehension reported by students? (2) Are there differences in TOEIC listening
difficulties among Nguyen Tat Thanh College with reference to gender and length of
English study? In order to answer these questions, one-sample T-Test, descriptive
frequency, and Crosstabulation of variables were used to analyze the problems that
students met in the TOEIC listening test.
The findings of the study revealed that internal factor (i.e. learners themselves)
and such external factors such as listening text and task, and learning environment and
equipment influenced their listening competence when taking the TOEIC listening
test. Moreover, the result also showed that the most dominant problems in four parts
of the TOEIC test were presented. For one thing, the relationship between length of
English study and these problems was discovered by the researcher.
Based on the problems in the study, some implications were made for the
improvement of teaching and learning listening process within TOEIC setting for both
NTT teachers and students in particular and for Vietnamese teachers and students in
general.

xii


CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, English has been used in Viet Nam widely because Viet Nam
has been integrated in the region and the world. English, therefore, has been

considered an effective means for international communications in many aspects such
as politics, economy, culture, diplomacy, and social activities, etc. Thus, the teaching
and learning of the English language with the focus on four language skills has been
spread out in VN in which Nguyen Tat Thanh College is not an exception. These
skills were taught in almost colleges and universities in the country. Among the four
language skills, listening is an important skill that contributes to a student‟s language
command (Anderson & Lynch, 1988). Different efforts have been made to find out
ways to assist learners in achieving fluency in this receptive skill. Theorists and
practitioners have attempted to explore listening methods that enhance students‟
listening ability (Buck, 2001; Nunan, 1999; Rost, 1992). Others, however, have tried
to investigate the problems that students may encounter in listening so that solutions
could be offered (Underwood, 1989; Wilson, 2008). Given the latter, one direction of
studies that has received some interests is identifying the problems that EFL students
encounter in the context of standardized tests such as TOEIC. In this introductory
chapter, some background to the study will be presented in relation to listening
problems in the context of TOEIC so as to provide readers the reason why the study
was carried out and the question that it attempted to answer. This chapter will end
with the significance of the study and how the thesis is organized.

1.1.

Background to the study
The impetus of this study was rooted from our concern about how to improve

NTT EFL students‟ listening. From our experience of teaching at NTT College, we
noticed that the students often complained about the challenges they face when taking
listening test, namely the TOEIC listening test applied at NTT College. It would be a

1

good idea to introduce some background knowledge about TOEIC and how TOEIC is
implemented at NTT School.

First of all, „TOEIC‟ stands for the Test of English for International
Communication, referred to a test of business and used to evaluate how well people
can communicate in English in the global workplace (Buck, 2001). In other words,
Buck (2001) claims that TOEIC is a test of language comprehension and considered
as the US testing tradition. A TOEIC test is designed with two main sections:
Listening, with 100 multiple choice items, which runs forty-five minutes, and
Reading, with 100 multiple choice items, which lasts in one hour and fifteen minutes.
In other words, students totally spend two hours completing TOEIC tests. Based on a
figure collected by Buck (1001), 1.8 million learners, mainly in Asia took TOEIC
courses in 2000, giving a picture that TOEIC is a huge testing program applied in
many countries, including Viet Nam.

According to the Ministry of Education and Training of Viet Nam (2011),
TOEIC tests are widely applied in most colleges and universities with the aim of
evaluating students‟ command of English before graduating. In other words, college
or university students are asked to get a certain TOEIC level. The level required is
commonly TOEIC 350– 450 by the time they are granted a diploma (MOET, 2011).
Thus, the TOEIC tests are regarded as an importa nt criterion to decide whether the
students finish their learning program. As a result, thousands of nationwide students
have come to foreign language centers to attend TOEIC training courses, which have
been popularly opened in order to meet the learners‟ enormous demand. More
importantly, TOEIC results have been treated to be a decisive factor for recruiting
employers to multinational companies or some state-run enterprises.

NTT College has used TOEIC as one of the important ways for graduating
students. Therefore, TOEIC classes, from TOEIC 100 to TOEIC 450, are taught

during their -3 year-learning at the college. It is fair to say that the significance of a
2


TOEIC certificate is evident in NTT College because TOEIC certificate is a necessary
and sufficient condition for the permission NTT students to graduate. Thus, they are
asked to attend the TOEIC courses, and have to get a certain TOEIC level such as 350
or 450, depending on the requirement of their faculties. For instance, those who
belong to Faculty of Banking Finance, Accounting, Business Administration, and
Nursing need to gain TOEIC 450; meanwhile, others coming from Department of
Food Technology, Construction, Engineering and other departments are required to
have TOEIC 350.

As mentioned above, NTT students have to spend three years

learning TOEIC classes at the college However, despite the long learning time, they
still complain that they have problems in acquiring listening, or understanding the
messages given in TOEIC listening tests. From my own observation during teaching
time at the school, difficulties that they often face come from: (1) listeners themselves
such as inability to hear „question‟ word, lack of knowledge of „sentence‟ intonation,
etc, …, (2) listening text and task, namely many new words in the oral texts, inability
to concentrate, the fast speed of speech, unfamiliar topic, similar sounds, and (3)
teaching and learning environment and equipment, which are analyzed in chapter 2.
The complaint provided an impetus for the implementation of the studies. For up to
now there have been no studies done in this area. Therefore, an investigation into
factors that hamper learners‟ comprehension of TOEIC listening tests is conducted at
Nguyen Tat Thanh College.

1.2.

The statement of the problem
The fact that TOEIC listening tests are too much higher than NTT students‟

level, hundreds of NTT students get failure in taking the test every semester. Many
workshops have been opened to improve the situation but the challenge still becomes
obsessive to them. During working with the students, a reality is found out that they
find it very hard to understand listening texts with business terminologies, or fail to
use strategy to guess the content of the oral text. Second, they have difficulty in
concentrating during the listening time, so they often miss the important information
for answering the questions in the listening test. Moreover, speed of speech, invisible
3


questions, the organization of information in the text, quality of textbooks, and
equipment used in learning cause remarkable obstacles for them when taking the
TOEIC listening tests. In short, these factors comes from the listening texts, learners
themselves, the environment and the facilities that make considerable contribution to
preventing learners from comprehending the texts.

On that account, a study on encountering difficulties reported by NTT students
in learning listening comprehension within TOEIC setting comes up with the
researcher‟ mind. With a big effort, the factors in the TOEIC listening tests will be
discovered with the aim in improving students‟ listening ability.

1.3.

Aims of the study
Acknowledging the problems that NTT students are facing in their leaning

process, the researcher conducted the study:

(1) to investigate the students‟

perceptions of difficulties when taking TOEIC listening tests, (2) to find out factors
which hamper the students‟ listening competence, and (3) to examine the relationship
among the three groups of students in terms of their English length in listening
difficulties.

1.4.

Research questions
With the above aims and the significance of the study, this research was

conducted with the following research questions.

1. What are difficulties reported by NTT students when taking TOEIC
listening tests?
a. To what extent does internal factor (i.e. learners themselves) cause
difficulties for the students when taking TOEIC listening tests?

4


b. To what extent do external factors such as listening text and task, and
environment and equipment create difficulties for the students when
taking TOEIC listening tests?
2. What are the kinds of listening problems that can be found among the
three groups of students in terms of their English study length?

1.5.

The significance of the study
TOEIC tests play a crucial role in evaluating students‟ proficiency of English

before graduating; but listening texts in the TOEIC create considerable challenges to
pass TOEIC exams. Therefore, the difficulties preventing students‟ comprehension of
listening passages in the study make meaningful contribution to improving NTT
college students‟ listening ability in English studying. Moreover, the analysis of those
problems is aimed to offer teachers deep insights into what hampers their students‟
ability to understand a spoken text in order to upgrade their method of teaching
listening. Moreover, the results of the study may help students raise their perceptions
of difficulties in the listening process.

1.6.

The organization of the thesis
The thesis comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 presents the introduction, which

introduces the background to the study, the statement of the problem, aims of the
study, the significance of the study, research questions, and the organization of the
study. Chapter 2 provides the theoretical background as the basis for conducting the
study. Research design and methodology are presented in chapter 3. Chapter 4 is to
talk about findings and discussion sections. Chapter 5 is to summarize the whole
thesis together with implication, limitation and recommendation for further research

5


CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW

. In this chapter, a framework of theory related to listening comprehension and
potential problems that EFL students may encounter in the setting of TOEIC tests will
first presented. It will then be followed by a review of related studies in the field
before a conceptual framework is presented.

2.1.

Definition of listening comprehension
Listening has been defined differently by theorists. According to Buck (2001),

he defines that “listening comprehension is a complex process in which the listener
takes the incoming data, an acoustic signal, and interprets it based on a wide variety of
linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge” (Buck, 2001, p. 247). The linguistic
knowledge includes that of phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics, discourse structure,
pragmatics and sociolinguistics. And the non-linguistic knowledge includes that of the
topic, the context and general knowledge about the world and how it works. In the
same sense, Richard and Platt (1992) consider listening comprehension as the process
of understanding speech in a second or foreign language. Similarly, Underwood
(1989, p. 1) shares that “listening is the activity of paying attention to and try to get
meaning from something we hear”. From his view, in order to understand successfully
what is delivered from speakers, listeners need to be able to analyze, recognize, and
interpret what is used to convey speakers‟ messages. What is more, Anderson and
Lynch (1988) argue that to understand what a speaker says, listener has to receive
sounds, use his/ her language knowledge and information available to decode the
sounds and interpret the meaning of the speaker‟ saying.
The two authors point out that listening effectively involves a multiplicity of
skills as follows:
1. The spoken signals have to be identified from the midst of surrounding
sounds.

6


2. The continuous stream of speech has to be segmented into units, which have
to be recognized as known words.
3. The syntax of the utterance has to be grasped and the speaker’s intended
meaning has to be understood.
4. We also have to apply our linguistic knowledge to formulating a correct
and appropriate response to what has been said.
(Anderson and Lynch, 1988, p. 4)

2.2.

The nature of listening comprehension
Before exploring difficulties in listening comprehension, it is worth discussing

what listening comprehension is.
Listening used to be treated as “a passive skill” (Celce- Murcia, 2001). It is fair to say
that listener is considered as „a tape recorder‟ only. For many years, therefore,
listening was ignored in second language process because of the main focus on only
productive skills. This accounts for the fact that Vietnamese learners in particular are
bad at listening and speaking. However, several linguists rejected the argument that
listening is an „active process” (Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Gerbhard, 1996;
Littlewood, 2001). Clearly, in order to achieve an adequate understanding of a passage
of text, listeners ought to focus on distinguishing vowel and consonant sounds in the
text, analyzing its structure, and recognizing lexical items in a speaker‟s utterance.
According to Thompson and Rubin (1996), they argue that listening process is an
active one in which the listener selects and interprets information from auditory and
visual clues to understand the spoken text. Also, Anderson and Lynch (1988, p. 6) do
not reject the claim that “the listener has a crucial part to play in the process, by

activating various types of knowledge, and applying what he knows to what he hears
and trying to understand what the speaker means”. In other words, in order to be
successful in listening process, listeners have to activate all kinds of knowledge to
elicit the speaker‟s meaning.
7


In addition, to understand a spoken text, listeners have to be able to use information
from context and general knowledge around the world to interpret what speakers
mean. Buck (2001, p. 3) shares his opinion that
listening comprehension is a top-down process in the sense that the various types of
knowledge are involved in understanding language” or, “listeners use whatever
information they have available, or whatever information seems relevant to help them
interpret what the speaker is saying.

(Buck, 2001, p. 3)
Furthermore, Nation and Newton (2009, as cited in Mahdalena, 2009, p. 10)
claim that “listening comprehension is an interactive process which requires the
listener to use top down and bottom-up processing simultaneously”. From that view,
while listening, the listener needs to employ linguistic knowledge such as phonology,
lexis, grammar, stress, etc., and non-linguistic knowledge relevant to culture, topic,
and the world in order for him/ her to get the speaker‟ meaning.
2.2.1. Bottom-up process
To Buck (2001), the bottom-up process makes the uses of linguistic knowledge (i.e.
knowledge of phonology, lexis, syntax, discourse structure, intonation, pragmatic,
semantic) to decode oral texts to get a speaker‟s meaning He has also confirmed that
acoustic input is decoded into phonemes that carry meaning, then identified individual
words, and continued on to the next higher stage, the syntactic level, followed by an
analysis of the semantic content to arrive at a literal understanding of the basic
linguistic meaning. Finally, the listener interprets that literal meaning in terms of

communicative situation to understand what the speaker means.
Wilson (2008, p. 15) shares the same view that “the bottom-up model emphasizes the
decoding of the smallest units – phonemes and syllables – to lead us towards
meaning”.

8


2.2.2. Top-down process
Different from the bottom-up process in which linguistic knowledge is used to
interpret the meaning of a speaker‟s utterance, top-down process makes use of nonlinguistic knowledge in understanding an oral text. The non-linguistic knowledge used
in comprehension is knowledge about the topic, the context, and general knowledge
about the world and how it works (Buck, 2001).In addition, Brown (1990) also claims
that
a crucial part of the comprehension processes is this „top-down‟ processing, in which
the listener actively marshals previous knowledge in interpreting what is being said,
as it is being said, so that prediction and interpretation have to be seen as interlinked
processes which cannot be separated.

(Brown, 1990, p. 11)
Likewise, Gebhard (1996) shares the same idea that the two distinct processes
involved in comprehending spoken English are bottom-up processing and top-down
processing. In bottom-up processing, a message is decoded through the analysis of
sounds, words, and grammar, while top-down processing refers to using background
knowledge to comprehend a passage.
In sum, both top-down process and bottom-up process play a crucial role in listening
comprehension, thus both effective listeners and ineffective listeners are encouraged
to use the combination of top-down and bottom-up, which is called interactive
processing (Peterson, 2001, as cited in Nunan, 2003). Indeed, activating the
background knowledge will help interpretation, thus Nunan (2003) heightens the role

of pre-listening activities in listening stages.

2.3.

Stages of listening instruction
The listening stages are divided into three categories: Pre-listening, while-

listening, and post- listening (Underwood, 1989; Harmer, 1991).

9


2.3.1. The pre-listening stage
Based on linguists‟ view, namely Underwood (1989), and Long (1987), the
first listening stage is considered as an important part of listening comprehension.
That is to say that the activities in the stage are to orient learners before the incoming
text, or get them involved in discussing what they are going to listen, and
brainstorming vocabulary of the spoken text before tapes are played. According to
Underwood (1989), he asserts “it is helpful to focus at first on providing considerable
pre-listening support so that the students can achieve a high level of success and thus
become confident that they can listen effectively” ( Underwood, 1989, p. 30). Clearly,
the preparatory work aims to get listener engaged in discussing topic, using context
clues to predict what is coming. Therefore, a variety of activities and valuable ideas
for the pre-listening activities are provided for the pre-listening stage, including:
► Pre-listening activities:
- The teacher giving background information;
- The students reading something relevant;
- The students looking at pictures;
- Discussion of the topic/ situation;
- A question and answer session;

- Written exercises;
- Following the instructions for the while- listening activity;
- Consideration of how the while-listening activity will be done.
►Ideas for the pre-listening activities:
- Looking at pictures before listening
- Looking at a list of items/ thoughts/ etc before listening
- Making a list of possibilities/ ideas/ suggestions/ etc
- Reading a text before listening
10


- Reading through questions (to be answered while listening)
- Labeling a picture
- Completing part of a chart
- Predicting/ speculating
- Previewing the language which will be heard in the listening text
- Informal teacher talk and class discussion
(Underwood, 1989, p. 31, p. 34 – 43).
Indeed, these suggestions have made a great contribution to learners‟
comprehension competence, or partly lessen obstacles learners face while listening.
Also, the step gives an orientation for the while-listening stage.
2.3.2. The while-listening stage
The while-listening stage is a stage that listeners are asked to fulfill the
requirement of the listening text. That means the listener has to predict, match and
interpret what is said with what they expect to hear to get the overall meaning of an
utterance, or to provide appropriate answers for the given questions in the text. Thus,
Underwood (1989, p. 45) points that “the purpose of while-listening activities is to
help learners develop the skill of eliciting messages from spoken language”. In order
to get learners involved in the activities, teachers are supposed to deliver listening
activities interesting and appropriate to their learners‟ level (Harmer, 1998;

Littlewood, 1991; Underwood, 1989). Also, ideas for while-listening activities are
supplied as follow:
- Marking/ checking items in pictures
- Which picture?
- Storyline picture sets
- Putting pictures in order
- Completing pictures
11


- Picture drawing
- Carrying out actions
- Making models/ arranging items in patterns
- Following a route
- Completing grids
- Form/ chart completion
- Labeling
- Using lists
- True/ false
- Multiple-choice questions
- Text completion (gap-filling)
- Spotting mistakes
- Predicting
- Seeking specific items of information
(Underwood, 1989, p. 49- 72)
2.3.3. The post-listening stage
In an overall view, some activities used in post-listening stage are the extension
of what is done at the pre-listening and while-listening stages. Underwood (1989, p.
74) proves that “post-listening activities embrace all the word related to a particular
listening text which is done after the listening is completed”. Thus, common work is

seen in the stage, including role-play, written work, summarizing, problem – solving,
decision- making. As a result, it can be said that listening work in the post-listening
stage can be much longer than that while-listening activities. Therefore, he realizes
that learners found it hard to maintain interest at the stage with boring activities. For
this reason, teachers are advised to provide their learners motivating activities in order
12