Using compensation strategies in listening for 10th form students a case study at the high school for gifted students of vinh university

Ministry of education and training
VINH UNIVERSITY
----------

LÊ THỊ HIỀN ANH

USING COMPENSATION STRATEGIES IN LISTENING FOR 10

TH

FORM STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY AT THE HIGH SCHOOL
FOR GIFTED STUDENTS OF VINH UNIVERSITY
(Sử dụng chiến lược bù trong kĩ năng nghe cho học sinh lớp 10:
Một trường hợp ở trường THPT Chuyên - Đại học Vinh)

Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching

Vinh, 2011

1


Ministry of education and training
VINH UNIVERSITY
----------

LÊ THỊ HIỀN ANH

USING COMPENSATION STRATEGIES IN LISTENING FOR 10

TH

FORM STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY AT THE HIGH SCHOOL
FOR GIFTED STUDENTS OF VINH UNIVERSITY
(Sử dụng chiến lược bù trong kĩ năng nghe cho học sinh lớp 10:
Một trường hợp ở trường THPT Chuyên - Đại học Vinh)

Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching
Code: 60.14.10
Master thesis in Education

Supervisor: Assoc.Prof.Dr. NGƠ ĐÌNH PHƯƠNG

Vinh, 2011
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DECLARATION

I certificate that the thesis entitled “Using compensation strategies in
listening for 10th form students: A case study at the high school for gifted students
of Vinh University” is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts is the result of my own work. This thesis or any part of this one has
not been submitted for a higher degree to any other university or institution.

Vinh, December 2011
Le Thi Hien Anh

3

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am greatly indebted to the members of my thesis committee whose
contributions and guidance without them this research could not have been carried out
successfully.
First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my
supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr Ngo Dinh Phuong for his valuable and enormously
support and comments, guidance and timely, encouragement while I was doing this
research. Without his guidance, comment, and suggestions during all phases of the
work, my thesis would still be far from completed.
I would like to express my gratitude to all my lecturers at Faculty of PostGraduate Studies, Vinh University for their valuable lectures and guidance from
which I have benefited greatly in the writing of this report.
I am also indebted to my friends, colleagues and students at the high school for
gifted students of Vinh University for their kindness and assistance to me in data
collection, for their support and encouragement they provided during the course.
Finally, I wish to give my special thanks to all my family members for their
warm support and encouragement during the time I conducted this thesis.

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ABSTRACT
It is the fact that listening is an important language skill. It seems that listening
is the most difficult skill for students to master.
However, in the reality, the teaching and learning English listening are still far
from satisfactory.
The study focuses on the teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards using
compensation strategies in listening as well as the analysis of the challenges of using
compensation strategies of 10th form student at the high school for gifted students of
Vinh University. Once, problems have been identified, suggestions for teachers and
students to improve the situation of teaching and learning listening English to 10 th

form students at the high school for gifted students of Vinh University would be
made.
The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1, the introduction - gives
rationale for the study and sets up the aims, scopes, research questions, significance
and organization of the study. Chapter 2 provides theoretical background about the
nature of listening comprehension, language learning strategies and compensation
strategies in listening. And this part will also provide a review in key concepts
relating to the research topic as well as the literature in the field. Chapter 3 is about
methodology, the current situation of teaching and learning listening. The research
methods which cover interviews (for teachers), survey questionnaires (for students)
and class observations, the setting of the study, participants, instruments, and
procedures of the research are presented in this chapter. Chapter 4 deals with the data
results. The results obtained are also analyzed and interpreted in this part, so that
major findings are revealed and discussed. The last chapter, chapter 5 presents a
summary of the study, gives recommendations based on the results to make the more
effectiveness in using compensation strategies in listening at this case and provides
limitations and suggestions for further studies.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION ....................................................................................................i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................ii
ABSTRACT............................................................................................................iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS.........................................................................................1
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION...........................................................................4
1.1. Rationale..............................................................................................................4
1.2. Aim of the study...................................................................................................6

1.3. Research questions...............................................................................................7
1.4. Scope of the study................................................................................................7
1.5. Significance of the study......................................................................................7
1.6. Organization of the study.....................................................................................8
CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW.............................................................10
2.1. The nature of listening comprehension..............................................................10
2.1.1. The concept of listening comprehension.........................................................10
2.1.2. The process of listening comprehension ........................................................12
2.1.3. Potential listening comprehension problems...................................................14
2.1.4. The importance of listening comprehension...................................................16
2.1.5. Principle for teaching listening skill...............................................................17
2.2. Language learning strategies..............................................................................18
2.2.1. The concept of language learning strategies...................................................19
2.2.2. Oxford's (1990) Classification of Language Learning Strategies...................20
2.2.3. The importance of strategies in learning process............................................23
2.3. Compensation strategies in listening..................................................................25
2.3.1. Definition of compensation strategies.............................................................25
2.3.2 The Classification of Compensation Strategies................................................26
2.3.3. Compensation strategies in listening...............................................................28
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2.3.4. Related studies of using compensation strategies .........................................29
2.4. Summary............................................................................................................30
CHAPTER 3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY...............................................32
3.1. Participants.........................................................................................................32
3.1.1. Students...........................................................................................................32
3.1.2. Teachers..........................................................................................................33
3.2. Setting of the study.............................................................................................34
3.3 Research methods................................................................................................35

3.3.1 Research questions..........................................................................................35
3.3.2 Data collection instrument...............................................................................35
3.3.2.1. Questionnaires..............................................................................................35
3.3.2.2. Interviews.....................................................................................................36
3.3.2.3. Class observations........................................................................................37
3.3.3. Data analysis method......................................................................................37
CHAPTER 4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS................................................39
4.1. The attitudes of teachers and students toward using compensation strategies
in listening.................................................................................................................39
4.1.1. Teachers’ attitudes toward using compensation strategies in listening...........39
4.1.2. Students’ attitudes toward using compensation strategies in listening............41
4.1.2.1. Students’ attitudes of compensation strategies.............................................41
4.1.2.2. Students' attitudes toward class-compensation strategies practice..............43
4.2. Students’ challenges in using compensation strategies in listening...................50
4.3. The expectations of the students towards teachers in using compensation
strategies in listening.................................................................................................54
CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS.....................59
5.1. Conclusions ......................................................................................................59

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5.2. Recommendations for improvement of the efficiency of using compensation
strategies in listening for teaching and learning at the gifted high school of
Vinh University.......................................................................................................61
5.2.1. Raising awareness of compensation strategies in listening.............................61
5.2.2 Raising awereness of top-down and bottom-up strategies ..............................63
5.2.3. Activating or building students’ background knowledge................................63
5.2.4. Teaching basic grammatical rules..................................................................65
5.2.5. Teaching phonological rules...........................................................................66

5.2.6. Providing many visual aids and contextual clues............................................67
5.2.7. Providing certain key words and ideas related to the listening.......................68
5.2.8. Raising confidence and interest by giving encouragement.............................69
5.2.9. Encouraging cooperative listening..................................................................69
5.2.10. Providing a variety of listening tasks............................................................70
5.2.11. Providing discourse markers and cohesive devices.......................................71
5.2.12. Helping students to make inference from speakers’ attitude or intention.....72
5.3. Limitations and suggestions for further study.............................................73
REFERENCES.......................................................................................................75
APPENDICES

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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Rationale
Nowadays, English is widely used as an international language in most
countries around the world in different fields of life such as economics, politics,
tourism, electronics, telecommunication, culture, science and technology, etc… With
the trend of development of life, Vietnamese people use English as a tool to integrate
with other countries all over the world. A large number of students are being required
to learn it through compulsory programs in schools and universities. English,
therefore, is considered to play a crucial role on the path of industrialization and
modernization of the country as well as in the process of integration and globalization
in the world.
In order to meet the demands of modern society, English teachers need to pay
attention to help their students find and apply appropriate learning strategies to learn
better. According to Cohen (1998), O’Malley and Chamot (1990) and Oxford (1990),
learning strategies are among the factors that can help students how to learn well a

second or foreign language. As a result, an important duty of the language teachers is
teaching students learning strategies because learning strategies can help students
monitor and take charge of their own learning. The appreciated characteristics of a
good language teacher can be considered as helping students understand language
learning strategies and training them to develop and use good learning strategies
(Lessard-Clouston, 1997).
Recently, English subject has become compulsory for high school students. It
has also been an obligatory subject in the final exam, along with Mathematics and
Literature. We know that in order to learn a foreign language successfully, students
should be helped to develop four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
These four skills are closely related to one another and they all are necessary. Of the
four skills, listening is regarded as a prerequisite to understand what is being said and
to pick up the general idea of what is being discussed. In our life, there will be
9


situations where we will hear and have to absorb a lot of details, facts and figures and
then extract some points from them. We may wish to listen to talks about subjects we
are interested in and wish to consolidate what we have learnt in order to progress to
other and more difficult areas. Thus, it is possible to give students the chance to
practise what they have learnt in the way listening to spoken English. To listen
successfully to spoken English language need understand what speakers mean when
they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasion and not to simply
understand the words themselves. In the acknowledgement of the importance of this
subject, specialists in language teaching have paid much attention to discovering and
applying new methods for teaching English as a foreign language with the hope of
helping learners acquire and learn English more effectively. The new series of
English textbooks, which cover all four skills namely reading, speaking, listening
and writing, have been used in schools in Vietnam for some recent years. At the
high school for gifted students of Vinh University, listening is treated equally as

other skills in terms of time allocation. In fact, it has not drawn much attention of
both teachers and learners, they are generally less aware of its importance. And
teaching and learning listening is a really new challenging job. It seems that
listening is the most difficult skill for students to master. For teachers, listening is
also the skill that makes a lot of difficulties to prepare and carry out the lessons.
Finding suitable ways to teach their students to listen effectively is not easy.
Because the old textbooks are not divided into different skills in each lesson. Most
of the teachers have been inexperienced in teaching listening methodology and
approaches. They often take time to prepare a listening period for their students.
Besides, another problem is students’ low level of proficiency in term of
vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, skills and so forth. The students using the new
kind of English textbooks find that it’s difficult to catch up with the information
from the listening texts and they fail to understand what is spoken. They are not
confident enough to do listening task successfully. Moreover, learning habits do not
help much to improve their listening in classroom. They do not have suitable
methods to learn listening. Throughout years of teaching English in the period of
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general education renovation, the researcher thinks that it is necessary to equip
students with listening strategies to help them develop their listening skill at high
schools. The teacher’s employment of different techniques and methodology has
impacts on successful listening lessons.
Many strategies can be applied in teaching and learning listening skill such as
memory strategies, cognitive strategies, compensation strategies, metacognitive
strategies, affective strategies and social strategies (Oxford, 1990). However, with
some experiences of teaching, the researcher thinks that compensation strategies, the
ability of guessing intelligently from linguistic clues and other clues, are of great help
to weak students in listening lessons. These strategies help them to overcome some
limitations to guess what they hear from listening texts. The facts stated also show

that there is a necessity of improving students’ autonomy in language learning so that
they can control their learning themselves, which can help them master the language
better. Compensation strategies training will be recommended in this situation with
the belief that teaching learners strategies will give students a good direction on their
future learning. It is necessary to train students these skills because they can help
them get better results and manage well with such a difficult subject like English.
In Vietnam, there has so far been some research on listening strategies.
However, research on listening strategies employed by students at the high school for
gifted students of Vinh University has not been done yet.
The above reasons have inspired the researcher to choose the subject entitled:
“Using compensation strategies in listening for 10th form students: A case study at
the high school for gifted students of Vinh University”. It is hoped that this study
would have some help for teachers and students to improve the effectiveness of
teaching and learning listening lessons at the researcher’s school.
1.2. Aim of the study
My research paper aims:

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- To investigate the attitudes of compensation strategies in listening by
teachers and 10th form students at the high school for gifted students of Vinh
University.
- To investigate the students’ challenges of using compensation strategies in
listening and their frequency of using these strategies in class.
- To propose some recommendations when using compensations strategies in
listening for English teachers and students at the high school for gifted students of
Vinh University effectively.
1.3. Research questions:
1. What are the teachers and students’ attitudes toward using compensation

strategies in listening at the high school for gifted students of Vinh University?
2. What are the challenges that 10th form students at the high school for gifted
students of Vinh University encounter when using compensation strategies in
listening?
3. What are recommendations that should be made for teachers and students in
order to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning compensation strategies in
listening lessons?
1.4. Scope of the study
There are a lot of English language learning strategies that teachers can
employ, and the new kind of English textbook covers four skills namely reading,
speaking, listening and writing. This study, however, focuses on using compensation
strategies in listening for high school students. Besides, the research will be carried
out only with 10th form students not specializing in English and the teachers at the
high school for gifted students of Vinh University due to the time limitation and some
purposes.
1.5. Significance of the study
In this study, both teachers and students have benefited from the strategies
training. On the students’ part, learning strategies have helped students become better
English learners. Skills in using learning strategies assist them in becoming
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independent and confident learners. Besides, they become more motivated as they
begin to understand the relationship between their use of strategies and success in
learning languages. On the teacher’s part, the researcher herself finds that when using
strategy training often, she becomes more enthusiastic about her roles as the
facilitator of classroom learning. Strategy training also makes the teacher more
learner-oriented and more aware of her students’ needs. This study will make an
investigation of using compensation strategies in listening to 10th form students at the
high school for gifted students of Vinh University. Hopefully, the study could

propose some suggestions to help teachers at the gifted high school have a new sense
of teaching listening and help the researcher’s high school students gain better results
in their learning.
1.6. Organization of the study
This thesis is composed of the following five chapters:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Literature Review
Chapter 3: Methodology
Chapter 4: Data analysis and discussions
Chapter 5: Recommendations and Conclusions
The first chapter will introduce the problem leading to the study, aims of the
study, research questions, scope, and organization of the study.
In the second chapter, the theoretical background of the study will be
presented in the thesis. And this part will also provide a review in key concepts
relating to the research topic as well as the literature in the field.
Chapter 3 is about methodology, the current situation of teaching and learning
listening. The research methods which cover interviews (for teachers), survey
questionnaires (for students) and class observations, the setting of the study,
participants, instruments, and procedures of the research are presented in this chapter.
Chapter 4 deals with the data results. The results obtained are analyzed and
interpreted in this part, so that major findings are revealed and discussed.
13


The last chapter, chapter 5 presents a summary of the study, gives
recommendations based on the results to make the more effectiveness in using
compensation strategies in listening at this case and provides limitations and
suggestions for further studies.

14

CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1. The nature of listening comprehension
2.1.1. The concept of listening comprehension
Language skills are often integrated with each other in language use. Listening
is not merely hearing words. In learning English as a foreign language, students
cannot develop speaking skills unless they develop listening skills. To have a
successful conversation, they must understand what is said to them. So, the ability to
understand or comprehension is considered to be the first- order goal of listening and
the highest priority of the listener.
There are a large number of definitions of listening comprehension with
different views of scholars towards the concept.
According to O’Malley and Chamot (1989: 420), “Listening comprehension is
an active and conscious process in which the listener constructs meaning by using
cues from contextual information and existing knowledge, while relying upon
multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement”. Relevant to this view,
Emmert, (1994) considers listening as an active process by which students receive,
construct meaning from, and respond to spoken and or nonverbal messages.
From the point of view of Littlewood (1981), listening demands active
involvement from the listener. In order to construct the message that the speaker
intends, the listener must actively contribute knowledge from both linguistic and
nonlinguistic sources. The listener can divide the continuous stream of sound into
meaningful units by applying the knowledge of the language and by comparing these
units with the shared knowledge between himself and the speaker, the listener can
interpret the meaning. The nature of listening comprehension means that the listener
should be encouraged to take part in an active process of listening for meanings,
using not only the linguistic clues but also nonlinguistic knowledge.
Rubin (1995: 7) emphasized the role of the listener, who is seen as an active

participant in listening. He sees listening as an “active process in which listeners
15


select and interpret information which comes from auditory and visual cues in order
to define what is going on and what the speakers are trying to express”.
According to Anderson and Lynch (1988), there are two influential views:
traditional view and alternative view. They thought that traditional view was
inappropriate and inadequate because the listener was regarded as a tape-recorder
and the listener took in and stored aural messages in much the same way as a taperecorder. While the listener was considered as an active model builder in alternative
view. Anderson and Lynch agreed with the second view. In this view, listener could
combine the new information with his previous knowledge and experience to reach
full comprehension of what had been heard. It emphasized the active interpretation
and integration of incoming information with prior knowledge and experience.
Vandergrift (1999:168) considered listening as a complex, active process. The
listener must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical
structures, interpret stress and intonation, retain what was gathered in all of the above,
and interpret it within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of the
utterance.
Rost (2002) defined listening as a process of receiving what the speaker
actually says (receptive orientation); constructing and representing meaning
(constructive orientation); negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding
(collaborative orientation); and, creating meaning through involvement, imagination
and empathy (transformative orientation).
Howatt and Dakin (1974) suggested that listening is the ability to identify and
understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker's accent or
pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning. An able
listener is a person who is capable of doing these four things simultaneously.
In Nunan’s point of view, listening is a fundamental and vital skill in the
acquisition of languages (Nunan, 2002).

From the different views above, listening is not a passive but a complex, active
process of interpretation in which listeners must construct and convey meaning by
using the linguistic knowledge such as phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics, discourse
16


structure and using their non-linguistic knowledge as the context, background
knowledge.
2.1.2. The process of listening comprehension
Listening is considered as an active skill that involves many processes.
According to Brown (2000), listening comprehension is not only the process
of sending and receiving sounds but also the conscious process to send and transmit
the message to the brain which will influence the process of communication.
Anderson (1983, cited in Fang, 2008) elaborated that listening comprehension
process consisted of three stages: the perceptual, parsing, and utilization. In the
perceptional process, listeners focused their attention on the oral text and stored the
sound in echoic memory. Unfortunately, the sounds remain in the echoic memory for
a very short time. Listeners do not have very long in which to sort out what is heard
and might make errors. They transferred quickly the selective information in echoic
memory to short-term memory to process the sounds for meaning. In the parsing
process, listeners used words and messages to construct meaningful mental
representations. They reorganized the information into a meaningful unit that could
be preserved in short-term memory. In the final process, listeners used long-term
memory to link the incoming message to their original knowledge. Comprehension
occurred when the new information could link with existing knowledge.
Fischer and Farris (1995) viewed listening comprehension as a process by
which students actively form a mental representation of an aural text according to
prior knowledge of the topic and information found within.
There has been much debate about the listening comprehension process
though, the two most important views that are widely agreed by many researchers

such as Rumelhart (1977), Brown (1994), Nunan (2001), Flowerder and Miller
(2005), etc are bottom-up and top-down processing.
Bottom-up processing considers listening comprehension as a process of
acquiring the meaning of the message based on the incoming language data from
sounds, to words, to grammatical relationships, and ultimately to the meaning.
Schemata are hierarchically formed. This acknowledges listening is the process of
17


decoding the sounds, from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete
texts. In other words, listeners use their linguistic knowledge (sound, words,
intonation, grammatical relationships, lexical meaning) to form final message.
However, this processing has its weak points. Bottom-up processing fails to see that
understanding a text is an interactive process between the listener’s previous
knowledge and the text. And efficient comprehension does not only depend on one’s
linguistic knowledge.
Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to utilizing schemata which
listeners use their background knowledge and global understanding to comprehend
the meaning of a message. As Nauman (2002: 25) sees that top-down process “focus
on the overall meaning of a passage and the application of schemata. Schemata are
metal frameworks based on past experiences which can be applied to and help us
interpret the current situation.” Inferring ideas, guessing words’ meaning and identify
topics are all examples of top-down processing. However, if listeners are unfamiliar
to the incoming information, top-down processing cannot evoke listener’s schemata
and they can only depend on their linguistic knowledge in listening comprehension.
Moreover, though listeners can trigger a schema, they might not have appropriate
schema expected by the speaker. Thus, if listeners only depend on top-down process,
they may get the failure of comprehension.
Both bottom-up and top-down processing are insufficient for comprehension.
The first view bases on linguistic knowledge whereas the second focuses on

background knowledge. From previous remarks one general point becomes very
clear: listening is an interactive and interpretive process because listeners do not just
passively receive the information but clarify the messages, identify the input and
organize the meanings. The accurate listening comprehension is possibly gained with
the interactive model.
From these ideas, it is helpful for listeners to recognize the importance of both
these types of processing to enhance listening comprehension and for teacher to
arrange opportunities to work on both aspects.
18


2.1.3. Potential listening comprehension problems
It can be seen that second language learners regard listening skill as the most
difficult one to master in second language acquisition. From the point of view of
listeners, there are some difficulties with different aspects.
Underwood (1989) points out the seven listening problems as follows:
First, listeners cannot control the speed at which speakers speak. She makes it
clear that “they are so busy working out the meaning of one part of what they hear
that they miss the next part. Or they simply ignore a whole chunk because they fail to
sort it all out quickly enough.”(1989:16).
Second, they are not able to get thing repeated. When student practice listening
in the class they may ask the teacher to repeat the recording. Unfortunately, in many
cases it is in the teacher’s hands and on his decision and not in hands of the learner
whether or not to play the recording again.

Despite the fact that it is almost

impossible for the teacher to judge whether or not the students have understood any
particular section of what they have heard.
The next problem is the listeners’ limited vocabulary. The unknown word in

listening comprehension might be a barrier causing students of foreign language to stop
and think about the meaning of the word and thus making them miss the next part of
the speech. This often happens when listeners focus on accuracy than fluency.
Another problem is about listeners’ interpretation. Students who are unfamiliar
with the context may get difficulty in interpreting the words even if they can
understand the surface meaning.
Underwood also indicates listeners’ inability to concentrate when listening.
This can be caused by a number of things. Students may find the listening work
uninteresting, tiring or too demanding. In addition, the poor quality of recording and a
bad acoustics of the classroom may as well cause the concentration to drop.
And listeners’ established learning habit is the last problem. Teachers aim to
teach their students to understand everything in the lesson. This can make students
become worried if they fail to understand a particular word while listening.
19


In addition, Rubin (1994) attributes five factors which affect listening
comprehension: text

characteristics such as speech rate, pause phenomena and

hesitation, level of perception, stress and rhythmic patterning perception, native
language/second

language

difference,

syntactic

modifications,

redundancy,

morphological complexity, word order, discourse markers, and visual support for
texts; interlocutor characteristics such as gender and language proficiency; task
characteristics such as task type; listener characteristics such as language proficiency
level, memory, attention, affect, age, gender, learning disability in native language,
and background knowledge; and process characteristics such as top-down, bottom-up,
and parallel processing, listening strategies, and negotiation of comprehensible input.
A number of other potential difficulties are also identified by different authors.
Yagang (1994) states that the difficulties of listening comprehension were
accompanied with the four factors: the message, the speaker, the listener and the
physical setting. As for Higgins (1995), the speech rate, vocabulary and pronunciation
caused major problems in listening. Similarly, Flowerdew & Miller (1996) also
assumed that the problems of the students were for the speed of delivery, new
terminology and concept, difficulty in focusing and the physical environment.
It is a common fact that research available on second language listening
comprehension is insufficient although problems in listening comprehension are
various. Comparing with other skills, Goh (1997:161) said that “there are fewer
insights about the process of listening and the way it is learnt”. Richards (1985:189)
also stated that: “there is little direct research on second language listening
comprehension”. As for that, I am doing this research not only to help students in our
school to find out appropriate language learning strategies with better listening but
also to contribute a small part to enrich the listening research which has been done so
far.
2.1.4. The importance of listening comprehension
Listening is the most common communicative activity in daily life. “We can
expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five
20

times more than we write.” ( Morley, 1991:82). Quite a few efforts have been made to
reinforce the significance of listening in everyday communication. More than 40% of
people are devoted to listening in daily communication, approximately 35% to
speaking, 16% to reading and only 9% on writing (Byrnes H., 1984). In the era of
mass communication, it is of great importance that listening skill is taught in teaching
process and students are trained to become effective and critical listeners.
According to Harmer (1991), “Listening is a medium through which children,
young people and adults gain a large portion of their education, their information,
their understanding of the world and of human affairs, their ideals, senses of values
and their appreciation”. Seeing the importance of listening in real-life interaction,
Nunan and Miller (1995) emphasized that “listening skill is one of the basic skills in
language teaching and learning”. Listening is also important for obtaining
comprehensible input that is necessary for language development. Some researchers
argue that listening skill is at the core of second language acquisition and therefore it
demands greater emphasis and concern from both teachers and students. It is now
widely accepted that oral communication can not take place without listening and
listening plays a central and possibly predominant part in the whole process of
language learning. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are interrelated and
interdependent. When someone wants to take part in conversation, the first thing they
have to do is to absorb the pieces of information from the speakers by listening. When
listeners do not understand the message, communication is considered unsuccessful.
The importance of listening in language learning is worth considering because, when
you do not listen you will never learn anything new. Besides, listening is an important
way of acquiring the language or “picking up” vocabulary and structures. Thus,
teaching listening is of primary importance. Listening is a continuous complex
process which we can not master easily, language teachers, therefore, should give the
learners many chances to listen to spoken foreign language as well as necessary
strategies to help them become effective and critical listeners.

2.1.5. Principle for teaching listening skill
Listening to English is more difficult for students who are not English majors.
21


Many students think that listening lessons are boring and often complain that they
benefit little from listening lessons. Therefore, it is necessary for English teachers to
find out the basic principles with specific strategies for teaching listening skill in
order to motivate students and help them to develop their listening ability. That is also
the writers’ purpose in this paper to make some recommendations for teaching
listening skill when using compensation strategies.
Discussing this issue, Ngo Dinh Phuong and Nguyen Thi Van Lam (2007: 77)
has highlighted seven principles which are dealt with in Forseth et. al. (1996: 72).
These principles can be directly applied to the mainstream classroom. They are
important for all students, but are of particular importance to English language
learners.
- Using authentic texts and present them as naturally and realistically as
possible. Authentic texts might be texts from radio broad casts or interview such as
the VOA or the BBC. Real language texts are important because they allow
background noise or interruptions, which are normal, using different voice types and
accents and avoiding out-of-context words.
- Using various types of texts such as conversations, dialogues, jokes, lectures,
news broadcasts, song, narratives, etc. Each type has its own characteristics to
transfer information to listeners dissimilarly. Based on this, listeners have opportunity
to discriminate voices and accents, since then they can improve their listening ability.
- Using primarily meaning-based tasks. In the practice phase of a lesson,
especially at the lower levels, some tasks may not be meaning-based but the longerterm goal is to use language for communication as it relates to meaning. The teacher
should make students remember to emphasize understanding above repetition and
meaning over form.
- Stating a specific purpose for the listening task. The task should be designed

to practice one more of the different sub skills. If the students are skimming for the
main idea, they may miss some specific information. Alternatively, if they are
listening for total comprehension, they may miss the main idea. Before a task begins,
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the teacher should tell the students what the purpose is, when they have a specific
purpose in listening, they will be able to listen more carefully.
- Introducing the listening task. It is necessary for teacher to prepare what
his/her students will hear. This can be done by asking questions, introducing one or
two important words, having a brief discussion about the topic or asking the students
to talk about their experiences. Whenever presenting a listening text, teacher needs to
inform the students of the topics or the setting of the text. All of this will help the
students to focus their attention.
- Generally, it is best to avoid pre-teaching vocabulary unless necessary. This
will help the students to guess the meaning from the context. Previewing lists of
words does not happen in real life. Students should have practice in understanding the
meaning of a text without knowing the meaning of all the words. The only words that
should be pre-taught are the ones necessary for understanding the main idea of the
text.
- Letting students listen to the text more than once. Often the listeners will not
catch the full meaning the first time. However, if the text is repeated, each time with a
different focus, this will help the students to understand more fully.
2.2. Language learning strategies
This section will provide readers with the definitions, Oxford's (1990)
classification of language learning strategies, the importance of strategies in learning
process.
2.2.1. The concept of language learning strategies
The concept of language learning strategies has become predominant and
influential in education in recent years. There is no general consensus of opinion in

the field of second language acquisition with respect to the appropriate way of
defining language learning strategies. There have been several definitions of language
learning strategies developed until now by many researchers.

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According to Wenden and Rubin (1987:19), language learning strategies are
"... any sets of operations, steps, plans, routines used by the learner to facilitate the
obtaining, storage, retrieval, and use of information."
Weinstein and Mayer (1986) defined language learning strategies as ‘the
behaviour and thought’ that a learner engages in during learning that are intended to
influence the learner's encoding process”. Similarly, Richards and Platt (1992:209)
also considered that language learning strategies are "intentional behavior and
thoughts used by learners during learning so as to better help them understand, learn,
or remember new information."
Chamot (1987) put language-learning strategies as techniques, approaches or
deliberate actions that students take in order to facilitate the learning and recall of
both linguistic and content area information.
In a general sense, as defined by Oxford (1990:1), “learning strategies are
steps by students to enhance their own learning” and they are “especially important
for language learning because they are tools for active, self-directed involvement”.
Besides, they help learners to make learning become easier, faster, more enjoyable,
more self-directed, more effective and more transferable to new situations.
Bacon (1992) finds that different strategies are used by learners according to
their level of proficiency, their own cognitive styles, and type of task they meet.
Stern (1992:261) stated that "the concept of learning strategy is dependent on
the assumption that learners consciously engage in activities to achieve certain goals
and learning strategies can be regarded as broadly conceived intentional directions
and learning techniques." All language learning strategies are used either consciously

or unconsciously by language learners when processing new information and
performing tasks in the language classroom. In language classroom, learners always
attempt to find the quickest or easiest way to do what are required by their instructors,
thus, using language learning strategies is inescapable.

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In O’Malley and Chamot’ view, “learning strategies are the special thoughts or
behaviors that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn, or retain new
information (O’Malley and Chamot’, 1990: 1)
In 1998, Cohen offered another definition. According to him, language
learning strategies are “the conscious moves made by second-language speakers
intended to be useful in either learning or using the second language”. Language
learning strategies, when taken together, constitute the steps or actions consciously
selected by learners either for the learning of a second language, the use of it, or both
(Cohen, 1998).
It is believed that the use of appropriate language learning strategies is of great
help for learners to improve their language skills. There are various definitions stated
and after Cohen’s (1998), some more definitions on language learning strategies have
been developed. The researcher intended to use the theory proposed by Oxford (1990)
as the base for the present study because of her concrete and clear definition and
apllicable classification.
2.2.2. Oxford's (1990) Classification of Language Learning Strategies
Oxford’s (1990) classification of language learning strategies is well-known
and has been referenced in many studies. She classifies language learning strategies
into six major categories: memory strategies, cognitive strategies, compensation
strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and social strategies.
Direct strategies include memory, cognitive, and compensation strategies
which “involve direct learning and use if subject matter, in this case a new language”

(p. 11) whereas indirect strategies include metacognitive, affective, and social
strategies, which are indirectly related to learning.

DIRECT STRATEGIES

INDIRECT STRATEGIES

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