5th National VTTN ELT Conference 2009

Hanoi

IMPROVING WEAK STUDENT’S LISTENING SKILLSTran Van Co,

ELT Specialist – Binh Dinh DOET

I. The problem of teaching listening

A new series of English textbooks for students have been used in schools in Viet Nam for some years and

there has been a lot of feedback from teachers who have used them. One of the problems they face is that

they are not satisfied with their teaching of listening. Although they have been trying to find ways to make

their listening activities more effective, the results they obtain are not as good as what they want.

Some conclusions have been made to explain the situation. Many teachers stated that the new textbooks

which contain a large amount of knowledge, hinder the students’ learning. Others stated that they have many

weak students who lack vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and have poor pronunciation, reduce classroom

learning potential learning environment. Sometimes the problem originates from the teachers themselves.

Many teachers think that if they teach in a class with many weak students, they can’t spend a lot of time

teaching listening. They do not use all of activities they had designed when writing lesson plans because if

they do, the weak students can’t keep up.

II. What the teachers know about teaching listening.

All qualified English language teachers know that a listening activity consists of three stages and each stage

has its own purpose. There are many different activities to use in each stage. The most important listening

skills they should train the students to gain are listening for gist and listening for specific information. They

help the students to focus on the information required to finish the listening tasks. What the teacher’s do (as

mentioned) only work well in the class where there are many good students.

Many teachers have the opportunity to attend the workshops on teaching listening. They are trained to use

lots of techniques for each stage of the listening. They tried them out at the workshop in the presence of their

peers. They received feedback from fellow teachers and useful tips from the trainers. After the workshops,

the teachers went back to their schools with the eagerness to apply what they had learnt into their own

language classes. Some classes were successful while other’s still had problems. There were no

improvements from the weak students when they listened to the tape or did the activities instructed by the

teacher. This shows that no matter how effective the listening activity itself can be, teachers and students are

still facing obstacles in the classroom.

III. What we should do to help develop listening skills in weak English language students.

A. Issues relating to the language learners

After finding out that our teachers used the listening techniques they were trained in the workshop, but not

successfully in every language class, we looked into other issues relating to language learning which have

been discovered so far.

1. PsychologyWe should take into account the psychology of learning habits and skills. Certain psychological factors

should be considered such as memory. We should consider their mental condition, their ability.

2. Motivation and learning- Students learn well if they are well-motivated. We can motivate even unmotivated students.

3. Learning styles- Visual learners learn through seeing.

- Auditory learners learn through listening.

- Tactile/Kinaesthetic learners learn through moving, doing and touching.

4. Types of Multiple Intelligence - Visual/Spatial Intelligence: ability to perceive the visual.

- Verbal/Linguistic Intelligence: ability to use words and language.

- Logical/Mathematical Intelligence: ability to use reason, logic and numbers.

- Bodily/Kinaesthetic Intelligence: ability to control body movements and handle objects skilfully.

- Musical/Rhythmic Intelligence: ability to produce and appreciate music.

- Interpersonal Intelligence: ability to relate and understand others.

- Intrapersonal Intelligence: ability to self-reflect and be aware of one’s inner state of being.

It is believed that each person has at least 3 or 4 types of intelligence. So we cannot think that weak

learners are unintelligent people.

5. Weak studentsWeak students are the students who usually lack basic knowledge or skills, have difficulty in comprehension.

Some teachers say that in the classroom the weak students often lack concentration. Weak students are

easily confused so in the classroom the teacher should give clear, step by step, instructions. The teacher

should anticipate that weak students may need extra help, extra explanations.

B. What we do to help weak students in Listening.

1. At the pre-listening stage: have more time at the pre-listening stage by shortening the post-listening

stage.

At this stage, we carefully prepare the lesson reading the tapescripts and using The Teaching Listening

Checklist (see Appendix 1). The following activities can be used based on the content of each lesson:

- Revise vocabulary.

- Revise grammatical structure.

- Create a gap-filling task or other tasks based on the tapescript.

- Train listening skills. (see Appendix 2)

- Train microskills for listening. (see Appendix 3)

- Give some listening tips.

2. At the while-listening stage:

- Remember to tell the aim of listening before you let the students to listen to the tape.

- Write a very easy question so that the students can answer after the first listening. (to encourage them to

listen, to make them have a feeling of success).

- Write more additional questions to the listening tasks to make them easy for the students.

- Ask the students to guess before they listening to the tape. (Do not say what they guess is wrong or

right, ask why they guess so if necessary).

- Be flexible when getting the students to listen to the tape. Read the listening text if you find it helpful to

your students.

AN EXAMPLE OF LISTENING LESSON FOR WEAK STUDENTS* Unit 1 – Listening, Task 1 – The 10th Form Textbook.

▪ The following is the listening Task 1 (page 16) from the Textbook and Tape script.

* Task 1: You will hear

Mr Lam, a cyclo driver,

talk about his morning

Activities. Listen to his

talk and number the

pictures in their correct

order.

* Tapescript

Hello everyone, my name is Lam. I'm a cyclo driver in Ho Chi Minh City. I usually have a busy working

day. I get up at five thirty in the morning. I start work at six. My first passenger is usually an old man. I take

him from District 1 to District 5. After I drop him at a cafe near Ho Chi Minh City College of Education, I pedal to

Thai Binh Market. My next passenger is a lady who does shopping there every two days. I help her put all her

purchases into the cyclo and then take her to her shop in Tran Hung Dao Street. At about ten thirty I ride off

toward Nguyen Thi Minh Khai School. There I park my cyclo, chat with some of my fellows and wait for my

third passengers. They are two school pupils, a girl and a boy. I take them home. At twelve I have lunch at a

food stall near Ben Thanh Market. After lunch, I park my cyclo under a tree, take a short rest and then continue

my afternoon's work.

In The Tieng Anh 10 textbook in Viet Nam, activities in the three stages are ready for the teachers to use.

The problem is that many students are still weak at learning English, particularly, listening. Sometimes they

are fed up with listening activities because they are forced to listen to stories or conversations from the

cassette players, and grasp nothing. Sometimes they feel happy in listening activities, because they just

pretend to do some activities the teacher asks them to do, pretend to listen to the tape carefully, finish one or

two tasks in the textbook and wait for the answers to the tasks the teacher tell them or someone of their

classmates who is lucky to get the teacher’s book.

In the Listening lesson of Unit 1 – The 10 th form Textbook currently used in upper secondary schools in Viet

Nam, the teacher has to go through the two tasks. For Task 1, the students are asked to listen and number

the pictures in the correct order. We can do the following activities to help the students complete the task

successfully and develop further their language skills.

A. At the pre-listening stage:

1. Revise vocabulary: get up, old man, a lady, fellows, school pupils, take a short rest. Use the pictures in the

textbook to help the students to find out the Vietnamese equivalence.

2. Helps the students to find out the Vietnamese equivalence of other English words given in the task:

district, routine, office, pedal, purchase, drop, ride, park, food stall, passenger.

Note: After the two above activities, students can obtain more words needed for listening to do the task.

3. Ask the students to pay attention to some clues:

+ The time: five thirty, six, after, twelve.

+ The words: first passenger, next passenger, third passengers.

3.a. Ask the students to use the given words to complete the spaces in the following sentences (The

sentences are extracted from the listening text):

work get up park food stall ride off a. I …… at five thirty in the morning.

b. At about ten thirty I ……. toward Nguyen Thi Minh Khai School.

c. I start ….. at six.

d. At twelve I have lunch at a …….. near Ben Thanh Market.

e. After lunch, I ……. my cyclo under a tree.

3.b. Tell the students that the above sentence belongs to a paragraph about the daily routine of a cyclo

driver, but they are not in their correct order. Ask the students to put them. (You can use Vietnamese for the

instruction if you find it helpful and you want to save the time in case your students do not understand the

instruction in English).

4. Ask the students to put the following sentences in their correct order (The sentences are extracted from

the listening text):

a. My next passenger is a lady who does shopping there every two days.

b. My third passengers are two school pupils, a girl and a boy.

c. My first passenger is usually an old man.

Note: The activities 3.b and 4 serve to help the students to be familiar with the ordering task.

5. Ask one student to mime what a cyclo driver does everyday.

Note: This activity will change the atmosphere in the classroom because it is funny and it helps the tactile

learners to show themselves. Activities 1, 2 is for visual learners or students having verbal intelligence. Activities

3.b and 4 are for students having logical intelligence.

A. During the listening stage:

- Ask the students to listen to the tape for the first time and answer the following questions:

The listening text is about …… .

A. a cyclo driver B. a school student C. a college lecturer.

- For the second or third, or fourth listening the teacher should help the students to finish the listening task in

the textbook. (See Appendix 4)

IV. Conclusion

Our way of teaching listening is that we change our attitudes towards the students’ ability in listening,

prepare the lesson plans carefully in class, exploit the transcript, try our best to lead the listening lessons in a

flexible way and study other issues in relation to teaching and learning such as motivation, psychology and

learning styles.

You, certainly, have your own difficulties in teaching listening and you have your own way of teaching

listening and helping your students to listen in English. But one more thing I would like to say is that do not

think or say about your difficulties in teaching listening. When you think you have difficulties, you cannot do

anything because everything will be difficult for you. Identify the difficulties you have and your students have

and find the way to overcome those.

References- In – service teacher training materials by MOET of Viet Nam.

- Introduction to TESOL – Teaching Listening.htm.

- A Profile of the Slow Learner – Teacher Education Project (U.S.A).

- English Now – Issue 9, November 2004.

- Listening in Action, Michael Rost, Prentice - Hall, 1991.

- Mac Yin Mee (University of Malaysia) – Teaching Listening: An overview. The English Teacher. Vol XIX

July, 1990.

- Adrian Tennant – Listening matters: Process Listening. OnestopEnglish.

- Miriam Greif - “Weak Learners” in High School – Must they read?

Appendix 1: TEACHING LISTENING CHECKLIST

Tran Van Co - ELT Specialist - Binh Dinh DOET – adapted the following from Listening in Action, Michael

Rost, Prentice - Hall, 1991 for training. (Extracted from English Now – Issue 9)

When teaching Listening, do you help your students…?

1. discriminate between sounds 2. recognize words

3. identify grammatical groupings of words

4. connect linguistic cues to intonation and stress

5. use their background knowledge and context to predict and to confirm meaning

6. recall important words and ideas 7. deal realistically with the situation

8. think about their relationship to the speaker 9. get clarification

10. organize what they hear 11. plan their response

12. know their reason for listening 13. pay attention to the key content words

14. guess unknown words and expressions 15. activate what they know about the topic

Appendix 2: LISTENING SKILLS- Listening for general information. - Listening for details

- Listening for specific information - Recognising words.

- Listening for the main idea - students listen to identify the overall ideas expressed in the whole recording.

- Listening for details – students listen for groups of words and phrases at sentence level.

- Listening for specific information – students listen for particular information at word level.

- Predicting – students try to guess key information contained in the recording before they listen.

- Inferring meaning – students listen to identify the difference between what the speaker says and what they

actually mean.

- Identifying emotion – students listen to identify the mood of certain speakers.

- Listening for opinions – students listen to identify the attitude of certain speakers.

- Inferring relationships – students listen to identify who the people are in the recording and what the

relationship is between them.

- Recognizing context – students listen to aural and contextual clues to identify where the conversation takes

place, who is speaking, etc.

Appendix 3: MICROSKILLS OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION

1. Retain chunks of language of different length in short term memory.

2. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English.

3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure.

4. Recognize reduced forms of words.

5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their

significance.

6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.

7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.

8. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g. tense, agreement, pluralisation),

patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.

9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.

10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.

11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.

12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals.

13. Inter situations, participants, goals using real world knowledge.

14. From events, ideas, etc, described, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events,

deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given

information, generalization, and exemplification.

15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.

16. Use facial, kinesics, “body language”, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.

17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of

words form context, appeal for help, and signalling comprehension of lack thereof.

Appendix 4: Have the students listen to the tape

When the students take the listening test, they listen to the tape twice and then use what they have heard to

do the test. After some days the students will be informed the test result. If the teacher do the same in the

class, that means he does not teach but test listening. In the listening lesson, the teacher has to finish the

lesson in 45 minutes with the two listening tasks in the textbook. If we ask the teachers how many times they

should let the students to listen to the tape we can get various answers. Some of them say at least three

times, the others say more than three or as many as possible. The ways they do are as follow:

1. The teacher lets the students listen to the tape twice and ask them to do the listening task 1 in the

textbook and then call out the answers to the questions.

If the students do not give the correct answers, the teacher lets them listen to the tape more.

2. The teacher lets the students listen to the tape once and asks the students to do the listening task 1 in the

textbook. And then he lets them to listen to the tape the second time, asks the students to do the task. After

the third time of listening the teacher starts to ask the students to give the answers.

3. The teacher lets the students listen to the tape three times in succession and then asks the students to do

the listening task 1.

The same steps are repeated for the listening task 2. Nothing wrong with the above mentioned steps the

teachers use and the times they let the students listen to the tape. Three or four times of listening are all

helpful providing that the students’ listening skills are developed. What we want to discuss here is that if you

do not help the students to listen (if you are not the helper) they cannot hear anything. (Tran Van Co)

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