DONG NAI TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
REPORT
RESEARCH PROPOSAL
A Survey on difficulties and solutions in learning listening
skill of English-majored students at DNTU
Nguyen Hien Vi Anh 141801612
Nguyen Tan Dung 14180096
Supervisor: Nguyen Van Duc, MA.
Dong Nai, October 22nd, 2020
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………. 2
1.1. Background of the study ……………………………………………………………………….. 2
1.2. Aim of the study …………………………………………………………………………………… 4
1.3. Research questions ……………………………………………………………………………….. 4
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ………………………………………………………… 5
2.1. Definitions of terms ……………………………………………………………………………… 5
2.2. Review of related literature ……………………………………………………………………. 6
2.3. Conceptual framework of the study ………………………………………………………. 11
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY …………………………………………………………………. 14
3.1. Context of the study ……………………………………………………………………………. 14
3.2. Participants and sampling procedures ……………………………………………………. 14
3.3. Research tools ……………………………………………………………………………………. 14
3.4. Data Collection procedure …………………………………………………………………… 15
3.5. Data analysis procedure ………………………………………………………………………. 15
REFERENCES …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 16
APPENDIX …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 19
2
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Listening is one of four English language significant skills and has been considered as
an important element in the process of English language acquisition. Researchers have
shown that those who speak English well are more hugely successful in many fields of
research and career advancement. Especially in the era of revolution 4.0 taking place
today, English is the official language of more than 53 countries and territories, the
official language of the EU and the 3rd most used language after China and Spain. It
can be said that English has become a global language and is not only like a travel
ticket but also a bridge to help people easily get a well-paid job. What would you do if
one day, the foreigners who are lost in Vietnam, they need your help but you can not
understand what they say?. Therefore, listening is key to all effective communication.
But, before having good communication, the learners have to make sure that they can
listen well as without the ability to listen effectively, messages are easily
misunderstood. As a result, communication breaks down and the sender of the
message can easily become failed or irritated. Therefore, if you cannot hear it well you
will find it hard to communicate or perhaps you cannot pass your listening
examination for instance. Therefore, we can not deny its importance. There is no one
able to influence language as well as communicate without listening skills.
1.1. Background of the study.
Scott Shelton (2008) thinks that listening effectively is a demanding and involving
process. One must be able to deal with different accents or pronunciation, unfamiliar
lexical items and syntactic structures, competing background noise, and also make a
conscious effort to not switch off or become distracted while listening. All of this must
be achieved and dealt with more or less simultaneously in order to identify and
understand the meaning in any given message. Likewise, Rost (2002) defined listening
comprehension as a process of receiving what the speaker says, constructing meaning,
negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding in various ways depending on the
purpose of the communication.
3
Listening is one of the necessary life skills which are defined as “skills which can
provide you with a better perspective on life, skills which can allow you to maintain a
higher awareness of both yourself and the world around you”. It is one of the most
vital ways that human beings feel life and live. Everyone, in the real-life, often listens
more than speaks, reads or writes. We listen everywhere and every time. We listen to
everything and everybody. For instance, at home, we listen to the news, watch films or
talk with others. At school, students listen to lectures teaching. At the meeting, the
staff listens to the new plan from the director, etc. Miller (2003 as cited in
Kavaliauskienė, 2008) also has sustained that “more than forty percent of our daily
communication is spent on listening, thirty-five percent on speaking, about sixteen
percent on reading, and only nine percent on writing”.
(Rubin. J & Thompson, 1994) have also affirmed: “Listening skill is probably the
most important language skill because people spend about 60% of their time
listening… Besides, listening skills give you a chance to feel language acquisition and
comprehensive enhancement of language use language “.
According to Rost (2001) and Kurita (2012), a major difference between more successful and
less successful learners is related to their ability to use listening as an instrument of learning.
According to Pourhosein Gilakjani and Ahmadi (2011), listening plays a significant role in
the communication process. Without listening, the man becomes backward in each minute of
their lives. It is obvious that listening is really important in the real life. Despite its
importance, the state of teaching and learning listening has long been ignored,
especially in rural areas in Vietnam. In fact, students in schools are mostly taught
using traditional methods of grammar exercises and vocabulary cramming. That is the
reason why despite having studied English from kindergarten to university levels,
compared with other language skills, listening skill still drops behind. Therefore, the
demand for English fluency among students is going up. To deal with the demands for
English skills, many schools and centers have sprung up everywhere. They supplied
programs and projects to increase in levels of English skills: listening, speaking,
writing, reading. But the question is that many programs and projects like that, why
the Vietnamese students are still not really fluence in their English.
4
That is the problem of the students of the non-English major in general and the English–
majored students in particular. This study was conducted to investigate the difficulties
and the solutions to learning English listening skills of English-majored students at
Dong Nai Technology University.
1.2. Aim of the study
We performed a survey on the students who have been learning the listening skill at
Dong Nai Technology University. The study mainly aims at pointing out the causes of
difficulties in learning listening by English-majored students and presenting some
solutions that the students apply to improve their (self-) study of Listening Skills. The
results of this study may be a good help for the students themselves and other people
who are interested in this field.
1.3. Research questions
This study is undertaken with the hope of improving the listening ability and providing
some insights into how the students perceived the usefulness of listening strategies. The
research seeks answers to the following questions:
1)What difficulties do the English-majored students encounter when listening to
English?
2)What kinds of listening solutions were used by successful learners?
5
CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
Following the rationale and the research questions presented in the previous part, a
review of the related studies in this field is introduced in this chapter. The focuses of
this part are on the definition of listening skills, and the difficulties when learning to
listen, which are considered as the theoretical background for the research.
2.1. Definitions of terms
The definition allows listening to be conceptualized as a process that includes the
messages that others have conveyed to be aware of those messages and reply to them
applicably. Listening involves making sense of spoken language, normally
accompanied by other sounds and visual input, with the help of our relevant previous
experience and the context in which we are listening. Rather than thinking of listening
as a single process, it is more exact to conceive of it as a bundle of related processes–
recognition of the sounds uttered by the speaker, awareness of intonation patterns
showing information focus, interpretation of the relevance of what is being said to the
current topic and so on (Schmitt.N, 2010).
Thomlison (1984) and Hamouda (2013) defined listening as the ability to recognize and
understand what others are telling. This process includes understanding a speaker’s
pronunciation, the speaker’s grammar and vocabulary, and understanding of meaning. Morley
(1972) said listening involves auditory discrimination, aural grammar, selecting necessary
information, remembering it, and connecting it to the process between sound and form of
meaning (as cited in Pourhosein Gilakjani & Sabouri, 2016).
According to Brown (2001), listening is “not merely the process of unidirectional receiving of
audible symbols”. He supposed that one aspect of listening comprehension which is “the
psychomotor process of receiving sound waves through the ear and transmitting nerve impulses
to the brain”.
Passive listening is that requires no effort. No meaning is attached. If your ears work
and you are in a place where the sound is being transmitted, you simply listen to an
English recording. The idea is that even though you don’t understand it now, over time
you will start to understand through a natural process of absorption.
Active listening is that when we listen for a particular purpose to find out the
information we need to know. It happens quite popularly in the real life. Here, we listen
with much more concentration and try to get as much information as possible.
To sum up, all of definitions are given with a view to clarifying the nature of the
listening skill which is necessary for the process of acquiring a native language or a
foreign one.
2.2. Review of related literature
In the perception stage, learners reported most difficulties as: “do not recognize words
they know,” “neglect the next part when thinking about meaning,” “cannot chunk
streams of speech,” “miss the beginning of texts,” and “concentrate too hard or unable
to concentrate.” Second, in the parsing stage, Goh (2000) found that listeners
complained of problems such as “quickly forget what is heard,” “unable to form a
mental representation from words heard,” and “do not understand subsequent parts of
input because of earlier problems.” Third, in the utilization stage, “understand the words
but not the intended message” and “confused about the key ideas in the message” were
