5 th National VTTN ELT Conference 2009 Hanoi IMPROVING WEAK STUDENT’S LISTENING SKILLS Tran 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
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Transcript
5th National VTTN ELT Conference 2009
Hanoi
IMPROVING WEAK STUDENT’S LISTENING SKILLS
Tran 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. Psychology
We 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 students
Weak 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 10th 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: