Tài liệu Điều tra về các vấn đề nghe hiểu toeic của sinh viên không chuyên tiếng anh ở học viện an ninh nhân dân

BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO HANOI UNIVERSITY TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC HÀ NỘI DEPARTMENT OF POST GRADUATE KHOA ĐÀO TẠO SAU ĐẠI HỌC STUDIES NGUYEN THI THUONG LUẬN VĂN THẠC SỸ AN INVESTIGATION INTO NON-ENGLISH MAJORS' PERCEIVED ĐIỀU TRA VỀ IN CÁC VẤN LISTENING ĐỀ NGHE HIỂU TOEIC CỦA SINH VIÊNAT IFFICULTIES TOEIC COMPREHENSION KHÔNG CHUYÊN ANH SECURITY Ở HỌC VIỆN AN NINH NHÂN DÂN THETIẾNG PEOPLE’S ACADEMY AN INVESTIGATION INTO NON-ENGLISH MAJORS' PERCEIVED DIFFICULTIES IN TOEIC LISTENING COMPREHENSION AT THE PEOPLE'S SECURITY ACADEMY Họ và tên sinh viên : Nguyễn Thị Thương SUPERVISOR:Giáo Dr.viên NGO PHUONG hướng dẫn: TSANH Ngô Phương Anh Chuyên ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh Khóa: K24 (2016 - 2018) Hanoi March 2019 Hà Nội – 2018 i MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI UNIVERSITY DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby declare that the thesis entitled "AN INVESTIGATION INTO NON- TRA VỀ CÁC VẤN ĐỀ NGHE HIỂU TOEIC ENGLISH ĐIỀU MAJORS' PERCEIVED DIFFICULTIES IN TOEIC LISTENING CỦA SINH VIÊN KHÔNG CHUYÊN TIẾNG ANH Ở HỌC VIỆN AN NINH NHÂN DÂN COMPREHENSION AT THE PEOPLE'S SECURITY ACADEMY" is the result of my own study. It was conducted with scientific guidance of Dr. Ngô Phương Anh. The data and ANofINVESTIGATION NON-ENGLISH conclusion the study presented in the INTO thesis have never been publishedMAJORS' in any form. PERCEIVED DIFFICULTIES IN TOEIC LISTENING COMPREHENSION AT PEOPLE'S ACADEMY The research reported in thisTHE thesis was approved bySECURITY Hanoi University. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in English Studies Signed: Name of student: Nguyen Thi Thuong Code of student: 2487010045 Name of supervisor: Dr Ngo Phuong Anh Dated: Ha Noi, 2018 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to my supervisor, Dr. Ngô Phương Anh, for her patient guidance and encouragement, intensive revisions, insightful suggestions and kind support throughout my research. I would like to express my appreciation to all the lecturers at the People’s Security Academy who have provided me invaluable sources of knowledge for my completion of this thesis. I owe special thanks to the participants who contributed to the study. Without their enthusiastic cooperation, this thesis would not have been completed. Finally yet importantly, I would like to convey my deepest gratitude to my family and friends for their constant support. Their love and encouragement are invaluable to me. i ABSTRACT Listening comprehension has been a topic of much concern for researchers from all over the world. The current research was conducted with the primary aim of investigating how non-English majored students at the People's Security Academy (PSA) rate their difficulties from three sections namely speaker, listener and environment in TOEIC listening comprehension. The second aim of this study was therefore to find the relationship between learners' difficulties and their listening ability. 200 second-year non-English majors at the PSA participated in the study. The data were collected by means of a five-point Likert scale survey questionnaire which was adapted from Hamouda (2013). The results of the research indicated that among three sections of factors, the difficulties coming from learner section deterred students' listening ability most. The research also proved that vocabulary, quality of the recording, difficulties in interpretation, inability to concentrate and the outside noise are the problems that learners met more frequently in their TOEIC listening comprehension. ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1. Listening comprehension difficulties.................................................................9 Figure 4.1 Variety of accents..............................................................................................43 Figure 4.2 Unfamiliar vocabulary, N = 200........................................................................44 Figures 4.3 The length of listening texts, N = 200.............................................................45 Figure 4.4 Difficulties in interpretation, N = 200...............................................................47 Figure 4.5 Listening strategies, N = 200.............................................................................48 Figure 4.6 Pragmatic knowledge, N = 200.........................................................................49 Figure 4.7 Size of classroom, N = 200................................................................................50 Figure 4.8 Outside noise, N = 200.......................................................................................51 iii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 Relationship between TOEIC scores and levels of ability........................................15 Table 2.2 A summary of previous studies................................................................................26 Table 3.1 Questionnaire items from literature review..............................................................36 Table 4.1 Listening comprehension difficulties from speaker section.....................................42 Table 4.2 Listening comprehension difficulties from listener section......................................46 Table 4.3 Listening comprehension difficulties from environment section.............................50 Table 4.4 Descriptive Statistics among items on Listening comprehension difficulties from speaker section, N = 200...........................................................................................................53 Table 4.5 Descriptive Statistics among items on Listening comprehension difficulties from listener section, N = 200...........................................................................................................53 Table 4.6 Descriptive Statistics among items on Listening comprehension difficulties from environment section, N = 200...................................................................................................54 Table 4.7 Model Summary........................................................................................................56 Table 4.8 ANOVA....................................................................................................................56 Table 4.9 Coefficients...............................................................................................................57 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ELC: English Listening Comprehension EFL: English Foreign Language ETS: Educational Testing Service ELT: English Language Teaching L1: First Language L2: Second Language PSA: People's Security Academy TOEIC: The Test of English for International Communication v TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP....................................................................................i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. ..................................................................................................ii ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................iii LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................................................iv LIST OF FIGURES..................................................................................................................v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.................................................................................................vi TABLE OF CONTENT ........................................................................................................vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 1.1 Context of the study..............................................................................................................1 1.2 Statement of the research problem ......................................................................................1 1.3 Aim of the study ...................................................................................................................2 1.4 Research question ................................................................................................................2 1.5 Scope of the study.................................................................................................................3 1.6 Organization of the study ....................................................................................................3 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................................................5 2.1 Listening comprehension......................................................................................................5 2.2 Common difficulties in listening comprehension ................................................................8 2.3 Overview of the TOEIC test ...............................................................................................13 2.4 Definition of perception......................................................................................................17 2.5 Previous studies..................................................................................................................17 2.6 Research gaps....................................................................................................................32 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY .......................................................................................33 3.1 Research question revisited................................................................................................33 3.2 Research design..................................................................................................................33 vi 3.3 The setting of the study.......................................................................................................34 3.4 Participants of the study.....................................................................................................34 3.5 Design of research instrument............................................................................................35 3.6 Data collection procedure..................................................................................................38 3.7 Data analysis procedure.....................................................................................................39 3.7.1 Data analysis for research question 1.............................................................................39 3.7.2 Data analysis for research question 2.............................................................................40 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS ...............................................................42 4.1 Answers to research question 1..........................................................................................42 4.1.1 Listening comprehension difficulties from speaker section ............................................42 4.1.2 Listening comprehension difficulties from listener section..............................................46 4.1.3 Listening comprehension difficulties from environment section......................................50 4.1.4 Discussions.......................................................................................................................52 4.1.4.1 Discussion on listening comprehension difficulties from speaker section....................52 4.1.4.2 Discussion on listening comprehension difficulties from listener section....................53 4.1.4.3 Discussion on listening comprehension difficulties from environment section............54 4.2 Answers to research question 2..........................................................................................55 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION..............................................................................................59 5.1 Summary of major findings ...............................................................................................59 5.2 Recommendations of the study............................................................................................60 5.2.1 Speakers ..........................................................................................................................60 5.2.2 Listeners...........................................................................................................................61 5.2.3 Environment.....................................................................................................................61 5.3 Strengths of the study..........................................................................................................62 5.4 Limitations of the study ......................................................................................................62 vii 5.5 Implications of the study.....................................................................................................63 5.5.1 Pedagogic implications....................................................................................................63 5.5.2 Implications for further research.....................................................................................63 5.6 Concluding remarks............................................................................................................64 REFERENCES.......................................................................................................................66 APPENDIXES ........................................................................................................................71 APPENDIX 1 ..........................................................................................................................71 APPENDIX 2 ..........................................................................................................................74 APPENDIX 3...........................................................................................................................77 APPENDIX 4...........................................................................................................................86 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1.1 Context of the study Listening comprehension has long been regarded as one of the most difficult skill in English language learning. It encompasses the multiple processes involved in understanding and making sense of spoken language. These include recognizing speech sounds, understanding the meaning of individual words, and/or understanding the syntax of sentences in which they are presented. So listening comprehension isn’t just hearing what is said—it is the ability to understand the words and relate to them in some way. Moreover, listening comprehension is the precursor to reading comprehension and also the basis for learners' speaking and writing skills, so it is an important skill to develop. Regarding TOEIC test, for the past few years, numerous universities in Vietnam have applied TOEIC assessment standards as one of the benchmarks to assess students’ English proficiency, which can be seen a criterion to standardize the outcome level of the graduating class. Therefore, the TOEIC test is more and more popular and university students are concerned about how to get high score in this test. Being a teacher at the People's Security Academy (PSA), I find that English learners in general and PSA students in particular still meet difficulties in listening comprehension as learners find it difficult to understand what they have heard, which make them boring and discouraged. In this context, research on this issue, which has not been worked on properly, is of paramount importance. 1.2 Statement of the research problem Listening has long been a challenge for second language learners due to its nature. Despite the fact that students can cope with missing whole chunks of speech having conversation in daily life in their own language, they don't seem to be able to transfer that 1 skill easily to a second language. The situation is the same for Vietnamese students when it comes to listening English. Students try to understand every word in the oral texts, consequently they get left behind trying to work out what a previous word meant. In certain cases, students are confused to identify the most important words to catch or they cannot recognize the words that they know. Sometimes students have to not only deal with a variety of British, American and Australian accents, but also have Indian or French. Also they often get tired when dealing with a lengthy text with requires high concentration. Frequently, such students lose all their confidence as second language practitioners. That is the reason why in TOEIC test, the test takers often receive low score of the listening skill compared with other skills (Pham, 2014). Moreover, the researcher decided to conduct survey on the difficulties in comprehension ability in TOEIC listening as TOEIC scores are officially used as an entrance and graduation standards at the PSA. Students have to get more than 300 points to be permitted to take the official English classes in the curriculum. Also to graduate from the PSA, together with other requirements, they are obliged to get at least 450 points in TOEIC listening and reading. 1.3 Aim of the study The study was conducted to reach two aims: to rate non-English majored students' difficulties in TOEIC listening comprehension and to find out the relationship between those difficulties with learners' English listening ability. 1.4 Research question In order to fulfill the above aim, the current study attempted to answer the following questions: 2 1. How do non-English majors at the PSA perceive their difficulties encountered in TOEIC listening comprehension? 2. Is there any relationship between TOEIC listening comprehension difficulties and learners' English listening ability? In this research study, the researcher intended to investigate how PSA second-year students rate the difficulties in their listening comprehension at the PSA and to find out the relationship between these difficulties with their listening ability. The scope of this study is, therefore, within the teaching and studying at the PSA. 1.5 Scope of the study The current research was conducted at the People's Security Academy, a renowned institution with intensive educational activities and scientific research. Furthermore, the literature reviewed is studies conducted from the early 1970s until the year of 2017 with research from almost every region in the world. Methodology used in the current research is quantitative approach (see Chapter 3), which aims at rating problems that non-English majored sophomores at the PSA encounter in TOEIC listening comprehension and working out the correlation between those problems with students' listening scores in their final test. The questionnaire for the research study was adapted from Hamouda (2014)'s and mapped out from the theoretical framework, thus, the listening problems investigated in this study just focus on three factors groups including speaker, listener and environment. 1.6 Organization of the study The thesis is organized into four chapters as followed: Chapter 1: Introduction presents the context of the study from which the researcher defines the statement of the problem, and then poses the research questions. After that the researcher identifies the scope of the study. 3 Chapter 2: Literature review analyses some general theories related to listening comprehension, the TOEIC test and common difficulties in listening comprehension, and examine if there are any needs for conducting the current research. Chapter 3: Methodology mentions research method in seeking the answer to the research questions raised in chapter 1. Detailed information about the participants of the study, research instrument design and procedures are also provided. Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion collects and reports the findings, discusses and interprets the main results of the study supported by empirical data and the literature review. Chapter 5: Conclusion summarizes the study and provides some recommendations from the study. It also states the limitations of the study and makes suggestions for future research. 4 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter deals with literature covering different aspects of listening comprehension including the definition, common listening comprehension problems, definition of perception and related studies in the period from 1970s to the year of 2017. The gap in the literature is therefore identified. Additionally, a list of difficulties, which serves as the basic foundation for building the survey questionnaire (see Figure 2.1), was mapped out by the researcher of the current research. An overview of the TOEIC test is also provided to help readers gain an insight into the overview of listening section in this test. 2.1 Listening comprehension Defining listening comprehension has been challenging due to the fact that listening has long been the neglected skill in second language acquisition, research, teaching and assessment (Osada, 2004). It is essential to understand what listening is to pave the way for the detailed definition of listening comprehension. Generally, Chastain (1971) defined listening as the ability to understand native speech at normal speed of speakers. With a detailed analysis of this term, other researchers inclusive of Morley (1972), Postovsky (1975), Goss (1982), Bowen, Madsen, and Hilferty (1985) regarded listening as a complex process with different phases. 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. According to Postovsky (1975), listening differs in meaning from sound discrimination to aural comprehension. Goss (1982) defined listening as a process of understanding what is heard and organizing it into lexical elements to which meaning can be allocated. 5 Bowen, Madsen, and Hilferty (1985) demonstrated that listening is understood as the oral language. Students hear oral speech, divide sounds, classify them into lexical and syntactic units, and comprehend the message. Listening is a process of receiving what the speaker says, making and showing meaning, negotiating meaning with the speaker and answering, and creating meaning by participation, creativity, and empathy. In Rost (1994) 's explanation, listening is the ability to identify and understand what the speaker is saying through understanding his accent, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and grasping his meaning. Those sub components of listening are well explained as he draws a particular list of components to master when dealing with this skill: - Discriminating between sounds. - Recognizing words. - Identifying functions (such as apologizing) in conversations - Connecting linguistic cues to paralinguistic cues (intonation and stress) and to non linguistic cues (gestures and relevant objects in the situation) in order to construct meaning. - Using background knowledge and context to predict and then to confirm meaning. - Recalling important words, topics and ideas. - Giving appropriate feed back to the speaker. - Reformulate what the speaker has said. With a different approach to the term, Wolvin (2010) mentioned four elements of the listening process to give a reliable definition for listening: First, the physiological dimension which deals with physiological capacity of receiving the vocal message. Second, psychological dimension which is assigning meaning to the incoming sound by the cognitive 6 and mental capacity. Third, sociological dimension, which has to do with the response of the listener for the message once he receives and interprets it. Fourth, communication dimension, which has to do with how the listener cooperates for the communication purpose. Lynch and Mendelsohn (2002) suggested that traditionally listening was viewed as a passive process in which our ears just received information and the listener passively registered the message. Today listening is considered as an active process, and good listeners are just as active when listening as speakers are when speaking. They asserted that listening is not a single process, but it is more accurate to conceive of it as a bundle of related processesrecognition of the sounds uttered by the speaker, perception of intonation patterns showing information focus, interpretation of the relevance of what is being said to the current topic and so on. Moreover, some researchers (Mendelsohn, 1998; Wilson, 2003) claimed that listening is a procedure in which language learners use bottom-up and/or top-down processes to comprehend speech. The bottom-up processing model follows a traditional view of communication where a message is encoded and sent to the receiver, who then decodes it and understands the message (Shannon, 1948). The most significant aspect of this model is the literal message. It neglects the importance of contextual factors, such as the physical environment and the relationship between speakers (Flowerdew & Miller, 2005), and cotextual information, or what has already been said in the input (Field, 2008). On the other hand, top-down processing involves using schemata to assist in comprehending an aural message. Field (2008) noted that learners draw from both context, or global knowledge of a topic, and co-text, or knowledge of what has been previously said in the text, to construct meaning. After analyzing all above definitions from the general to more specific one, it is understood that listening is the combination of the sound reception, analysis and 7 comprehension. Thus, listening comprehension has an integral part to play in students' listening process and it is essential to thoroughly understand the term "listening comprehension". There are different definitions of the term “listening comprehension”. Brown and Yule (1983) related listening comprehension to the understanding ability, it means that a person understands what he/she has heard. If he/she learns the text through hearing it, he/she will understand it. From the perspective of teaching, Dirven and Oakeshott-Taylor (1984) defined listening comprehension as the product of teaching methodology and is matched by terms such as speech understanding, spoken language understanding, speech recognition, and speech perception. Many other experts (Rost, 2002; Hamouda, 2013; Nadig, 2013) referred listening comprehension to the harmonious link of numerous factors. Rost (2002) and Hamouda (2013) defined listening comprehension as an interactive process in which listeners are involved in constructing meaning. Listeners comprehend the oral input through sound discrimination, previous knowledge, grammatical structures, stress and intonation, and the other linguistic or non-linguistic clues. According to Nadig (2013), listening comprehension is the various processes of understanding and making sense of spoken language. These involve knowing speech sounds, comprehending the meaning of individual words, and understanding the syntax of sentences. According to Faerch and Kasper (1983), this is not necessary that the listener must not realize the message word for word, since not every clue is equally important to the message. The listener has to seek the general meaning to compensate his misunderstanding by continuing being involved in the communication. So, it is perceived that the comprehension involves different phases. 8 Thus, there are three types of comprehension as main - idea comprehension, detail comprehension, and full comprehension (Lund, 1990). He defined main-idea comprehension as involving actual comprehension of the messages and depends primarily on recognition of vocabulary. The second type of comprehension is detail comprehension that involves getting specific information; it may be performed independently of main-idea comprehension when listeners know in advance what information they are listening for. Full comprehension, which is the goal of listening instruction, involves understanding the whole message the main ideas and the details. In short, listening comprehension is a complex process where listeners need to be attentive in order to get the message of the talk. The term listening comprehension used throughout this study is understood as the third type - full comprehension suggested by Lund (1990). This category involved the understanding of the overall message and specific information in the conversations or the lectures, particularly in part 3 and part 4 of TOEIC listening part. The concept listening comprehension in this study also accorded with Rost (2002), Hamouda (2013) and Nadig (2013) in which there are contributions of different factors including listeners and oral inputs. 2.2 Common difficulties in listening comprehension In the eyes of many researchers (Azmi Bingol, Celik, Yidliz, & Tugrul Mart, 2014; Buck, 2001; Munro & Derwing, 1999; Goh, 1999; Hasan, 2000; Graham, 2006; Underwood, 1989; Bloomfield et al, 2010 and Walker, 2014; Seferoglu & Uzakgoren, 2004 and Hamouda, 2013) and learners of English, listening is a complex and active mental activity. During the process of listening comprehension, various factors may affect learners' listening ability. Lists of general factors have been identified (Yagang, 1994; Boyle, 1984; Teng, 2002, Underwood, 1989) while the role of specific factors has also been examined. Some factors 9 have been the focus of research such as regional accents (Bloomfield et al, 2010) and background knowledge (Vandergrift, 2007 and Walker, 2014). To give a specific picture of listening comprehension difficulties, the researcher of this research reviewed all the related factors and relatively divided them into three main groups including speakers, listeners and the environment in the following figure (Figure 2.1): 10