SKKN Setting strategies in teaching receptive skills to improve students’ skill in listening activities in the new text book” Tieng Anh 10″ Global Success

ucation to meet the demand of the modern society in the

process of integration and development, the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and

Training has introduced the new English textbooks since the school year 2022-

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023 in the view of Education and Training Programme 2018. With this reform,

beside the excitement of getting the new and advanced knowledge with modern

method of teaching and learning, both teachers and students have certain difficulty

in mastering the skills in the process of teaching and learning English.

Of the skills, listening, in general, is proved a relatively difficult one for

students, especially Vietnamese students to master. Students lack of authentic

sources and, as more important, efford of training their listening skill. They

consider listening as a challenging skill to conquer. When practising listening,

students tend to be confused and lost their way in the stream of strange words,

expressions. Their minds confuse to try to understand more and at last, they quit

the job. Furthermore, due to the limited background knowledge as well as essential

skills, they often feel scary when carrying out listening tasks, especially when

lacking supports and motivation from teachers. Due to students’ lack of practising,

time constraints and low motivation, listening skills still remain impossible field in

upper-secondary schools and teaching listening skills is a hard job for many

teachers.

Most listening activities, in the upper-secondary syllabus in general, and in

the new textbook “Tieng Anh 10” introduced officially in 2022 in particular, are

designed in a controlled listening format. The content of listening comprehension

tasks are quite new and difficult with upper-secondary students. This, to some

extent, demotivates students because they don’t have enough experiences and skills

to understand the track and do the tasks efficiently

Besides, from the experience in teaching speaking skills to the 10th form

students who have a rather low level of proficiency in learning English, the author

realizes that inspite of the students’ lack of skills and knowledge, they are able to

learn listening comprehension more effectively if they are suggested suitable

strategies while listening.

Related to these problems, this study was carried out, entitling: Setting

strategies in teaching receptive skills to improve students’ skill in listening

activities in the new text book” Tieng Anh 10″ Global Success

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. Aims of the Study

The study aims at suggesting setting strategies applied for some listening task

activities given in the new textbook “Tieng Anh 10” Global Success to

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improve10th graders’ skill in listening activities

PART II: CONTENT

1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

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. Teaching receptive skills.

Teaching receptive skills in English is known as teaching listening and

reading.

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.1. What does teaching receptive skills involve?

Three important things should be taken into account when teaching receptive

skills:

Teaching receptive skills is aimed to help the learners develop the necessary

skills to understand and interpret spoken or written materials. Consequently,

teachers have to avoid focusing only on testing the learners’ performance in getting

the meaning of the texts. Instead we should also aim at training them to use the

reading and listening strategies that enable them to deal with any type of text.

People read or listen for a purpose, which can be to get specific information

or to get a general idea of a text. Sometimes, listening and reading are done just for

pleasure as when we read poetry or listen to a podcast.

Receptive skills are not passive. Listeners and readers make use of important

cognitive processing while listening or reading. Two of the most important

activities that occur in the mind while processing a text are top-down and bottom-up

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. Listening skills

.1. Definition of listening

Listening is a basic skill that language learners should master with the other

language skills. It is defined as a complex process of receiving language through

the ears. Listening involves identifying the sounds of speech and processing them

into words and sentences. When we listen, we use our ears to receive individual

sounds (letters, stress, rhythm and pauses) and we use our brain to convert these

into messages that mean something to us.

Listening in any language requires focus and attention. It is a skill that some

people need to work at harder than others. People who have difficulty

concentrating are typically poor listeners. Listening in a second language requires

even greater focus.

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.2. Elements of listening

Author Marvin Gottlieb cites four elements “of good listening:

–

–

Attention – the focused perception of both visual and verbal stimuli

Hearing – the physiological act of ‘opening the gates to your ears’

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–

–

Understanding – assigning meaning to the messages received

Remembering – the storing of meaningful information” (“Managing Group

Process.” Praeger, 2003)

He also cites

four

levels

of

listening:

“acknowledging,

sympathizing, paraphrasing, and empathizing. The four levels of listening range

from passive to interactive when considered separately. However, the most

effective listeners are able to project all four levels at the same time.” That means

they show they’re paying attention, they show interest, and they convey they are

working to understand the speaker’s message.

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. Setting strategies for listening comprehension as a key feature of teaching

listening skills

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.1. What are strategies for listening comprehension?

Strategy is an intended plan to achieve a specific purpose.

As readers or listeners, we never start listening completely from a “zero

starting-point.” Instead, we always use our prior knowledge to predict what the text

will be about or to make sense of what is said or written. In addition, we always

look for contextual clues to help in our quest for making sense of the text. We also

often recall and connect the information in the text to other texts, to ourselves and

the world.

Teachers need to understand that teaching listening comprehension is not

merely testing comprehesion. Rather, a receptive skill lesson aims at training the

learners to make use of different strategies to get meaning from written or spoken

texts. These strategies are related to either top-down or bottom-up cognitive

processing. Ideally, the teacher should start with a general understanding of the

text (i.e. top-down processing) and end up with a more detailed understanding (i.e.

bottom-up processing).

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.2. Short descriptions of some strategies for listening comprehension

Here are short descriptions of some of these strategies:

Predicting/Previewing: Using information or elements from a passage (e.g. title,

sub – titles, headings, pictures, diagrams, words in bold type, first sentence of each

paragraph…) and personal background knowledge to anticipate what the text is

about

Skimming: Listening to a text to get its general idea (i.e. to get the gist) of the

content.

Scanning: Listening to a text to locate a specific fact or piece of information.

This may be a date, a name or a figure…This strategy is also referred to as

reading/listening for specific details

Questioning: Generating questions about the text and the speaker’s intentions.This

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helps learners get engaged actively with a text instead of listening to it passively.

Making connections: Readers relate the content of the passage to self, to other

texts or to the world. Good readers take advantage of the connections they make

between the current passage with:

–

–

–

Their personal experiences (text-to-self),

The content from other texts (text-to-text),

Their knowledge about the world (text-to-world).