VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES ********* THE EFFECTS OF ACTIVATING LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE ON LEARNERS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MASTER’S DEGREE IN TESOL By ĐOÀN THỊ CÚC Supervisor NGUYỄN THÁI ÂN, Ph.D HO CHI MINH CITY, MARCH 2012 i CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: THE EFFECTS OF ACTIVATING LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE ON LEARNERS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION in terms of the statement of Requirements for Theses in Master’s Programs issued by the Higher Degree Committee Ho Chi Minh City, March 18th, 2012 ĐOÀN THỊ CÚC ii RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I hereby state that I, ĐOÀN THỊ CÚC, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirement of the university relating to the retention and use of Master’s Thesis deposited in the library In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of thesis Ho Chi Minh City, March 18th, 2012 ĐOÀN THỊ CÚC iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Dr Nguyễn Thái Ân, who did provide me with insightful discussions, constructive criticisms, valuable comments, and continuing support in the completion of this thesis Specially, I would like to send my deepest gratitude to Associate Professor Dr Nguyễn Thanh Tùng because of his great assistance in developing the proposal for my thesis and in finishing my study I am greatly indebted to Dr Hà Văn Sinh, my former college instructor, because of his helpful advice and useful materials for my study as well as all lecturers of the TESOL graduate program at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities for their helpful instruction during the M.A course from the year 2008 to 2011 I would like to sincerely thank the participants who contributed to this study Many thanks also go to the Headmaster as well as the staff of Nguyen Trai high school in Khanh Hoa province for their assistance in finishing my study Special thanks are offered to the Deputy Head of this school, Mr Trần Đắc Trường, who provided great help for data processing Last not the least, I would be grateful to my family and my friends, who always cared, encouraged and supported me during the time of completing the thesis iv ABSTRACT Listening comprehension is a very important skill in language learning However, it has not been paid much attention to in high school contexts In spite of recognizing its importance, most of the students are weak at this skill and have met a lot of difficulties in learning listening because of their shortage of some linguistic knowledge and unawareness of innovative language teaching methodology It is necessary for the researchers to find a solution to this problem Therefore, this study aims to investigate the practicability and some educational values of activating some linguistic knowledge in the listening stages, especially the prelistening one, connected with language teaching sequences by Harmer (1998) on improving learners’ listening comprehension Data were collected from eighty-three 10 th graders at Nguyen Trai high school, Khanh Hoa province, who were divided into two groups – the Control Group and the Experiment Group They were invited to participate in the study through providing their responses to the questionnaires and undergoing the experimental teaching process in two months Questionnaires were used to find students’ linguistic difficulties in learning listening and their reflections on linguistic knowledge activation T-tests were employed to check whether there was any statistically significant difference in the ability in listening comprehension between the two groups The findings of the study indicate that the Experiment Group recognized the importance of linguistic knowledge (vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation) as well as their linguistic difficulties in learning listening comprehension and they achieved some promising progress in the post-test results thanks to the treatment of activating linguistic knowledge In addition, they showed positive attitudes towards this strategy and its effects in terms of enhancing language acquisition, improving ways of learning listening and providing stimulation Such results affirm that linguistic knowledge activation is an innovative and effective teaching approach for teachers to help the students improve their listening comprehension Based on the results, the study shows that it is feasible to apply this strategy in listening lessons v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CLT: Communicative Language Teaching CG: Control Group EG: Experiment Group EFL: English as a foreign language ES: Effective size ESA: Engage, Study, Activate FL: Foreign language L2: Second language LC: Listening comprehension LK: Linguistic knowledge MOET: Ministry of Education and Training PPP: Presentation, Practice, Production SPSS: the Statistical Package for the Social Science TPR: Total Physical Respond USSH: University of Social Sciences and Humanities vi LIST OF CHARTS Chart 2.1: Interconnected dimensions of Grammar 12 Chart 4.1: Students’ opinions on difficulty level of LC 52 Chart 4.2: Students’ opinions on roles of linguistic knowledge in LC 58 Chart 4.3: Students’ interest in the strategy of LK activation 65 Chart 4.4: Students' desire of using LK activation 66 Chart 4.5: Histogram of the Experiment Group 72 Chart 4.6: Histogram of the Control Group 73 Chart 4.7: Trends in creating changes of the mean values 73 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: ESA Straight Arrows sequence 18 Figure 2.2: EAS (A) Boomerang sequence 19 Figure 2.3: EAASASEA (etc) Patchwork sequence 19 Figure 2.4: Geography of a listening text 25 Figure 2.5: Bottom-up and top-down processes by Celce-Murcia 26 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1: Students’ background information 42 Table 4.1: Students’ responses to the importance of LC 52 Table 4.2: Students’ responses to difficulties related to LK 53 Table 4.3: Students’ problems related to methods of teaching LC 54 Table 4.4: Students’ awareness of the importance of LK 56 Table 4.5: Students’ vocabulary acquisition in learning LC 59 Table 4.6: Students’ grammar acquisition in learning LC 59 Table 4.7: Students’ pronunciation acquisition in learning LC 60 Table 4.8: Students’ awareness of the strengths of LK activation 61 Table 4.9: Students’ responses to stimulation in learning LC 62 Table 4.10: Students’ responses to other strengths of the strategy 63 Table 4.11: Students’ responses to some constraints of LK activation 64 Table 4.12: Pre-test score analysis for the two groups 67 Table 4.13: Post-test score analysis for the two groups 69 ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Certificate of originality i Retention and use of the thesis ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv List of abbreviations v List of charts vi List of figures vii List of tables viii Table of contents ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background to the study 1.2 Rationale of the study 1.3 Research questions 1.4 Delimitation 1.5 Significance of the study 1.6 Organization of the study CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Perspectives of linguistic knowledge 2.1.1 Definition 2.1.2 Some aspects of linguistic knowledge 2.1.3 Roles of linguistic knowledge in listening learning 15 2.2 The element Activate in language learning 17 2.2.1 Definition 17 2.2.2 Types of ESA language teaching sequences 18 2.2.3 The place of the element Activate in teaching models 20 2.3 Listening comprehension 22 2.3.1 Viewpoints of listening comprehension teaching 22 2.3.2 Listening process 26 ... to Roach (2000), there are main functions of intonation: the attitudinal function, the accentual function and the grammatical function of intonation The attitudinal function of intonation, considered... states “pronunciation can also affect the perceived tone or mood of an utterance” Along with pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary are necessary aspects of language that learners have to pay much... in all of those methods of teaching and learning language Grammar-Translation is a teaching method which is based on analyzing the grammar and translating students’ mother language into the language