Challenges in Teaching Listening Skills in Blended Learning Modality

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A Thesis

Presented to the College of Arts, Sciences, and Education

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In Partial fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Bachelor of Secondary Education

Major in English

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Antony, Dominic

Asombrado, Mark Jhan

Lloren, Loraine Kate

December 2020
Rationale:

Far and near, the process of teaching has changed from the traditional face to face

interaction to a distance learning. Beaucoup institutions have allowed distance learning

due to a pandemic called Coronavirus which changes the traditional way of teaching,

ergo, this brought beaucoup challenges to the teachers as to how they are going to edify

students effectively. Additionally, adjustments are necessary because of the changes in

the modality of learning. Distance education has now emerged as one of the most

important changes in teaching and learning process (Simonson et al., 2011). One of the

most important part of learning is listening as it is the very basic language skill which is

interconnected to the other language skills. The availability of technologies succors the

difficulty that teachers faced in teaching listening skills even in distance.

Listening plays an important role in the success of English language learning. The

ability to listen well contributes to the success of the learners and teachers. Gilakjani and

Ahmadi (2011) explained that listening plays a significant role in the lives of people.

Also, Hien (2015), states listening as foreign language learning is important since it

presents the language input. As an input skill, listening plays the important roles in

students’ language development. Furthermore, has the potential to develop students’

pronunciation, word stress, and syntax acquisition.

On the other hand, according to Purchosein Gibakjani and Sayedeh Ahmadi

(2011), out of the four main areas of communication skills called Listening, Speaking,

Reading and Writing. Listening is the most important of all. Most of the students best

learn from listening because most of them to read and they just wanted to listen. Hence,

the poor listening skills of the students can affect their academic performance, note that

we listen twice as much as we read, and four times as we write and speak.

In this phenomenological study, the researchers would like to anatomize the

challenges and strategies that teachers faced in the amidst of teaching listening skills to
the students via blended learning. Therefore, this study is conducted to explore how to

succor the difficulty in the new way of teaching and learning.

Purpose of the Study:

The purpose of this phenomenological study aims to ascertain the struggles and

plights of the teachers in teaching listening skills to the students in blended learning. The

problems and interruptions faced and experienced by the teachers in the midst of

teaching. Also, this enables us to know the encumbrances and hindrances encountered by

the teachers along the new way of teaching. Moreover, this explores how teachers are

able to cope up with the difficulty in teaching listening skills to the students.

On the other hand, this study enables us to discern the ways and strategies used

and applied by the teachers in blended learning. Also, to ascertain how teachers are able

to edify students effectively even if the traditional ways of teaching have changed and

turned into blended learning. Additionally, this shows the coping mechanisms and

techniques used by the teachers in teaching listening skills. This study aims to depict

what teachers have undergone in teaching listening skills in blended learning.

Research Questions:

1. How can a blended learning modality help develop the students’ listening skills better
than face-to-face teaching?

2. What are the students’ attitude towards blended learning modality?

3. What is/are the challenges of the teachers in teaching listening skills to the students in
blended learning?

4. How do the teachers cope up with the difficulty in teaching listening skills to the
students in blended learning?

5. What is/are the way/s of the teachers in ascertaining the effectiveness of blended
learning in teaching listening skills?
Research Participant

The chosen participants of this study are the teachers of Compostela Valley State

College Compostela Davao de Oro. We have followed criteria in selecting our

participants. The selected participants of our study are the teachers who teach through

blended learning modality. We have chosen ten (10) participants to interview.

Data Collection

Data collection is the process of gathering and measuring information. Before the

data collection, we have prepared questionnaires for the participants. We guarantee our

participants that everything will remain as confidential and secret. In collecting data, we

make sure that the participants followed the government’s implemented rule due to a

pandemic called CoronaVirus 19. Ergo, we have conducted an interview through online

platforms e.g. video conferencing and video chatting to assure the safety of our

participants.

Theoretical Lens:

This study is supported by the theory of Armin Kover (2017) which says that

testing listening skills is a difficult task for the teachers because of the abstruseness on its

process specifically the barriers in listening comprehension skills. Moreover, the

complexity of listening process causes the implemented designs or tests to become more

challenging for the teachers. In addition, according to Sarjaniah Zur (2020) the highest
problem in teaching listening skills is the influence of their perception skills as it affects

the quality of their listening comprehension.

Furthermore, this study is founded on the theory of Tseng J, et al. (2011) which

evinces that in the mode of media presentation the cognitive skills or level of the students

have reduced, ergo, the epitome presented and used were ineffectual for students’

learning. To add to that, the results declared that the use of media tools were not helpful

enough for the students in their listening comprehension skills. It was also stated by

Hamouda (2013) that listening comprehension problems are caused by different accent of

different speakers, pronunciation, speed of speech insufficient vocabulary as well as the

poor quality of student’s recording. Additionally, he also mentioned that students do not

give enough attention to the learning as they lack of concentration during the learning.

On the other hand, Andapong (2013) said that the main reason why students have

difficulty in listening comprehension skills is because of the listening text. This creates

drawback especially if the texts are not clearly presented by the teachers which students

find it ambiguous that resulted to a wee learning in listening comprehension skills.

Lastly, Arnett (2014) stated that blended learning is a powerful tool to learn in distance,

however, it was mentioned that it needs components like computers and other mobile

devices to be able to make the learning in listening comprehension skills effective.

METACOGNITIVE THEORY

Metacognitive Theory was developed by John H. Flavell in 1979. It was defined as the

simplest term as “thinking about your own thinking.” The root “meta” means “beyond,”

so the term refers to “beyond thinking.”. In Metacognitive strategies facilitates learning

that includes questions, tune in, listen and remember. Selamat & Sidhu (2011) found that

metacognitive strategy could improve their lecture of listening skills and make students

more effective in following and comprehending knowledge conveyed in English.

Types of Metacognitive Knowledge

Declarative knowledge “person knowledge,” or understanding one’s own capabilities.

This type of metacognitive knowledge is not always accurate, as an individual’s self-

assessment can easily be unreliable.

Procedural knowledge “task knowledge,” including content (what do I need to know?)

and length (how much space do I have to communicate what I know?). Task knowledge

is related to how difficult an individual perceives the task to be as well as to their self-

confidence.

Strategy knowledge “conditional knowledge,” or one’s ability to use strategies to learn

information, as well as for adapting these strategies to new situations. This is related to

the age or developmental stage of the individual. For example, a kindergartener can be

taught strategies, but needs to be reminded to use them, such as sounding out words when

learning to read. In contrast, an upper elementary student understands this strategy and

knows when it will be effective under different circumstances.

Natures of Listening Comprehension

Listening provides an input to the students through interactive communication, study

shows that listening provides an information to students before a learner reads something

Gebhard (2000: 143) states that listening is not a passive skill but an active one because

we need to be receptive to others, which include paying attention to explanations,

questions, and opinions. Gilakjani and Ahmadi (2011) are also among the writers who

early noticed the importance of listening. Gilakjani and Ahmadi (2011) reported data on

how people spend their communicative time: of the total time devoted to communication,

40-50% is spent on listening, 20-30% on speaking, 11-16% of reading, and 9% on

writing. Listening is one of the way that we can gathered information, hence, developing

listening skills to the students are important especially in teaching and learning process.

SittiNurpahmi (2015) in her research article, Improving Listening Skill by Activating

Students’ Prior Knowledge, describes that the activation of the prior knowledge would

help the students to listen better.

Factors that can affect the listening skills in the learning process

In learning process, we can’t deny the fact that there are factors that can affect when

teaching listening skills. There are abundant factors that guide the students into confusion

in listening activities, such as native speakers’ volume, speed rate, accents, intonation,

listening methods, and pronunciation (Ghaderpanahi,2012). As mentioned, it affects the

simulation of information to input knowledge to the learners. Listening in language

processing involves the simultaneous integration of neurological, linguistic, semantic,

pragmatic, and background information present in the Working Memory (Rost, 2011).

Because of these factors, the simulation of language and information may vary, also the

pedagogy of teaching and learning may also vary. More importance is now given to

listening in the learning of a foreign language, as demonstrated by recent studies (e.g.

Graham & Santos 2015; Lee & Lee 2012), and to the social and cultural impact listening

can have on students.

Significance of the Study

This research expected outcomes provides information about the benefits of this
following entities:

TEACHER. This study focuses on the challenges and strategies of English teachers in

teaching listening skills through blended learning modality. The given data would guide

the teachers to assess students on their listening capabilities.

STUDENTS. It helps the students to identify their strength and weaknesses through

blended learning modality most commonly in terms of this kind of situation that we are

facing as of today. At the end of the study, students would finally know how to listen

well and learning through listening, create sentences and improve their listening skills

using the English language.

PARENTS. It will give them a satisfactory performance of their children. The given data

would help them formulate some techniques to their children to evaluate their listening

skills. The findings would also help them learn the actions/performance of their children.

Definition of Terms

Listening. Is an act of making effort to hear somebody; the ability to identify and
understand what others are saying.

Strategies. It is way of planning an action to be designed to achieve a major overall aim.

Teaching. Is an act of giving lessons to someone, especially to students in a school and it

has the purpose about helping somebody to learn something through giving information.

Blended Learning. A type of teaching strategy that integrates technologies and digital

devices in collaboration with the traditional type of teaching.

Limitations and Delimitations of the Study

This study is limited to Fifteen participants within the municipality of Compostela

Davao De Oro as an English teacher either in high school or college. This study focuses

on the challenges that they have encountered upon dealing with blended learning

modality and the strategies used by the teachers as coping mechanisms in teaching

listening skills in blended learning. All of the participants are given three similar

questions and we as the researchers ensure that all the answers of these participants are

well secured and kept in private to avoid confidentiality.

Moreover, the study will be conducted locally by asking questions to the teachers

about the challenges they have encountered and the strategies to cope up with those

challenges in terms of teaching listening skills through blended learning.

 Chapter II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This chapter will show the previous studies of related literature of this research.

2.1 TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS

2.1.1 Definition of Listening

Generally, Listening skills is defined as an activity that human uses one of their five

senses, that is using the ears to listening something. People thought that listening is a

likely the same from hearing, but basically it is different. Hearing is an activity for which

a person are connected to a sounds which leads to listening act. Listening is an activity

that a person are focused of finding out the meaning of what somebody is saying.

Teachers taught learners to read, write, speak and listen, hence, study shows that

listening skills has the most spent skills that we usually use in our everyday life. Gilakjani

and Ahmadi (2011) reported data on how people spend their communicative time: of the

total time devoted to communication, 40-50% is spent on listening, 20-30% on speaking,

11-16% of reading, and 9% on writing. 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. Commonly, people first

used listening skills since they were born and it is the first skills that a baby or a toddler

to comprehend their first language. Moreover, the success of understanding English

learners must be first taught of listening skills and integrated with the three other skills
which is the speaking skills, writing skills and reading skills. Hamouda (2013), Abidin

(2013), Anadapong (2011) who completed the related study, they concluded that in order

to help students to improve their listening ability, language lecturer had to understand

students‟ listening difficulties in comprehending listening text, and instruct effective

listening strategies to help the students to solve their listening difficulties. The teachers

faces various of difficulties in teaching and learning process of the learners in listening

skills, teachers should know a better teaching techniques in teaching an active class.

Hamouda (2013) stated that factors causing students listening comprehension problem

are categorized into different sources including problems related to the listening text,

listening problems related to task and activities, listeners problems related to the listener

and teachers methodology.

As the definition above of the problems, researchers focused on the teaching

techniques process such as integrating the learning process in blended learning modality

especially the way the teachers teaches listening skills and responded to the learners. As

Rost in Hien (2015) stated listening as foreign language learning is paramount important

since it provides the language input. As an input skill, listening plays a crucial role in

students language development. Jafari and Hashim (2015) emphasized that listening is a

channel for comprehensible input and more than 50 percent of the time learners spend in

learning a foreign language is devoted to listening. Particularly, we conceptualised

listening as a process rather than a product (Graham & Santos 2015) As a consequence, a

gap has developed “between theoretical development in listening research and materials

for listening pedagogy” (Graham & Santos 2015, p. 96), with repercussions for the

learners, who are not instructed efficiently on how to approach listening. While listening

and reading share receptive language processing, listening needs to be studied

independently from reading (Vandergrift & Baker 2015, p. 392) More importance is now

given to listening in the learning of a foreign language, as demonstrated by recent studies

(e.g. Graham & Santos 2015; Lee & Lee 2012), and to the social and cultural impact

listening can have on students.

 2.2 Types of Listening

The teachers can use a different types of techniques in teaching listening skills to the

students and focus functions and purposes. The students can acquire skills of not only the

process of listening but of the product and how they listen. Experts have proposed

different types of listening according various functions and purposes. According to Rost,

there are six types of listening practices.

1. Intensive listening Intensive listening focuses on decoding sounds, word, grammar,

and the speaker spoke. The teacher can evaluate and provide feedback for the

performance.

2. Extensive listening Extensive listening focuses on wide range of listening activities for

the purpose of pleasure and entertainment. Listening music concerts, watching films and

plays are the examples of Extensive listening.

3. Selective listening In Selective listening the students focus on specific information or

detail with the purpose in their mind. Here, the teachers can provide feedback on the task

completion.

4. Interactive listening In Interactive listening the students must focus on shared task. It

requires to listen and speak such as participating in conversation.

Responsive listening Responsive listening is the higher-level listening. here the focus is

not the information but the response to what is being listened (Renandya& Farrell, 2011)

(Bozorgian, 2012) Twenty-eight Iranian EFL listeners participated in a strategy-based

approach. It was utilized to four listening lessons to improve listeners’ comprehension of

IELTS listening texts. The results displayed that less-skilled listeners indicate higher

improvement than more-skilled ones on the IELTS listening tests. This shows the

significant role of metacognitive instruction to help learners to consolidate their listening

comprehension skill. Unfamiliar Vocabulary According to (Azmi Bingol, Celik, Yidliz,

and Tugrul Mart 2014), when listening texts contain known words it would be very easy

for students to them. If students know the meaning of words this can arouse their interest
and motivation and can have a positive impact on the students’ listening comprehension

ability. A lot of words have more than one meaning and if they are not used appropriately

in their appropriate contexts students will get confused.

2.3 Meta-cognition in Listening Strategies

In relation to the given types of listening, listening comprehension is one of the

contributors of human’s Meta-cognition in order to facilitates learning. TLQR (Tune in,

Question, Listen and Remember) is an metacognitive strategy before listening to a story

or presentation, thus, the metacognition helps facilitates the learners learning process.

Hamouda (2013), Abidin (2013), Anadapong (2011) who completed the related study,

they concluded that in order to help students to improve their listening ability, language

lecturer had to understand students‟ listening difficulties in comprehending listening text,

and instruct effective listening strategies to help the students to solve their listening

difficulties. (Selamat & Sidhu 2011) found that metacognitive strategy could improve

their lecture of listening skills and make students more effective in following and

comprehending knowledge conveyed in English. (Serri, Boroujeni, & Hesabi 2012)

reported that cognitive focus on the process of understanding the linguistic input and

getting the knowledge to find the solution of students’ listening difficulties. (Kim &

Phillips, 2014) and Kim & Phillips (2014) suggested that cognitive instructional

implications is important to be implemented to help students in mastering listening

comprehension. Birjandi & Rahimi, (2012); Selamat & Sidhu, (2013); Rahimi & Katal,

(2013); Dodi, (2015) concern only the instruction of metacognitive strategy instruction

without considering the cognitive strategy students to find out the solution with their

difficulties in listening comprehension by identifying the learners’ listening problems at

an early age and could help students to become better listeners.

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