Anxiety in learning english listening skill experienced at thai nguyen university

TNU Journal of Science and Technology 225(11): 18 - 24 
18  Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 
ANXIETY IN LEARNING ENGLISH LISTENING SKILL 
EXPERIENCED AT THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY 
Diem Thi Thu Thuy
1*
, Le Phi Hong Ha
2 
1TNU – School of Foreign Languages 
2AMes English, Nam Dinh province 
ABSTRACT 
The paper investigated the foreign language listening anxiety of 171 first-year non-English major 
students at School of Foreign Languages - Thai Nguyen University. To achieve the desired aims, 
questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were conducted. The analysis of the collected data 
reveals that although the respondents considered listening as an important skill in learning English 
process, they could not have enjoyment when being in listening class. Several suggestions of 
reducing listening anxiety were offered according to the findings in this study: (1) using various 
methods to convey the messages of the listening tapes, (2) using a wide range of strategies to 
improve the students’ listening comprehension level, (3) encouraging students’ motivation and 
creating a low-anxious atmosphere to study. 
Keywords: anxiety; listening skill; English; students; classroom. 
Received: 03/02/2020; Revised: 03/5/2020; Published: 18/5/2020 
SỰ LO LẮNG KHI HỌC KỸ NĂNG NGHE TIẾNG ANH 
DIỄN RA TẠI ĐẠI HỌC THÁI NGUYÊN 
Diêm Thị Thu Thủy1*, Lê Phi Hồng Hà2 
1Khoa Ngoại ngữ - ĐH Thái Nguyên 
2Trung tâm Ngoại ngữ AMes Nam Định 
TÓM TẮT 
Bài báo nghiên cứu về sự lo lắng khi nghe tiếng Anh của 171 sinh viên không chuyên ngữ năm thứ 
nhất Khoa Ngoại ngữ thuộc Đại học Thái Nguyên. Để đạt được các mục tiêu đề ra, tác giả đã sử 
dụng bảng câu hỏi và phỏng vấn bán cấu trúc. Việc phân tích các dữ liệu thu thập được đã chỉ ra 
rằng mặc dù sinh viên coi kỹ năng nghe như một kỹ năng quan trọng trong quá trình học tiếng 
Anh, nhưng các em không có cảm giác thích thú và hài lòng trong lớp học nghe. Từ kết quả này, 
tác giả đã đưa ra một số gợi ý để giảm sự lo lắng khi học nghe như sau: (1) sử dụng phương pháp 
đa dạng để truyền đạt thông tin của băng nghe, (2) áp dụng nhiều chiến lược để cải thiện trình độ 
nghe của sinh viên, (3) tạo động lực cho sinh viên và không khí thoải mái để học tập kỹ năng này. 
Từ khóa: sự lo lắng; kỹ năng nghe; sinh viên; tiếng Anh; lớp học. 
Ngày nhận bài: 03/02/2020; Ngày hoàn thiện: 03/5/2020; Ngày đăng: 18/5/2020 
 * Corresponding author. Email: diemthuthuy.sfl@tnu.edu.vn
DOI: https://doi.org/10.34238/tnu-jst.2582
Diem Thi Thu Thuy et al. TNU Journal of Science and Technology 225(11): 18 - 24 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 19 
1. Introduction 
English is becoming widespread in foreign 
language teaching nowadays. According to 
[1], “the last 50 years have witnessed the rise 
of English from an international language 
to the position of the first truly global 
language in the history of the world” (p. 33), 
and the need for English in Vietnam has also 
increased [2]. As the rising requirements from 
foreign companies, international trading, the 
tourist industry and the students’ demand to 
study oversea, English has gained higher 
status and become the compulsory subject in 
all levels of education [3]. 
Consequently, the students usually notice 
their need to improve listening skill and 
exactly experience listening anxiety when 
they face kinds of exams with listening parts. 
Additionally, the students may feel depressed 
when they think they got lost in 
incomprehensible input, but they are unable 
to specify whether they experience high 
listening anxiety or not. 
Particularly, from the observation, teaching 
period and informal conversations with the 
students of School of Foreign Languages, 
Thai Nguyen University (SFL, TNU) during 
the teaching period here, the researcher had 
discovered that they mostly hesitate and feel 
stress when talking about listening skill. They 
could not exactly say the name of the 
phenomenon but they tended to employ some 
common phrases to describe their feelings; for 
example, “feel like blind/ scared/ my heart 
and hands are terribly shaking while listening 
to the tape” If they are asked to rank the 
four macro language skills: speaking, reading, 
writing and listening in order of difficulty, 
listening skill will probably be one of those 
which are put at the top of the list. 
Additionally, several teachers shared the same 
opinion about the listening problem of the 
student; they would rather study reading or 
writing than listening. 
Quite a lot of attention has been paid to the 
anxiety suffered by many learners when 
listening to the foreign or second language. 
Ko [4] explores listening anxiety and listening 
comprehension skills of 66 Korean college 
students. The results indicate that there are no 
statistical differences relating to listening 
anxiety levels and listening comprehension 
skills as well as gender of students. In an 
investigation of listening anxiety level of 178 
students from the College of Gardening in 
China, Xu [5] discovers that the non-English 
majors experience considerably high level 
and most students with high anxiety level will 
have low learning efficiency. Likewise, the 
findings from Al-Sawalha [6] show that 43 
out of 60 Jordanian undergraduates majoring 
in English language experience a high level of 
listening anxiety. He suggests that low 
proficiency and high anxious levels are seen 
by the students to be factors that affect the 
listening performance of the students. 
Additionally, in Vietnam, Le [7] has an 
investigation into listening anxiety of 30 first 
year English major students by using 
questionnaire and interview. Through 
qualitative and quantitative data, the researcher 
finds that the students are highly anxious in 
listening class due to the factors: listening 
materials, speakers, listening environment, and 
listeners, she also proposes some solutions to 
alleviate the student anxiety and promote their 
English listening comprehension. 
The discussion of existing literature 
demonstrates that while listening has been 
researched in various EFL situations, fewer 
have explored listening anxiety problem and 
its impacts on the student proficiency. To be 
more precise, listening anxiety was of little 
interest in the study context. The researcher 
believes that there is a need to investigate the 
variable listening anxiety, given that studies 
investigating listening anxiety of the university 
students in such context, to the best knowledge 
of researcher, do not exist. 
Diem Thi Thu Thuy et al. TNU Journal of Science and Technology
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Therefore, the paper aims at clarifying the 
levels of listening anxiety experienced by the 
first-year non-English-major students in SFL 
and giving some potential causes. 
2. Research methodology 
In an attempt to examine the listening anxiety 
phenomenon among the students at SFL, the 
researchers justified their decision to design 
this research as a mixed methods study which 
provided the most suitable approaches for this 
study. The mixed research method design is 
becoming an increasingly popular attempt to 
incorporate the strengths of both quantitative 
and qualitative research in order to provide “a 
more complete understanding of a research 
problem” [8]. 
2.1. Setting 
The School of Foreign Languages has 100 
teachers who are assigned to teach Russian, 
Chinese, Korean and English separately. For 
all participants, subjects about Chinese 
language skills are always more predominant 
than English. 
“Life A1” course book [9] is used as the 
textbook in teaching integrated skills in 
English. The students are non-major English 
learners, so their English language 
proficiency level can be described as pre-
intermediate from the results of university 
entrance examination; therefore, this book is 
assumed to be suitable for them according to 
some experienced teachers. The book consists 
of 12 units and provides a wide range of 
essential knowledge from the basic grammar 
of tenses, popular structures in use to culture 
and daily life situation. 
2.2. Participants 
All of the participants (total 200) in this study 
were first-year students. At the time of the 
study, they had finished their first semester to 
begin the second semester of the academic 
year 2018 - 2019. All the students 
participating in the study were told that their 
participation was voluntary and their answers 
would be confidential. 
 225(11): 18 - 24 
All the subjects were 19-years-old females 
and a few numbers of students were one or 
two years older. However, gender was not 
seen as a variable in this study. 
2.3. Data collection instruments 
2.3.1. Questionnaire 
The first tool used was the questionnaire. This 
was used to generalize a picture of listening 
anxiety phenomenon that the participants face 
most frequently. The questionnaire consists of 
two parts. In the first part, the students were 
asked to respond about their general 
information and attitudes toward listening 
skill. In the second part, the subjects were 
asked to identify their problems that increase 
their anxiety in listening classes by 
responding to questions on the basis of the 
five-point scale. Additionally, the researcher 
employed 19-item questionnaire in Part 2 as 
the main instrument in order to get students’ 
responses about the anxiety levels and sources 
of listening anxiety by four factors [7]. All the 
items are accompanied by a 5-point Likert 
scale ranging of which 5 refers to Always, 4 
as Often, 3 as Sometimes, 2 as Seldom, and 1 
as Never. Generally, the questionnaires 
included most of the closed questions so that 
respondents could answer quickly. Once the 
potential participants were recruited, they 
were asked to respond to paper-based self- 
reported questionnaire surveys. For the 
current study with Vietnamese students, all 
the instructions and questions in the papers 
had been translated into Vietnamese before 
handing to the participants to make sure they 
would not have any difficulty in 
understanding. In this translation, the 
researcher attempted to be as faithful as 
possible to the original English version. In 
terms of the documents’ accuracy, the 
researcher asked some experienced teachers 
to verify the wording through a back- 
translation process which ensured the validity 
of the data. 
Diem Thi Thu Thuy et al. TNU Journal of Science and Technology 225(11): 18 - 24 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 21 
2.3.2. Interview 
The second instrument, interview, was a 
common data collection technique in 
qualitative research. After conducting the 
survey questionnaire, the semi-structured 
interviews were carried out with five chosen 
students who were conveniently available to 
participate in the study to get better insights 
into the research questions and to discuss for 
further information about the items raised in 
the questionnaires. 
All the interviews were carried out in 
Vietnamese in the form of an informal 
conversation between the researcher and the 
students. The data collected from the 
interview was recorded and then translated 
into English words. 
2.4. Data collection procedure 
After gaining approval from the management 
board, the researcher started the initial contact 
with the participants, all the procedure was 
taken in Vietnamese. Then, the researcher 
first carefully gave the participants an 
overview of the purpose and importance of 
the study; therefore, the students were 
requested to be serious and honest. 
Moreover, to maximize the reliability and 
validity in the study, the researcher collected 
the data from separated time of the research 
process, the questionnaires were delivered to 
the participants in February (2019), that was 
when the students were at the beginning of 
the second semester in the academic year of 
2019, to partly reflect what had been 
encountered during the studying time and 
later on (two months after) the researcher 
collected the information again and after 
comparing the data of two different periods 
with the same questionnaire, the researcher 
found the consistency between the answers. 
The subject participating in the present study 
was 200 first-year students. However, the 
number of questionnaires returned was 177, 
of which six questionnaires failed to properly 
finish the questions; thus, they were 
consequently eliminated from the analysis. 
Finally, the number of questionnaires selected 
for this study was 171. 
After a week of calculating the results, the 
researcher interviewed five voluntary 
participants from the questionnaire in the 
afternoon so as not to affect the students’ 
main morning learning lessons. 
3. Results and discussion 
3.1. Results from the questionnaire and 
interview data 
3.1.1. Students’ attitudes towards listening skill 
Three questions in Part 1 of the questionnaire 
were used to investigate the attitudes of the 
students in learning English listening skill. 
Question 1: How important is listening skill? 
Very
important
Rather
important
Little
important
Not very
important
Figure 1. Students’ responses relating 
the importance of listening skills 
Figure 1 reveals that most of the students 
consider learning listening skill is important, 
no participants thought that it is not important 
at all to learn listening. It is evident that the 
majority of them were aware of the 
importance of listening skill, (70.8%) students 
agreed that the listening skill is very 
important and 37 out of 171 (21.6%) students 
thought that listening skill is rather important. 
13 out of 171 students (7.6%) accepted the 
little importance of listening skill in English. 
This result shows that all students were aware 
of the importance of listening skills in 
learning a foreign language. 
Question 2: Listening is.. 
As indicated clearly in Figure 2, an 
overwhelming number of the students (78.9%) 
Diem Thi Thu Thuy et al. TNU Journal of Science and Technology
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viewed listening as the most difficult skill. 
The rest of the students (21.1 %) reported that 
listening skill is as difficult as other skills 
(reading, speaking, writing), and none of 
them considered listening skill to be an easy 
one or easier than other language skills. The 
main reason seems that listening skill is not 
familiar to them. 
The most
difficult skill
difficult as
other skills
easier than
other skills
easy
Figure 2. Students’ responses relating to the 
difficulty level of listening skills in comparison 
with other skills 
In addition, they always felt nervous and 
confused when they learn listening skill. In 
the interview, some respondents said, 
“because we might get on well with reading, 
try to learn the pieces of writing and speaking 
speech by rote, but there is no way to tackle 
the listening problems. (S3) 
I don’t think my listening level is as high 
as other skills. I normally get lower scores 
and I have no confidence in doing well in 
listening. (S4) 
Although I have learnt English for more than 
10 years, I still often feel nervous when 
listening to English because I cannot manage 
to grasp what the speakers say. (S5)”. 
very much
Not much
Little much
Not at all
Figure 3. Students’ responses relating to their 
interest in learning listening skill 
 225(11): 18 - 24 
Question number 3: How interested are you 
in learning English listening skills?
Figure 3 shows that only about (2.36%) of the 
respondents are not much interested in learning 
listening English, while (44.44%) of the 
subjects are little interested in it and more than 
half (53.2%) are not interested in it at all. The 
percentages above suggest that though the 
students did realize the importance of listening 
skill, they tended to have little or no interest in 
this subject. Through the interviews, most 
students responded that they had certain 
difficulties while listening to English, and 
these difficulties were believed to affect their 
enjoyment in listening to English:
I know how important listening skill is but I 
just simply cannot enjoy it, which seems like a 
burden to me. (S5)
From the result of the three questions in Part 
1 of the survey questionnaire above, we can 
conclude that although most of students 
believe English listening skill is important, 
they feel that it is more difficult than other 
skills such as speaking, reading and writing 
and their difficulties in learning listening skill 
may decrease their enjoyment for it. 
3.1.2 Students’ listening anxiety level 
Since the questionnaire was a 5-point Likert 
scale, the total score ranged from 19 to 95 
(one point for each item equals 19 points of 
minimum score in total, whereas five points 
for each item equals 95 of maximum score, 
based on the Likert scale grading). Among the 
171 subjects, the maximum score and the 
minimum score of listening anxiety were 89 
and 45 respectively. 
It was suggested that in order to analyze 
levels of anxiety through scales, multiply the 
total number of the items five-point Likert 
scale by the highest point, and then subtract 
from the total multiplied scores from the total 
items of the scale [10]. 
Thus, in this study, the scale total multiplied 
scores were 95 from which was subtracted 19; 
scores higher than 76 were categorized as a 
Diem Thi Thu Thuy et al. TNU Journal of Science and Technology
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 
high level of listening anxiety, whereas a 
total score ranging from 76 to 57 
demonstrated a moderate level of listening 
anxiety, and less than 57 indicated a low 
level of listening anxiety. 
Table 1. Percentages and frequencies of students’ 
foreign language listening anxiety 
 Percentages Frequencies 
Low level of 
listening anxiety 
4.1 7 
Moderate level of 
listening anxiety 
47.4 81 
High level of 
listening anxiety 
48.5 83 
Total 100 171 
The results presented in Table 1 reveals that 
the percentages of high and moderate level 
are rather equal, the first-year students at 
TNU generally tended to experience a 
moderate level of listening anxiety. The 
descriptive results suggest that 48.5% of the 
participants scored higher than 76, which 
indicates a high level of listening anxiety, 
whereas 47.4% of them scored 57 – 76, which 
indicates a moderate level of listening 
anxiety. In addition, 4.1% of them scored less 
than 57, which indicates a low level of 
listening anxiety. 
3.2. Discussion 
The findings were generally encouraging in a 
number of areas as follows. 
Firstly, the students’ anxiety level and attitude 
toward listening skills is very clear. Most of 
the students had high level of anxiety in 
listening classes. The students are aware of 
the importance of listening skill in foreign 
language acquisition process. However, 
according to an overwhelming number of the 
students, listening skill is one of the weakest 
skills and one in which they have least 
confidence. None of them is satisfied with 
their current listening comprehension ability. 
Having been familiar with the grammar 
testing structure since their school years, they 
defined listening skill as a burden. 
 225(11): 18 - 24 
Secondly, the results of fairly high anxiety 
level among the students (48.5%) may be 
attributed to several reasons such as listening 
text factors, speaker factors, listener factors 
and listening environment factors. The 
complexity and difficulty of lexis and syntax 
made students nervous and embarrassed while 
listening to spoken text. The difficulties come 
from learners such as limited vocabulary, weak 
memory, lack of background knowledge and 
ineffective appli