MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY Lu Thanh Tó Using discussion to develop oral fluency for non - English - major first year students at Nghe an Junior teachers training college (áp dụng phơng pháp thảo luận nhóm học nói nhằm nâng cao khả nói trôi chảy cho sinh viên không chuyên năm thứ trờng Cao đẳng S phạm Nghệ An ) Master Thesis in Education Vinh, 2011 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY Lu Thanh Tó Using discussion to develop oral fluency for non - English - major first year students at Nghe an Junior teachers training college (áp dụng phơng pháp thảo luận nhóm học nói nhằm nâng cao khả nói trôi chảy cho sinh viên không chuyên năm thứ trờng Cao đẳng S phạm Nghệ An ) Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching Code: 60.14.10 Master thesis in Education Supervisor: Dr Le Van Canh Vinh, 2011 TABLE OF CONTENT CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION The teaching of foreign language has traditionally concentrated on making the students aware of certain aspects of the code (vocabulary, pholological and morphological features and syntactic rules) without providing adequate practice in the selection of message and in the process of encoding it for transmission (Rivers, 1968) As a result, later years of study, students have known a great deal about a foreign language without being able to use it to express their intentions In recent years, much of the dicussion relating to proficiency-oriented instruction and testing has focused on the development of oral skills The emphasis on speaking proficiency can be attributed to a variety of factors, many of which are traceable to the methodological trends and movements and new developments in theory and research These are the impetus for a continued interest in oral proficiency This chapter introduces the study It starts with the background and rationale of the study Then the aims and objectives of the stucy are presented, which is followed by the presentation of the research hypothesis, reasearch questions and the methods used for the present study Then, the scope of the study is presented Finally, information about the structure of the thesis is provided 1.1 Background and Rationale As we all know, for a long time, the traditional teaching methods of English language such as Grammar-translation, the directed and the audio-lingual has been used as dominating ways of teaching and learning English in Vietnam These methods not focus on communicative skills, but much on grammatical points in order to help learners be excellent at grammar, but they can not communicate with each other English In classroom, teachers always explain grammatical points such as tenses, articles, prepositions and so on, and give students a great deal of exercises to practice in order to master grammar rules Therefore, learners rarely have opportunities to speak and express their own ideas In the teacher-centered class, the teacher tends to explain and students take notes and practice; they rarely work in pairs or in groups to discuss a topic with each other This seems to be very absurd for many educators in the world as the purpose of learning a second language is to communicate with each other in society This is a reason why the Ministry of Education and Training needs to innovate the way of the second language teaching by applying the communicative approach in teaching English in Vietnamese classrooms In addition, the text books and curriculums for both schools and universities should be designed for the communication-oriented and learnercentered approach Almost all teachers are required to improved their teaching skills and try out new method to be successful in classrooms There is no doubt, discussion is one of the most effective communicative approaches that teachers often take into practice A number of researches have been conducted in the field in order to realize the influences of group discussion as a frequent class activity on students’ linguistic performance and communicative competence Participating in group discussion helps students develop “reproductive thinking” into “productive thinking”, and discussion method results in effective learning outcomes in terns of: (a) the mastery of general subject, (b) ability of problem-solving, (c) the development of communication skills ( Wilen, 1990) Alvermann and Hayes (1989) believed that active and thoughtful participation in class discussion in an “outward sign of leaning” Besides, in group participants learn to talk better, i.e they know how to retrieve ideas, organize them coherently and speak them out fluently; therefore, communication competence is developed Discussion also shapes “moral culture” as participants act together in a special way with regard to truthfulness, responsiveness, openness, respect, self-awareness, selfconfidence and so on (Bridges, 1979) However, Jones (1999) raised a question why a number of non-native English speaking background students, particularly those who come from Asian countries, encounter difficulties in academic group discussion They stay silent and reticent whilst their counterparts from Europe, for example, actively participate in the group work In sum, group discussion is regarded as a fruitful topic for researchers, particularly for those who are interested in Second Language Acquisition in the sense that is relates to how L2 learners approach a new language and how interactions among them contribute to that process A number of researchers have shed light onto the field and seemed to agree on the point that group discussion productively promotes interactions among its participants Although many of the researchers did investigate the issue, few have drawn the conclusion about what truly happens during group discussion and whether there are the relation ships between group discussion and its influence on the participants’ speaking skill in terms of accuracy Moreover, the most important reason why I pursue the study on group work is that teachers comes at the Nghe An Junior Teachers Training College have been using group discussions very so often , however , they not truly recognize how much their students may benefit from this dynamic activity A minority of them even show doubts on group discussion’s possibilities Being inspired by the teaching situation in the Nghe An Junior Teachers Training College , the researcher comes up with the project with clear purposes in mind: to go deeply into the essence of group discussion to explore what the students actually during group discussion and its impacts on students’ acquisition of communicative competence in terms of accuracy , to determine if there is any possibility that participating into discussion for academic purposes can help students gain better at their interactions within the classroom, inside the college campus and later on in a learning environment of other higher educational institutions In addition, nothing is absolute The activity of group discussion is necesarrily accompanied with constraints, which encourages me a lot to find out the key to it Surely, my intimate goal through all of such efforts is ditermining the fittest activity of fostering non-major first year students’ English competence at Nghe An Junior Teachers Training College 1.2 Aim and Objectives of the Study The aims of the present study are (1) to investigate the extent to which group discussion activities can help to reduce the students’ speaking anxiety, and (2) to find out the students’ reactions to group discussion activities for the development of their speaking skills Thus, the study is designed to achieve the following objectives * To find out the possibilities of using group discussion activities in the context of large classes of Nghe An Junior Teachers training College; * To find out the students’ attitudes towards speaking English as well as the factors affecting their participation in speaking activities; To gain students’ opinions on how group discussion activities enhance their participation in speaking activities in the classroom 1.3 Research Questions In order to achieve the above-mentioned aims and objectives, the study was designed to seek answers to the following research questions: 1: What are the student’s opinions of the benefits resulted from participation in group discussion activities to the development of their oral fluency? 2: What the students like and dislike about discussion activities? 3: What are their suggestions for improvement in using discussion in speaking lessons, if these activities can be continued in the classroom? By answering all these research questions, it is hope that the study will shed light on whether group discussion activities can be used as an instructional strategy in the context of large classes and students’ low proficiency in English, and if they are appilcable, how they can be used 1.4 Method of the study: This study is a small-scale action research project, and it is conducted with a quantitative methodology Before group discussion activities were designed and applied in the classroom, a questionnaire was administed to the researched students to find out the factors affecting their participation in classroom speaking activities On the basis of initial analysis of the students’ responses to the questionnaire, group discussion activities were designed and applied in the classroom During the intervention, the researcher observed the students and took notes of important issues emerging during the intervention, such as the students’ attitudes, their interactions, and linguistic difficulties After the treatment, another questionnaire was administed to the same groups of students The purpose of this post-intervention questionnaire was to find out how the students evaluated the impact of group discussion activities on their speaking skills All the responses from both the questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively by means of descriptive statistics Data were then tabulated for discussion 1.5 The Scope of the Study The present study, which is an action research project in nature, is limited itself to the investigation of how the application of group discussion activities helped to reduced the students’ anxiety in speaking English as well as their self-evaluation of the benefits of participating in group discussion activities to their speaking skills Although part of the study was somehow like an experiment, i.e., the application of group discussion activities, the study is by no means experimental This is because the purpose of the study is not to establish the cause-effect relationship between variables, i.e between the application of group discussion activities and the students’ oral proficiency Rather, the study is aimed at determining whether group discussion activities can help to reduce the students’ anxiety in speaking English, thereby increasing their participation in classroom speaking activities This means that the causal relationship between students’ participation in group discussion activities and their oral proficiency is beyond the scope of this study 1.6 The Design of the Thesis This thesis is organized into five chapters Chapter One has briefly introduced the general background information, the scope, objectives and methods dealt with in the study Research questions will also be raised in this chapter Chapter Two – Literature Review - will start with some definitions of group discussion, then review a number of studies on pre-task strategic individual planning and its consequences on task performance in terms of fluency, complexity and accuracy Chapter Three, the methodology chapter, will make it clear how the present study was implemented, including information about context, participants , and procedures, instrumentation and data collection Methods of analysis will be addressed in Chapter Four Analysis of a range of data collected from various sources (oral data from group planning and individual presentations, teacher’s observation notes ) for the study will be clarified in this chapter These results will be discussed and interpreted in Chapter Five, which is also the concluding chapter of the study 1.7 Summary This chapter introduces the study This introduction includes the background, the rationale, the research questions, research methods, and the scope of of the study Next chapter reviews the literature for the study Chapter II: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter reviews the literature on teaching speaking skills in foreign language education with particular reference to discussion as a classroom activity that aims at developing students’ oral competence 2.1 What is Speaking? Mackey (1965) summarizes oral expression as follows: Oral expression involves not only [ ] the use of the right sounds in patterns of rhythm and intonation, but also the choice of in the right order to convey the right meaning the right words and inflections (p 266) According to the above definition, Mackey emphasizes doing things ‘right’ in order to be any good at speaking: choosing the right forms; putting them in the correct order; sounding like a native speaker; even producing the right meanings This views of speaking influences the list of exercises which Mackey discusses: model dialogues, pattern practice, oral drill tables, look-and-say exercises, and oral composition However, critiques argue that this is a bit like learning to drive without ever going out on the road (Bygate, 1987) Ten years later after Mackey’s work was published, Wilkins (1975) pointed out there were some learning problems that exercises like these did not solve An important one is that of ensuring a satisfactory transition from supervised learning in the classroom to real-life speaking This transition is often called the ‘transfer of skills’ As Wilkin points out, if all language produced in the classroom is determined by the teacher, ‘we are protecting [the learner] from the additional burden of having to make his own choices’ He continues: As with everything else he will learn only what falls within his experience If all his language production is controlled from outside, he will hardly be competent 10 providing vocabulary, grammatical structures, and background information related to the topic for discussion Thus, although the study does not provide any evidence of the students’ progress in their speaking competence, it does show significant changes in their attitudes and motivation I believe that if the students have positive attitudes and they are sufficiently motivated to take advantages of the class time to speak English, their competence in speaking English will be better And this is the significane of the study 5.2 Reflection Reflection is part of action research (Burns, 2010; Nunan, 1992) Reflecting on the distance I travelled in completing this action research, I learned the following things: • Teaching cannot be effective unless teachers understand their students, especially the challenges and difficulties they were encountered with during the process of learning English as a foreign language I would not have been able to understand why my students did not participate in classroom speaking activities if I had not undertaken this action research • By conducting this action research I gained many benefits to myself as a classroom teacher First, I understood whay my students were reluctant in speaking English in the classroom Learning English as a minor subject with few hours of classroom instruction a week is evidently not enough to develop the students’ proficiency in English Their limited grammar and vocabulary prohibited them from speaking English Also, most of my students came from the rural areas where they had little opportunity to expand their background knowledge necessary for talking about many issues provided in the textbook Understandably, deficiency in vocabulary and grammar as well as background knowledge are the leading reasons 64 for their low participation in classroom speaking activities Secondly, the action research I reported in this thesis enabled me to understand the students’ attitudes toward the intervention I made to achieve changes in the classroom From the students’ responses to the questionnaire, I understood not only why they did not speak English, what they expected the teacher to in speaking lessons, but also their attutudes towards my action for change This made me more confident in using group discussion activities focusing on daily topics that my students were interested in and felt confident in talking about in English This understanding improves not only the rapport between the teacher and the students but also my professional understanding and competence • Now I agree with many scholars (Burns, 2010; Nunan, 1992) about the benefits of action research as a tool of professional development This study may not be up to the standards of true research in terms of its validity and reliability Neither is it rigourous enough to claim any generalizations of the findings However, Nunan (1992) points out that, for action research, there is not the same imperative to deal with external validity In many cases practitioners are less concerned with generating generalizable knowledge than with solving pressing problems associated with their own particular workplace (pp 18-19) As I have pointed out earlier, I did not have any intention to generalize the findings of my study Instead, my aim is to gain understanding about the problem of my students’ limited participation in speaking English in the classroom, then to find ways to improve the situation This will be discussed further in section 5.4 about the limitations of the present study The findings of the study has taught me useful lessons that learner-centred teaching should start with the teacher’s understanding of the students Withoug that understanding, teaching is teacher-dominated and consequently, students not learn what they are taught or they gain nothing from what the teacher teaches 5.3 Implications for Classroom Teaching 65 Discussions are probably the most common used activity in the oral skills class (Celce-Murcia, 2001) This study shows that this classroom activity can be applicable to the teaching of speaking to the English non- majors at Nghe An Junior Teachers Training College To apply this teaching strategy, the teacher can introduce a topic via a reading or a listening passage Then students are asked to get in pairs or groups to discuss a related topic in order to come up with a solution, a response, or the like Teachers must take care in planning and setting up a discussion activity First, planned grouping or pairing of students may be necessary to ensure a successful discussion outcome While there is no one ‘right way’ to group students, considerations such as gender, level of proficiency, talkativeness, etc may come into play Second, students need to be reminded that each person should have a specific responsibility in the discussion, whether it be to keep time, takes notes, or report results; these decisions can, and should, be made by the group members Labour dividion in the group is to avoid someone dominating the group discussion as pointed out by the students in this study Finally, students need to have support Because most of the English non-majors at Nghe An Junior Teachers Training College have limited proficiency in English, they need to have linguistic support Specifically, before the students start the discussion, the teacher needs to provide them with some vocabulary and grammatical structures which they may use for their discussion These can be provided in the form of sentence frames like: - My point is …… - What I want to say is …… - Although I agree with you, but I’d like to … - I see your point, but in my opinion …… Horwitz (2008) has pointed out 66 Many learners learn phrases before they understand exactly what mean or how they are constructed Formulaic and simplified make it possible for learners to participate in personalized feedback before they have conversations they expressions and received developed a large amount of second language ability” (pp 99-100) The provision of formulaic expressions or lexical chunks in the form of sentence frames as described above help the students participate more actively in speaking English in order to learn the language After all, learners cannot learn a language without comprehensible input and the opportunities for production Information related to the topic is also an important factor that ensures the success of group discussion As most of the students are from the rural areas, they have limited world knowledge If they have nothing to say about the topic, their better choice is to keep silent This is understandable Therefore, the teacher needs to brainstorm or elicit them about the topic before the discussion There are cases in which the teacher needs to provide different views on the topic in the form of worksheets for the students to choose and give the reasons for their choice These types of support or scaffolding will help the students to reduce anxiety in speaking English Related to the students’ anxiety, the study shows that most of them were not confident enough in speaking English partly because they were afraid of making mistakes This raises the issue of teacher correction strategies If the teacehr corrects them so frequently or while they are speaking, this will reinforce their fear of making mistakes Thus, error correction should be sensitive Another strategy that can help the students to overcome reticence in speaking English is to choose appropriate topics, i.e.,topics they prefer Having the students to choose what they want to talk about has been shown to be an effective strategy to deal with students’ reticence (Zhang & Head, 2010) 67 In order to make group discussion activities effective, teachers need to develop good social relationships in the classrom so that the students are happy to cooperate with each other That cooperation should be rested on the mutual acceptance of differences in opinions and linguistic mistakes Once the friendly atmosphere is created in the classroom, the students will lower their anxiety The teachers should be sympathetic to the students mistakes and their unfamiliarity with the discussion topics Helping the students deal with their linguistic limitations is so critical Findings of this study showed that the principal reason for the students’ nonparticipation in speaking activities is their limited vocabulary and grammar Providing them with relevant sentence frames and lexical chunks or formulaic expression is crucial in this regard.Teachers should also be patient with the students’ minimal responses Any criticism would be counter-effective Finally, teachers should be encouraged to undertake action research to find ways of improving their teaching If the teacher’s teaching methods are suitable to the students and her expectations are not so high, the students will be likely to become more motivated to speak English in the classroom 5.4 Limitations of the study The study has some limitations First, the intervention, i.e group discussion was implemented in a very short time The duration of the intervention was not long enough to familairize the students with the new teaching technique This may have two different effects On the one hand, there was not enough time for the new teaching technique to bring about its effects On the other hand, the students’ positive attitudes towards group discussion may be simply because of the technique which was new to them If implemented for a longer time, the effect may be different Therefore, interpretation of the findings should be cautioned Methodologically, the study used just questionnaires as the sole instrument of data collection The students’ responses to the questionnaire may not be true to their thought, but they just wanted to please the researcher, who is also their classroom teacher The students may also 68 have been affected by their peers’ opinions while answering the questionnaire items Moreover, the impact of group discussion on the students’ oral fluency was not investigated It is true that if the students change their attitudes to learning, they may be more motivated and this may lead to better learning However, this is just an assumption The effect of group discussion on the students’ oral fluency should be measured more rigorously by means of an experimental study Another point that is worth noting is that asaction research is not aimed at generalizing the findings This means that if the study is conducted in another context with a different group of students, the results may be different However, Nunan has claimed that if the action research projects “address questions of interest to other practitioners, if they generate data, and if they contain analysis and interpretation, they they qualify as research” (p 19) This action research, I believe, has met all these criteria Despite these limitations, the study, which is itself action research, provides the researcher with useful information It provides evidence that the teacher can bring group discussion into the classroom Group discussion can be a teaching technique that helps to change the students’ attitudes towards speaking English in the classroom and to reduce their anxiety The contribution of this study not only lies in the findings it yielded but also in the encouragement it provided me in conducting action research for my professional growth This is the first time I conducted such research, and despite many difficulties, I learned a great deal about how to improve my classroom teaching and how to make my teaching more motivating to the students 5.5 Suggestions for Further Research In next cycle of this action research, I plan to change the way I use group discussion in light of the findings of this study I will start with interviewing the students to shed more light on what they said in the questionnaires Data gained from the interviews will help to cross-check the reliability of the questionnaire responses 69 Then, I will design a quasi-experimental study to measure how effective group discussion might be to the students’ oral proficiency It is really useful to find out the impact of group discussion on the students’ speaking proficiency because this study is limited itself to the understanding of the students’ attitudinal and motivational changes regarding speaking activities Although the students stated the benefits and the changes in their attitudes and motivation, it is not clear whether those perceived benefits and stated changes helped them improve their speaking skills in any way Therefore, experimental studies are really needed However, it is almost impossible to design a true experimental study because of many pragmatic reasons So, a quasiexperimental design would be more realistic For those who are interested in the effect of group discussion activities on their students’ motivation in learning to speak English can repeat the procedures and use the instruments of this action research This effort would help to cross-check the validity of the study 5.6 Conclusion Speaking is so important to the success of learning a foreign language It is a form of output Without speaking the language, the students cannot learn the language successfully However, there are many factors that affect negatively the students’ participation in classroom speaking activities This urges the teacher to continuously find ways to encourage the students to speak English both inside and outside the classroom Group discussion could be one of many pedagogical solutions This teaching startegy needs to be further investigated by different teachers on different groups of learners Then, findings should be shared among teachers of the department in order to make the teaching of oral skills more effective From this study, I have learned that the students are really interested in speaking English However, it is common observation that they were not willing to speak English in the classroom The study reveals the reasons why they did not want 70 to speak English and how the teacher can change their attitudes The study suggests that the problem of students’ reticence or poor particpation in classroom speaking activities can be resolved if the teacher applies an appropriate instructional strategies One of those strategies is the use of group discussion activities The study also confirms the benefits of group work in English language teaching 71 REFERENCES 1.Allwright, R L (1984) Why don’t learners 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EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY Lu Thanh Tó Using discussion to develop oral fluency for non - English - major first year students at Nghe an Junior teachers training college. .. Nghe An Junior Teachers Training College so that more possibilites can be exploited and constraints can be avoided 3.3 Participants The participants for this study are non- major first year students... about changes and, even better, improvements in practice.” (p 2) This study is designed to look into a ‘problematic situation’, that is why the English non- majors at Nghe An Junior Teachers Training