Khóa luận how to make pupils at SIU interested in learning english speaking

CONTENT Chapter 1: Introduction The research began when the class of speaking conducted at SIU had finished since the majority felt the same that the class either quite reluctant or no

GRADUATION THESIS

Major

English Language

Topic

How to make pupils at SIU interested in

learning English speaking

school governor of The Saigon International University (SIU) is my original work and I

also confirm that, the report is only prepared for my academic requirement not for any other purpose

Student's name : Đinh Thái Sơn

Signature of the Student:

classroom and that is not a good news for a new teacher, who does not have it but

urgently needs to acquire the basic knowledge This writing provides the reasons why the level of interesting acts as a crucial point in the succeeding of a class Furthermore, some methods of teaching speaking are going to be viewed and discussed to strengthen the point of view that intrinsic motivation should be applied in the class Readers will find graphs and figures demonstrating the subject and result in finding them useful for further studies at the Saigon International University

research and this Thesis

A special thanks I would like to give to my instructor, Mr Nguyen Thanh Tuan, for helping

me with the information needed for my Thesis Over the period of 10 weeks, he helped us

to schedule the writing from step to step so that the writing could be handed in time Professor also guided us the correct form of writing and corrected our paper works

Furthermore, I would like to thank the class 15DTA, who act as a helpful source of data on reflecting the state of our speaking class in the pass The data was rapidly filled and the reply was so frank Without their participation, this writing was so much in trouble

Last but not least, I would like to thank the Saigon International University The academic facility provides me a chance to be able to present the knowledge that I had learned here for the last four years and applied them to real life situation

Instructor: ………

Signed: ………

Content

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

1 Rationale 1

2 Purposes of the Study 1

3 Significant of the Study 2

4 Research Questions 2

5 Limitation 3

6 Scope of the Study 3

Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

1 Intrinsic motivation 6

2 Distinguish Types of Motivations 6

3 Advantages of Intrinsic Motivation 7

4 Some Elements of English Speaking 8

5 Communicative Language Teaching 8

6 Task-based activities and Topic-based activities 9

7 Some Classroom Speaking Activities 9

7.1 Script Acting 9

7.2 Discussion 10

7.3 Prepared Talks 11

7.4 Questionnaires 11

7.5 Simulation and role-play 12

Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY 13

1 Research design 13

2 Research Procedures 13

3 Participants 15

4 Sample Selection 15

5 Material Technique 15

6 Data Collection 16

7 Reliability and Validity 16

Chapter 4: ANALYSIS AND DICUSSION 18

2.2 Topic-based methods 25

3 Which methods are considered to be the most suitable for the students at Saigon International University? 27

Chapter 5: CONCLUSION 33

REFERENCE 35

APPENDIX 37

students’ grading 20

Chart 2: The chart describing the amount of activities were use 21

Chart 3: The chart describing the most common method used during class

22

Chart 4: Chart describing which methods students prefer 29

Chart 5: Chart describing which task-based activities students prefer 30

Chart 6: Chart describing which topic-based activities students prefer

32

CONTENT

Chapter 1: Introduction

The research began when the class of speaking conducted at SIU had finished since the majority felt the same that the class either quite reluctant or not being able to distribute the enthusiastic activities In the search for methods to better the class learning environment, the hope is that speaking class will be more communicative for students to enjoy

1 Rationale

English has always been unofficially considered to be the most used language of the modern time for it has proved it significant in global business and communication in the last decade Yet, learning a second language is not as easy as it seems especially when it comes to speaking English During speaking session, we found that some of the students lack the motivation to stand up in front the class and deliver a speech in English This typical situation is often assigned to being shy, reserved and insecure of making mistake, some cases event engage with the negative attitude toward speaking in front of public Such matter has raised the attention of us as future teachers to find an appropriate solution

2 Purposes of the Study

As stated before, we are aiming at creating an efficient English speaking period for students of Saigon International University By attending the classes, we noticed that getting students to speak English in class is quite tricky especially to those who were reluctant to speak or express themselves in front of other people Since then, we have been

scanning through methods of teaching Speaking English and obtaining more new modern practices to help students deal with speaking problems

3 Significance of the Study

As the first to benefit from this research, we would say that through the process of making this writing possible, we have learned a quite amount of ways to conduct an effective speaking class With a certain belief that the students at Saigon International University would be the next target to gain advantage since this research was aimed to better the class of speaking based on the interest of each individuals Lastly, teachers’ role

is quite important in the learning and progressing of pupils so we hope that this small research could act as a support to those seeking of such helps and shall gain benefit from

6 Scope of the Study

This topic focused on the student at Saigon International University:

The Saigon International University (SIU) is an international university,

founded in Vietnam to help Vietnamese and foreign students advance their

education to the tertiary level All our programs are taught either in English or

in Vietnamese based on the standard of the American university curriculum

The SIU degrees are valuable nationally and internationally (siu.edu.vn)

The class of 15DTA of English Language faculty started in 2015 and will end in 2019 The curriculum consisted of Vietnamese program including subjects such as Introduction

to Linguistics, Semantics, etc and English program which were the skills of Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening

The research targeted the students attended the class of 15DTA of the faculty of English

Language at Saigon International University only The list of students we used is the LIST

OF STUDENTS GRADUATION INTERNSHIP - 2019 sent to us by the school office on

February 27th, 2019 which contained 25 members in total

In conclusion, the main target for this research are students at SIU in general, for

the students of class 15DTA in specific Although, there some difficulties in reaching for

the sample, we were managed to acquire the result needed for this thesis

Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

According to Harmer (2007) in his fourth edition of “The Practice of English Language Teaching”, speaking can be quite easy to practice especially in a class where students are acquainted to each other and archive an appropriate level of English learning On the other hand, Harmer also stated that it is a challenge job for teachers to handle a class with a variety of mixed level or students who are little exposed to English in their previous learning These reluctant students are described as often being shy and refusing to express themselves in front of the crowd because of the fear of not speaking normal English In addition, a more common problem comes to Speaking class is “I cannot think of anything to say” This issue is usually assigned to not being able to relate students themselves to the topics or activities happening during the class Last but not least, speaking class should have a high number of individual participants because unlike other skills, speaking need great amount of time in order for learners to expose themselves to the language

To have a better view of some of the matter we were working on, the below terms and definitions are going to be discussed

As we would all agree on, “To be motivated means to be moved to do something A person who feels no impetus or inspiration to act is thus characterized as unmotivated, whereas someone who is energized or activated toward an end is considered motivated” as Richard, M, R & Edward, L, Deci (2000) described Therefore, we would like to classify two types of motivation that keep learner at their stage of studying

1 Intrinsic motivation

The writing of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions stated:

Intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent

satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence When intrinsically

motivated, a person is moved to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather

than because of external products, pressures or reward. (Ryan & Deci,

2000, pp 56)

Furthermore Vanderbilt University in its article had suggested these intrinsic motivators could be describe as those who show interest at a specific subject with the thought of it somehow connect to the reality and when come to solving problems they can easily apply More specific, when asked the question of how efficient you are when learning a subject or what archive do you earn when learning The responses might sound like these, ““Literature interests me.”, “Learning math enables me to think clearly.”, “I feel good when I succeed in class.” ” (Article about Motivating Student, Vanderbilt University)

2 Distinguish Types of Motivations

A much tougher task is how to tell the differences between intrinsic, extrinsic and internal, external motivation Being as briefly as possible, external motivation regards the outer forces that drive learners to their success while internal motivation is more likely to fulfill personal satisfaction Let us have an example A student completed his homework with the fear of being punished by his parents if the work had not been done In this case,

he is motivated by his parents’ sanctions so it is obvious external The same student

complete his work because he thinks that it will lead to his succeed at school, then he is internally motivated As comparing to the other two, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are much more of an instrumentally value The boy could have finished his homework since his discovery that his homework contain knowledge that he needed to perform in other subject, then he is intrinsically motivated On the other hand, the child completing his task thinking that he it would help him to earn a job or in short term get a reward in the future could be considered as extrinsically motivated

Since we are only mentioning the intrinsic motivation, the distinguish part above just

to clarify these definition It is, however, important for teachers to recognize these types of motivation and be able to classify reluctant students to fit in each type and make sure to plan ahead a solution to deal with each type

3 Advantages of Intrinsic Motivation

The process of acquiring information on students’ liking as well as further developing them can easily accompany class time meaning that steps can happen at the same time without interfering or suppressing one another For instant, during speaking class, teachers can ask students to provide their hobby or ask question about their future jobs, etc As far

as we acknowledged, extrinsically motivating methods do their jobs as soon as you apply them during your teaching section Rewards and good marks draw the attentions of students, hands are up for answering questions and speaking of ideas It provides strong stimulation and makes students eagerly to aim for rewards

4 Some Elements of English Speaking

As Harmer defined, speaking English fluently means there is a full potential deployment on pronouncing phonemes, using stress and intonation patterns and creating a connected speech Furthermore, these above criteria must also accompany with various speaking events Speaking in another language is difficult and it has been argued that an important reason for this is that a student’s attentional resources during a speaking activity are limited (Skehan, 1998: 73) Many students cannot stay balance between getting the meaning right in a proper time (fluency) and using it correctly (accuracy) as an article of Cambridge Press had suggested

5 Communicative Language Teaching

In the work of Littlewood (2013), the communicative ability is described by analyzing two different points of view of language, the structural and the functional Structural point

of view considers the aspect of grammar, in other words, two sentences can be distinguished from each other by their grammatical structure For instant, “John is drinking coffee” and “The coffee is being drunk by John” The structural view alone, however, cannot be used as a way of conveying communication Learners will need the view of functional as well Here is an example: “Are they still working?” In the aspect of grammar, the sentence should be understand as a question or interrogative However, there are more than one meaning in the view of functional base on the circumstances that the speakers in

As a result, the communicative language teaching was there to solve the problem in three aspects: getting students to understand the linguistic structure first since this is ESL class,

helping students to use the language communicatively and also introducing students to a non-linguistic knowledge of communication

6 Task-based activities and Topic-based activities

As Ur defined in her work, a topic-based activity helps students to relate the ideas of students to their own experience and knowledge This kind of activities could also represent

a group discussion where teachers can stimulate speeches but not too many arguments so that students can keep their origin ideas On the other hand, task-based activities require groups or pairs to complete observable tasks such as records, lists, charts, etc The main difference between these types of activities is the outcome While topic-based activities aim to produce discussion or such type of outcome, task-based activities provides a more specific result, a source of material that could also be used for other subjects Therefore, task-based activities seem to produce more speech than its company since the procedures

of conducting a task-based activities already creates opportunities for students to talk, especially to communicate with one another

In this research, topic-based activities would be widened as a method of conducting speaking class using a topic as a center to construct an activity

7 Some Classroom Speaking Activities

7.1 Script Acting

This activity involve in having student to act a cut-out part of a story from their books

or other sources that they have most interest, the progress can be recorded and act as an

evaluation for grading These scripts should be selected carefully so that it could fit the age

of the class and students should be asked to look through the script as if they were “real” actors and actresses Students will have time to practice their performance which teacher head them toward the stress and intonation as they are speaking the lines Not only student will be able to practice speaking with their friend during prepare section but they also gain confident during acting section in front of the class During acting out part, teachers should give students with less confident chances to look at their classmate and create a helpful

friendly environment where they help each other with the pronunciations and acting

7.2 Discussion

The most common of this type of interactions between teachers and students is what

Jeremy described as Buzz group This activity involves in predicting a topic name after you

have exposed it to the students or discussing after naming some key words of that same topic For example, teachers show pictures of snake, elephant, tiger, etc and suggest that

we might discuss the topic of animals in the rain forest and ask them to name the animals

Then teachers ask them to guess where they could live or capable of, “the elephant can

swim”; “The snake cannot fly”, etc The buzz group method, however, should be

discriminated from Instant comment, which have more connection to producing fast

corresponding in-class activities Let take the same lesson of the rain forest for example Teachers again show the topic but now instead of involving the class into speaking, we can invite individuals to stand up and list as quickly as possible four animal and their living

habitats Another type of discussion is the Formal debates Students during the class should

be given a topic then plan their arguments in group while teachers direct them toward some

point of view or answer their questions It is important for the student to practice their speech in advance in their group first

7.3 Prepared Talks

This activity is often seen in the secondary grade classes where they acquired a quite amount of vocabulary and the ability to use formal conversation Students then choose a topic that they most acquainted and prepared the talk in advance Teachers should encourage students to present their ideas using notes instead of scripts and should speak in

a small group first Then teacher could grade them on a criteria that the whole class had agreed on before

As the most used activity in teaching English speaking, prepared talks are suitable for both intrinsic students It can assure that the topics chosen by students are those familiar or interesting so they can have as much information as possible along with vocabulary needed

to make their presentation The criteria that teachers introduce will act as grading tools to see if students could get better in speaking English

7.4 Questionnaires

As Harmer (2007) mentioned, “Questionnaires are useful because, by being pre-planned, they ensure that both questioner and respondent have something to say to each other” This activity is what we called “flexible” to conduct and here are the reasons Questionnaires can be delivered to students by teachers or can be done by students themselves Provided that questions are came up by teachers, students then discuss answers with friends or practice one-on-one conversation with teachers On the other hand, students design the materials themselves so that they could collect data from their friends and present their

finding in front of the class In this case, teachers’ role is crucial in helping them in the design process

7.5 Simulation and role-play

It is described as the act of students “simulate a real-life encounter (such as a business meeting, an interview or a conversation in an aeroplane cabin, a hotel foyer, a shop or a cafeteria) as if they were doing do in the real world” (The Practice of English Language Teaching, 2015, pp 352) Also described by Ur in her “A Course in English Teaching Language” (p 123), this activity can also begin with role cards distributed to students about a situation This simulation can also be students themselves take on the role-play of a character It is important that the role of students should be given with full instruction of background, characteristic, etc Sometimes, teachers can have students to improvise a circumstance of real life encounter

In other words, to understand the matter thoroughly, teacher should be aimed with the basis for professional look through books, articles and most importantly through experience The above provides information for such need

Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, we are going to cover some information and methods that we used to collect the information These include the written discourse regarding the methods of acting, planning activities, etc for conducting an English speaking class and the tool to find out the numbers which brought up the questions for this research

1 Research design

As trying to better the quality of our English speaking class, we have conducted this research to find out whether more interesting methods should be considered to make the class more enthusiastic and seek for best methods suitable for students by using both the

Qualitative Research and Quantitative Research The Qualitative method helps us to know

better the topic that we had chosen through written materials like books and articles related

to the topic The procedure of Quantitative research was applied to find out the figure of efficiency that speaking class had brought to students in the past This section was carried

out by the form of Questionnaires, which is going to be discussed in the later part

2 Research Procedures

The research literally starts on February 27th, 2019, right after students received the list

of instructors, who help them to finish their paper work Since the time, the schedule was designed by our instructor, Mr Nguyen Thanh Tuan, as:

Week 1, 2 and 3: Finished writing Chapter 1, 2 and Correction

Week 4 and 5: Finished writing Chapter 3, 4 and Correction

Week 6: Finished Chapter 5 and Correction

Week 7 and 8: Meetings

This research aims to gather methods in relating to teaching speaking effectively for advanced English learning students following these steps:

1 In the first step of this research, we are going to focus on the questions of research Firstly, for the target of this research, we would like to determine who should be on the list of our questioning, what kind of methods that came up in the past for teaching Speaking and select which should be able to apply to make it more successful

Then we put up the questionnaires about the quality of the class they had attended

in the past, mostly about activities and how enthusiastic these activities brought to the students

2 After having all information collected, we presented the idea and proposed the topic and made it a research

3 We came up with strategies to collect the data and which approach we would use

to analyze the data

4 Then we put up the questionnaires about the quality of the class they had attended

in the past, mostly about activities and how enthusiastic these activities brought to the students Besides, we were walking through books and articles to scheme out

5 The data then would be analyzed to a final result

6 The result then is going to be informed as in the Chapter IV

3 Participants

The main participants of this research is the student of the faculty of Major English, to be more specific, the students were assigned to the class 15DTA and were classify differently based on their English standard test that the university provided

A vast majority of students in the 15DTA class have been exposed to English for at least a year as the recent research has shown Over a number of 25 members of the class, 38.9%

of students have been learning English for over a year while 61.1% of pupils got acquainted

to the language for over two years

4 Sample Selection

As mentioned before, the focus of this research lay on the students of Saigon International University, typically speaking the student of class 15TDA Through the questionnaires distributed earlier, results would be choose manually More specific: the sample of those who attended all four courses of English skills should be selected; the sample of those who subjected to English for at least a year should be selected

5 Material Technique

The main technique in gathering material for this research is Google form and its calculator site This application helps user to create questionnaires on their own Moreover, these forms can be sent quickly through connection to other social media applications Last but not least, the questions can also be calculated, made into graphics and had their digital numbers place on the table for individual results Beside the data from students, the written

materials also played an important role in the making of this research The selections were books related to the education aspects, mainly about teaching English as a second language The research also considered specialized topics related to education as a source of information

6 Data Collection

The main technique in gathering materials is questionnaires, which included three sections The first section included three questions act as a filter for eliminating results that were not suitable for collecting data in next two sections The second set of questions was aim for collecting data on the level of interesting the lessons of speaking class brought to students

in the past Kind of activities, time used to process the activity and whether these activities can leave an impression to student are criteria this part aimed at The third part includes six questions mainly about activities that students would like to present during their class

As a result, over the total of twenty-five students in 15DTA, twenty-four samples were submitted back to the site Twenty-one samples, however, made it through the final calculation process since there were two did not valid due to the fact that the answered stated that he or she did not go through the class in the period of 2015 to 2019

7 Reliability and Validity

The result of the data found in this research is assured to be reliable due to three reasons Firstly, the numbers were obtained through a serious survey with a scale of enough participants to make the outcome possible Secondly, this survey was completed by students of English Major so the barrier of language could be minimized Last but not least,

the numbers were processed with accuracy so that the same survey of exact type should be able to produce the result with the least speculation as it could have This research guaranteed that a same survey conducted based on the steps and questions upon this writing would get a very same outcome

The result of the data found in this research is assured to be valid due to two reasons The result of this research was carried out in an appropriate amount of time needed for the Questionnaires to happen for the most sample could be collected Total amount of seven days used for collecting the sample of 25 students is legit enough The research starts with general question, whether the speaking class actually provided a lot of speeches To look into that, we narrowed down the target to a more familiar target which is our classmate, the class of Major English As we had noticed in the past, the majority of the class seemed quite reluctant in the period due to the fact of lacking interest so we designed to come up with a survey to evaluate the enthusiastic of speaking class Then we analyzed the pros and cons of the class that we had in the past based on our own experience and compare the details provided by our friends answer samples This writing as described above, followed strictly the steps of conducting a scientific method research Therefore, this research is validity

Chapter 4: ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

After working through details about how the research had its samples collected and figures calculated, the analysis of the topic would be performed by first answering three main questions in the part of research questions To demonstrate better on how this research got the result as well as reached a conclusion, graphics and charts would also be shown, described and analyzed

1 Speaking class should be improve to be more enthusiastic for

For a closer look as well as a more direct approach to the first question, leveling the student interest in their speaking class question was put into the questionnaires Based on chart number 3, the majority of the students agreed that the class only acquired a level of average when it comes to how interesting it could get 52.4% of students chose the option that describe their class was interesting enough for it to carry on Furthermore, 19% agreed that the class was just effective enough for them to study in The numbers were pretty low when it came to the level 4 and 5 which is the level of good and excellent with only 14.3% and 9.5% for each category

Chart 1: The chart describing the level of interest the speaking

class could get based on students’ grading

To understand better why the level of interest was at about average, the following charts was withdrawn from the results of the questionnaire

As the chart described, over the total amount of 21 valid samples, 23.8% of the class claimed that the class happened with not enough activities while 61.9% stated that the activities were enough for the class to continue Only a small fraction, however, says that the amount of activities should range from several to a lot of activities used Therefore, the majority of participants agreed that the level of using activities or methods only at about enough to keep the class on routine

When it came to which is the most common method to create an activity for the class, the research got the answer with the second chart below

Chart 2: The chart describing the amount of activities were used