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CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY
I certify my authorship of the Bachelor’s Thesis submitted today entitled:
“THE 8TH GRADERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON
ENGLISH SPEAKING PROBLEMS IN EFL
CLASSROOM: A STUDY AT THE ASIAN HIGH
SCHOOL – CAO THANG CAMPUS”
In terms of the statement of requirements for Thesis in Bachelor’s programs issued by
The Saigon International University.
Ho Chi Minh City, July 2019
LE TRAN HANH PHUC
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RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS
I hereby state that I, LE TRAN HANH PHUC, being a candidate for the degree of
Bachelor (English Language) accept the requirements of the University relating to the
retention and use of Bachelor’s Thesis deposited in the Library.
In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my Bachelor’s Thesis deposited in
the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the
normal conditions established by the Librarian for the care, loan, and reproduction for
theses.
Ho Chi Minh City, July 2019
LE TRAN HANH PHUC
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to Mr. Nguyen Thanh Tuan, my
supervisor, for his patience, guidance, insightful advice, and constant encouragement
through the whole research process. Without his enthusiastic support and guidance, this
thesis would never have been completed.
Additionally, the task of writing this thesis is much easier by the support of my
lecturers at The Saigon International University (SIU) for their useful lessons from which I
could learn a lot of for the accomplishment of the study. It is equally important to send my
sincere gratitude the Management of SIU for giving me the best help to complete this
paper.
Besides SIU, I am grateful to the managers and teachers at Asian High School
(AHS) for allowing me to conduct my study. In addition, I would also like to send my
heartfelt thanks to of the 8th graders at Asian High School who provided me a great deal of
valuable information for analysis of this study.
Last but not least, I extend my special thanks to my beloved family and my friends
for their love, belief, inspiration, care, support, and continuous encouragements during the
time I conducted this study. There are many more acknowledgements I wish to make.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to mention all of them, but they are all in my heart.
I truly hope this thesis can place some value to the 8th graders and teachers of
English especially in developing speaking skill.
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INSTRUCTOR’S COMMENTS
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ABSTRACT
Speaking is considered one of the most significant macro skills in the process of
language acquisition. In ELF classrooms, however, this skill is likely to be ignored, which
may cause ELF learners confusion and problems when learning it. The present study aimed
to explore English speaking problems perceived by the 8th graders at Asian High School
(AHS) and suggest some solutions to the investigated problems. The quantitative study was
conducted with the participation of 80 students who are in grade 8. In addition, the
quantitative data collected from the questionnaire were processed by SPSS (19.0). The
findings showed that most of students “agreed” that they faced some speaking problems.
Specifically, the most dominant problems included vocabulary limitation, motivation,
mispronunciation, uninteresting topics, the curriculum limitation, class size and layout of
tables and chairs. Besides, possible solutions are proposed to tackle such challenges in
helping teachers and students in order to teach and learn English speaking skill more
effectively. Finally, it is recommended that further research should assess the speaking
problems by means of observation and interview, investigate the speaking strategies that
the students have unconsciously used to deal with the speaking problems, explore the
differences in terms of speaking problems and strategies used between proficient speakers
and non-proficient speakers, and elaborately examine the links between the specific
speaking problems and the specific speaking strategies. (240 words)
Keywords: English speaking skill, problems, suggested solutions, Vietnamese EFL
context