Sáng kiến kinh nghiệm THPT: Applying active learning techniques into english speaking class grade 10

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The contributions of this research are conveyed to: First, designing some activities for English speaking lesson using active learning techniques and make a contribution to teaching materials. Second, giving the effective ways to teach speaking skill. Third, assisting students a lot in practise speaking English actively.

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NGHE AN DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING TEACHING EXPERIENCE TOPIC: "APPLYING ACTIVE LEARNING TECHNIQUES INTO ENGLISH SPEAKING CLASS GRADE 10" SUBJECT: ENGLISH YEAR 2023
NGHE AN DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING THAI HOA HIGH SCHOOL TEACHING EXPERIENCE TOPIC: "APPLYING ACTIVE LEARNING TECHNIQUES INTO ENGLISH SPEAKING CLASS GRADE 10" SUBJECT: ENGLISH Author: Phan Thi Phuong Thao Telephone: 0812812757 Year 2023
PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. The background of the study: Nowadays with the sharply development of the technology, science and economy, education plays an important role in society. English becomes an essential tool that helps the youth succeed in many fields such as business, finance, education and technology. Students who are fluent in English can have the chances to contribute to the development of their country. The need to master English of the language learners has forced the instructors to find the new way making the lessons more effective. The question is raised to the teachers in many high schools all over the country is that how can we make our lessons more interesting and make English more attractive. In fact, one of the skills that English learners find it hard to master is speaking skill. There are lots of people who have 12 years learning English but can not use it for communicating. The high school students lack of passion for learning English. A common problem that occurs in a speaking class is that instructors frequently feel it difficult to involve students in the speaking activities. In fact, English instructors should work hard to attract the students to speak a lot in the class. However, the result is not up to their expectation. So how can the teachers help improve students’ speaking skill? Active learning, therefore, is supposed to help in solving this problem. It emphasizes the significance of the learner’s involvement in the learning process and may involve independent inquiry, collaborative learning and self-awareness of the individual’s own learning process. I hope that this research will suggest some ways for the teachers to make their lessons more exciting. 2. Aims and Objectives of the study The contributions of this research are conveyed to: First, designing some activities for English speaking lesson using active learning techniques and make a contribution to teaching materials. Second, giving the effective ways to teach speaking skill. Third, assisting students a lot in practise speaking English actively. 3. The scope of the study: The study deals with the problems that students of the 10th grade at Thai Hoa High School usually have when they have speaking lesson in classrooms. These problems are caused by some factors. Some solutions and implications will be given for students in speaking skill. 4. Methods of the study. To complete my study, I - Read reference books. - Draw from experience of my own teaching - Learn and exchange teaching experiences with my colleagues. 1
- Carry out surveys and tests among grade 10 students. 5. Study and experimental time This research has been applying for teaching speaking skill at class 10A, 10C 10M of Thai Hoa high school during the school year 2022-2023. PART II: INVESTIGATION CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1. Active learning techniques 1.1. Definition of active learning techniques “Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in class listening to teachers, memorizing prepackaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences, apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.” – A. Chickering and Z.f. Gamson, “Seven principles for good practice”. AAHE Bulletin 39 (March, 1987), 3-7. From this opinion, it can be seen that learning in general and learning a language in specific is a complex and long process. Practice makes perfect. If students take part in learning process, they will learn more. Active learning is any learning activity in which students participate or interact with learning process. In recent years, the term active learning has become increasingly common among English classes. The English teachers all over the world are trying to make students more active, more involved in the lessons. After a long time teaching English at a high school, I see that the common problem that happen in many English speaking lesson is that students feel shy to speak in an English speaking class because of the anxiety of making mistakes due to lack of grammar, vocabulary, structures and ideas. In fact, English instructors must have worked hard to attract the students to speak a lot in the class. However, the result is not up to their expectation. Active learning is alleged to help in solving this problem. It focuses on the significance of learner’s involvement in learning process. Firstly, active learning helps develop collaborative skill. When using the methods to encourage active leaning, the teachers will ask students to work with other students, so they have chance to improve group collaborative skill. Secondly, active learning is a good way to increase engagement. Students who are actively learning will actively engaged. They will excitingly participate in each classroom activities. Thirdly, active learning encourages risk taking. It pulls students out of their comfort zone and forces students to share their ideas with others so through learning tasks, students will gain confidence and self-possession. In short, active learning has brought lots of benefits to an English class. 2
1.2. Some active learning techniques for teaching speaking skill.  Think-pair-share: The teacher states an open-ended question. Ask students to spend a minutes or two thinking about and writing a response. Then ask students to pair with a partner to discuss their responses. Reconvene the class after a few minutes and call on individual students to share their pair’s responses Brainstorming: Students are asked to generate ideas on a certain topic, category or question while you facilitate and record the answers on the blackboard. Encourage students to draw on prior knowledge and experiences. It is important to acknowledge all the answers during this idea generation period.  Discussion: Discussions can be useful both in-class or online, and can be adapted to any class size (although more effective in smaller group settings). In a discussion, the instructor facilitates students’ learning experience. Discussion requires students to think critically, and to evaluate their own and other’s responses. Students are able to explore a diversity of perspectives, and build on each other’s knowledge and understanding of the content. Discussions help students develop the skills of knowledge synthesis and integration.  Picture Prompt Show students an image with no explanation, and ask them to identify/explain it, and justify their answers. Or ask students to write about it using terms from lecture, or to name the processes and concepts shown. Also works well as group activity. Do not give the “answer” until they have explored all options first. Three step interviews: Use the three step interview process, divide students into groups of three, and assign three roles: interviewer, interviewee, and notetaker. After that, also assigning a theme or topic of discussion, have students participate in a five to 10 minutes interview to discuss what they found to be the key information relating to the topic. After each interview, having students rotate roles. Depending on factors including the grade level of your students and their experience with the strategy, you may adjust the length of the time for each interview. True or false: Distribute index cards (one to each student) on which is written a statement. Half of the cards will contain statements that are true, half false, students decide if theirs is one of the true statements or not, using whatever means they desire. 3
Role play: In this activity, students are given a particular role to play in a conversation or other interaction. They may be given specific instructions on how to act or what to say. The students will then act out the scenario and afterwards there will be reflection and discussion about the interactions. Poster session: Teacher divides the class into 6 or 8 groups, and assign each group to find and make poster related to the topic. After that each group will present their ideas in front of the class while other groups give feedback. Teacher should provide group assessment checklist to evaluate their participation during the class session. Jigsaw: In this activity, students are divided into small groups. Each group has a different topic. After students take time to finish their task during their original group, one expert from this group will have to teach his new group. Guessing game: This is a simple warmer activity that can be used to generate some interests at the beginning of class. Students work in groups. Each group will have a representative who will describe the objects to their group members. The other people in the group have to guess what it is. The group who can guess more will be the winner. Questionaire: Teachers will prepare students a poll. Students read the information, mark, finishing the on-demanding content and reporting. Mapped dialogue: This activity can be done through the use of visuals such as maps, diagrams, charts. The teachers present the chart and then the students practice and act out in pairs or in group. Ranking: Students may rank (put in order of importance) the items on a list they have made. For example, afer students have made long list of clothing words, you can ask those questions.” Which are the most important clothes to wear in winter?” or after making a list of countries, “which countries would you like to visit? Where would you go first?” after making a list of hobbies,” which of these hobbies are the most fun?” you can use this activit to learn nouns during the lesson. The level of this activity depend on difficulty of the words on the list. Problem - solving: Present a problem to the students. Students work in pairs or as a whole class to solve the problem. For example, “Tom never does his homework, what should teachers do? 4
What should his parents do?” or “Susan wants to buy a beautiful dress but she doesn’t have much money”. Use this activity to get better results in teaching of modal verbs: can, should, must….  Report - Presentation: Report can be made more meaningful to the audience through the use of visuals such as charts, maps, diagrams and overhead transparences. Oral report should emerge from other English language arts process.if some students are not comfortable with reporting, they can develop more confidence by taking part in other oral activities before they are ready to give a report. Students will report back on what we have learned, what we have discussed. Obviously this is a difucult operation, so students must be prepared and reported in groups or take turns reporting. Improving a dialogue: The teacher gives the topic and ask students improve the dialogues based on their ideas and expressions. This activity can be difficult for students, so the teachers have to guide clearly to help them make the dialogues more easily. Game: Games are popular activities that teachers often use. Those are many activities that are also considered games when we want students to do and want to find out the winner. Obviously, games are very positive and are highly promoted. Teachers can design the game to suit each specific class, each specific audience to entice more students to get involved. Talk show Preparations: Lesson plan, handouts,questionaires… Procedure : Step 1: Class members are divided into groups. Step 2: Teacher asks students to prepare for the show: table, chair, vase of flowers… Step 3: Teacher asks one student to play the role of MC and the other of an educational expert to act out the conversation. Step 4: Teacher asks students to write their ideas and practice in their groups. Step 5: Teacher goes around the class to offer help. Step 6: Teacher gets students to act out their presentation. Step 7: Teacher takes note for indirect correction. Step 8: Teacher gives feedback. 5
2. Speaking skill 2.1. Speaking skill definition Speaking is a basic skill that language learners should master with the other language skills. It is defined as a complex process of sending and receiving messages through the use of verbal expressions, but it also involves non-verbal symbols such as gestures and facial expressions. Hedge (2000: 261) defines speaking as “skill which people are judged while first impressions are being form”. The ability to speak confidently and fluently is something which children will develop during their time at school, and something that will help them throughout their life. Speaking skills are defined as the skills which allow us to communicate effectively. They give us the ability to convey information verbally and in a way that the listener can understand. Children will learn English speaking skills as well as speaking skills in other languages, in primary and secondary school. Learning how to develop English speaking skills is so important for ESL students and EAL students too. It's one of the most important parts of language learning as speaking is how we tend to communicate in everyday life. Speaking is an interactive process where information is shared, and if necessary, acted upon by the listener. So, it’s important to develop speaking skills in order to communicate effectively. 2.2. Characteristics of speaking skill Many researchers who have paid much attention on the oral skill. They investigate the characteristic of spoken language. In their point of view, speaking is not completely accepted as a separative area, speech is more commonly unplanned, contextualized, informal and reciprocal than writing. It can be clearly seen that speakers usually have a little time to prepare for their conversations. Bygate claimed: "Oral language can be identified by certain features which are more prototypical of speech than of writing. Among these features, one of the most typical one is that speech is organized by clauses, phrases and spoken utterances while writing is generally organized according to whole sentences. In addition, spoken language is less formal in relation to vocabulary and grammar than writing language, characterized by repetition of utterances, close relation to the context in question and features of correcting speech. As speaking skill is the ability to start and to maintain a conversation, it closely 6
relates to the performance of the participants in a conversation. In classroom, teacher may explain the items for the students and then the teacher may ask the students to implement some certain tasks to illustrate the items just explain. This is a mono-dialogue when the speaker has no interaction with the listeners, for instance the radio speaker speak on the cassette. 2.3. Learning speaking skill Speaking skill is a complex process that combines many different aspects such as pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, phonetic, etc… so that not many students are good at this skill. The fact of teaching shows that it is very important in daily communication especially with native person. According to Jo Mac Donough (1995, p151) "Speaking is often thought of as colloquial , which helps to account for its lower priority in some teaching context". In many countries, students always focus on other skills while using a little time on oral skill or even ignore it. Agree with him, Grace Stovall Burkat (1998) claims that it is necessary to supply students with the basic aspects of the skill. In his opinion, language learners need to recognize that speaking involves three areas of knowledge: they are Mechanics, Function and Social, and Cultural rules and Norms. Mechanics including pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary is the basic aspect of speaking skill that gives the basements to develop the skill. This aspect helps students use the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation. The second aspect requires the recognitions of the functions. It includes transaction, interaction and performance. This aspect helps students recognize the type of talk with certain criteria and purposes. Another aspect that is last but not least than others is the social and cultural rules and norms such as turn-taking, rate of speech, length of pauses between speakers, relative roles of participants. This is background knowledge that helps them to understand how to take into account who is talking to whom, in what circumstance. Teachers should help students use English in real life such as communicate with foreigners to develop the ability to produce grammatically correct, logically connected sentences. 2.4. Teaching speaking skill Speaking skill is a complicated process that combines many different aspects such as pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, phonetic, etc… so that not many students are good at this skill. The fact of teaching shows that it is very important in daily communication especially with native person. According to Jo Mac Donough (1995, p151) "Speaking is often thought of as colloquial , which helps to account for its lower priority in some teaching context". In many countries, 7
students always focus on other skills while using a little time on oral skill or even ignore it. Agree with him, Grace Stovall Burkat (1998) claims that it is necessary to supply students with the basic aspects of the skill. In his opinion, language learners need to recognize that speaking involves three areas of knowledge: they are Mechanics, Function and Social, and Cultural rules and Norms. Mechanics including pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary is the basic aspect of speaking skill that gives the basements to develop the skill. This aspect helps students use the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation. The second aspect requires the recognitions of the functions. It includes transaction, interaction and performance. This aspect helps students recognize the type of talk with certain criteria and purposes. Another aspect that is last but not least than others is the social and cultural rules and norms such as turn-taking, rate of speech, length of pauses between speakers, relative roles of participants. This is background knowledge that helps them to understand how to take into account who is talking to whom, in what circumstance. Teacher should help students use English in real life such as communicate with foreigners to develop the ability to produce grammatically correct, logically connected sentences. 3. Adapting Textbooks 3.1. Definition In teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL), speaking has always received a great deal of attention. According to Carrell [3; p.1] “for many students, speaking is by far the most important of the four macro-skills, particularly in English as a second or foreign language”; sharing the same point of view, Richard [11; p.15] shows that “Becoming an effective and fluent speaker in another language has a number of important benefits for learner.” Undoubtedly, speaking has become not only an important means to communicate with other people but also an essential means to help them with their further study in future. Unfortunately, teaching and learning speaking skill at high schools are still far from satisfactory for various reasons. Despite the teacher’s effort, students’ motivation is still low and speaking lessons are said to be the boring one. English language teaching materials in general and textbooks in particular play the role of tool, tutor, guide book. These roles are especially significant in EFL contexts including Vietnam, where textbooks are regarded as a staple in almost all EFL classes. Textbooks are useful source of language input and guidance for both teachers and learners. Despite the development of technology and the growth of computer-assisted language learning, it is unlikely that textbooks will disappear. In teaching and learning 8
speaking skill in particular, the role of textbooks is even more important than in teaching any other language skills or grammar and vocabulabry because when speaking, students have to pay much attention to the printed tasks in textbook in order to understand them. However, available textbooks are not completely good for all teaching contexts. Accordingly, it is necessary for teachers to be well-equipped with assessment tools evaluate materials and more importantly, recommendation to adapt the materials to ensure that students are using the highest quality activities, and their language knowledge and skills are improved. Nevertheless, there has been little investigation into how to adapt material. According to Hayirie Kaki, "Teaching speaking is a technical term that requires learners set of items to study”. As his theory, teaching speaking skill is to teach learners to: - Produce the English speech sounds and sound patterns: Pronunciation is a very important part in learning any languages including English. - Organize their thoughts in a meaningful and logical sequence. - Use language as a mean of expressing values and judgments. - Use the language quickly and confidently with few unnatural pauses, which is called as fluency. - Use word and sentence stress, intonation patterns and rhythm of the second language. - Select appropriate words and sentences according to the proper social setting, audience, situation and subject matter. 3.2. Principles and techniques for adapting textbooks Despite the great effort that textbook writers make to meet the needs of the intended users, textbooks are subject to adaptation when they are actually used in the classroom. McDonough and Shaw (1993:83) propose that textbooks are internally coherent although they may be, they may not be entirely applicable. Although most classroom teachers will not be involved in the production of textbooks, all teachers have the responsibility for textbook evaluation, selection and adaptation. It is undeniable that adapting textbook allows teachers to achieve more compatibility and fitness between the textbook and the teaching environment, and therefore maximize the value of the book for the benefit of their particular learners and for the most effective teaching outcomes to achieve. Maley (1998:281) suggested the following techniques to adapt textbook: - Reduction: where the teacher shortens an activity to give it less weight or emphasis. - Re-ordering: teachers may decide that the order in which the textbooks are presented is not suitable for their students. They can then decide to plot a different 9
course through the textbooks from the one the writer has laid down. - Branching: teachers may decide to add options to the existing activity or to suggest alternative pathways through the activities. - Extension: where an activity is lengthened in order to give it an additional dimension. (For example, a vocabulary activity is extended to draw attention to some syntactic patterning.) - Rewriting/modification: teacher may occasionally decide to rewrite material, especially exercise material, to make it more appropriate, more “communicative”, more demanding, more accessible to their students, etc. - Replacement: text or exercise material which is considered inadequate, for whatever reason, may be replaced by more suitable material. This is often culled from other resource textbook. - Omission: the teacher leaves out things seemed inappropriate, offensive, unproductive, etc., for the particular group. - Addition: where there seems to be inadequate coverage, teachers may decide to add to textbooks, either in the form of texts or exercise material. Textbook adaptation can be done at three levels. The first level is macro adaptation, which is ideally done before the language program begins. After comparing what is covered in a textbook and what is required by the syllabus or examination, the teacher may find that certain areas or even whole units of the book can be omitted, and certain contents need to be supplemented. The second level of adaptation is adapting a unit. This could be done by reordering the activities, combining activities, omitting activities, rewriting or supplementing exercise material, etc. Unit adaptation helps to make the classroom teaching more smooth and cohesive. It also helps the teacher to better fulfill the aims of a unit. The third level is adaptation of specific activities in a unit. Occasionally an activity is regarded as valuable, but it is not well-designed or it is not suitable in a particular class. If the teacher does not want to give up the activity, he or she needs to adapt it. 3.2. Instructions for adapting textbooks Teachers should follow the following steps when adapting the textbooks: 1. You have to decide what content or which topics need adapting in light of the reading texts and activities. Activities can relate to any one of the four basic skills: reading, listening, writing and speaking. Can the text be exploited because of its thematic, lexical and structural elements in order to appeal and engage all three levels of students? If not, you will need to adapt your textbook activities to 10
suit the levels. This may appear as a ton of work, but the key is to think better, not to work harder. 2. Before you go ahead and change some of the activities particularly the reading activities, consider rewriting parts or all of the texts. The reason for doing this is to simplify some of the vocabulary items and other concepts that might be difficult for some of your low-performing ESL students to understand. You might also consider glossing the difficult vocabulary items or writing the meanings in another language if you are teaching in a bilingual context. 3. Take a look at those textbook activities in your textbooks and redesign them in light of the amount of the activity itself. Redesigning the activity in light 7 of "amount" is about the obligatory and optional tasks. ESL students can be required to complete a specific amount of questions. For example, low performing ESL students can list four answers, while the stronger students can list more than four answers. 4. Cater to the level of difficulty of the task. The teacher can adapt the task to suit all three levels: lower, middle and stronger. This gives the student a choice of activities. Most ESL students will want to choose first the activity that they feel they can comfortably do before deciding if the topic is motivating enough. Again, adapt the language of the activity and the instructions of the activity itself to suit the level of the student's linguistic ability. 5. Decide how you want to engage your students. If you are working with groups, then maybe you should adapt a few textbook activities to engage students in group or pair work. Once you have decided how you want to actively engage your students, you will need to make sure students understand the procedures of group and pair work you intend to use. Leave enough time in the lesson to do both or you will find yourself struggling with time. 11
CHAPTER 2: PRACTICAL BACKGROUND 1. An overview of the new textbook 10 In the textbook “Tieng Anh 10”- Global Success, it has 10 units with different topics for two semesters. Each unit refering to a particular theme is divided into 6 sections: Getting started, Language, Skills, Communication and Culture, Looking back and Project. Each section is designed with different kinds of activities with the aim of helping students follow the lessons easily and gain basic knowledge related to the theme of the unit as well as improve their skills in terms of Reading, Speaking, Listening and Writing. Normally, every lesson is taught and learnt in a 45-minute period. Like other skill lessons presented in the textbook, speaking lesson consists of many activities from the easier to more complicated ones for students to fulfill. The topics of speaking part are quite interesting and diverse. They are familiar with some circumstances that related to the topic of the unit and real life situations. 2. Real situations of learning and teaching speaking at high school As far as I know, most high schools allot 45 minutes for each skill lesson. However, many tasks in Speaking lessons cannot be fully given out due to the limitation of time as well as the ability of students. Many students are not able to actively take part in pairs or group discussions. Their levels of proficiency are not the same. The requirements of some tasks in the text book also affect the quality of the speaking lesson. Taken these factors into consideration, it is undeniable that the objective of the lesson is not always reached. When teaching and observing students in speaking lessons, I have found out some challeges that students often have: - Students do not want to talk or say anything One of the problems is students feel really shy about talking in front of other students, they suffer from a fear of making mistakes and therefore “losing face” in front of their teacher and their peers. Speaking in front of other people needs courage, motivation from inside and outside such as joyful atmosphere in the conversation and interesting topics. Further is because there are students who dominate and almost intimidate. Another reason for students silence may simply be that the classroom activities are boring or pitched at the wrong level. Many people have a good ability in English language skills but when they should communicate with English, they fall in expressing their ideas. They are afraid and anxious of saying something wrong or incomprehensible. One way to encourage students to speak Enlish is simply to speak in English as much as possible in classroom. - Students keep using their own language One problem may teachers face is that students use their native language rather than English to perform classroom tasks. This may happen because they want to communicate something important, and so they use language in the best way they 12
know. They have difficulty saying something and because they do not want to lose their face in front of their peers, they think that they better use their native language and so others can understand them. This problem also connected with students do not want to talk or say anything in the foreign language but they keep using their own language. - It is difficult to handle students in large classroom If the classroom is big, for example, 35 or 45 students in a classroom, it is clearly that the students hardly got a chance to practice the language, and difficult for them to ask and receive individual attention they need. It is hard for the teacher to make contact with students at the back, to keep good discipline, also to organise dynamic and creative teaching and learning sessions. But there are the disadvantages of a large classroom: when there are many students in a classroom, they can share many different ideas, interesting life experiences, learn to share responsibility and help each other during project work which bring variety and speeds up the work. - Students are not discipline in classroom Students do not pay attention to the lesson given, they just talk with each other and make some noises. The problems nay be because students are bored with the activities or they feel unable to cope with the task given. They show their frustration by disruptive behavior and loud outbursts. The discipline of the students in the classroom is realated to the motivation of the students themselves. If they have low motivation, it means that they have low enthusiasm in following the classroom which makes them indiscipline in the classroom. In this situation, teachers can create activities that make students feel enjoy themselves in the class. - The materials do not fulfill the need of students Language teacher should attempt to associate the language they are teaching with the situations outside the classroom. When school topics do not relate to students’ lives, they may find themselves confused or bored. Moreover, when the students cannot understand the language instruction, they may become frustrated. Good teaching-texts for classroom use are not there simply in order to be read, they lead to comment and interpretation by learners, and illustrate typical pragmatic uses of lexis and structure. They have to be “appropriately accessible”. This means “not too difficult for learners to understand but difficult enough to encourage them to develop further in language”. - Students have low motivation to learn English If students do not learn how to speak or do not get opportunity to speak in the language classroom, they may soon get demotivated and lose interest in learning. Nevertheless, if the right activities are taught in the right way, speaking classroom can be a lot of fun, raise learner motivation and make the English language classroom a fun and dynamic place to study English. To some extends, we would like to give out some suggestions for improving speaking skill in the new textbook “Tieng Anh 10” to encourage students’ participation in speaking activities and make speaking activities easier for students to fulfill so that the lesson objective is fully gained. The author hope that the study will be a useful material that helps teachers improve their students with speaking skill. 13
CHAPTER 3: Designing some activities for English speaking lesson using active learning techniques 1. Methodology 1.1. Participants The participants of the research consist of 131 students of 10th form from classes 10A, 10C and 10M and 9 English teachers at Thai Hoa high school. Almost of the informants have the same time of learning English of nine years; and they have already completed the syllabus of English with the new series of English textbook from grade 6 to grade 9 at secondary school. 1.2. Instrumentation There is a questionnaire designed to investigate the opinions and some factors relating to speaking skill for 10th students at Thai Hoa High School. The questionnaire is also designed for students and teachers to find out the ideas about the effectiveness of those adapted activities to improve English speaking skill. The questionnaire is designed for the students including 3 questions through students' background and ideas will be made clear. Question 1 is a small survey about students’ thoughts about English speaking skills; whether this skill is essential for their study or not. Question 2 will show us students' attitudes towards the effectiveness and feasibility of the adapted communicative activities in each unit. Question 3 is created with the aim of finding out the attitudes of students whether the communicative activities are created regularly or not. The questionnaire for the English teachers at Thai Hoa high school have 2 questions. Question 1 aims to find out the necessity of using and adapting communicative activities in speaking class in textbook grade 10. Question 2 is created with a view to evaluating the feasibility and effectiveness from adapted activities in speaking lessons. 2. Findings of the study 2.1. Students’ survey results (appendix 1) 2.1.1. Investigating the students’ attitudes towards the importance of learning speaking skill. Teacher gives out a question: "What do you think of speaking skill in learning English?" Gathering the number and we have a pie chart below. 14
The results from the survey show that speaking skill plays an essential skill in learning English with 91.6% (120 out of 131 students). Meanwhile, about 8.4% of students evaluate speaking skill quite important. This evaluation reveals the crucial role of practising speaking English in learning a foreign language. Moreover, it is undenial that the attitudes of students towards speaking skill are quite high. 2.1.2. Investigating the feasibility of the designed activities they have taken part in speaking lessons. The question is given out to find out the students’ attitudes towards the activities which have been designed in speaking lessons: "How do you think about the communicative activities adapted in each unit?". It is clearly seen from the chart that approximately 62.6% of the students feel interested and motivated in speaking activities, which proves that students to some extent are able to master basic things of a speaking activity. It is also surprising to discover that none of the students dislike English as well as feel bored and uncomfortable. One more significant finding related to students of this group is that 49 out of 131 students feel excited and ready to talk when taking part in speaking activities with 37.4%. They admit that the activities they take part in speaking lessons makes them quite feasible and adaptable. 2.1.3. Finding out the attitudes of students towards whether the communicative activities should be created regularly or not After gathering the number for the question: “Communicatives activities should be ……..created”, It shows that 87% students say teacher should regularly have communicative activities as organising speaking period (about 114 students). As also can be seen from the chart, 13% (17 students) of them think that active activities should be designed sometimes to enhance students’ speaking skill. Luckily, no students object to the ideas of having active activities. 15
2.2. Teachers’ survey results (appendix 2) 2.2.1. Investigating the necessity of applying communicative activities in speaking lessons in grade 10 Collecting the opinions from teachers at Thai Hoa high school (9 teachers), we can see that the majority of teachers approve that using and adapting communicative activities in speaking class are really essential with 66.7%. Meanwhile, 33,3% of teachers also stress the necessity of this action in teaching speaking skill. The figures show the necessity of creating communicative strategies for speaking lessons to make the lessons more exciting and suitable to students’ levels. 2.2.2. Evaluating the feasibility of applying the designed activities in their classes The question is given out to find out the attitudes of 9 teachers from Thai Hoa high school towards the feasibility and effectiveness of applying the designed activities in their classes: " How do you think about the communicative activities adapted in each unit?". 16
Adapted Really Feasible Less Unfeasible activities feasible feasible Unit 1: Poster session 5 55.6 4 44.4 0 0% 0 0% % % Unit 2: Discussion and game 6 66.7 3 33.3 0 0% 0 0% % % Unit 3: Guessing Game 7 77.8 2 22.2 0 0% 0 0% % % Unit 5: Role play 6 66.7 3 33.3 0 0% 0 0% % % Unit 6: Matching & Find 9 100 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% someone who % Unit 7: Discussion 8 88.9 1 11.1 0 0% 0 0% % % Unit 8: Talk show 5 55.6 4 44.4 0 0% 0 0% % % Belows are the pie charts illustrating the percentage the teachers respond to each adapted activities: 17
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