QUANG NAM UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ~~~~~~~~~~ GRADUATION PAPER AN INVESTIGATION INTO DIFFICULTIES IN LEARNING AND TEACHING ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILL AT TRAN QUY CAP SECONDARY SCHOOL IN NUI THANH DISTRICT Student: NGUYEN THI KIM YEN Student Code: 2113010846 MAJOR: ENGLISH Academic Course: 2013 – 2017 Supervisor PHAN THI DIEU HIEN, M.A Quang Nam, May 2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES. LIST OF FIGURES. STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP .2 Aims and Objectives .4 Scope of the Study .1 Definition of Speaking .2 The Importance of Speaking Skill.3 Difficulties in Learning and Teaching English Speaking .4 Factors Affect the Process of Speaking.5 Fluency and Coherence.2 Previous Studies on the Difficulties in Teaching and Learning English.1 Design of Research Method. 20 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .1 Students attitude to learning English speaking skill.2 Teachers’ Attitude towards Teaching English.3 Students’ Interest in Different Speaking Activities .4 Students’ Practice Speaking Skill .5 Speaking Activities Used for the English Speaking Class.6 Students’ Difficulties in Learning English Speaking Skill .7 Causes of Difficulties in Learning Speaking .8 Teachers’ Difficulties in Teaching English speaking .9 Suggestions for Effective Learning and Teaching English Speaking Skill .2 Teachers’ Suggestions for Effective Teaching Speaking Skill .3 For the School .1 Creating Speaking Environment for Students.2 Reducing the Class Size.4 Limitations of the Study.5 Suggestion for Further Researches.
49 LIST OF TABLES Table 4.1 Students’ attitude towards speaking skill Table 4.2 Teachers’ attitude towards teaching English Table 4.3 Learners’ interest in different speaking activities Table 4.4 Teachers’ activities Table 4.5 Objectives causes of difficulties in learning speaking Table 4.6 Subjective causes of students’ difficulties in learning speaking Table 4.7 Students’ suggestions to enhance speaking skill Table 4.8 Teachers’ suggestions LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Students’ interest for speaking Figure 2: Importance of speaking for students Figure 3: The students’ opinion on the difficulty of speaking skill Figure 4: The frequency of students’ English speaking skill practice Figure 5: Students’ difficulties in speaking Figure 6:Teachers’difficulties I STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP The thesis has been resulted from my own interest as well as difficulties in learning English of secondary students in Nui thanh district. I directly distributed the questionaires to the learners. Therefore, the entire statistics given must be reliable. Moreover, all the reference information was quoted or summarized with the clear original sources which have been shown in the references.
I truthfully assure that the thesis has been complete by me. II ABSTRACT Speaking is one of the most necessary skills to communicate in the real life. In learning a foreign language, it is extremely important to learn this skill. Everybody knows that speaking is not simple, so the speaker has to make the listener understanding the message and responding in the right manner.
Realizing the problems from learning experience, the author would like to do the research titled: “An investigation into difficulties in learning and teaching English speaking skill at Tran Quy Cap secondary school in Nui Thanh district”. The thesis will study the difficulties of the teachers and learners in teaching and learning the speaking skill. Then it will give some suggestions to overcome these difficulties. Therefore, the author will apply the qualitative, quantitative methods and descriptive methods to do the research.
The results of the research will point out the difficulties that teachers and learner meet when they teach and learn the speaking skill at secondary school. More importantly, it helps the author find out the causes of those difficulties so that the author can work out the right solutions to the problems. With the hope of improving learners' speaking competence, the author has tried her best to do this thesis by her own experience and knowledge in English learning methodology. III ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My graduation thesis has been completed with a lot of encouragement and support from my teacher, colleagues and family.
First of all, I would like to express my deep great thank to my supervisor, Ms. Phan Thi Dieu Hien for her indispensable and useful advice, suggestion and support. And I wish to thank my teachers at Quang Nam University from whom I could get background knowledge to complete this thesis. In addition, I am grateful to all my friends in my class, who have encouraged me a lot to finish the thesis and shared useful information with me.
I also wish to acknowledge the cooperation of the teachers and students at Tran Quy Cap Secondary school in contributing to the data collection presented in this study. Last but not least, my special thanks go to my parents who have, as it always goes, encouraged and supported me so much in all respects during my time of fulfilling this graduation paper. Quang Nam, April, 2017 Student Nguyen Thi Kim Yen CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This chapter shows the rationale, the aim, the objectives and the research questions, followed by the scope and the organization of the study.1 Rationale In recent years, along with the quick development and cooperation of the world's economy, people need a common language to communicate with each other. Therefore, English is used more and more widely and becomes an international language.
English is used as a second or foreign language in the workplace, international trade, global media, tourism, education, aviation, business, technology and on diplomatic occasions. As a result, the demand for speakers using English effectively is necessary in every country. Teaching and learning English, except for the native language, is thus crucial for communicative purposes to meet the demands of global economics and to cope with the growing local, national and international demands for English skills. In Vietnam, English is becoming more widely used in every field of life and it is an official and compulsory foreign language which has been taught in most schools all over the world.
Many people are aware that English guarantees them to have good jobs if they are good at speaking English. People thus have a great concern about learning speaking skill. Learning English is becoming a must in this modern world. Students need to effectively obtain basic language skills such as reading, listening, writing and especially speaking.
Speaking is the most important skill in communication because we are only able to communicate well effectively when we can make other people understand our message. It is also an important tool in helping learners to succeed in any fields. For students who want to become a tour guide, they must be fluent in speaking so that they can help visitors to understand the cultural and historic attractions. If they want to become a teacher, they have to be able to communicate with their students so that they can understand the class 1 materials easily.
Even if they want to become a businessman, in order to expand the business market, they have to know how to use the international language to communicate with their foreign partners. However, speaking is a challenging task for students. Most secondary students in Vietnam in general and Tran Quy Cap secondary students in Nui Thanh district of Quang nam province in particular find it hard to be proficient in this skill. As a result, teachers and students in this school face a lot of problems in teaching and learning English speaking skill.
As a student who used to study at this school and had many problems in learning English speaking. I have realized that secondary students cope with a lot of problems and difficulties when dealing with speaking because of some objective and subjective reasons while speaking becomes more important in the modern life. Thus, I would like to choose the title "An investigation into difficulties in learning and teaching English speaking skill at Tran Quy Cap secondary school in Nui Thanh district” to point out the difficulties and their causes to help the teachers and students have effective methods in teaching and learning English speaking skill.2 Aims and objectives 1.1 Aims The study aims at investigating into the real situations in learning and teaching English speaking skill of the students and teachers at Tran Quy Cap secondary school and helping them to find out the difficulties, causality as well as recommendations on how to improve their skills.2 Objectives The study is intended : - To find out the common difficulties that the secondary students and teachers face when they learn and teach English speaking skill at Tran Quy Cap secondary school. 2 - To suggest some possible solutions to those difficulties.3 Research questions These objectives could be summarized into some research questions as follows: 1.
What are the difficulties the students and teachers face in learning and teaching English speaking skill at Tran Quy Cap secondary school? 2. What should be done to help them overcome the difficulties for better English speaking skills teaching and learning? 1.4 Scope of the study Due to the limitation of time, knowledge and materials, the study only concentrates on the difficulties in speaking skill and makes suggestions to solve problems related to speaking skills. The research is aimed at the students and teachers at Tran Quy Cap secondary school in Nui Thanh.5 Organization The study is presented in 5 main chapters as follows Chapter 1: “Introduction” provides the overview of the research including rationale, aims and objectives, questions, scope and organization of the study. Chapter 2: “Literature review” – presents relevant essential theoretical foundation for the current study.
Chapter 3: “Methodology” –the research introduces the participants, the data collection instruments as well as research methods, data analysis. Chapter 4: “Findings and Discussion” – analyzes the result of questionnaire and tape recorders. Based on what is found, this chapter discusses the answers to the research questions. Chapter 5: “Conclusion” – draws the conclusion of the research and some suggestions for teaching and learning IELTS speaking skill.
It also mentions some limitations of the paper, and finally, this section makes some recommendations for further studies. 3 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW In this chapter, the author will give an overview of the theoretical background for the study. It begins with the definition of speaking, the importance of speaking skill, speaking problems in learning and teaching, continues with factors affect the process of speaking.1 Definition of Speaking There are many different definitions of speaking. According to Florez [1999, cited in Bailey, 2005:2], speaking is “an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing, receiving and processing information.
It is often spontaneous, open-ended and evolving”. Chaney [5,13] states that speaking is "the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts". Brown [3:245] defines speaking as “a process of constructing meaning that involves producing, receiving and processing information”. Bygate (cited in Mackey, 1965:266) shows that “oral expression involves not only the use of the right sounds in the patterns of rhythm and intonation, but also the choice of words and inflections in the right order to convey the right meaning”.
Speaking is “an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing and receiving and process information” [Brown, 1994; Burns & Joyce, 1997]. Its form and meaning are dependent on the context in which it occurs, including the participants themselves, their collective experiences, the physical environment, and the purposes for speaking. It is often spontaneous, open-ended, and evolving. However, speaking is not always unpredictable.
Language functions (or patterns) that tend to recur in certain discourse situations (e., declining an invitation or requesting time off from work), can be identified 4 and charted [Burns &Joyce, 1997]. For example, when a salesperson asks "May I help you?" the expected discourse sequence includes a statement of need, response to the need, offer of appreciation, acknowledgement of the appreciation, and a leave-taking exchange. Speaking requires that learners not only know how to produce specific points of language such as grammar, pronunciation, or vocabulary (linguistic competence), but also that they understand when, why, and in what ways to produce language (sociolinguistic competence). Finally, speaking has its own skills, structures, and conventions different from written language [Burns & Joyce, 1997; Carter & McCarthy, 1995; Cohen, 1996].