VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY- HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature WX AN INVESTIGATION INTO PROBLEMS OF TEACHING ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS TO NON-ENGLISH MAJORS AT SAIGON TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY M. THESIS IN TESOL SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF TESOL HOANG THI PHONG LINH Supervisor: NGUYEN HOANG LINH, M. HOCHIMINH CITY – 2005 Certificate of originality I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: AN INVESTIGATION INTO PROBLEMS OF TEACHING ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILL TO NON-ENGLISH MAJORS AT SAIGON TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY in terms of the statement of Requirements for Theses in Master’s Programmes issued by the higher Degree Committee. Ho Chi Minh City, December 10th, 2005 HOANG THI PHONG LINH RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I hereby state that I, HOANG THI PHONG LINH, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library.
In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be assessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses. Ho Chi Minh City, December 10th, 2005. HOANG THI PHONG LINH ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Mr. NGUYEN HOANG LINH, M.A, who provided valuable comments and support in the preparation and completion of this thesis.
I would also like to thank the organizers of this master course, Mr. Le Huu Phuoc, Head of the Department of Post Graduate Studies of Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities; and Mr. Nguyen Huynh Dat, Head of the Department of English Linguistics and Literature of the university; and their staff members. This thesis would never have been possible without the assistance and support from my colleagues and students of GE at Saigon Technology University.
Therefore, I would take this opportunity to send my special thanks to them all. Last, but not least, I wish to send my warmest thanks to my parents and my aunt, who took all the family burden during the long period of time I spent doing this thesis with great understanding and sympathy as well as whose moral support has backed me to attain my aim. ABSTRACT Reality shows that a large number of Vietnamese university students can hardly communicate in English although they have spent 7 years learning English at high school. The English text-books for high school students only focus on the reading skill and grammar.
High school teachers generally have no time scheduled in class for speaking activities. They are supposed to provide their students with vocabulary and grammar structures so that they can manage to pass written examinations. This seems to be the ultimate aim of learning English as a foreign language at high school. Little by little, students get used to learning vocabulary and grammar structures and focusing only on improving their reading skill when they learn English at high school.
As a result, when they enter university, they are used to this learning style, which helps them get high marks in the written end-of-term test. They can hardly ever change their learning style, which is considered to be very passive and not effective at all despite a very communicative course-book used for General English at university. A lot of school years passed and a lot of generations of students finished “New Interchange 1&2” with high marks in written end-of- term tests, even 9 or 10 marks. The great concern is that even these students cannot communicate in English.
It could be a really serious problem in the present situation when they have to take part in job interviews in English. It is certain that the interviewer would assess how well the applicant does in the interview, i. whether or not s/he has the ability to express herself or himself in English. At this point, new graduates definitely identify that it is a waste of time and energy when they spend such a long time - 7 years at high school and 2 years at university - studying English and cannot communicate in it.
What is the cause of this? The “Communicative Approach” is always encouraged to adopt in teaching English; however, it is not much put into application. Here and there, “Grammar- Translation” method is still most dominant possibly because of factors such as schedule, class setting, test questions, students’ learning style and so on. How to improve their speaking skill has become a big question at present. In order for us the teachers of English at Saigon Technology University (STU) as well as those who teach English to non-English majors to find out the answer to this question, its root must be taken into consideration.
In an attempt to make practical contribution to the general process of improving the teaching of English speaking skill, I would like to do an investigation into the problems the teachers of English at STU have to face when teaching this skill to non-English majors. After the investigation, the findings serve as basis for implications for teaching this skill. This study was carried out as follows: (1) a series of class observations at STU in order to figure out what kinds of speaking activities the teachers ask the students to do and how they organize them in GE classes, (2) interviews with the teachers who are in charge of the chosen observed classes in order to seek the reasons why they choose a certain kind of speaking activity, (3) a questionnaire asking students about their experience in learning English at high school, their motivation for learning English, their attitude towards practicing speaking English, their levels of confidence in speaking English and contributing factors, and their expectations in GE classes at university. Background of the study: GE courses provide the students at STU, who major in engineering, with 240 periods of class time during 4 semesters (2 periods each class session, 2 sessions each week, 15 weeks each semester).
They help to consolidate basic grammar structures and improve students’ performance competence, especially listening and speaking skills. They enable students to study ESP following the GE courses. New Interchange 1 & 2 by Richards (CUP, 1990) used as the course-books covers the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, as well as improving pronunciation and building vocabulary. Particular emphasis is placed on listening and speaking.
The primary goal of the course-books is to teach communicative competence, that is, the ability to communicate in English according to the situation, purpose, and the roles of the participants. However, teachers of English at STU have not completely helped their students achieve this goal. Their communicative competence, especially speaking skill is not much improved after they finish the courses. It is just because teachers must be responsible for their students’ result in the end- of-term test, which tests students’ knowledge of vocabulary, grammar structures and reading comprehension that most of them tend to switch the focus of the course books to reading and writing.
Significance of the study: To most people, mastering the art of speaking is the most important aspect of learning a foreign language. Success is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a conversation in the language (Karl Krahnke, 1994). It is obvious that communicative ability is the goal of foreign language learning: people who know a language are referred to as “ speakers” of that language and speaking seems to include all other kinds of knowing and many if not most foreign language learners are primarily interested in learning to speak ( Penny Ur, 1996). No one can say that he has learnt a certain foreign language but he is unable to speak it.
Reality shows that most teachers of English at Vietnamese technology universities, especially at STU encounter a lot of difficulties when they want to teach speaking skill to their students. The problems result not only from the students themselves but also from many other factors such as the way of testing at the end of each semester, teaching methodology and so on. For fear that non-English majors will waste a lot of time, money, and energy in learning English if they can not communicate in it after learning it for a long time, I would like to conduct this study in hope of helping the teachers of English at STU in particular and other universities in Ho Chi Minh city in general get a better view on the problems they have to deal with and take a forward step in teaching English, especially English speaking skill to their students. Research Questions: In this study, the following questions will be used as a basis: 1.
What problems do the teachers have to face in teaching English speaking skill to non-English majors at STU? 2. Why do they have such problems? 1. Aims of the study: The thesis aims at identifying problems in teaching English speaking skill to non-English majors at STU through investigating the dominating tasks that are usually used in General English classes at STU and the reasons why the teachers adopt them as well as looking into the students’ attitude, motivation and expectations towards their studying English at university so that the teachers can make innovation in their teaching method on the basis of the findings. Scope of the study: In this study I would like to focus on the problems encountered by the teachers in teaching English speaking skill.
The investigation takes place at STU, a private technology university, where the students do not major in English, but in engineering. The findings are based on the writer’s observational time in General English classes, interviews with the teachers in charge of those classes and data collected from a questionnaire for the GE students from the observed classes at STU. Design of the study: The thesis is divided into 5 chapters: Chapter 1 discusses the reason why I choose this topic and the significance of the study. This chapter shows that this issue is really concerned about.
Chapter 2 is the literature review, in which I (1) extract some linguists’ ideas about the great importance of speaking skill in learning a language and then discuss how they suggest teachers of English to develop speaking tasks in the classroom; and (2) give an overview of teaching and learning English speaking skill in Vietnam. This chapter lays the foundation to move forward to the study of problems facing the teachers in teaching English speaking skill. Chapter 3 is the methodology I adopt to do the investigation into the above- mentioned research questions, involving a series of GE class observations, interviews with the teachers in charge of the observed classes, and a questionnaire for the students of these classes. Chapter 4 presents the results from the investigation, on the basis of which I would like to discuss some problems facing the teachers.
The findings pave the way for the implications suggested in the next chapter. Chapter 5 closes the thesis with the conclusion and some implications for teaching English speaking skill. CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 4 2. Speaking - the most difficult skill to acquire: Speaking can be considered the most difficult skill to acquire since it requires command of both listening comprehension and speech production subskills (e.
vocabulary retrieval, pronunciation, choice of a grammatical pattern, and so forth) in unpreditable, unplanned situations. (Murcia and Olshtain, 2000:165) Spoken language, as has often been pointed out, happens in time, and must therefore be produced and processed “on line”. There is no going back and changing or restructuring our words as there is in writing.