VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES TRAN QUYNH HUONG A STUDY ON APPLYING GROUP WORK TO INCREASE QUALITY AND QUANTITY OF STUDENTS’ LANGUAGE USE AT HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIFTED STUDENTS NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ VIỆC ÁP DUNG HOẠT ĐỘNG NHÓM NHẰM TĂNG CƯỜNG VIỆC SỬ DỤNG TIẾNG ANH Ở TRƯƠNG TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG CHUYÊN SƯ PHẠM- ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM HÀ NỘI MINOR M. THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60.10 Hà Nội - 2013 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES TRAN QUYNH HUONG A STUDY ON APPLYING GROUP WORK TO INCREASE QUALITY AND QUANTITY OF STUDENTS’ LANGUAGE USE AT HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIFTED STUDENTS NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ VIỆC ÁP DUNG HOẠT ĐỘNG NHÓM NHẰM TĂNG CƯỜNG VIỆC SỬ DỤNG TIẾNG ANH Ở TRƯƠNG TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG CHUYÊN SƯ PHẠM- ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM HÀ NỘI Field : English Teaching Methodology Code : 60.10 Supervisor: Do Thi Mai Thanh Hà Nội - 2013 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS PART A: INTRODUCTION (1) Rationale for the study……………………………………………1 (2) Aims of the study …………………………………………………2 (3) Scope of the study ……………………………………………….2 (4) Methods of the study …………………………………………….3 (5) An overview of the rest of the paper …………………………….6 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW……………………………. Group work in the History of ELT……………………………. Concept of group work ……………………………….
Classification of group work …………………………………. Advantages and disadvantages of Group work ……………. Features of a good group work ……………………………. Individual and group accountability …………………….
Face to face promotive interaction …………………. Interpersonal and small group skills ……………………. Data collection instruments ………………. Questionnaire ……………………………………………17 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Data collection procedure ………………………………….19 CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION………………………21 3. Students‟ cooperation in Group activities in class …………. Students‟ Communicative proficiencies after Group work…. Limitations of the study ……………………………………….
Suggestions for further studies …………………………………. Contribution of the research …………………………………….36 REFERENCES APPENDICES LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Frequency of Group work ………………………. Overall picture of group members‟ accountability ………. Students‟ accountability to Group work……………………24 Figure 4.
Students‟ improvement in Group work skill……………. Students improvement in separate skills after GW……….28 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART A: INTRODUCTION In this chapter, the problem and the rationale for the study, together with the aims, objectives and the scope of the whole paper are clearly stated and explained. Above all, this chapter also builds the research questions to work as clear guidelines for the whole research. Rationale for the study: According to the statistics issued by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training in 2003, English was widely chosen by 98.5% of Vietnamese secondary students as their foreign language.
This enormous proportion, however, reflects the considerable demand for English rather than the quality of language learning and teaching itself. In fact, English teaching and learning in Vietnam have confronted a number of obstacles, one of which is identified by as students‟ low motivation and limited opportunities to practise communicating in the target language Michael, H, L & Patricia, A., (1985) declared that “the use of group work in classroom second language learning has been supported by sound pedagogical arguments” (p. In other words, no one can deny the effectiveness of group work in language teaching. Therefore, following this educational trend, teachers and professors are trying to extensively exploit group work in teaching with the aim of “promoting communicative language skills for the largest number of students in class” (Shevin et al., 1994, cited by Richard & Roger, 2001).
However, in our country, Grammar translation methods have been applied in language learning for many years, which leads to students‟ limited group work, presentation skills and inactive learning LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. This, in fact, turns out to be a challenge for the applied group work to achieve their original intentions. Thus whether these Group activities can reach their intentional effectiveness is still a big question mark for not only the educationists but also the authority. Students who directly take part in those group activities can help answer this question.
Inspired by this fact, the researcher decides to conduct “A study on applying Group work to enhance quality and quantity of language use in High School for Gifted Students” 2. Aims of the study: This study is conducted to figure out how often group work is conducted in classes of High school for Gifted Students. In addition, the research is expected to investigate into the effectiveness of Group work in language classroom. With these two aims, this research is carried on to fulfill the following research questions: 1.
How are group activities applied in English lessons? 2. How effective is the group work applied in English lessons? 3. What are the solutions to improve group work activities in English classes? 3. Scope of the study First of all, both quality and quantity of language use which students can enhance after Group work activities in class are too broad for this small- scaled research; therefore, this study does not cover all the features of group LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com work but only the most important features in the light of Cooperative learning which can help group work foster cooperation among students to get the highest benefits.
Second, this study plays a role of collecting and analyzing the feedback from students, who directly work with Group work for further study in the future. Last but not least, it is noteworthy that the samples of the study were restricted to classes of only one senior secondary school in Hanoi, namely High school for Gifted Students. Nevertheless, the students would be deliberately chosen so that the survey results would be as highly representative of the whole picture of language learning and teaching as possible. Methodology of the study: 4.
Data collection methods: The combination of the two data collecting methods: qualitative and quantitative and the one of two data collecting instruments: questionnaire and interview were fully employed in this study. Going into more detailed, a set of questionnaire was delivered to 276 students so that the data would be collected from different viewpoints. Moreover, after this survey, some semi-structured interviews were applied to get further information from 6 students who had finished the questionnaires in the previous stage. All of the participants here would be chosen in light of the „stratified random sampling‟ with the aim of varying the data of different kinds of students.
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com As for the procedure, the set of questionnaire was distributed to students to see whether the textbook content can meet students‟ needs and levels. Then, after collecting the surveying data, the interview questions were revised to ask for more information which had not been clearly stated in the questionnaire. Then, the in-depth interviews would be applied to get further information of those students. Data analysis methods: The collected data were utilised to answer all three research questions.
Then, for each research question, data would be summarized into tables and charts to facilitate the synthesis and generalization of the data. In addition, the most important details in the semi-interview were clearly quoted to illustrate the analysis of data. An overview of the rest of the paper The rest of the paper includes five chapters as follows: Chapter 2 – Literature review – provides the background of the study, including definitions of key concepts, description of the context of applying group work and discussions of related studies. Chapter 3 – Methodology – describes the participants and instruments of the study, as well as the procedure employed to carry out the research.
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Chapter 4 – Data analysis and discussion – presents, analyzes and discusses the findings that the researcher found out from the data collected according to the two research questions. Chapter 5 – Conclusion – summarizes the main issues discussed in the paper, the limitations of the research, several suggestions for group work adaptation and further studies. Following this chapter are the Bibliography and Appendices. Summary In this part, the researcher has elaborated on these following points: 1.
Rationale for the study 2. Aims and objectives of the study 3. Scope of the study 4. Methodology of the study 5.
An overview of the rest of the paper To sum up, these elaborations have not only justified the major contents and structure of the study but will also work as the guidelines for the rest of the paper. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW This second chapter is totally devoted to the literature review, especially to the key concepts and related studies to the research topic. At first, the overall picture of background is provided with some key concepts of group work in details. At the mean time, related studies from all over the world in general and in countries in particular are deeply analyzed to illustrate the concepts more clearly.
Group work in the history of ELT: It is common knowledge that not until the emergence of Communicative Language Teaching was Group work applied to teaching language in class. However, in fact, Group work has been taken use of in different versions since the early stage of Language Teaching Method with a typical representative, Grammar Translation Method. According to Richard J., (2001), even before English totally overthrew Latin to become the international language in the early 19th century, the Grammar Translation Method had become a standard and dominant approach in Language Teaching. “Grammar Translation Method is a way of studying a language that approaches the language first through detailed analysis of its grammar rules, followed by application of this knowledge to the task of translating sentences and texts into and out of the target language.
Although this method focuses on widening linguistic knowledge “about the Language not the LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com language itself” (p.5) for individual students, some original version of Group work was still recognized during class hours from the observation of Nadz DisiNi (2010) when “A student read out loud “when did Mark Twain live?” Another student replied “Mark Twain lived from 1835 to 1910” and after that students come back to “work quietly by themselves”. This example reveals the fact that role- playing structure- based dialogues are one common technique in Grammar Translation Method, which laid the foundation for Group work in the next stage of ELT history. The mid and late nineteenth century witnessed a “Revolution” or Reform Movement in terms of Language teaching Method. Grammar Translation Method gradually lost its initial position and was replaced by many other alternative approaches and methods.
Among these alternative approaches was Audio-lingual Method that officially emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Richards & Rodgers (2001), Audio-lingual Method “advocated aural training first, then pronunciation training, followed by speaking, reading and writing” and language is almost studied through extensive repetition only. It is that repetitive learning technique that led to some “working together in Chorus” of students “the dialog is read in chorus, one half saying one speaker‟s part and the other half responding” (Richard & Rodgers, 2001, p. However, these kinds of activities are also just considered as another origin of Group work not Group work itself because there was actually little cooperation among group members.
It was not until the appearance of Communicative Language teaching (CLT) that Group work was officially declared as an essential teaching method to achieve the goal of language teaching, which now focuses on LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com developing “Communicative competence” for students. In the light of this approach, English classrooms transformed from “teacher- centered” to “learner- centered”, in which “students are expected to interact primarily with each other than with teacher”.