VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES -----------o0o------------ VƯƠNG THI ̣ THU HUYỀN AN INVESTIGATION INTO STUDENTS’ PARTICIPATION IN GROUP WORK AT LUU NHAN CHU HIGH SCHOOL ( NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ SỰ THAM GIA HOẠT ĐỘNG NHÓM CỦA HỌC SINH TẠI TRƯỜNG THPT LƯU NHÂN CHÚ) M. MINOR THESIS Field : English Language Teaching Methodology Code : 60.10 HaNoi, 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES -----------o0o------------ VƯƠNG THỊ THU HUYỀN AN INVESTIGATION INTO STUDENTS’ PARTICIPATION IN GROUP WORK AT LUU NHAN CHU HIGH SCHOOL ( NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ SỰ THAM GIA HOẠT ĐỘNG NHÓM CỦA HỌC SINH TẠI TRƯỜNG THPT LƯU NHÂN CHÚ) M. MINOR THESIS Field : English Language Teaching Methodology Code : 60.10 Supervisor: ĐÀO THU TRANG, M.A Ha Noi, 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND CHARTS 1. Abbreviations: - CLT: Communicative Language Teaching 2.
Charts: - Chart 1: The frequency of teachers organizing group work in an English class - Chart 2: The usual time group work often takes up over the total time of an English lesson - Chart 3: The benefits of group work - Chart 4: Skills teachers often use with group work - Chart 5: The ways teachers often prepare for group work classes - Chart 6: Skill most suitable with group work - Chart 7: Do students like taking part in group work in an English lesson? - Chart 8: Students’ opinion about appropriate time for group work - Chart 9: Students’ opinion about group work’s benefits - Chart 10: The frequency of students taking part in group work - Chart 11: Students’ opinions about difficulties when taking part in group work - Chart 12: Students’ opinions about what their teachers should to make group work successful 3. Tables: - Table 1:Ways teachers often use to group students - Table 2: Problems group work can cause - Table 3: Factors affecting the success of group work most - Table 4: What the teacher should do to make group work successful in an English lesson. - Table 5: Characteristics of the students participating in the language learning survey - Table 6: Students’ opinions about suitable skills for group work - Table 7: The ways students grouped by their teachers - Table 8: Students’s preparation for group work - Table 9: Students’ opinions about factors affecting the success of group work most iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION .iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND CHARTS. iv Part A: INTRODUCTION.
Aims of the study.Scope of the study. Research questions of the study. Methods of the study. Design of the study.
5 Chapter 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).Definitions of CLT. Characteristics of CLT. Group work in teaching and learning English.
Definition of group work. Advantages and disadvantages of group work.1 The advantages of group work.2 The disadvantages of group work. How to organize group work. Preparation for group work.
Steps in classroom. Steps of organizing group work. Difficulties in organizing group work and suggested solutions. 13 v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Concepts of students’ participation in group work. Context of the study. Description of English syllabus at Luu Nhan Chu High school. Description of the students at Luu Nhan Chu high school.
Description of the teachers at Luu Nhan Chu school. Methodology and design of the study. Presentation of statisical results. 33 Chapter 3: FINDINGS AND SUGGESTIONS.
What are the difficulties in organizing group work at Luu Nhan Chu high school? 35 3. Difficulties from teachers. Difficulties from students. How is group work organized in an English class at Luu Nhan Chu high school? How do the students participate in group work?.
What are attitudes of the students at Luu Nhan Chu high school towards the application of group work in teaching and learning English?. 38 vi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. How to organize group work in English class more effectively for improve fours skills to students at Luu Nhan Chu high school?. Summary of the study.
Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further study. I vii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Part A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the study Nowadays, English has become one of the most popular languages in the world.
Because of its popularity, teaching and learning English is paid more attention everywhere, especially Viet Nam. One of the reasons is that English is widely used in many fields such as politics, business, international conference, education or just everyday communication. However, the results of the English learning are not very good. Vietnamese teachers of English may not have applied the teaching method in effective ways.
For many years, we taught English in a traditional way in which teacher played the role of the knowledge provider and the students were the passive knowledge receivers. However, with the help of the communicative approach in language teaching, we are now paying more attention to the role of students in the class. We begin to realize the importance of students‟ interaction. We begin to teach English in a more natural way by putting it in real communicative situations.
The teachers are now trying to organize communicative activities in English classes, among them, group work, key features of learner- centered orientation- has received more emphasis because of a number of advantages it brings about. Group work creates more opportunities for students to work with each other by exchanging their ideas and, therefore, learning so many things from their partners. Participating in group work makes students confident and creative in learning English. It also helps students overcome shyness.
Group work brings advantages not only for the learners but also for the teachers. First of all, it saves time. Instead of asking individual student to practice a structure or answer the questions, the teacher can divide the class into groups and make them do the exercise at the same time. 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Being a teacher of English at Luu Nhan Chu High School, the researcher is well aware of the importance of using group work in English classes.
However, like many school teacher in Viet Nam, we still face with common problems coming from teachers, students, classroom condition when organizing and using group work. This led me to the choice of the study: “ An investigation into students’ participation in group work at Luu Nhan Chu High school.” with the hope of investigating the ways teachers organize group work and the students‟ participation into group work to find out an effective way to improve four English skills for students at Luu Nhan Chu High School. It is also hoped that this study may offer the teachers of English at Luu Nhan Chu High School ways on how to use group work in teaching four English skills more effectively. Aims of the study The aims of the study are: - to investigate students‟ participation in group work and why they participated in group work, the ways they did.
- to explore some strategies to increase students‟ participation in group work.Scope of the study As mentioned above, the study focuses on ways to organize and use group work as well as the students‟ participation in group work at Luu Nhan Chu High school. The researcher intends to draw a brief overview of group work in classes at Luu Nhan Chu High School and to find out the ways to organize group work more effectively. Research questions of the study This study was aimed to answer the following research questions: 1. What are attitudes of the students at Luu Nhan Chu high school towards group work in teaching and learning English? 2.
How do the students participate in group work? 3. How is group work organized in an English class at Luu Nhan Chu High school? 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com How to organize group work in English class more effectively for students at Luu Nhan Chu high school? 5. Methods of the study To realize the aims of the study, both qualitative and quantitative methods are used. - By means of qualitative method: the author has to refer to different materials, lectures, former researchers and relevant issues related to group work and teaching and learning English to gain more knowledge of the subject matter and to come to the final conclusion.
- By means of quantitative method: all comments, remarks, recommendation assumption and conclusion provided in the study based on the analysis of the statistics from the survey questionnaires conducted with students and teachers of Luu Nhan Chu High School. In addition, the researcher also used class observations with the hope that two methodologies supplemented each other so that the data could be more reliable. Design of the study This study consists of three parts: Part A: Introduction: presents rationale, aims, scope, research questions, methods and design of the study. Part B: Developments: consists of three chapters.
Chapter 1: Theoretical background: reviews the theory of CLT, group work and students‟ participation in group work. Chapter 2: Methodology: provides an analysis on the current situation of using group work in teaching and learning English at Luu Nhan Chu High school. Data collection and analysis are also presented in this chapter. Chapter 3: Findings and suggestions: focuses on how the teachers at Luu Nhan Chu High School organized group work, difficulties faced by them and their students 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com in using these activities and some suggestions for the teachers to organize group work and for the students to learn more effectively.
Part C: Conclusion: summarizes all the key issues as well as the limitations of the study and makes suggestions for further research. 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Part B: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND This chapter is devoted to building a conceptual framework for the research. It consists of three sections. Section one deals with the issue of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) which is intended to be discussed in terms of CLT definitions and its characteristics.
Section two concerns some concepts of group work, the benefits of group work, the ways to organize group work and difficulties when organizing group work. Following section two, section three focuses on the concepts of students‟ participation in group work. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) 1.Definitions of CLT The origins of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) are to be found in the changes in the British language teaching tradition dating from the late 1960s. The communicative approach in language teaching starts from a theory of language as communication.
The goal of language teaching is to develop what Hymes (1972) referred to as "communicative competence." Hymes defines “communicative competence” as “ what a speaker needs to know in order to be communicatively competent in a speech community”. Another theorist frequently cited for his views on the communicative nature of language is Henry Widdowson. In his book Teaching Language as Communication (1978),Widdowson presented a view of the relationship between linguistic systems and their communicative values in text and discourse. He focused on the communicative acts underlying the ability to use language for different purposes.
Littlewood (1984) consideres an alternative learning theory that he also see as compatible with CLT-a skill-learning model of learning. According to this theory, the acquisition of communicative competence in a language is an example of skill 5 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. This involves both a cognitive and a behavioral aspect. The cognitive aspect involves the internalisation of plans for creating appropriate behaviour.
For language use, these plans derive mainly from the language system- they include grammatical rules, procedures for selecting vocabulary,and social conventions governing speech.