VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES LÊ PHƯƠNG LAN THE APPLICATION OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES TO DEVELOP SPEAKING SKILLS FOR 10TH GRADERS IN SON TAY HIGH SCHOOL-HANOI (ỨNG DỤNG CÁC HOẠT ĐỘNG GIAO TIẾP ĐỂ PHÁT TRIỂN KỸ NĂNG NÓI CHO HỌC SINH LỚP 10 TRƯỜNG THPT SƠN TÂY-HÀ NỘI) M.A MINOR THESIS Field : ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY Code : 601410 HANOI, 2011 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES LÊ PHƯƠNG LAN THE APPLICATION OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES TO DEVELOP SPEAKING SKILLS FOR 10TH GRADERS IN SON TAY HIGH SCHOOL-HANOI (ỨNG DỤNG CÁC HOẠT ĐỘNG GIAO TIẾP ĐỂ PHÁT TRIỂN KỸ NĂNG NÓI CHO HỌC SINH LỚP 10 TRƯỜNG THPT SƠN TÂY-HÀ NỘI) M.A MINOR THESIS Field : ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY Code : 601410 Supervisor: Prof. Hoàng Văn Vân HANOI, 2011 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACCEPTANCE PAGE i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv LIST OF TABLES vii ABBREVIATIONS viii INTRODUCTION 1 1. Rationale of the study 1 2. Aims of the study 2 3.
Scope of the study 2 5. Design of the study 2 DEVELOPMENT 4 Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 4 1. Spoken language versus written language 4 1. Implications for teaching 5 1.
The speaking needs and goals of language students 7 1. Approaches to teaching speaking 8 1. Principles for teaching speaking 10 1. What are communicative activities? 12 1.
Purposes of communicative activities 13 1. Types of oral communicative activities 14 1. Discussion 15 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Simulation and role-play 17 Chapter 2: METHODOLOGY 18 2.
An overview of Son Tay High School 18 2. The teachers of English in Son Tay High School 18 2. The students in Son Tay High School 18 2. The current situation of English teaching and learning in Son Tay 19 High School 2.
Description of the subjects 20 2. Data collection instruments 20 2. Methods of data analysis 21 Chapter 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 22 3. Results of teachers’ survey questionnaire 22 3.
Results of students’ survey questionnaire 26 3. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 29 3. Findings from classroom observation 29 3. Findings from survey questionnaire 29 3.
SUMMARY 30 Chapter 4: IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 32 4.1 Some kinds of effective communicative activities 32 4.2 Some considerations and suggestions on using 35 communicative activities CONCLUSION 37 REFERENCES 39 APPENDIX 1 I APPENDIX 2 III APPENDIX 3 V TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com vi LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1 Information about Teachers’ CLT training 22 Table 2 The teachers’ time of using communicative activities. 22 Table 3 Kinds of communicative activities teachers usually use in 23 their English teaching process. Table 4 Major obstacles teachers encounter when they apply 24 communicative activities in their English teaching. Table 5 Some strategies the teachers have applied to overcome these 25 obstacles.
Table 6 The reasons for speaking of students in classroom 26 Table 7 Kinds of communicative activities that students were fond of 26 participating in. Table 8 Reasons discourage students from speaking English in class 27 Table 9 Some strategies the teachers have applied in order to 28 overcome these obstacles. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com vii ABBREVIATIONS TEFL : Teaching English as a Foreign Language CLT : Communicative Language Teaching EFL : English as a Foreign Language M.A : Master of Art TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Rationale of the study The introduction of the new textbook “English 10” into teaching at Son Tay High School in 2006 has marked real renovation in language teaching and learning from the traditional approach-grammar translation method, which only concentrates on the ability of using grammar rules precisely, to communicative approach, which focuses on communication ability.
Nonetheless, the teachers of English at Son Tay High School find it difficult to teach speaking successfully because of the class size, the students’ language level, and additionally, students are not acquainted with CLT. Moreover, the majority of the teachers were trained under the strong influence of the Grammar-Translation method, which impedes them from teaching speaking successfully even the new textbook follows the communicative approach. As a teacher of English at Son Tay High School in Hanoi, I often receive similar questions from many students. For example, “I can understand grammar and sentence structures well, but I feel embarrassed to talk in English” or “What should I do to speak English well?” In my reality of teaching, there are a lot of students who have perfect knowledge of grammar that works wonderfully for reading and writing but cannot express themselves to the teachers.
On the other hand, I often hear a lot of complaints from the colleagues: “Students seem so quiet and lazy during speaking lessons. It is very difficult to make them participate in speaking activities”. Therefore, the idea of doing something useful for my colleagues and students has urged me to conduct the research. Another reason why the study was carried out lies in my love for teaching speaking.
By doing the study, I can know more about the challenges in teaching and learning speaking skills so that I can find relevant techniques along with activities to improve my teaching speaking at Son Tay High School. The above reasons have inspired me to conduct a study on “The application of communicative activities to develop speaking skills for 10th graders at Son Tay High School-Hanoi” with the hope to make a little contribution to the quality of teaching and learning speaking skills for Grade 10th at Son Tay High School. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Aims of the study The aims of the study are to address the following issues: The difficulties that teachers and students face in the process of teaching and learning speaking skills; The application of some useful communicative activities to improve English speaking ability for 10th graders.
Research questions To achieve these aims, the following two research questions are addressed: 1. What communicative activities can make the speaking lessons more effective? 2. What obstacles have the teachers and students faced in their speaking lessons? 4. Scope of the study This study is concerned with the application of communicative activities to develop speaking skills to the students in grade 10th at Son Tay High School.
The researcher is not planning on studying a larger population of the whole students at Son Tay High School, just on the students in grade 10th in order to find out what communicative activities are applied and the obstacles experienced by these students and teachers of English then offer some recommendations with the hope that teaching and learning speaking skills will be improved. Design of the study Apart from acknowledgement, abstract, table of contents and appendices, this thesis is structured in three main parts namely: Introduction, Development, and Conclusion. The first part “Introduction” presents the rationale, aims, research questions, scope of the study and its design. The second part “Development” includes four chapters.
Chapter 1, Theoretical Background, begins with the literature on understanding speaking, including the comparison of spoken language with written language and implication for teaching. Then comes the literature on teaching speaking with the speaking needs and goals of language students, some approaches to teaching speaking and principles for teaching speaking. The rest of the chapter is on communicative activities, its purposes and its different types. Chapter 2 is composed of two sections.
The first section presents the local situation in Son Tay High School. The second section provides the research methods that involve TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 3 information about the subjects, data collection instruments and procedures. Also, the methods of data analysis are mentioned. Chapter 3 presents major findings and discussion Chapter 4 gives recommendations for more effective application of Communicative Activities in developing students’ speaking skills.
The third part is the conclusions of the study. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 4 DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1. Spoken language versus written language Communication between humans has its own characteristics. The speaker speaks and the writer writes because they want to say something and they have a communicative purpose.
For example they may want to give information about some special events, they may want to make a claim or they may want to argue. In addition, both the speaker and the writer select the language they think is appropriate for their purpose of communication. However, there are significant differences between spoken language and written language. Understanding the different characteristics between the two modes of communication is very important for educators, in order to design an appropriate curriculum in teaching integrating skills and thus to promote learners' language acquisition.
Spoken and written language serve different social purposes, therefore they have different characteristics and have their own systematic patterns and language forms. Harmer (1996), Burns (1997) and many other scholars have distinguished the different features between spoken and written language. The first and perhaps the most obvious difference between spoken and written language is that “speech and writing are typically used in different kinds of situations” (Burns: 8). When we speak, we are usually interacting directly with others such as talking on the phone or chatting with friends in the cafe.
The language produced during talk is spontaneous and relatively unplanned. Speakers have less time to plan than writers do and they often have to produce what they want to say on the run. As a consequence, speakers tend to hesitate, use more informal or everyday language, make mistakes or change the topic in the middle of the conversation. Speakers use a number of linguistic devices, which are called: parataxis and hypo taxis formulaic expressions and ellipsis (Burns: 18).
Harmer (1996) states that the significant different feature between spoken and written language concerns the need for accuracy and the level of accuracy. Writers are usually alone and not in direct contact with the audience. As a result, they do not receive immediate feedback from the reader and sometimes get no feedback at all. Native speakers constantly make “mistakes” when they are speaking.
They hesitate and say the same thing TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 5 in different ways and they often change the subject of what they are saying in mid- sentence. A piece of writing, however, with mistakes and half-finished sentence, etc. would be judged by many native speakers as illiterate since it is expected that writing should be “correct”. From the point of view of language teaching, therefore, there is often far greater pressure for written accuracy than there is accuracy in speaking.
Apart from this, writers can not use intonation, stress or body language. They also often feel under an obligation to achieve accuracy and precisions, because written language is more permanent than spoken language. Another different characteristic of written and spoken language is in the overall structures of spoken and written texts (Burns, 1997). Written texts are usually logically organized with a distinct beginning, middle and end structures.
It is generally possible for readers to predict quite easily how the text is likely to be structured. Spoken texts, on the other hand, are more open-ended and dynamic with one utterance leading to another. Speakers also tend to change their topic of conversation during the talk. Therefore it is difficult for the speakers and listeners to predict the exact direction the interaction will take.
Finally, spoken and written languages are grammatically different. According to Halliday (1989) in Burns (1997), written language is more lexically dense while spoken language is more grammatically complicated. Writers tend to use lexical words such as nouns or noun groups, speakers tend to use verbs and grammatical words such as pronouns and conjunctions or linking words such as "and", "but" and "because" to produce clauses.