AN GIANG UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES STUDENT: NGUYEN THI NGOC PHUOC STUDENT ID NUMBER: DAV150476 CLASS: DH16AV UNDERGRADUATE THESIS SPEAKING FLUENCY: INFLUENTIAL FACTORS AND PRACTICES FOR DEVELOPMENT AMONG ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS AT AN GIANG UNIVERSITY SUPERVISOR: LE DO THAI, M. May 2nd, 2019 Contents LIST OF TABLES. Rationale of the study. Significance of the study.
Limitations of the study. Organization of the study .12 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Fluency and English language speaking fluency. The importance of fluency in English language speaking.
Factors influencing speaking fluency. Practices for improving speaking fluency. Summary of literature review and justification of the study. Research participants and sampling methods.
Procedure of data collection .1 Administering the questionnaires.2 Administering the interviews. Procedure of data analysis. Analysis of questionnaire data .2 Analysis of the interviews. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS.
The factors influencing the English language speaking fluency of the first-year English major students at An Giang University. The first-year English major students’ perceptions of the affective factor influencing their English language speaking fluency. The first-year English major students’ perception of the linguistic factor influencing their English language speaking fluency. The first-year English major students’ perception of the cognitive factor influencing their English language speaking fluency.
The activities that the first-year English major students have been doing to develop their English language speaking fluency at An Giang University. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS. Summary of findings and discussions. PROTOCOL OF THE INTERVIEWS WITH STUDENTS.
75 2 LIST OF TABLES Table 3. Distribution of students by class, gender, and English speaking level………………. Item distribution in the questionnaire………………………………. Reliability statistics of the pilot study.
Reliability statistics of the major instrument. Time frame of the study. Students' perceptions of factor influencing their English language speaking fluency…………………………………………………………………………………………. Results of One-Sample T-Test……………………………………………………….
Students' perceptions of three factors influencing their English speaking fluency……………………………………………………………………………………………35 Table 4. Differences in students’ perceptions of factors that influence on their speaking fluency between classes. Result of One-way ANNOVA Test. Differences in students’ perceptions of affective factor influencing their speaking fluency between classes.
Result of One-way ANNOVA Test. Differences in students’ perceptions of affective factors influencing their speaking fluency between speaking scores. Students’ perceptions of linguistic factors influencing their speaking fluency. Students’ perceptions on cognitive factor influencing their speaking fluency .42 3 🙡🕮🙣 DECLARATION 🙡🕮🙣 I hereby declare that the thesis titled “Speaking fluency: influential factors and practices for development among English-major students at An Giang University” represents my own work and that it has not been previously submitted to any other university or institute in application for admission to degrees or other qualifications.
_____________________________________________ May 2019 Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuoc 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study could not be done without a great deal of assistance. I gratefully acknowledge the support and motivation of my school, my instructor as well as all the participants of this study during the time I was doing this study as a requirement of completing my Degree of English Language at An Giang University First of all, I am extremely grateful for having the opportunity of meeting and working on this thesis with my supervisor Mr. Le Do Thai. He has been the best supervisor I could have ever imagined.
His expertise, guidance, and support helped me to go through not only my thesis but my whole degree at the An Giang University. Without him, I would definitely not be where I am now. Without his valuable comments, my research might not have finished completely. I also would like to send my special thanks to all first-year English major students at An Giang University who were studying English Language at An Giang University for their cooperation in working with me during the time this study was being carried out, completing the questionnaires and providing precious information for my research Additionally, I would like to thank and show my appreciation to staffs and lecturers at An Giang University for their support and advice during my graduate studies.
Finally, my sincere thanks obviously go to my family for their motivation, love, encouragement and belief in me when I am exhausted. They are the greatest motivators in my life. Without them, I might not be able to go through this all. An Giang, April 22th, 2019 Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuoc 5 ABSTRACT The research “Speaking fluency: influential factors and practices for development among English-major students at An Giang University” investigates factors that influence students’ speaking fluency and activities that the first-year English major students have been doing to develop their English language speaking fluency, as in their self-reports.
It is conducted to the second semester students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, An Giang University. The participants of the research are the first-year English major students at An Giang University. The data, both qualitative and quantitative, were collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. One hundred students are chosen to fill in the questionnaire, and 8 students who are chosen randomly to be interviewed.
The research result shows that the factors influencing students speaking fluency are cognitive, linguistic and affective. Those are the main factors that have contributed to the speaking fluency (Wang, 2014). The results of questionnaires and interviews revealed that it is affective factors that more affect the students’ English fluency. In addition, the study reveals that students have different ways to develop their English-speaking fluency.
Some important conclusions were drawn, and recommendations were made based on the study results. 6 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The chapter provides general information of the study, including the rationale of the study, the research aim, the research questions, as well as the significance of the research. It ends with a short description of the organization of the thesis. Rationale of the study To begin with, with the globalization of the world economy, especially with Vietnam's entry into the WTO, we all have to communicate with people from all over the world in English.
It is recognized that English is becoming an universal language importantly and requires us to be master of communicative competence. In the context of English learning and teaching in Vietnam, productive and receptive skills are developed by the students and teachers essentially. Receptive skills which are reading and listening allow students to understand textbook, documents or works. And, productive skills which include in speaking and writing are significant because they help students perform in communicative environment.
Each of these skills must be attended by the teacher to help students develop their communicative competence. According to the process of learning, the first skill to be developed by a language learner is speaking skill and to foreign language learners, it represents a hard challenge to accomplish. Producing, receiving and processing information are components of an interactive process called speaking (Burns, A. This process is one of the most essential challenges in the English learning path and includes the ability to communicate fluently.
Also, speaking is related to other language skills. The ability of the students to speak can utilize vocabulary and be the basic foundation to be master at listening and reading comprehension (Patiung, Tolla, Anshari, & Dolla, 2015). Yet, speaking skill has much more demanding than listening, because it is not only understanding but also producing (Hidayat & Herawati, 2012). There is no doubt that speaking which is one of the most important skills in English learning includes all other kinds of knowing.
People who know a language are considered as “speaker” of that language are actually interested in contributing to the communication so that it is worth making effort to speak. It does not mean that they all have to speak correctly, they just feel free from pronunciation, lexical and grammatical errors that produce the meaning 7 communication. Besides, classroom activities help to develop students’ ability to express themselves through speech and improve their speaking fluency in informal conversation interaction (Ur, 2012). In the universities, all the students have been required a good English foundation.
They have already been taught four skills (reading, listening, writing and speaking) based on communicative teaching method by teachers. They already know grammar, vocabulary, and they can write short phrases and paragraph or even essay, but in speaking lesson in the classroom or in real life when they meet foreigners , they do not seem to have developed good fluency in speaking though they spent many years for studying. The fact is students in high school who have good English foundations already know grammar structures, vocabulary, pronunciation. They are also taught communicative approach methods to develop speaking skill.
However, when they enter the university, they are not interested in speaking and do not have good fluency in speaking. This situation is true with the first-year English majored students and even students after studying English for several years. Thus, they do not understand the message from foreigners since their interaction are interrupted by a lot pauses and hesitations. That is why, this present study looks for resources in the learning, teaching, and the development of fluency in the English classes.
All this with the purpose to explore what factors are necessary for fluency development can be more beneficial or appropriate for the first-year English majored students in the context of an EFL program. Especially for the students who will become the teachers of English of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, English speaking fluency is indispensable. Firstly, they need to use English orally daily as a role model for their students. Being competent in using English to be able to interact with students during the teaching and learning is essential.
Secondly, they need to design classroom activities that support to develop their fluency when using English orally. Yet, there is a fact that even English majors still have difficulty expressing themselves effectively. Helping them express themselves fluently in the English classroom teaching and daily communication has been a matter of concern to teachers of English for quite a long time. 8 In fact, the primary function of language is to communicate.
We communicate with one another by sharing or expressing our thoughts, ideas, emotions and collected facts. Thus, to become a proficient communicator, one needs to be good at one of the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, but it will be more advantages when one takes his speaking skill into consideration to talk to someone. That is his ability to express his thoughts, opinions and feelings, in range of words put together in a meaningful way and the joy of sharing his stories, ideas, and perceptions with others is immense and vice versa. People cannot communicate with one another without speech.
And, speaking skill is important for the learners of any language. An active speaker can get the audience’ attention and transfer his message when he is purposefully trained in the skill of speaking. Certainly, it is useful for career success and one’s professional aspiration (Ishrat & Qureshi, n. Furthermore, gaining speaking fluency has become a major goal for many foreign language learners who study English in EFL are able to use the language for communication purposes.
This research can be relevant in the AGU context because many AGU EFL students or even the majored students in English are unable to speak fluently after spending many years studying the foreign language because they have a little chance to converse in English outside the classroom. As a result, at the moment of speaking, they are very confused and being slow and hesitant in producing their messages which has resulted in the feeling of anxiety and lack of confidence to speak. This is a lack of speaking fluency in general students in AGU. Because of that, speaking fluency has become a challenge for them because they are required to master some sub- skills like pronunciation, stress, intonation, grammar, vocabulary, and so forth.