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.A. 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.A.

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-ofterm 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.e. 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, “GrammarTranslation” 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.


CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1. 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 endof-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.


1


1.2. 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.

2



1.3. 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?

1.4. 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.

1.5. 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.

3


1.6. 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 abovementioned 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


2.1. 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.g. 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. (Cook, 1989:115)
Murcia and Olshtain and Cook’s ideas about spoken language shows that
learners of English have to try hard to acquire this skill and more
importantly, teachers play an important role in facilitate their students’
process of learning spoken language.

2.2. Teaching English speaking skill:

2.2.1. Some opinions by methodologists on how to get students to talk in the
classroom:

In real life, one of the main reasons why people talk to one another is to
exchange information; that is, you tell others what they do not know and
find things out from them. According to Doff in Teach English: A training
course for teachers, the teacher should create a “communicative need” for
students. It is not easy to create a so-called “communicative need” for
students in the classroom. However, if the students find no “communicative
5


need” in an activity, they are not highly motivated to say anything. Krahnke
in Teaching English as a foreign /second language says, “Just imagine if
right now someone said to you, “Speak for 5 minutes about your favorite
food”. Most of you would be tongue-tied, and that is in your first language.
Think about how much more difficult it would be in a second language. But

the difficulty is not the point. Tasks such as this are difficult because we
rarely speak without a purpose.”

The teacher must, therefore, make a careful choice of speaking activities to
stimulate interest from students. There are a lot of speaking activities such
as information gap exercises, exchanging personal information, role play,
discussion and so on, from which the teacher can choose for their students.
Activities that are truly communicative, according to Morrow (Johnson and
Morrow, 1981), have three features: information gap, choice, and feedback.
Freeman explains them in Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching
as follows: First, an information gap exists when one person in an exchange
knows something that the other person doesn’t. If we both know today is
Tuesday and I ask you,” What is today?”, and you answer,” Tuesday”, our
exchange isn’t really communicative. Second, in communication, the
speaker has a choice of what s/he will say and how s/he will say it. If the
activity is tightly controlled so that students can only say something in one
way, the speaker has no choice and the exchange, therefore, is not
communicative. In a chain drill, for example, if a student must reply to
his/her neighbour’s question in the same way as his/her neighbour replied
to someone else’s question, then s/he has no choice of form and content,
and real communication does not occur. True communication is purposeful.
A speaker can thus evaluate whether or not his/ her purpose has been
achieved based on the information s/he receives from his/her listener. If the
6


listener does not have an opportunity to provide the speaker with such
feedback, then the exchange is not really communicative.

2.2.2. Communicative language teaching (CLT):


Several workshops on how to improve the English teaching method have
been organized recently in order to meet the practical requirement of
learners of English; that is, how they can communicate in English.
Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching is,
therefore, most mentioned and suggested using in the classroom. So, what is
Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)?

According to Diane Larsen-Freeman (1986), when adopting this method,
the teacher aims at having students become communicatively competent.
Communicative competence involves being able to use the language
appropriate to a given social context. To do this, students need knowledge
of the linguistic forms, meaning, and functions. They need to know that
many other forms can be used to perform a function and also that a single
form can often serve a variety of functions. They must be able to choose
from among these the most appropriate form, given the social context and
the roles of the interlocutors. They must also be able to manage the process
of negotiating meaning with their interlocutors.

What is the role of the teacher and the students in “Communicative
Approach”? The teacher has many roles to fulfill. S/he is the manager of
classroom activities. In this role, one of his/ her major responsibilities is to
establish situations likely to promote communication. During the activities,
s/he acts as an advisor, answering students’ questions and monitoring their
7


performance. At other times s/he might be a “co-communicator” – engaging
in the communicative activity along with the students (Littlewood, 1981).
The students are communicators. They are actively engaged in negotiating

meaning - in trying to make themselves understood - even when their
knowledge of the target language is incompetent. They learn to
communicate by communicating.
It is obvious that the teacher’s role in CLT, according to which students are
seen as more responsible managers of their own learning, is less dominant
than that in a teacher-centered method.

2.2.3. The relation of beliefs, knowledge and practice of CLT:

Most teachers of English attending the workshops learn what CLT is as
well as the necessity of applying it to their teaching; however, how many
of these teachers manage to adopt communicative approach in their
lessons. The relation of beliefs, knowledge and practice of CLT, therefore,
should be taken into consideration.

As Johnson’s (1999) collections suggest, teacher’s knowledge is the
combination of experiential knowledge (e.g., what teachers know about
teaching from their real-life experiences inside and outside the classroom)
and professional knowledge (e.g., what they acquire from the workshop as
well as the training courses they took when they were at University of
Pedagogy). The latter includes four general areas: subject matter
knowledge,

general

pedagogical

knowledge,

pedagogical


content

knowledge, and knowledge of context. According to Johnson, teacher’s
knowledge is tacitly embodied in their actual practices since it functions as
the foundation for reasoning teaching. Knowledge of a domain is different
8


from feelings about a domain, so another factor to affect teachers’
reasoning is their beliefs. Broadly described, “beliefs have a cognitive, an
affective, and a behavioral component and therefore act as influences on
what we know, feel, and do” (Johnson, 1999:30). In the teaching field,
Pajares (1992) refers to teachers’ beliefs as filtering component that
influence everything that teachers think about, say and do in the
classroom. Although there is not a clear-cut distinction between beliefs
and knowledge (Sato and Klensasser, 1999), Pajares (1992) and
Richardson (1996) agreed that knowledge and beliefs are inextricably
intertwined. However, as indicated by Pajares (1992), all teachers hold
beliefs about their work, their students and subject matter and their
responsibility to their career, and such a belief is far more influential than
knowledge in “determining how individuals organize and define tasks and
problems”. He means individuals’ beliefs strongly affect their behaviour
and act as an instrument to help define tasks and select the cognitive tools
to plan, and to decide which tasks to carry out. Richardson (1996) also
noticed that beliefs have a stronger and more direct influence on teaching
practice than knowledge. To a certain extent, the ways in which teachers
come to conceptualize themselves as teachers and develop explanations
for their classroom practices seem dependent upon their beliefs.


In addition, Richardson (1994) asserted that, to understand how teachers
make sense of teaching and learning, we should examine teachers’ beliefs
and practices because beliefs and actions have an interactive relationship.
This view appears to be opposite to Shulman’s (1986) view that teachers’
decisions in teaching practice are based on their knowledge and skills.

9


These quite different views show that teachers’ knowledge of
Communicative Approach and belief of the necessity of this method do not
certainly lead to their practice of CLT in the classroom.

2.2.4. Learner-centeredness:

One of the most distinguished features of Communicative Approach is
learner-centeredness, which makes language acquisition facilitated by
maximizing learners’ opportunities to interact (David Nunan, 1999).
Students use the language a great deal through communicative activities.
The teacher’s role is less dominant than in a teacher-centered method,
students are seen as more responsible managers of their own learning. In a
learner-centered classroom, the learning is focused on communication
fluency rather than accuracy. It aims to cover, in any particular phase, only
what the learners need and see as important for an efficient
communication with the outside world. The range of classroom tasks and
activities in learner-centered orientation is not limited to a certain type of
drills or pattern practice. They are topic discussions, dialogues and roleplays, simulations, games, etc. at learners’ choices. Among studentstudent interaction, there are numberless activities that can create an
atmosphere in which students feel more at ease for their co-operative
learning and innovation. Language and materials used in classroom are
authenticated and related to learners’ experience and emphasized on

genuine daily language. As for error treatment, except errors that cause
communication breakdown misunderstanding or misleading, mistakes are
often ignored or corrected at a later stage. This communication efficiency
and fluency that help to bring the message across is considered more
important. Self-correction or peers’ correction is always encouraged. Data
10


flow is effected in all directions, teacher-students, student-students with
peers’ interaction is prioritized.

2.2.5. Classroom interaction:

2.2.5.1. What is classroom interaction?
According to Gerard Counihan (1998), interaction is spontaneous of all the
conversational parties in changing both social and personal data as the vast
majority of everyday talking done by natives. Interaction involves
emotions, creativity, agreement, disagreement, people waiting patiently to
get in a word, sighing, nodding, gesticulating and so on. Interaction is not
waiting to be asked a question nor giving a short one-sentence answer to
this question, which almost always happens in English class. Classroom
interaction happens when: (1) the students don’t have to be invited by the
teacher to speak. (2) The students speak when there is a short silence
indicating the end of someone else’s turn. (3) The students interrupt one
another diplomatically to insert an opinion or question. (4) The students
use paralinguistics, such as exclamations, gestures, body language and so
on. Real interaction involves students not only as respondents but also as
active participants in the negotiation of meaning while the teacher taking
the role of a supporter, a facilitator or just as an ordinary participant.


2.2.5.2. Factors influence interaction:
a) Self-esteem:
Self-esteem may be one of the most key factors that affect language
learning and language interaction in particular. Self-esteem is defined by
Coppersmith (1967:4-5) as a personal judgment of worthiness that is
expressed in the attitudes that the individual holds towards himself. If
11


someone always tell himself or herself, ”I’m no good at language”, he or
she will be always threatened by any effort to speak up, even in a very
common situation. Success is, therefore, out of the reach. There would be
no successful cognitive or affective activity that can be carried out without
some degree of self-esteem, self-confidence, knowledge of yourself, and
belief in your own capabilities for that activity. (Brown, 1994:136)
b) Anxiety
Anxiety is described as “feelings of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt,
apprehension or worry” (Brown, 1994:141). Over-anxious students can
never produce a proper talk with confidence. Anxiety is associated with
learners’ various kinds of fear such as fear of looking ridiculous, fear of the
frustration coming from a listener’s blank look showing that they have
failed to communicate, fear of the danger of not being able to
communicate.( Beebe, 1983:40).
c) Inhibition:
With physical, emotional and cognitive changes, young students tend to
protect their fragile ego and ward off anxiety that threatens to their selfesteem by building up walls of defensive inhibition. Some people with
higher self-esteem and ego strength are more able to withstand threats and
anxiety and thus their defenses are lower. Those with weaker self-esteem
usually have to face with a lot of nameless anxiety and therefore maintain
walls of inhibition to protect what is self-perceived as a weak or fragile ego,

or a lack of self-confidence in a conversational situation or task (Brown,
1994: 138). Actually, one who never ventures to speak a sentence until he is
absolutely certain of its total correctness, he will likely never communicate
productively or make any progress at all.

2.2.6. Organizing a speaking activity effectively in the classroom:
12


How to design a speaking activity is one thing, but how to organize that
activity effectively in the classroom so that students can learn something
after each speaking activity is another. Reality shows that some teachers
can design very good speaking activities; however, s/he cannot apply them
to his or her class for some reason. Doff in Teach English: A training
course for teachers suggests that the teacher should follow some rules
below when getting students to communicate with each other in the
classroom:
• The teacher should use pair work and group work. This increases the
sheer amount of learner talk going on in a limited period of time and
also lowers the inhibitions of learners who are unwilling to speak in
front of the full class. This also gives students more chance to speak
English. If the activity is done “round the class”, it is dominated by a few
students and many other students would lose interest and say nothing at
all. Working in pairs or groups encourages students to be more involved
and to concentrate on the activity. Shy students feel less anxiety when
they are working in pairs or groups than when they are “on show” in
front of the whole class. More importantly, pair work and group work
encourage students to share ideas and knowledge.
• In addition to those advantages, pair work and group work cause some
problems. Both Doff in Teach English: A training course for teachers

and Ur in A course in Language Teaching: Practice and Theory
elaborate that during a pair or group activity, the teacher cannot control
all the language used, so students often make mistakes. The teacher has
less control over what students are doing in pair work or group work
than in a normal class. Sometimes, students talk about something other
than what the teacher asks them to discuss. In order to get over those
13


problems, the teacher should give enough preparation for students
before they enter into a speaking task. For instance, the teacher gives
them clear instruction about the task and sets the time limit. In some
activities, it is necessary for the teacher to model the task for the whole
class so that students can know exactly what they are expected to do.
The teacher must make sure students have the resources for the activity.
Resources here include both informational and linguistic resources. If
the teacher asks students to discuss something in groups, (s)he should do
some brainstorming in front of the whole class first to determine whether
they know enough about the topic to undertake the task. Besides,
information about that topic can be given to students by distributing
handouts, reading or listening materials. In this case, the teacher must
make sure that these materials are understood by the students before the
activity is undertaken. Also, the teacher must focus on the language
forms the students should use in their discussion. For example, when
they want to express their ideas, they should use which expressions.
•

The teacher should also form pairs and groups so that students know
who works with whom. When the students enter into the speaking
activity, the teacher should go around to give help if necessary and to

observe what the students are talking about, prevent them from speaking
their mother tongue, and simultaneously take notes of their mistakes.

After stopping the task, the teacher should conduct feedback by asking
some pairs and groups what they said and then correct the mistakes if
necessary. It is noticeable that in order to encourage students, the teacher
should focus on what they have got right, not on what they have got
wrong. More importantly, the teacher had better praise students for their
correct answers and even for partly correct answers; in this way, they will
14


feel they are making progress. In order to stimulate students to join in the
next speaking activity eagerly, the teacher should avoid humiliating
students or making them feel that making a mistake is “bad”.

2.2.7. An overview of teaching and learning English speaking skill in
Vietnam:

The economic open-door policy pursued by the Vietnamese government
increased the demand for English-speaking people who are expected to be
competent at communicating verbally in English with the outside world
and to access advanced technology mainly in English. All EFL teachers
want to get their students involved in speaking activities in class as they do
when they are outside the classroom. However, despite their great concern
about this issue, teachers of English have not been able to apply an
effective method to better their students’ speaking skill. It is unlikely to do
this when the teacher’s talking time dominates the lesson. In the
classroom, the teacher’s talk is usually in the form of a lecture delivered, a
question, or a request to do a certain task. Students’ talk is usually a

straight answer to the question posed by the teacher or a drill practice
when students are inserting their own information, using their own
vocabulary into the gaps provided. Those talks cannot be considered as
interaction, which really occurs in reality.

A lot of training courses and workshops for teachers of English are
designed and delivered with a focus on how to teach learners of English to
communicate in English effectively. Communicative Approach or
Communicative

Language

Teaching

is

encouraged

to

adopt.

Unfortunately, not much improvement in terms of teaching methods has
15


been noticed in English classes (Le, 1999), which can be due to several
reasons as follows:

First, according to Rossner (1988), not many teachers frequently use the

term “communicative” because they may view that the communicative
movement is not easy to be implemented in their teaching environment or
because the full adoption of the approach is impossible to meet.
Second, citing Nespor’s (1987) remark, Johnson (1999) reminded that
despite professional courses, teachers still keep an accumulation of
experiences that manifest themselves in beliefs that tend to be quite stable
and rather resistant to change regardless of their teaching contexts.
Third, little change in teaching methods is the effect of learning and
teaching styles. According to cultural stereotypes, English teaching in Asia
is still dominantly didactic, product-oriented and teacher-centered (Liu,
cited in Phan, 2004). In Vietnam, influenced by Confucianism, students
feel rude if they interrupt, question or argue with their teacher. Like most
Asian students, they are also passive, rote learners and dependent thinkers
(Pennycook, 1994). The Vietnamese educational system is characterized
as being knowledge-centered in which teachers are considered the sole
providers of experience and the fount of knowledge (Phan, 2004). Being
not exposed to the target language and the pressure of examination,
teachers of English focus much on language knowledge rather than
language use, so role-plays, problem-solving tasks or information gap
activities are rare. As pointed out by Le (1999), English language teaching
in Vietnam is still challenged to match the demand for competent Englishspeaking people.

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CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

This chapter discusses the design and methodology employed in the study. It
begins with the presentation of the objectives and the overall methods to
approach these objectives, followed by a description of the participants, the

data collection procedure, and the limitation of the study.

3.1. Objectives:
The objectives of this study are:
(1) to figure out what kinds of speaking activities the teachers asked the
students to do and how they organized them in GE classes.
(2) to seek the reasons why the observed teachers chose a certain kind of
speaking activity.
(3) to get to know (a) students’ experience in learning English at high
school, (b) students’ motivation for learning English, (c) students’
attitude towards practising speaking English in the classroom, (d)

17


students’ levels of confidence in speaking English and contributing
factors, and (e) students’ expectations in university English class.

All those issues were based on:
(1) a series of GE class observations at STU
(2) interviews with the teachers in charge of the observed classes.
(3) a questionnaire for the students from the observed classes which consists
of 14 questions on 5 above-mentioned aspects.

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3.2. Participants:

¾ 10 out of 26 teachers of English at STU, 8 females and 2 males about

28 – 50 years of age, agreed to participate in the study. Their
experience ranges from 5 years to 25 years. Two of these teachers
have just obtained a Master degree in TESOL. Other 5 teachers are
attending an M.A. course in TESOL.
¾ Other participants were 374 first-year students at the age of 18 - 21
from 10 randomly chosen classes of 7 departments at STU. Most of
them have finished high school with 7 years learning English as a
foreign language. Although they specialize in engineering, they
show their interest in learning English because of its importance in
the present situation.

3.3. Data collection procedure:

The study was based on an empirical inquiry in the real-life context at STU.
The research procedures justified for descriptive and exploratory study.
Beginning in September 2004, I first piloted the class observation scheme in
a GE class and the questionnaire for students of the GE class. The
observation scheme adapted from Wajnryb’s (1992) checklist includes notes
on the lesson activities, timing, what the teacher and students did in a
speaking task, and personal comments on the real happening in a speaking
task in the observed class. The questions in the questionnaire for students
were formulated in the light of reviewing the questionnaires made by
Nunan (1995) and Scharle & Szabo (2000), the literature review in chapter
2, and unstructured interviews with teachers and students at the STU. The
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