A STUDY ON IMPROVING ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS TO 10TH FORM MINORITY STUDENTS AT GIA PHU HIGH SCHOOL

Part one: introduction

I. Rationale of the study.

It is undeniable that English is an international language. English is considered as the

medium of communication in many different fields such as: science, technology, aviation,

international sport, diplomacy, and so on. English is also the official language of many

international organizations, such as: ASEAN, WTO, WHO, UN, etc. With the spread of

globalization and the rapid expansion of informational and technologies, there has been an

explosion in the demand for English worldwide.

In Vietnam, in recent years, the study of English has gained momentum. Because it is

partly the change in education policies of our government, and partly the people’s need.

English has been widely taught in schools, universities, companies as well as in organizations.

There are also many different English teaching programs available on radio, television and

internet.

It is widely accepted that one of the main purposes of studying English is to use it for

communications. Being able to speak English is an important criterion to assess a learner of

English. However, it is a common issue at my school that the students rarely speak English,

even in English classes, though they have been learning English since they started at the lower

secondary school.

Being a teacher of a high school, within my minor thesis, I would like to investigate the

reasons of the students’ inhibition and unwillingness to speak English, and I hope to be able to

make some recommendations that can help the students overcome their inhibition and

unwillingness, and thereby improve their speaking skills. This actually drives the researcher to

the study thesis, namely “A study on improving English Speaking skills to 10th-form minority

students at Gia Phu High School in the New Set of English Textbook”.

II. Aims of the study.

The study is aimed at:

• Investigating the current English speaking teaching and learning situations of grade

10 at Gia Phu High School.

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• Identifying the factors which make the students inhibited or unwilling to speak

English in class.

• Making some suggestions for the teachers at Gia Phu High School with the hope of

helping the students overcome their inhibition and unwillingness, and thereby

improve their speaking skills.

• Suggesting some realistic and appropriate class teaching techniques with the hope

that they can enhance the learners in speaking skills.

III. Scope of the study.

To improve speaking skills for the students at Gia Phu High School, various activities

can be used, and a number of things should be done. However, the researcher only intends to

overview a brief of the current situations of teaching and learning English speaking skills of

grade 10 at Gia Phu High School, and to identify the factors which make the students inhibited

and unwilling to speak English, and to make some recommendations to motivate students to

speak English more.

IV. Method of the study.

To realize the aims of the study, quantitative and qualitative methods have been used.

The data collected for the study came from two sources: the 10th- form student respondents and

the teacher-respondents at Gia Phu High School, Son La province.

Two questionnaires, one for students and the other for teachers, and an interview of

teachers are going to be used to collect information and evidence for the study. All the

comments, remarks, recommendations and conclusions provided in the study are based on the

data analysis.

V. Design of the study

The minor thesis consists of three parts:

• The first part is an introduction to the thesis which presents the factors as plan of

the study such as the rationale, aims, scope, methods and design of the study.

• Part two comes the second, in which a theoretical background, research

methodology, presentation of statistical, results and discussions were presented.

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• The final part focuses on the summary of the findings, the limitations of the

study and future directions for further research are also mentioned in this part.

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Part two: development

Chapter I: literature review

Any study should have theories as its background. In my minor thesis, I base the study

on the theories which are the views from the famous linguists and methodologists on the

concepts concerning language and methodology.

I. Communicative Language Teaching.

The history of language teaching has shown a lot of changes in approaches and methods,

which reflects the recognition of changes in the sort of proficiency learners need. Teaching a

second language used to be aimed at enabling learners to read and appreciate class of literature.

Therefore, any teacher who was able to reach this aim was thought to be a good teacher (Le Van

Canh, 2004).

Most learners of English recently desire to be able to communicate with others in the

language they learn. Parallel with this change in the aim of learning English, methods of

teaching have been changed. For a long time, many language teaching methodologists have

constantly looked for the most appropriate way to teach English effectively. As a result, many

language teaching methods and approaches have come into being such as:

• Grammar-translation method

• The Direct method

• The Audio-lingual method

• The Audio-visual method

• Communicative Language Teaching.

Mackey (1965) remarks that most of the methods which have ever been developed still

continue to exist in one form or another as each method has its advantages and disadvantages.

For example, grammar-translation method is easy to implement and cheap to administer, which

makes it still be used in many classroom situations.

In this thesis, the author just focused on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) as it

is considered one of the most effective approaches to teach learners to communicate in a

language they learnt. Accordingly, CLT has become an “umbrella” term which covers a wide

range of classroom practices.

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