Compared to previous researches on the development of learners speaking ability through communication activities, these studies have led to a consistent conclusion that students’
speaking abilities can be developed thanks to the use of communication activities. In addition, cadets’ test results have shown that their pronunciation and speaking ability’s pronunciation and grammar changed more after this research. There are many benefits of learning resources that cadets could use. For this study, a teaching method was communicative activities since they are various methods in real-life environments and provide a wealth of contextualized language. The study has found whether cadets can learn the ability to speak and investigate the attitudes of cadets towards learning the ability to speak through communication activities. The motivation of the first-year ADA cadets has also been well developed. According to the data from the post-action questionnaire, a significant number of cadets agreed that they were involved in communication activities.
Moreover, the observation results have shown the optimistic mindset of cadets in the course of speaking lessons towards communicative activities. Nearly all cadets were participating, and they were meant to approach. Furthermore, cadets admitted that the communicative activities in speaking lessons could allow them to retrieve pronunciation, improve their vocabulary and strengthen their grammar structures.
Besides, communicative activities will be a suitable technique for teaching and learning speaking skills for first-year ADA cadets and military cadets in general. Most of the cadets enjoy speaking lessons using communicative activities. In other words, they desired to have more time to practice more because they realized that their speaking ability was developed. Besides, most of the participants were optimistic about using communicative activities to improve their speaking ability. They agreed that using communicative activities made the lessons more interesting.
In classes, it was worth recommending the implementation of communicative activities in speaking lessons. It was seen that the importance of communication activities was strongly shown in developing the speaking ability of cadets. In addition, communicative activities were also helpful methods for enhancing the engagement and interest of cadets.
However, besides the benefits, the data collected from the questionnaire revealed some challenges had reported. For instance, teachers need to add more suitable speaking lessons of communicative activities for different cadets’ levels.
6. Conclusion
The research aimed to use communicative activities to develop 33 first-year ADA cadets’ speaking skills at ADAFA.
At the Academy, the cadets encountered difficulties when participating in speaking lessons and speaking tests because of the limitation of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
Furthermore, they seemingly lacked motivation and interest in learning speaking. Therefore, this research was intended to suggest using communicative activities to develop the speaking
ability of the first-year ADA cadets at the ADAFA. The action research results with four instruments, such as a pre-test and post-test, questionnaire, observation, and interview, show both benefits and drawbacks in using communicative activities in teaching English language skills.
To sum up, considering the drawn challenge, the use of communicative activities could provide cadets with desirable benefits in terms of developing their speaking ability.
Implications
According to the study’s findings, implementing the use of the questions and answers technique and role-play technique has been shown to enhance the cadets’ speaking ability.
It has helped to strengthen the teaching and learning processes. However, the application of these methods should correspond to the situation of daily life and the cadets’
background experience so that the cadets’ awareness of the lesson was also enhanced and it could be implemented in real life.
Limitations of the study
Although the action research was conducted fruitfully, limitations are still inevitable.
Firstly, the research was conducted on a small and selective number of 33 cadets who were not chosen at random; therefore, the importance and overview of the results can be limited and may not be indicative of all non-major English cadets at ADAFA.
Secondly, a further limitation that also limits the relevance of the study focuses only on ways to support the involvement of cadets in those forms of activities. Meanwhile, speaking ability is evaluated in several other aspects. It could take a long time to cover all these things that this study could not. It was also the reason why the researcher just took only one cycle of the action research.
Finally, because the cadets at the Academy have to participate in numerous other activities, such as shooting, physical fitness, and drilling command of the army, the research time is not suitable. These practices would affect the success of the cadets in the class and the examinations.
While there are certain drawbacks of using action research in this study, the feedback from cadets in the interviews can also substitute for the study’s shortcomings.
Suggestions for further study
In order to achieve a more significant outcome for future study, all the disadvantages mentioned above should be addressed more effectively. For more analysis, the researcher would like to make some suggestions as follow:
Firstly, this study only investigated 33 first-year cadets in ADAFA so that researchers or instructors may experiment with a broader number of cadets to acquire more real evidence on the impact of improving speaking ability through using communicative activities.
Secondly, this study was not carried out the cycle two because of the limitation of the study.
Thus, researchers can extend their research limitation to complete the full cycles of the action research to get more accurate results.
Thirdly, researchers may perform research outsides the classroom. Since they need to incorporate real-life scenarios to help learners learn the language efficiently by applying communicative activities. Teachers should take their cadets to go outside the classroom and then examine how their speaking skills improve.
Finally, teachers and researchers at ADAFA and other educational institutions should bring more work into studies on using communicative activities in various fields of language learning in order to generalize the study’s results.
References
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Tóm tắt
Nghiên cứu này nhằm mục đích sử dụng các hoạt động giao tiếp để phát triển khả năng nói của học viên chuyên ngành Pháo phòng không năm thứ nhất tại Học viện Phòng không - Không quân. Số lượng học viên tham dự là 33 học viên chuyên ngành Pháo phòng không.
Nghiên cứu sử dụng nghiên cứu hành động trong lớp học kéo dài 10 tuần, gồm nhiều hoạt động giao tiếp như đóng vai, hoạt động trao đổi thông tin, hội thoại và các hoạt động suy nghĩ-ghép cặp-chia sẻ đã được sử dụng để giảng dạy cho các học viên ADA năm thứ nhất.
Công cụ nghiên cứu được sử dụng là kiểm tra nói, bảng câu hỏi, quan sát và phỏng vấn.
Bài kiểm tra nói được sử dụng để đánh giá khả năng nói của học viên trước và sau khi thực hiện nghiên cứu. Bảng câu hỏi và quan sát cũng được sử dụng để đánh giá sự phát triển khả năng nói của người tham gia và thái độ của họ đối với các hoạt động giao tiếp. Kết quả sau bài kiểm tra cho thấy những người tham gia đã phát triển khả năng nói của họ một cách đáng kể thông qua việc sử dụng các hoạt động giao tiếp trong hơn hai tháng. Dữ liệu từ bảng câu hỏi và quan sát cho thấy học viên có thái độ tích cực đối với các hoạt động giao tiếp bởi chúng cho học viên cảm giác thú vị, thoải mái và thư giãn hơn. Học viên cũng mong muốn có đa dạng loại hình hoạt động giao tiếp hơn nữa trong tương lai. Bên cạnh đó, nghiên cứu này được kỳ vọng sẽ giúp các học viên phát triển khả năng nói của họ, và các giáo viên có thể có một phương pháp hữu ích khác để làm cho các bài học nói của họ trở nên hấp dẫn hơn.
AN EVALUATION ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ROLE PLAYS IN IMPROVING TECHNICAL COLLEGE STUDENTS’ ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS
ĐÁNH GIÁ ỨNG DỤNG CỦA KỸ THUẬT ĐÓNG VAI TRONG VIỆC CẢI THIỆN KỸ NĂNG NÓI TIẾNG ANH CỦA SINH VIÊN TRƯỜNG CAO ĐẲNG KỸ THUẬT
Bui Trung Kien, MA.
Vietnam National University of Agriculture Abstract
The actual aim of the research is improving students’ English speaking skills through the application of role plays by collecting the evidence to demonstrate how engaged the technical college students. Consequently, the researcher would be able to discover what was successful and what needed more adjustments in future applications. The results of the 6-week project have shown the innovation’s success in term of providing the students with an enjoyable and friendly environment to improve their speaking skills through interacting with many other students. Also, this is hoped to be an effective source for other researchers who work in other contexts to serve the purposes of education.
Key words: role plays, speaking, skills, evaluation, engagement
1. Introduction
The evidence-based study presents the evaluation of Role Plays innovation, with its judgments on how well it has worked to improve the teaching and learning process and for its future development as well. The innovation aims to enhance students’ communication skills through role plays so as to reduce technical college student’s speaking anxiety, with its research question
“How do Vietnamese Technical College students respond to the application of role plays to reduce speaking anxiety in English speaking?”
Due to the limitation of time, the research was conducted for 6 weeks, which means that the researcher has had a great deal of difficulties in understanding deeply underpinning aspects. In addition, the students’ understanding about the innovation could still be limited.
However, it will be brought to the on-going research for the development of the innovation in the future.
On the contrary, the researcher also plays a role as an “insider researcher”, from his
“inside” observation; the context and the students’ learning backgrounds are acknowledged attentively, it is likely to bring accurate results and appropriate interpretations for the study. Besides, the number of the students, only 15, is reasonable for a small-scale
research, which helps the researcher discover each individually carefully. What’s more, the enthusiasm and sincerity of students, who are 18 years old, made the researcher conduct the study more feasibly.
In my current teaching context, the class has 15 male students, who are aged at 18 years old, and their major is Information Technology at a technical college in Hanoi. For the characteristics of learning IT, very few female students participate in the major, and from the researcher’s observation, the IT students seem to spend a great deal of time with computers and lack confidence to communicate with the people around them. They come from many towns in the north of Vietnam, and have had different learning backgrounds.
However, they all have experienced the common teaching methods, grammar and translation, in order to deal with only grammar-based exams. As a result, thinking too much about appropriate grammar structures really slows down their speaking speed, whenever expressing ideas, they feel nervous and inhibited. Moreover, they find it unfamiliar with some activities which require interaction such as working in team and having a project. They expressed that the learner-centered method in higher education is strange, in which they are supposed to communicate with others considerably, and discover the knowledge by themselves, while they have been familiar with “feeding knowledge” in their previous education. In Vietnam, Hoang (2000) also stated that passing the school exams is the popular goal of learning English in Vietnam, and exams are mostly about grammar structures, therefore, the limitation of communication practice leads to students’
embarrassment and anxious feelings; a typical weakness of Vietnamese students.
As according to Holiday (1994), the traditional education has impacted on how the learners learn a language. Lewis and McCook (2002) stressed that Asian traditions have influenced teaching in Vietnam with the teacher-centered methods, so the students tend to
“receive” the language rather than “construct” it.
Nevertheless, in a research, Tomlinson and Dat (2004) stated that Vietnamese students were not passive, but the teachers should take consideration about the students’ feelings and their own teaching methods. Littlewood (2000) also stressed that Asian students are not really “obedient listeners”, on the other hand; they enjoy group activities in a friendly classroom atmosphere.
Moreover, they are interested in discovering knowledge by themselves, not only being
“spoon-fed”.
Fortunately, the study was implemented in a private technical college, and the learning English target is not only reading IT materials, but also improving communication skills for their future careers. Exams are not grammar structures but all practical skills, especially in that speaking and listening skills are taken into consideration even more than the other skills. This is a vital factor which makes the study feasible since the institution is eager for an innovation to be able to compete with other institutions in a competitive environment, Hanoi the capital.
The social context and teaching context have been investigated cautiously before conducting the study. Moreover, the researcher took into account the recent studies about the application of role plays in improving speaking skills and reducing speaking anxiety, which are sorted out with 3 main aspects: the linguistic difficulty, the cognitive challenge, and the role of teachers.
Regarding the Linguistic Difficulty, Walesko (2000) and Ur (2007) stressed that role plays require a great deal of repeated practice with vocabulary and structures before the presentation part. Also, the teachers provide more extra language when needed.
In addition, role plays are able to solve the Cognitive issue. Thanks to the purpose of role play activities – communication, the mistakes are really necessary only when they cause misunderstandings (Walesko, 2000). What is more, not only “single structure” could be used in role playing activities, but also doing actions, body language, and charts which could help for the communication aims (Epstein & Ormistion, 2007). Plus, Kyriakopoulos (2008), Epstein and
Ormiston (2007) argued that interesting, challenging and familiar topics will activate students’ creativity in a cozy and friendly environment.
Teachers’ roles are extremely related to the student-centered teaching method, the students have great opportunities and freedom to express their own ideas, while teachers’
roles are minor, even if they act as organizers, supporters, facilitators and spectators, who appreciate the students’ ideas in a enjoyable environment (Walesko, 2000; Dorathy, 2011).
The culture context, teaching context and recent studies about the innovation of role plays have been analyzed carefully before being applied in my own teaching place. The study was carried out for 6 weeks. From the second to the fifth week, the application of role plays were to point out how engaged the students were to improve speaking skills and reduce speaking anxiety. The textbooks chosen by the facility have been adapted for the innovation, the topics for role play have been selecting based on the contents from each unit, new challenging and interesting topics could be extended but in familiar contexts in Vietnam so as to help the students focus on the language being learnt and to be realistic.
That is why; the application of role play is designed only in a Vietnamese context in general, and in a technical college in Hanoi in particular, which makes the paper different from other previous studies about role plays.