Part A: Introduction
I. Rationale
The economic open- door policy pursued by the government of Vietnam has
increased a demand for studying English. Many people are expected to be competent to
communicate verbally with the outside world and to access technology. In correspondence
to this trend, in almost all of schools, colleges, universities, English is a compulsory
subject. HGMSS, where I have been working for 7 years, is not an exception.
Besides the aim of passing their exams and getting some further studies for their
future life, all students have a desire to be integrated into the culture, the civilization, and
the people of English speaking countries. They expect to have a good knowledge of
English to read books and magazines, to see films or to sing English songs, etc. As a result,
learning English now is not only an interest but also a practical need for many people.
Together with the growing demand for learning English, there has been an
innovation in English teaching and learning methods everywhere in Vietnam. For a long
time, language teaching in Vietnam was strongly influenced by the structuralist tradition.
Emphasis was placed on mastery of language structures. Students have been taught how to
form correct utterances and to understand the structures of the language without any
consideration of language use. Students have been asked to learn every single word by
heart, and translate or analyze grammatically every sentence in the text. The teacher has
often taken up almost all the time in class explaining the form of language to students who
were passive recipients. As a result, this kind teaching and learning, of course, has been the
“production” of students who were structurally competent but communicatively
incompetent.
However, as the result of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research, language
teaching has moved from the traditional to a more communicative approach. In this current
approach, language is considered as a form of social behavior. The objective of language
teaching is teaching learners to communicate fluently, appropriately and spontaneously in
the cultural context of the target language. Communicative competence, according to
Canale and Swain (1980), is made up of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic
competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence.
1
With 7 years of experience in teaching English at HGMSS, I find that students have
to learn English in two semesters in the curriculum and English is often taught in the first
school - year. At the end of each semester, the students have to take a written test, not an
oral one. Therefore, most of the time is spent on grammar points because many of the
students have never learnt English before and the teachers have to try to keep to the
syllabus, that is, to finish the course- book entitled “Headway Elementary”. In addition,
many students are too shy to speak in class whereas most of the grammar lessons are
carried out in traditional methods. That is, the teacher presents new grammar verbally, and
then students do, turn by turn, exercises in workbooks. As a consequence, the students find
it hard to speak out as well as to communicate in the real life naturally.
The question of how to equip students with grammatical competence so that they
can use the language to communicate in any situation has become a matter of teachers of
English in general and teachers of English at HGMSS in particular.
For the above reasons, in this minor thesis, the author intend to figure out what
difficulties are experienced by teachers in teaching grammar communicatively and then
to give some suggestions to reduce the difficulties.
II. Scope, objectives, significance, method and design of the study.
II.1. The scope of the study
The study is concerned with finding the teachers’ difficulties in teaching grammar
communicatively for ethnic minority students at HGMSS. The study of others would be
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