Some of my own experience in improving students ability of speaking english in junior high school

I PROBLEM SITUATION: Reasons for choosing the theme: 1.1 Rationale of theory: Nowadays, English is playing a very important role in the global development Therefore, the teaching of English has been improved in method of the communicative, learner-centered approach which is adaptable to give students many opportunities to communicate in English However, at many junior high schools in Vietnam, the teaching of English has not really developed students’ ability, activeness and motivation 1.2 Rationale of practice: Speaking is a crucial part of language learning The mastery of speaking skill in English is a priority for many language learners Nowadays, many learners even consider the ability to speak the language is the aim of language learning They often evaluate their success in language learning as well as the effectiveness of their English courses on the basic of how well they feel they have improved in the spoken language proficiency Despite its importance, for a long time, teaching speaking has been depreciated Traditional teaching methods have seemed to emphasize the learning of language system (rules of grammar and lists of vocabulary items …) as a goal in its own right and failed to give learners an ability to gain realistic experiences in actually using the language knowledge gained Moreover, very often when people study a language, they accumulate a lot of 'up-in the head' knowledge, but then find that they can't actually use this language to express what they want to There seem to be some difficulties in moving language from 'up-there' knowledge to actively usable language Without experience in using the language, students may tend to be nervous about trying to say something Nowadays things have been different Today's world requires that the goal of learning speaking English should develop students' communication skill so that students can express themselves and use the target language to state opinions, express their feelings and exchange information Many new teaching methods have been introduced and applied to serve the basic need of English learners Among them, communicative approach and learner-centered approach seem to be the most effective ways to teach oral communication Also, we should apply these methods in teaching the four skills and focus on designing speaking activities in appropriate stages of English lessons while teaching other skills so that students always have a lot of chances to practice speaking while learning English 1.3 Urgency: Now I am teaching English at a junior high school near my house I used to teach English at two other junior high schools in my district What I have realized is that a large number of students are afraid of learning to speak English and say that it is difficult for them to be good at this skill and there is not a real language environment for them to their practice every day Moreover, their awareness of importance of being good at this skill is not really made clear because speaking skill is not usually included in their exams, so they often learn English only for their written exams, not for communication In addition, some teachers of English not still manage to put real interest in their lessons Another reason is because of the lack of necessary equipment for teaching English at many schools in Viet Nam Indeed, the school where I am working as a teacher of English has been famous for its good quality in education for years Most students of my school are well brought up by their parents and they identify a good motivation in their studying, which leads to their better study results for English as well as other subjects at school However, according to the survey carried out at the beginning of this school year at my school, more than 70% of the students reported that they are worried about their English speaking skill They said that they could hardly make a simple conversation in English or express what they thought Importantly, most of them assumed that speaking is very difficult for them to master Therefore, if students not learn how to speak or not get many opportunities to speak in the language classroom, they may soon get de-motivated and lose interest in learning On the other hand, if the right activities are taught in the right way, speaking in class can be a lot of fun, raising general learner motivation and making the English language classroom fun and dynamic 1.4 My ability: Necessarily, among the teachers of my school I should work harder and harder so as to master the language and always give my students good lessons, which means that my students always have the chance to develop their speaking skill in the language That is the matter I have been absorbed in and that is the reason for my theme Purpose of study: I would like to give out some of my own experience in improving students’ ability of speaking English Researched knowledge: Ways to make students more excited about developing their speaking skill and ways to encourage students to feel confident enough to express their ideas in front of the class Researched participants: Students of my junior high school Ways to conduct the theme: - My real teaching at my school - Surveys Time and place for conducting the theme: - Time: School year 2018- 2019 - Place: At my junior high school II PROBLEM SOLUTION: Logical basis: The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative efficiency Learners should be able to make themselves understood To help students develop communicative efficiency in speaking, instructors can use a balanced activities approach that combines language input, structured output, and communicative output 2 Practical basis: For most learners, the ability to speak a foreign language is synonymous with knowing that language because speech is the basic means of human communication English learners no longer expect the traditional approach of their teachers based on developing mainly the grammatical competence and using methodology popular in the past Today, teachers are expected to provide their students with useful active knowledge of the foreign language, not just theory about the language Developing students’ speaking skill while teaching speaking itself: There are many rules teachers of English must remember while teaching speaking so that they can help students improve their speaking skill 3.1 Firstly, teachers must make sure that students feel safe and confident while they express themselves: In my point of view, the first thing that teachers have to to help students improve their speaking skill is that they have to help them overcome their feelings of shyness and nervousness when practicing English in their class One of the best ways to solve this problem is to put them in 'safe' situations in class where they are inspired and encouraged to manage to use the language from their background Organizing communicative activities in pairs, in groups is also an effective way to serve this aim Working in pairs, in groups, students will feel less anxious when they are 'on show' in front of the whole class together Moreover, pair-work and group-work can help shy students who would never say anything in a whole class activity have the confidence to open their mouths Students can also learn from one another's new ideas so that they will have something to speak in front of the class later Another thing that teachers should remember to help students have confidence in speaking is teachers’ positive correction and feedback Making errors is a natural and unavoidable part of the learning process, but how to correct students’ errors is particularly important Teachers need to provide appropriate feedbacks and corrections, but they ought not to interrupt the flow of communication Teachers should take notes while pairs or groups are talking and address the problems to the class after the activity without embarrassing the student who made the error Teachers can also write the errors on the board and ask who can correct it Teachers should encourage their students to speak whatever they can and focus on what they have got right, not on what they have got wrong Teachers should also help them to develop positive attitudes towards their friends’ errors and to correct themselves Teachers should try to develop for themselves positive strategies of error corrections When students achieve success in oral communication, they will feel confident and secure and they will enjoy learning English Also, they will have confidence to take part in communicative activities later 3.2 Secondly, teachers must pay attention to warm-up activities: Warm-up is also an important part which contributes to the success of a speaking lesson Warm-ups help learners put aside their daily distractions and focus on English Warm-ups also encourage whole-group participation which can build a sense of community within the group and warm-ups can help to arouse students' interest in speaking Teachers should vary warm-up activities to attract students' attention and interest because if they feel excited about their lessons from the beginning, they will make a good contribution to it In order to give students exciting readiness for their speaking lesson, teachers can different things to arouse students’ interest by using various teaching techniques such as brainstorming, word web, chatting, etc Before a new lesson I often motivate my students by chatting to them about the topic of interest, giving them preparation tasks or quick warm-up to get them in the right mood for the new lesson Brainstorming is one of the simplest teaching techniques, but it is one of the most effective kinds of motivation because it takes a short time I can write key words on the blackboard and the class is encouraged to think of ideas, words, phrases associated with them I have taught my grade students English since the beginning of this school year The following slide was designed on my power point lesson plan for one speaking lesson (Grade selective subject - Period 5) My students were divided into two teams The first team tried to put as many adjectives describing people’s characters as they could around the key word “CHARACTERS” and the second team tried to the similar thing with the key word “APPEARANCE” When the time allowed was over, the team with more correct words was the winner After that, the class was required to predict the topic of the speaking lesson The fact is that they were really interested in their speaking topic “DESCRIBING PEOPLE” The possible answer key for the warm-up activity For Period 15 (Grade selective subject), I used the technique “word web” in order to warm up the speaking lesson This activity could help my students revise the prepositions of place they had learned and could help them get ready for the new lesson with more interest The possible answer key for the warm-up activity Next, these pictures were shown so as to elicit the topic of the speaking lesson and my students could easily find out that the speaking topic was “DESCRIBING ROOMS IN A HOUSE” 3.3 Thirdly, students must be well-prepared and well-instructed before they practice speaking English: Another point that makes it difficult for students to practice speaking English is that their knowledge of the language is poor and they don't have enough ideas to talk about the topic As a result, in order to help students their speaking tasks better, teachers have to provide them with necessary language input and give students clear instructions The following example is given as an illustration This slide is extracted from my power point lesson plan (Period 15- Grade selective subject) Although I was sure that the students had learned this grammatical knowledge from their previous lessons in Unit (Tiếng Anh 8), I still gave the students the chance to learn this knowledge again Moreover, the “WORDWEB” warm-up activity mentioned above also helped my students to look back the useful prepositions of place This necessary language input could make “DESCRIBING ROOMS IN A HOUSE” speaking task easier for my students 3.4 Fourthly, varying communicative activities is also important: As I have just presented above, effective methods of teaching indirectly encourage oral interaction and they can provide motivation The direct way to promote oral communication is to provide students with opportunities to participate and to communicate with each other so that students can learn the language from speaking The more opportunities of speaking the language they have, the more fluent they become Actually, various activities in each lesson add interest to students and help make students more dynamic and active In speaking, students will be motivated if teachers provide them with various communicative activities Below are some common speaking activities that I often carry out in my classes to make my speaking lessons more interesting and to motivate my students in practicing speaking English: 3.4.1 Discussions: In a discussion, students may aim to arrive at a conclusion, share ideas about an event, or find solutions Before a discussion, it is essential that the purpose of the discussion activity is set by their teachers In this way, the discussion points are relevant to this purpose In a discussion, teachers can form groups of or students Then each group works on their topic for a given time period and presents their opinions to the class For efficient group discussions, it is always better not to form large groups because quiet students may avoid contributing their ideas in large groups Generally speaking, in class or group discussions, whatever the aim is, students should always be encouraged to ask questions, paraphrase ideas, express supports, check for clarification, and so on 3.4.2 Role play: Another way of getting students to speak is role-play Students pretend they are in various social contexts and have a variety of social roles In role-play activities, teachers give learners information such as who they are and what they think or how they feel 3.4.3 Information gaps: In this activity, students are supposed to be working in pairs One student will have the information that the other partner does not have and the two partners will share their information Information gap activities serve many purposes such as solving a problem or collecting information… These activities are effective because everybody has the opportunity to talk extensively in the target language The aim of this activity is to get learners to use the language they are learning to interact in realistic and meaningful ways, usually involving exchanges of information and opinions An example is illustrated in Unit 11/ part A3-Period 67 (Tiếng Anh 7) This is a speaking lesson The grade students were divided into close pairs In each pair, one was A and the other was B They had to fill in the missing information to complete the medical records (A and B) In order to encourage my students to feel more confident for the speaking task, I first let them use different target language structures (which school does he go to?/ where does he study?/ which school does he study at?/ how tall is he? / what is his height?/ where does he live?/ what is his home address?/……….) which were easy enough for them Afterwards, I encouraged their classmates to give the other ways of making the questions and the answers In addition, good marks were given to my students’ good work and no bad marks were given to any bad speaking work This speaking lesson continued with another gap-information task The class was divided into pairs, too (not the same students are paired in different classroom activities) In each of the pairs, one was a nurse and the other was a patient They had to make dialogues to complete their medical records 3.4.4 Brainstorming: This helps students produce ideas in a limited amount of time The good characteristics of brainstorming is that students are not criticized for their ideas, so students will be open to sharing new ideas Brainstorming is one of the simplest, but the most effective kind of motivation because it is not timeconsuming Teacher can write a key word on the blackboard and the class is encouraged to think of ideas, words, phrases associated with them 3.4.5 Storytelling: Students can briefly summarize a tale or a story they heard from somebody beforehand, or they may create their own stories to tell their classmates Storytelling fosters creative thinking 3.4.6 Interviews: Students can conduct interviews on selected topics with various people It is a good idea that teachers provide a rubric to students so that they know what type of questions they can ask or what path to follow, but students should prepare their own interview questions 3.4.7 Reporting: Before coming to class, students are asked to read a newspaper or magazine and, in class, they report to their friends what they find as the most interesting news Students can also talk about whether they have experienced anything worth telling their friends in their daily lives before class 3.4.8 Group planning tasks: An example of this is planning a party or an excursion for the whole group In this activity, teachers should allow them a good amount of time to prepare for a presentation in which they attempt to persuade the rest of the class to agree with their arrangements 3.4.9 Picture Narrating: This activity is based on several sequential pictures Students are asked to tell the story taking place in the sequential pictures by paying attention to the criteria provided by their teachers as a rubric Rubrics can include the vocabulary or structures they need to use while narrating 3.4.10 Picture Describing: One way to make use of pictures in a speaking activity is to give students just one picture and having them describe what it is in the picture For this activity, students can form groups and each group is given a different picture Students discuss the picture with their groups, then a spokesperson for each group describes the picture to the whole class This activity fosters the creativity and imagination of learners as well as their public speaking skills 3.5 Last but not least, teachers should also pay attention to these points: The communicative activities listed above can help teachers a lot in promoting their students' speaking skills because they are quite interesting and they give students a reason to speak in different situations and about different topics However, how teachers should run an activity effectively so as to achieve their aims is also a problem Here I would like to provide you with a basic route-map plan for running a simple EFL activity (English as a Foreign Language): Activity route map: Teachers should: Before the lesson: (teachers prepare at home) - familiarize themselves with the material and the activity - prepare any materials or texts they need In class: - lead-in and prepare for the activity (this may help to raise motivation or interest, or perhaps to focus on language items that might be useful in the activity - model the conversation or the talk Typical lead-ins are: showing a picture connected to the topic, asking questions/writing up or reading out a sentence starting a viewpoint, eliciting reactions/ - set up the activity: giving instructions, making groupings, organizing the class, ect - run the activity: Students the activity, maybe in pairs or in groups while teachers monitor and help them - close the activity and invite feedbacks from learners: Teachers ask some groups to perform in front of the class and give feedbacks Post activity: - any appropriate follow-on work Good atmosphere in the class and friendly relationship between teachers and students: Presenting their opinions and feelings in front of a lot of people in their native language has been a challenge to many people and using another language to convey what they want to say is of course more challenging Therefore, if the teacher does not encourage his students and make them feel good about their teacher and their lessons, the class will become tense and dull and interaction cannot take place in the class effectively As a teacher in a language class, we should always create a good class atmosphere from the beginning because our students, especially young students, will have no communication if they not feel good about their teachers and their English class Teacher's and students' involvement: The main aim of organizing a communicative activity is to get students to speak, then one way to achieve that would be for a teacher to reduce his own contributions Probably the less a teacher speaks, the more space it will allow his students It could be useful to aim to say nothing while the activity is underway, and save any contribution for before and after Improving students’ speaking while teaching other skills: 4.1 While teaching reading, listening and writing: As it has been mentioned above, speaking is an important skill to any learners of English or any other languages Therefore, teachers must help students to make full use of every chance to practice speaking This can be done at different stages of a lesson: Pre-, While- and Post- Before students read or listen to a text/ a dialogue/ a conversation or write about a certain topic, they should be prepared for what they are going to read about in advance by discussing some questions and talking about their own experiences relating to the topic These activities can be carried out in pairs or in groups, or sometimes teachers ask questions and students answer The teacher at this time should play the role of an assistant Teachers should use different ways to encourage students to be engaged in oral communication and to present their ideas Teachers can also apply this when they present new language (vocabulary, structures, etc.) or review what their students have learned Teachers can make students think and pay more attention to their teaching by asking students for their opinions, suggestions, or by encouraging them to guess new words, by having them contribute what they remember or already know instead of introducing directly the new lesson Some of the communicative tasks teachers can give students while teaching listening or reading or writing may be as follows:  Discussing about the text  Summarizing texts  Reviewing texts  Using a 'follow-up' speaking task related to the topic Clearly, teachers can encourage students to share their knowledge with those who not and teachers can help students make full use of every chance to practice speaking And in fact, telling someone about what they have read or listened is a very natural reaction to a text Speaking activities can be also used as a mean for students to check their answers with each other after they listen or read a text/ a dialogue/… Students may answer their teachers’ questions directly or discuss the questions in pairs 10 Furthermore, teachers can encourage students to talk by asking them to summarize what they have read or listened Students take turns to talk in groups and then they may present their ideas in pairs 4.2 Some illustrations of TEACHING SPEAKING by using communicative tasks while teaching reading, listening or writing: 4.2.1 Pre-reading stage: I designed a discussion activity in the pre-reading stage of Period 30 (Unit 5/B3- Tiếng Anh 7) My students worked in groups of or 5, discussing the following two questions: - As a Vietnamese student, what you usually at recess? - Do you think American students often the same things or different things at recess? Another illustration is that my students had to discuss the question “What you often after school?” in the pre-reading part of Period 31 (Unit 6/A1Tiếng Anh 7) The students were encouraged to answer the question in close pairs in a given amount of time and then they worked in two teams, completing the wordwebs in a limited amount of time 4.2.2 Pre-listening stage: The following is a pre-listening activity designed to give my students the chance to practice speaking English I had prepared a photo of a library and in the pre-listening part of the fifth lesson of Unit (B3,4- Tiếng Anh 7), I told my students to look at the photo and answer my question: “Is it a photo of a library?” It was quite easy for my students to give their answer “Yes” 11 Next, a series of other questions were raised and some individuals of the class gave their answers to the questions when the rest of the class listened and corrected their classmates’ mistakes if necessary “What are they?” (The answer key: They are the bookshelves.) “What can you see on the shelves?” (The answer key: I can see many books.) “What is it?” (The answer key: It is the study area/ the reading area.) “Who are they?” (The answer key: They are the readers.) 12 Then, the picture of a library (Unit 4/B3- Tiếng Anh 7) was introduced to the class and other questions were raised: “What is it for number 8?” (The answer key: It is the librarian’s desk.) “Where is it?” “What is it for number 1?” (The answer key: It is the study area.) “Where is it?” “What are they for number and number 5?” (The answer key: They are the racks.) “Where are they?” ect 13 This activity helped my students practice speaking something by answering my questions and by student-student correcting their mistakes and helped me present the new vocabulary in an active interaction with the students Another illustration is a discussion question in the pre-listening activity of lesson of Unit (B4 - Tiếng Anh 7) My students were asked to look at the pictures of the five things that Mrs Robinson buys and my students (in close pairs) answer the question “What does Mrs Robinson buy?” I raised the question so as to check my students’ knowledge for the vocabulary shown in the pictures and gave them the opportunity to talk something 4.2.3 Pre-writing stage: In fact, almost all writing tasks are often designed in the post-reading, postlistening and post-speaking stages of the lessons in Tiếng Anh and Tiếng Anh The writing skill is taught much more officially in Tiếng Anh and Tiếng Anh In order to help my students better the writing task “Write lists of things you in different seasons and then write about you, beginning with In the spring, I…………” for Unit 13/B2 (Tiếng Anh 6), my grade students were first encouraged to make dialogues with their partners Example: Student A: What you in the spring? Student B: I usually ride a bike What you in the spring? Student A: I often go fishing What you in the fall? Student B: I …………………………… …………………………… etc 4.2.4 Post-reading stage: Various speaking activities are often designed in this part of a reading lesson These are the illustrations: For lesson of Unit 1/ B1,2,3 (Period 4- Tiếng Anh 7), I gave my students the chance to retell about Hoa as the post-reading activity The re-telling task was done with the help of the NET on the board Another example is the post-reading activity of asking and answering questions about the library plan in B1 (“Where are the newspapers and magazines?” / “They are on the racks in the middle of the library.” / …) and describing this library 4.2.5 Post-listening stage: “Make your own dialogues, using the given cues” was a post-listening activity of lesson of Unit 13/ B1,2 (Tiếng Anh 7) In this activity, my students worked in open pairs and close pairs Good marks were given to the students with their good demonstration and no bad marks were given in this activity in order to arouse my students’ confidence, motivation and excitement Before that above-mentioned speaking task, a game (used as a transitional tool) called MIMING was designed so as to fill in the activity with more excitement 14 [ one student was miming playing soccer The rest of the class tried to guess what he was doing Then, this student invited his classmate to play soccer with him, basing on the following suggestion: ] 4.3 Improving students’ speaking skill while teaching “grammar practice” or “language focus”: Teaching grammar sometimes makes students feel passive and bored Mostly, teachers only teach grammar rules and ask students to exercises in a passive way If we observe a Traditional Grammar Teaching class in most of the schools in our district, we may find out that nearly every teacher follows a simple way like this: Firstly, the teacher lists the grammar rules Then, the students learn by heart all the rules and some exercises Lastly, the teacher gives more written exercises such as blank-filling or translation, … This is quite similar to what we called 3P theory: Presentation, Practice and Production These three stages convey different purposes Presentation is to present new language in context so that the meaning is clear, to present the new form in a natural spoken or written text so that students can see its use in discourse, to link the new form to what students already know, to check comprehension, to elicit the form from students where possible and exploit their existing knowledge And when students learn English this way, some of them would have good command of English especially in the examinations, but when they open their mouth, they always find that they can’t get a proper word to express themselves or sometimes when someone points out some mistakes in their speech they can hardly believe that they have made such silly mistakes Most of my students mention that they are quite sure to have learned the corresponding term but they can’t help making mistakes when they talk That is the question which is going to be focused on Nowadays, most of us realize that in order to teach grammar lessons effectively so that students can not only remember grammar rules but also apply the language in communication, we should resourcefully move as quickly as possible from certain pattern drills to oral interaction because each student really likes talking about his or her own ideas and feelings We should 15 give them a reason to use the structure we teach in conversation Let’s look at some examples: A very simple communication task is designed in the GRAMMAR PRACTICE lesson immediately after Unit 14 (Tiếng Anh 6) A series of questions were raised and my students practiced asking and answering them This activity was a transition to EXERCISE Another illustration is seen in LANGUAGE FOCUS lesson (Tiếng Anh 7) With the target grammatical knowledge of the PAST SIMPLE TENSE, my students were asked to look at the given pictures and answer the question orally And immediately after this interaction activity was another interaction one …etc… Above are some examples in which we can use communicative tasks to help students practice English while learning Grammar Giving them as many chances to practice speaking English as possible is the best way to help them improve their speaking skill 4.4 Developing students’ speaking skill while teaching “PresentationPractice-Production” lessons: This illustration is extracted from lesson of Unit 14 (Tiếng Anh 6) This oral task was designed in the production stage of the lesson In order to make the communicative activity easy enough for my students to fulfill, I gave each of them the hand-out and helped them complete their network on their hand-outs first 16 * RESULTS: After a period of time of conducting these solutions, to my expectation, I have gained satisfying results I've found that my students have become more confident and active in their speaking lessons Many of them said that they no longer feel their speaking lessons stressful and too difficult Most of them admitted that their speaking skill has been improved a lot day by day In fact, I usually encourage my students to feel excited and confident in their oral skill; therefore, I usually give them good grades when they their speaking tasks well or quite well and I not discourage them by giving them bad grades when they not fulfill their oral exercises Instead of that, I always give these students positive feedbacks so that they will try their best later However, my students are told that their speaking skill is always assessed during the school year and their constant progress is always positively taken into consideration In addition, their results for the final term oral exams account for 30% of the total results for this language subject Class 7B Number of students 24 Mark and over total rate 20 83,3% Under mark total rate 04 16,7% 17 Grade Number of Mark and over Under mark students total rate total rate 44 37 84,1% 07 15,9% III CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Conclusion: Speaking is an important part of second language learning to any learners The ability to communicate in English clearly and efficiently contributes to great success of the learner in school and to far better success later in his life Therefore, it is essential that language teachers pay great attention to helping students develop their speaking skill rather than leading students to pure memorization Teachers should provide students with a rich environment where meaningful communication takes place while teaching any other skill With this aim, various speaking activities can contribute a great deal to students in developing basic interactive skills necessary for life These activities make students more active in the learning process and at the same time make their learning more meaningful and fun for them And remember the English proverb: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” Recommendations: Recommendations to THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING COMMITTEE DIVISION and my school: - I recommend that THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING COMMITTEE DIVISION hold more sample teaching lessons, using various useful teaching techniques in an artistic way in order to attract students’ enthusiasm in communication tasks - I suggest that THE MANAGING BOARD of my school buy more and more materials of methodology for the teachers of the school As a result, the teachers should have a better chance to develop their job 2 Recommendations to other teachers: - Indeed, I know that I am not really full of experience in teaching because the number of years I have involved in this job is still far smaller than many of my colleagues Therefore, I would need useful comments and supplements from experienced teachers so that my initiative ideas would be much better Sincerely thanks! Loc Tan, May 20th, 2019 The headmaster’s identification: I am sure that I myself have written this experiential initiative This document is not someone else’s copy The writer, 18 Vu Ngoc Hung 19 ... activities that I often carry out in my classes to make my speaking lessons more interesting and to motivate my students in practicing speaking English: 3.4.1 Discussions: In a discussion, students may... my grade students English since the beginning of this school year The following slide was designed on my power point lesson plan for one speaking lesson (Grade selective subject - Period 5) My. .. their speaking skill in the language That is the matter I have been absorbed in and that is the reason for my theme Purpose of study: I would like to give out some of my own experience in improving