Question 1. How often do your English teachers organise group work activities during speaking lessons?
Chart 3: How often teachers organise group activities during speaking lessons Answers to this question revealed potentials that the study can exploit and contribute to the students’ skill development. Majority of students admitted their teachers very often organise group activities during speaking lessons. With this high frequency, if the group work activities are conducted in a good way then the students benefit a lot. Vice versa, it could be a huge waste of time and energy of both teachers and students.
69
15 0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
A. Very often B. Often C. Rarely
Question 1. How often do your English teachers organise group work activities during speaking lessons?
25
Question 2. How much do you like working in groups?
Chart 4: How much students like working in groups
At the time when the pre-questionnaire was administered, the 84 students only experienced the normal group activities organised by the teachers who still found themselves stuck with how to make students love group activities. Therefore, it is understandable that half of them chose “Neutral” which indicates students’ low interest in the group activities.
20
49
15
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
A. Very much B. Neutral C. Not very much
Question 2. How much do you like working in groups?
26 Question 3. How much do you talk in groups?
Chart 5: How much the majority of students spoke during group work
More than a half of the students said they spoke less than 20% of the talking time during group work. Data collected through question 3 consolidates the teachers’ opinion that one of the biggest difficulties they face is the unequal opportunities to talk among students; weaker students speak less while more capable students or group leaders are dominated.
Question 4. What do you prefer in a lesson?
Chart 6: Students prefer stay in the same group or move around and join more than one group during speaking lesson
59 11
9 5
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
A. Less than 20%
B. Between 20% and 40%
C. Between 41% and 60%
D. More than 60%
Question 3. How much do you talk in groups?
36%
64%
Question 4. What do you prefer in a lesson?
A. Stay in the same group
B. Move around and join more than one group
27
Question 5. Do you think you are important in the group because you have a unique role?
Chart 7: Students’ perception about the importance they have in the group work The data obtained here suggested that the group members took the unbalanced responsibilities. 82% of the students did not feel themselves as important as the other 18% due to the fact that they did not have clear roles and responsibilities to contribute.
This might result from the dominance of a minority of high capable students or group leader to the rest of the members. With the unequal responsibilities within a group, students were not motivated to actively participate in group work (Wang, 2017).
Therefore, the learners might not fully get involved in accomplishing the cooperative assignments.
18%
82%
Question 5. Do you think you are important in the group because you have a unique role?
A. Yes B. No
28
Question 6. How much do you interact with other members and feel engaged?
Chart 8: Students’ feeling of engagement and interaction with other group members As can be seen from the chart, up to 72% students did not feel engaged in the group work and therefore had little interaction with other members in the group within the cooperative learning process. That is to say, the teachers’ encouragement seemed not to be enough for the students to fully take part in the cooperative learning. Normally, people get interested or engaged as the result of both external and internal motivation. If they don’t feel interested enough into an activity there would be no ways we can get them involved and interact with others in a group. In teaching and learning speaking, in addition to the external motivation created by teachers, it is more necessary that students have the internal motivation to talk and discuss with the group mates to accomplish the tasks. However, it seems that the traditional method of organising groups in speaking lesson haven’t been effective in getting students to interact.
12
57 15
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
A. Very much B. Neutral C. Not very much
Question 6. How much do you interact with other members and feel engaged?
29
Question 7. Do you like joining Literature Circle groups in the next lessons?
Chart 9: Current speaking lessons’ attractiveness to students
By asking this question, the researcher would want to test students’ desire to participate in the current speaking lessons. If the lessons were boring, less useful and fun to the students then many of them might choose “Neutral” or “Not very much”. Therefore, looking at the chart above whose percentage of students choosing “Neutral” or “Not very much” options accounts for 82%, we can draw a conclusion that the students didn’t look forward to having speaking lessons in the weeks to come. If so, how can the teachers expect much improvement to be made at the majority students in the classes?
Finding out a set of tools or techniques which enable teachers in making their lessons more interesting and useful to students is really a worthy job to do to the researcher.
Fortunately enough, literature circle technique as reviewed in books and journals seems to be an effective tool. However, in order to confirm its workability in Vietnamese classroom contexts, there should be further study. A number of experimental lessons using cooperative learning groups and employing literature circle technique are discussed about in the next part of this thesis as answers to another research question.
18%
71%
11%
Question 7. Do you like joining Literature Circle groups in the next lessons?
A. Very much B. Neutral C. Not very much