Pre-action questionnaire results

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

3.1.1. Pre-action questionnaire results

This part will present the analysis of the data collected from the EFL second-year students in class KT17.13. Survey questionnaire 1 was used to investigate the levels of the students' motivation before the action as well as their difficulties in learning speaking skill. The following chart indicates the results of question 1 and 4 in the survey questionnaire 1.

Figure 3.1. Students' levels of interest in English speaking lessons and discussion activities

The above figure reveals that overall 64.29% of the students did not like speaking lessons. It is apparent from the chart that 35.71% of the respondents show high interest in speaking lessons. Specifically, 1 out of 14 students (7.14%) were highly interested in speaking lessons, 7.14% of them liked speaking very much and 21.42% felt interested.

Regarding students' interest in discussion activities, there were 5 students (35.71%) not being interested, and the other 9 students (64.29%) liked taking part in these activities. It can be seen from figure 3.1 that the percentage of the students liking or disliking speaking lessons and discussion activities were relatively the

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same.

However, when considering the students' willingness to speak English, the researcher found that the majority of the students (71.43%) accepted that they spoke English when they were asked to do so. According to the table below, the percentage of learners' communication in English when they talked to their friends and they thought it was useful were the same (7.14%). Only 2 out of 14 students (14.29%) spoke English when they found speaking activities interesting.

Speaking English when... Percentage

You talk with your friends 7.14 %

Your teacher ask you 71.43%

You think it's useful 7.14%

You are interested in speaking activities 14.29%

Table 3.1. Students' speaking opportunities during speaking lessons

The collected data in the next figure revealed certain difficulties faced by the students during the process of learning speaking English.

Figure 3.2. Students' difficulties in learning speaking English

In figure 3.2, all of the students admitted that the biggest factor that prevented them from communicating in English was their limited vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, and the influence of their native language. Students' high anxiety and low self-confidence was also a big problem for a half of the students. Appropriately

42.86% and 35.71% of 14 students agreed that their low fluency and accuracy, and their low motivation were the other obstacles for learning English speaking skill.

Only 4 out of 14 students (28.57%) had difficulty in speaking due to their poor background knowledge.

The next figure shows a list of some certain discussion activities that had ever been given to the students by their teachers and their preferences for the activities.

Figure 3.3. Students' preferences for types of discussion activities

It was found in figure 3.3 that among the four activities - guessing, comparing, putting in order and surveys - that were most familiar to the students, comparing and guessing received 10 out of 14 students being interested in. It seemed that though putting in order and surveys were among the most common activities, they were the least interesting ones to half of the students. Detecting differences seemed to be uninteresting to the five students who had ever used it because 4 of them showed no or little interest in that activity. Layout problems and debates were new to most of the students as only 1 or 2 of them had ever used this kind of activities;

however, the student or students showed quite positive attitude towards the activities.

Having studied and analyzed the results obtained from the data in survey questionnaire 1 for students in preliminary investigation, the author found that many of the students had difficulties in learning speaking skill, which led to the fact that speaking skill was not interesting to them. In general , the students showed not

much interest in the most common discussion activities. Therefore, the researcher decided to employ layout problems and debates which had not usually been used by the teachers before with the aims to stimulate students in speaking lessons. To examine whether the students' level of motivation will be improved or not after implementing the action, please have a look at the next part.

3.1.2. After action findings

Techniques for improving students’ motivation in speakinglessons