What are the factors influencing the students’ attitudes?

PART B: THE STUDY Chapter one: LITERATURE REVIEW

2. What are the factors influencing the students’ attitudes?

To carry out this, the researcher decided to choose the survey research because of its advantages. Survey research is suitable for the study with a large population.

The data in this study were collected through a combination of the questionnaire and interviews, the two typical data collection instruments in the survey research.

The questionnaire was expected to offer the best description of the students’

attitudes towards learning speaking skills at USSH, VNU through significant statistics. However, during the process of completing the questionnaire, the students might circle the choices that were not similar to their thoughts or opinions because they might be afraid to make their teachers sad if their answers had a tendency to criticize their teachers. Therefore, the researcher used the interview more to have an opportunity to talk directly with some of the students participating in the questionnaire with the aim of increasing the reliability of the questionnaire, which made the study more reliable.

2.2. The setting

The survey is carried out at USSH, VNU, which is located at 336 Nguyen Trai Road – Thanh Xuan District – Hanoi – Vietnam.

Most of the students are not English majors, and this survey is conducted on the first-year non-English major students. There are 30 classes which consist of the first-year students. Each class has approximately 15 to 30 students. In the first year, students have to learn two course-books, New English File – elementary for the first term (equivalent to level A1) and New English File – pre-intermediate for the

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second term (equivalent to level A2). Furthermore, students have to attend two English classes every week.

Although students have learned English for nine years, their English in general and their English speaking proficiency are not good. This study is expected to find out whether they have positive or negative attitudes towards learning speaking skills and why they have those attitudes, from which the suggestions will be made to enhance the students’ ability to speak English.

2.3. The participants

To investigate the students’ attitudes towards learning English speaking skills, the researcher chose 150 students (both males and females) from six classes FLF1105 1, FLF1105 2, FLF1105 6, FLF1106 10, FLF1106 29, FLF1106 30. The number of students in each class ranged from 20 to 30 people. These students come from different parts of Vietnam. They reach Hanoi to go to university. At USSH, VNU, they have to learn English as a compulsory subject although it is not their major. Their majors are History, Orientalism, and Philosophy. Moreover, when they are learning English at university, the course-book and the self-study materials are their main learning tools. The researcher chose these students as the participants of the study because all of them have been learning English since they were in grade 3 or 4; however, their English is rather weak, especially speaking skills. Furthermore, they are not confident of using English to communicate with their partners in English classes. Therefore, the researcher would like to have a bird’s eye view of their attitudes towards as well as their expectations of learning English speaking skills so that he can make suggestions about improving the students’ English speaking skills at USSH, VNU.

2.4. The data collection instruments

Seeing that the study is a survey used to gain the information of attitudes, conditions or events at a single point in time (Nunan, 1992:140), the researcher decided to use two various instruments, namely survey questionnaire and interview.

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Firstly, questionnaire is one of the typical instruments in the survey research.

This technique is used the most widely in order to gain data from participants;

moreover, it is said to be economical and have standardized questions ( McMillan and Schumacher, 1993) . Richards et all (1992) states that the questionnaire is a group of questions about a topic designed to be answered by participants in a study.

It is very important that a questionnaire should be valid, reliable and unambiguous.

Two types of questions often appearing in a questionnaire are closed questions and open questions. With closed questions, the researcher will design the range of possible choices for respondents to be able to choose, whereas with open questions, respondents can decide what they want to say and how they say it.

The questionnaire in this study includes 12 questions, which are both closed and open ended. The researcher asked the students to give further information to explain their choices below each question. Furthermore, all the questions were bilingual in English and Vietnamese in order that the students can understand the questions perfectly and precisely. Below are the categories of the twelve questions:

Question 1, 2: students’ general attitudes towards learning English

Questions 3 to 9: students’ attitudes towards learning English speaking skills Question 10: students’ attitudes towards lecturers’ teaching methods in speaking classes