Data presentation of the quizzes and the test- 123docz.net

CHAPTER TWO: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2.1 Background of the study

3.3 Evaluation .1 Data presentation of the evaluation questionnaire.1 Data presentation of the evaluation questionnaire

3.3.2 Data presentation of the quizzes and the test

Types of test Quiz 3 Quiz 4 Quiz 5 Quiz 6 Quiz 8 Test

Percent above average 61% 81% 78% 81% 90% 92,7%

Table 2: Results from quizzes and test

To have a better view on the effectiveness of C R activities, a quiz aíìer each lesson was conducted. For the limitation of time, the ĩirst two quizzes and the seventh one could not be carried out. The third quiz result was not very good (60% above average) because students hadn’t got used to with 5-minutes test before. The results o f the next quizzes become better and better (around 80%) and the last one vvas 90%.

Before a real test takes place, the pilot test was done for students to get used to vvith the test form. A ll the students did both tests within 45 minutes and the researcher managed the whole class herself. By that way, the result seemed reliable and exact with the changes varying from 2.5 to 9.5 (see appendix 7).

Valid Missing Mean Median Mode Minimum Maximum

41.00 . 0 0 7.18 7.50 8 . 0 0 2.50 9.50

Tabỉe 3: Statistics from the achievement test

(LUAN.VAN.THAC.SI).The.effect.of.consciousness.Raising.activities.on.the.10th.grade.students''.grammatical.competence.at.Tran.Nhat.Duat.upper.secondary.school001(LUAN.VAN.THAC.SI).The.effect.of.consciousness.Raising.activities.on.the.10th.grade.students''.grammatical.competence.at.Tran.Nhat.Duat.upper.secondary.school001(LUAN.VAN.THAC.SI).The.effect.of.consciousness.Raising.activities.on.the.10th.grade.students''.grammatical.competence.at.Tran.Nhat.Duat.upper.secondary.school001(LUAN.VAN.THAC.SI).The.effect.of.consciousness.Raising.activities.on.the.10th.grade.students''.grammatical.competence.at.Tran.Nhat.Duat.upper.secondary.school001

From the above table, the mean is rather good with the average 7.18 and the impressive mode o f the marks is 8.00. In this case, C R activities really helped students in remembering and using the new structures in doing exercises and tests. The following chart shows the result from the analysis of the marks:

M a rk s

02 5-4

■ 5-6.5

□ 7-7.5

□ 8-9 5

Chart 4: Statistics o f the achievement test

As seen from the chart, the students who gained over mark 8 were 41.5% and the number of students who received marks under mark 5 was only 7.3%. The students above average were 92.7 %.

3.4 Summary

This chapter has focused on showing the results obtained from four sources:

intervievvs, class observations, questionnaire and test. Signiĩicantly, it investigated the practice o f teaching and leaming of grammar in the actual classrooms. From the íìndings, the researcher applied C R activities vvith the hope to change the problem. Results from questionnaire and test showed that C R activities were really effective in improving mountainous stuđents’ GC.

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C H A P T E R FO U R : D ISC U SSIO N O F T H E F IN D IN G S

4.1 Research question 1: What are the stu d en ts' attitudes towards gram m ar lessons?

The analysis o f the data from the intervievv revealed that mountainous school students had positive attitudes towards grammar and they were aware o f its importance to their study of English both for their examinations and for ĩuture use. Because they had met a lot of diffìculties through their leaming, they contributed a lot of useful ideas. As shovvn above, they expected grammar to be treated in a more diverse manner such as through games, songs, and so on... in addition to conventional manner o f teaching grammar with teacher presenting the new structure in contexts to be followed by students’ practice.

However, the data of the interview is far from enough and reliable. Essentially, as a teacher of English, these reasons motivated the researcher to find the second data.

4.2 Research question 2: How do teachers treatgrammar lessons in a mountainous school?

The observations of three lessons also uncovered the fact that the teaching of grammar in the Language Focus lessons was very teacher-centered, with a remarkably high amount o f teachers’ talking time. Part of the reason for this preference for teacher- dominant techniques might relate to the teachers’ hope to maintain the flow of their teaching and keep pace with other teachers regarding the content being taught. In most classes, all that the students did was to listen passively to the teacher, copying down whatever was written on the black board, with little interaction among them. As could be seen in three class observations, a teacher did encourage the students’ participation by asking them to read aloud and answer questions orally, do the exercises in pairs or groups and take part in communicative activities. But the teacher still played the main role, and student input was limited to responses to teacher-directed questions.

With triangle data from the questionnaire (see table 1), we can see the more popular method is traditional one and teachers have their reasons to do that. Their aim in teaching English is their students can get good marks in writing tests and exams in which the two most important English examinations are the school íìnal examination and the university entrance one, both o f which are administered at the end of grade 1 2 all over the country. Due to the lack o f exposure to the target language and the pressure to pass the examinations, the students’ leaming motivation actually depends on the teacher’s initiative.

This explains partly why Vietnamese teachers focus more on language knovvledge than language use, and more receptive skills than productive skills.

Many teachers are aware of the aim of leaming a language: To communicate and create communicative environments with a lot o f communicative activities such as role- playing, song-singing, music-listening, game-playing, picture-drawing, story-telling, etc.

Those activities motivate students a lot in studying. But the question is that whether they are really necessary when there is no listening or speaking in the two important tests.

In her observations, the researcher noticed that when teaching grammar structures, instead of providing the students vvith situations and opportunities to be exposed to the new structures and letting them induce the rules by themselves; two out o f three teachers stated the rules right at the beginning. It can be infeưed that the pressure to cover all knowledge required to transfer to the students pushed the teachers to resort to a more time-saving method. As a result, grammar structures were often introduced through isolated sentences, but not in contexts. However, from the íindings o f the study, it is clear that all students find it necessary both to understand grammar structures and to produce the pattems in practice (Giao & Hoa 2004).

It is noticeable that grammar is best taught and practiced in contexts. The reading text in the textbook provides a good context for grammatical presentation and practice. If it is too complex, teacher should make it simpler, easier or may create a new context involving the new grammatical structure. C R activities help the students understand the structures more clearly, do exercises and tests more easily, communicate more exactly and fluently.

4.3 Research question 3: What are the students ’ reactions to C-R activities applied in gram m ar lessons? How C-R activities ajfect stu d en ts' gram m atical competence?

The results could be seen from questionnaire that more than half of the students vievved leaming grammar through C R activities was the most effective way. They liked these activities because they could study grammar in a speciíic context, they preferred deriving the rules for themselves from this context; understood the íunctions of language and then practice using the new structures in communication activities. High results from quizzes and test which measure students’ G C in vvriting gave more reliable data. No doubt, C R activities are impressively effective.

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P A R T c. C O N C L U S IO N

In this last part, the conclusions o f the study w ill be provided íìrst, then some suggestions for teaching grammar w ill be followed. This chapter also discusses the limitations of the study and some recommendations for further research.

1. Conclusions of the study

This research aims to investigate the effectiveness o f C R activities on grade 10,h students’ grammatical competence in a mountainous school. Some issues conceming grammar teaching has been pointed out in the data analysis.

The teacher’s method o f grammar teaching is an important source o f student’s motivation in leaming grammar in particular and in leaming English in general. If the students find the teacher’s teaching style suitable, they w ill feel môre interested in leaming, and as a result, they understand the lesson better. When comparing to other skill- periods such as Speaking, Listening or Reading, teaching grammar seems diíTícult to be more communicative and studying for examinations’ aims are the main reasons why many teachers remain their traditional methods in Language Focus periods; some others have tried to apply C L T but faced a lot o f diffìculties and often neglected grammar. To get beneíìts from above methods, the researcher tried to apply C R approach.

Throughout the research, students like C R activities because they present grammar in authentic contexts, they can make grammar easier to understand, can improve and develop students’ grammatical competence, meet their wish for both examinations and communicative aims. Taking the contexts for teaching grammar in a mountainous school into consideration, the researcher is quite convinced o f the value o f such combination.

Although communicative approach was given preíerence over traditional methods, the combination o f the two approaches as most o f the students wished for quite reasonable. However, there is no single right method o f grammar teaching for all leamers, for all leaming context, grammar should be treated in a diverse manner to suit different students’ leaming styles in diíĩerent contexts.

2. Recommendations

In accordance with the above fmdings, the followings w ill be some suggestions about teaching grammar at upper secondary school. The recommendations were made to M OET and the individual language teacher.

• Suggestions to M O E T

There were so many problems associated to teaching grammar in upper secondary school context. The problems were mainly resulted from the negative wash back effect of the important examinations for the high school students such as secondary school leaving examination (SSLE), the exam for high school excellent students, university entrance exams.

Thereíore, more ‘communicative’ elements should be added to English tests of SSLE.

• Suggestions to individual language teacher of the school

Firstly, the teachers should be more ílexible while teaching the grammar section of the new English textbooks. In the case that there are too many tasks provided, they had better períòrm just the most appropriate one and reserve time for communicative activities.

They should also change their techniques or even approaches to the aims and objectives of each lesson.

Secondly, the teachers should spend time on designing and preparing activities for communicative situations. Although this is a hard work but it w ill bring students a lot of bencfits and can be used again and again.

Last but not least, each teacher must be very sensitive and patient on students’

mistakes in order to save their face and give them more supportive feedback.

In conclusion, the suggestions above may make the teachers’ life harder but the students would beneíìt. Students will not view English as a burden, hard now and useless in the future. They also feel much more coníident with their ability to communicate in English. Besides, better English will help to increase their opportunities for both higher education and better employment in the íuture.

3. Limitations of the thesis

The context school investigated in this study, with certain peculiarities of a mountainous school, cannot be the representative of all upper secondary schools in Vietnam. Thereíòre, it is difficuỉt to make many generalizations about the problems identiíìed in this thesis. However, this study still provides a picture that may be illuminating for other mountainous schools in Vietnam and act as a piece making a contribution to the picture of the English grammar teaching situation in Vietnamese upper secondary schools.

Besides, in the research, all the lessons were applied C R approach, which made the lessons always in shortage of time and a lot of communicative activities couldn’t be done

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perfectly. In the next circle, the researcher might consider altemative approaches and suitable methods for each lesson.

Although keeping in mind that communicative “elements” should be examined in the test, only some situations of communication were created; there were still no speaking and listening in the achievement test partly due to poor equipments and shortage of time.

The researcher needs to try hard to overcome these diíTiculties.

4. Suggestions for further study

The main Instruments of this study were the interview with the 20 students, the questionnaire for 41 students of the investigated school; thus, the data got were almost from students’ perspective. For this reason, the future study needs to be conducted to explore the issue from teachers’ perspective. An interview and a questionnaire for teachers of this school then will be of great value.

ỉn addition, a more ambitious study may involve observations of more classes or the same class over a longer period o f time to identiíy different tasks used by the teachers in teaching grammar and the quality of the grammar teaching. It is also interesting to carry out an experimental research on measuring the students’ grammatical competence through C R activities. Such a study will help to answer the question o f how much C R activities heỉps students improve their grammatical competence.

To beneílt both leamers and teachers themselves, teachers should try as hard as they can to be a good teacher. On the way to be good teachers, they will face a lot of challenges but the most difficult challenge is “to go on developing into the teacher you most want to be” (Edge, 1993). The researcher would like to quote this idea to conclude her thesis.

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