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Improving students' presentation skills through principles and models

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INVESTIGATING ISSUES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING THOUGH ACTION RESEARCH

Stories from the Mekong Delta, Vietnam Edited by Kevin Laws ISBN: 978-0-9923846-2-3 DEPISA, December 2015

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CONTENTS

Introduction to the Volume Kevin Laws Improving EFL Adult Learners’ Writing Skills by Peer Assessment Quyen Phuong Vo The Effect of Songs on Writing Compound and Complex Sentences Thi Kim Thi Nguyen Improving Students’ Writing Skills in English Through e-journal Writing Tu My Thu & Vo Kim Huong Helping First Year English Majors Develop Ideas for Writing Descriptive Paragraphs Trinh Boi Ngoc & Nguyen Thi Tuyet Nhung Improving Students’ Short-term Memory through Retelling in the Source Language Truong Thi Ngoc Diep Improving Students’ Oral Presentation Skills Through Principles and Models Tran Thi Thanh Quyen Using Follow-up Questions to Help Students Avoid Using Simple Verbs When Answering Questions Ly Thi Anh Nguyet Enhancing Students’ Out-of-class Listening Practice by Using Extensive Listening To Quyen Luong & Kim Hoa Ngo Improving Teacher- Student Interaction in a General English Classroom Tran Thi Diem Can Enhancing Productive Teacher Collaboration in Instructional Teams Phan Thi Minh Tuyen & Nguyen Thi Anh Nguyet Enhancing Student Collaboration in Doing ELT Assignments Nguyen Thi Thu Lan How Can the Use of Blackboard and Transcribing Help English-major Students’ Listening Skills? Pham Thi Kim Dung Enhancing Pedagogical Students’ Teaching Methodology Through the Use of Video Phan Van Chi

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Motivating Non-English Major College Students’ Speaking Through Task-Based Language Teaching Phan Huýnh Nhâ̤t Thanh Motivating Non-major Students to Study General English Bao Tram Nguyen Stimulating Non English-Majored Students through Drama Performances Phuong Thuy Ho Lecturers’ and Students’ Challenges in Doing Research in Education Trinh Quoc Lap

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INTRODUCTION

In September 2015, as part of the National Foreign Languages 2020 Project, workshops on the use of Action Research as a means of supporting the professional development of teachers were held in Can Tho University. Participants in the workshops were encouraged to undertake their own Action Research projects in order to better understand the issues faced by teachers in future workshops they conduct in their own universities and schools. A selection of the action research reports are published in this monograph. Action Research is a very important type of research because it focuses on professional practice with the intention of contributing to better teaching and learning in schools, colleges and universities. To some people it is not as prestigious as ‘scientific research’, but I would argue that the results of action research are just as valid as research in the physical and natural sciences. Because teaching and learning involves human beings it is usually not possible to conduct research in the same manner as might be undertaken in other sciences. There are many ethical issues to consider and it is not possible to control all of the variables as might be appropriate when conducting research in the physical and natural sciences. The results of action research cannot necessarily be generalized to whole populations. The results are context specific and relate directly to the particular setting and topic being investigated. However, the results can be used to suggest to others how they might apply similar studies in other contexts. In this way we learn more about what contributes to effective teaching and learning in a practical way. Action research is particularly valuable because it involves both product and process. The product, or results

• f the action research, increases our knowledge about teaching and learning. However, the process, or

methodology, used in the action research study should also be part of the focus of the reflections of the action researcher as these reflections can lead to modifications in the research approach. This collection of papers, selected from all of those submitted in response to the workshop at Can Tho, illustrate the great variety of methodological approaches used by the researchers. The papers have been written by participants from many schools, colleges and universities in the Mekong Delta. They focus

• f issues identified as important in the contexts of the specific researchers in their workplaces and work
• practices. The overarching goal of all of the papers is to contribute to our knowledge about effective

ways to address issues we all face at some time in our teaching. The papers could have been organized in many different ways, but in this monograph they have been grouped roughly into the following themes: writing, speaking, listening, collaboration/working in groups, the use of technology, and motivating students to study well in English classes. I hope the writing of the selected participants will encourage others to undertake action research and share the results of the product and process with others. Kevin Laws

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Improving EFL Adult Learners’ Writing Skills by Peer Assessment Quyen Phuong Vo School of Foreign Languages Can Tho University vpquyen@ctu.edu.vn Writing is an essential skill for intellectual and communicative development because it shows their thinking development. Vygotsky (1978) suggested that writing is an appropriate instructional method that can enhance complex thinking development. Eggen and Kuachck (1999) mentioned that writing is considered as a communicating tool to express one’s thought. Despite its importance, teaching writing is not taught in the first place compared to other skills like listening, speaking and reading skills (Heaton, 1977). The reason may come from its complexity compared to other skills. Since 2010 I have conducted some classroom action research on peer assessment in some writing classes of young students to find out how peer assessment could improve their writing abilities. The reflections from most of the students have indicated that peer assessment could help them identify good points and mistakes from their work. However, when the same action research was conducted with one writing class of adult students last year, their feedback seemed different from the younger group. Some adult students appeared very interested in the implementation of peer assessment in writing, but some felt afraid of assessing their friends’ writing. In Can Tho university of Vietnam writing is included in the bachelor’s program of English Language for both young students and adult students whose age ranges from 22 to 40 when they learn English as a foreign language (EFL). The writing instruction for adult students in this context aims at developing the learners’ writing skills to support other skills development as well as other advanced courses they

• undertake. Its objectives are to not only meet the program completion but also to contribute to their

their present and future work (Can Tho University, 2010). However, many Vietnamese EFL adult students frequently are faced with certain problems with skill courses because the program for these students is not quite similar to the typical one for young students in terms of its shorter training time and studying schedule in the evening when most of them have just finished their work. Along with such the factors, the EFL adult students also find writing skills challenging since they often prefer learning from their experiences (Knowles, 1980; Pennington, 2015). In fact, they sometimes follow their experiences in Vietnamese writing style to transfer ideas in English writing work, but it is not easy for the teacher to change it. Therefore, these external factors have partly contributed to EFL adult students’ achievements, and getting them familiarized with English writing style is necessary. Besides the complexity of the process of teaching and learning writing skill, assessing writing is also a rather difficult process with certain challenges. In other words, teachers can be faced with negative consequences in the process of assessment as they do not give appropriate judgments, and clear provision of developmental criteria (Klenowski, 2012). Hyland (2000) and Xiang (2004) mentioned, learners can improve their writing ability by assessing and editing their peer’s work. It is clear that peer

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assessment is considered as an alternative of assessment process to involve learners’ participation since it can enhance learners’ awareness of self-learning and independent thinking (Falchikov, 2002; Puegphrom & Chiramanee, 2011). Topping et al. (2000) maintained that peer assessment learners have to determine the standard or quality of their peer’s writing products, indicate their peers’ strengths and weaknesses, and improve their writing abilities. In addition, assessing and editing peer’s writing encourages learners obtain more knowledge in combining, analyzing, and synthesizing information. As a result, implementing peer assessment in writing classes is truly influential to learners’ language development. Research Question, Objective of the Research and Significance The research question investigated in the study aims at determining in what ways peer assessment can improve EFL adult students' writing abilities. The study also provides information about students’ reactions while doing peer assessment. The objective of the research is to examine whether the use of peer assessment will improve EFL adult students’ writing theoretically and practically. Regarding the theoretical aspect, the study is important to examine the existing theories about peer assessment, which can improve learner’s writing abilities. Concerning the practical aspect, the study is important for the teachers who are willing to use peer assessment for improving their learners’ writing practice so as to help the students feel more interested in learning writing. Prior studies Shokrpour, Keshavaiz, and Jafari (2010) conducted an experimental study on peer assessment on a group of EFL students who were paired for peer review by exchanging their essays. After doing peer review, they were asked to present their opinions on the problems and mistakes. They then made arguments with peers to get the problems solved. The study revealed that the students enjoyed the process and product. In addition, the researchers mentioned that the peer review process engaged the students in frequent reading and writing, fostered their critical reading and reflection, sharpened their writing knowledge and skills, helped them to manage their learning schedule, increased their motivation and joy of writing, and promoted their information literacy. Another study by Puegphrom and Chiramanee (2011) investigated the effectiveness of peer assessment

• n writing and students’ attitudes towards the technique and being assessed by peer. It included 24

participants enrolled in The English Gifted Program of Triam Udom Suksa School. The researchers introduced the process and technique of peer assessment’s to the participants after instruction in writing and the learners had practiced their writing work. The participants then practiced assessing peer’s writing in groups of three. The process of assessing, editing, and revising was carried out from the first draft until the complete version was achieved. The questionnaire results revealed that the participants had highly positive attitudes towards the writing instruction with peer assessment and being assessed by peer in terms of the writing ability development, self-directed learning, co-operative learning and self- confidence.

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Writing criteria for peer assessment: As mentioned in Assessment, Articulation, and Accountability (1999), one of the major concerns about peer editing is that lower level learners are not be able to find their own errors, or understand what

• ther students have said and/or written. In order to promote effective peer assessment it is necessary to

develop clear and objective assessment criteria and to instruct the students in the use of the criteria Lie (2003). In addition, it is advantageous for students to be involved in setting criteria for assessment since this process helps them analyze and think critically as they are able to methodically assess their peer’s

• work. Incorporating peer assessment requires to design ‘guidelines or rubrics with clear defined tasks

for the reviewer’ (Cornell University, 2014). Approaches to Action Research: There are a number of approaches to the process of conducting action research. As Kemmis and Mc Taggart (1988) and Sagor (2005) suggested, there are four elements in a model of action research, namely plan, action, observation and reflection. Conducting the research requires the researcher to focus on the process. When the process does not provide convincing results, further cycles can be conducted until the researcher feels content with the

• results. However, as McNiff (1988) mentioned, the cycle of the action research is flexible with the

focus on its changes. I conducted two cycles in this action research project. The research ran across the period of ten weeks between September and October 2015. First Cycle Planning: In the planning stage, after teaching the theory on how to write an opinion paragraph, I randomly grouped my students in groups of three and asked them to make an outline on one topic. Then they were required to put ideas in the outline of an opinion paragraph into the draft. Each group selected one person to take notes and complete the draft. Other members in each group gave ideas on the draft and the note-taking members completed the final draft. After this step, they were asked to discuss and list certain marking criteria on an opinion paragraph with regard to the theory transferred in the earlier

• stage. These criteria focused on three components in an opinion paragraph, namely a clear topic

sentence, clear supporting sentences, and a clear concluding sentence. Along with these points, grammatical accuracy and connecting words would also be included. Action: In this stage, all groups exchanged their group writing papers together. Based on the marking criteria mentioned earlier, students discussed with their group members their assessment of their peer’s work by presenting their opinions towards the problems and mistakes of their peer’s writing work. They also thought about how to solve such the problems and mistakes. After all groups finished their peer review, each group was asked to report what they assessed and made suggestions to solve any problems. Reflection: After the peer review among groups was done, most groups showed their positive attitudes to the process of peer review, but one group revealed that it was too challenging for them to give feedback on their peer’s work. They explained that the marking criteria were not specific enough and their abilities

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were not good enough to know whether their peer’s work achieved such the criteria. Also they felt less confident to correct mistakes. Second Cycle Planning: Based on the results of the first cycle, there were certain issues noticed. The first issue was resetting “marking criteria”. Students in groups with highly positive attitudes were asked to give their suggestions for more specific points to each criterion. Meanwhile, the researcher considered their

• pinions and recommended certain points to be noticed. As a result, the “editor’s checklist” for an
• pinion paragraph was constructed with regard to (1) the topic sentence that focused on a clear topic

and a clear controlling idea- what the writer thinks about the topic; (2) the supporting ideas that included relevant explanations for the topic in terms of appropriate facts, specific explanations, or logical personal experiences to support the controlling idea; (3) the concluding sentence that restated the main ideas; (4) ensuring grammar accuracy in terms of sentence structure, punctuation, and capitalization; (5) the correct paragraph format like space, indenting; and (6) the paragraph coherence and unity among ideas and sentences. The second issue was about regrouping students. It was decided that one or two good students should be present in each group. These good students were noticed during the process of implementing peer assessment in the first cycle and arranged in new groups. In addition, the teacher increased the number

• f students in each group to four members so that they could share more ideas on their peer’s work.

The third issue was that another new topic on opinion paragraph was assigned to the new groups as

• homework. Following the same steps in the first cycle, these new groups worked together to complete

their own paragraph. Their completed paragraphs were ready to be exchanged with their peer in the next class meeting. Action: Based on the ideas contributed to the ‘editor’s checklist’, the researcher gathered all of students’

• pinions, adjusted their criteria, typed them, printed the ‘editor’s checklist’ in a piece of A4 size paper,

and handed it out to all groups with one checklist for one group. All groups followed the same procedure in the first cycle: exchanging their paragraphs prepared in advance at home, selecting one member taking notes, and starting their jobs as peer reviewers by basing the ‘editor’s checklist’. All groups discussed their peers’ work. They put check on the points that their peer achieved and did not

• achieve. For the points which were not achieved, each group noted down and discussed how to solve

these issues. After the process of peer review was done, each group was also asked to report what they assessed and made arguments with peers to get the problems solved. Reflection: All of students were involved in the process of peer assessment and they appeared to enjoy working in

• groups. They looked more confident to give their feedback on their peer’s work. The groups which

were reviewed by their peers were also happier with their peers’ feedback since they were shown specific mistakes to be corrected. Some students were interviewed and stated that they learnt many things from their peers’ ideas and they felt ready to correct their mistakes. Post Cycle:

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At the end of the research, I asked students to fill a questionnaire to find out their views on peer

• assessment. They were also asked to write their own opinion paragraphs with two assigned topics in the

textbook (Savage, A. & Shafiei, M., 2007, p.120). Each topic was done in one class meeting. They finished the first drafts at home and brought them to the class in the following meetings. Students then exchanged their paragraphs together and followed the process of peer assessment to review their friends’ work. Most of them appeared more confident in assessing their peers’ paragraphs on their own,

• nly two students felt less confident to correct their friends’ paragraphs although they could identify

mistakes rather well. At the end, based on their friends’ feedback, students were required to complete the final writing versions in the class, and then submitted to the teacher for marking. Findings .Qualitative data were collected from classroom observation, learners’ questionnaires, learners’ interviews, and students’ writing work results. The class observation showed that although they must spend a long day of working, most adult students actively participated in the process of peer assessment with two participants who were still not confident in giving feedback to their peers’ work. When they were interviewed, they revealed that they could recognize their peers’ good points and mistakes, but they did not know how to correct them due to lacking grammatical knowledge related to sentence structures and verb forms. This reason was also mentioned by other participants when they were asked about the difficulties in the process of implementing peer assessment in writing work. From 17 EFL adult students in the class, the results of the questionnaire indicated that most students were interested in implementing peer assessment in writing lessons (90%) and 100% of them found peer assessment useful for their own writing. In particular, these adult students agreed that peer assessment helped them sharpen their writing theory knowledge (37%), helped avoid making the same mistakes (73%), developed their critical thinking (73%), improved their writing abilities (89%), and increased their vocabulary (18%). In addition, most adult students in this study agreed that comprehensive marking criteria were necessary for the implementation of peer assessment in writing. Interestingly, 90% of the participants wanted peer assessment to be applied in the next semester. However, there were more learners who were interested in group peer assessment than those supporting pair peer assessment with 63.6% and 27.3% respectively, and one adult learner revealed that there should be a combination of peer assessment and teacher assessment. The results from the two mini-tests of the participants’ individual writing showed that 37% of participants scored between 5.0-6.0, 16% of students had 7.0-7.5, 42% got 8.0-8.5, and 5% of students got 9.0. Compared with the first result, the second test showed that 68% of adult students increased their scores. Although the number of participants with the scores of 8.0-8.5 remained the same, accounting for 47% of the total, the number of adult students who received scores of 9.0 significantly increased by over 20% compared to the previous result (5% and 26% respectively) and the number of

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adult students scoring 5.0-6.0 was reduced by 11%. It can be concluded that peer assessment has considerably increased these EFL adult students’ progress in writing opinion paragraphs. Conclusions It is concluded that EFL adult students were interested in peer assessment and actively involved in the process of peer assessment especially group peer assessment. However, during the first cycle, there was one group that was less active in giving feedback on their peers’ work because they met difficulties with grammar knowledge especially with some complex sentence structures. Therefore, a course on basic grammar knowledge needs to be delivered before or at the same time with this writing course to support learners with general knowledge of sentence structures, subject and verb agreements, and verb tenses so as to they feel more confident to recognize mistakes of sentence structures and they are able to use these structures thoroughly. Further research is suggested to be held in a longer period of time in order to increase the outcomes and achieve better results. In addition, the process of peer assessment can be applied to other writing lessons such as other kinds of paragraph writing, and essay writing. Furthermore, this kind of assessment is also suggested to be applied in forms of pairs for both EFL young and adult students to find out how peer assessment can improve students’ writing abilities. References Assessment, Articulation, and Accountability (1999). Tools to Use in Assessments: Self- and Peer

• Assessment. Retrieved from

http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/curriculum/worldlanguages/resources/aaa/selfpeer4.pdf Can Tho University (2010). Curriculum for English Language Program (For internal circulation only). Can Tho University, Vietnam. Cornell University (2014). Peer Assessment. Retrieved from https://www.cte.cornell.edu/teaching- ideas/assessing-student-learning/peer-assessment.html Eggen, P. & Kuachck, D. (1999). Educational Psychology: Windows on Classroom. New Jersery: Prentice Hall, Inc. Falchikov, N. (2002). ‘Unpacking’ Peer Assessment’. In P. Schwartz & G. Webb (Eds.). Assessment: Case Studies, Experience & Practice from Higher Education. London: Kogan Page. Heaton, J. B. (1977). Writing English Language Test. London: London Group. Hyland, F. (2000). ESL writers and feedback: Giving more autonomy to students. Language Teaching Research, 4 (1), 33-54. Kay, M. (2015). 8 Rules For Training Adults Effectively. Retrieved from http://www.mindvalleyinsights.com/8-rules-for-training-adults/ Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R. (1988). The Action Research Reader. Third edition. Deakin University Press, Victoria. Klenowski, V. (2012). Raising the Stakes: The Challenges for Teacher Assessment. The Australian Educational Researcher, 39 (2), 173-192. Knowles, M. (1980). The modern practice of adult education. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall Regents.

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Lie, L. Y. (2003). Implementing effective peer assessment. CDTL Brief, 6 (3). Retrieved from http://www.cdtl.nus.edu.sg/brief/v6n3/sec4.htm McNiff, J. (1988). Action Research: Principles and practice. London: Routledge. Pennington, M. (2015). Characteristics of Adult Learners. Retrieved from http://www.eslteachersboard.com/cgibin/articles/index.pl?page=4;read=3484 Puegphrom, P. & Chiramanee, T. (2011). The effectiveness of implementing peer assessment on student’s writing proficiency.The 3rd International Conference oh Humanities and Social Sciences. Retrieved October 24, 2015 from http://fs.libarts.psu.ac.th/research/conference/proceedings- 3/2pdf/003.pdf Sagor, R. (2005) The Action Research Guidebook: A Four Step Process for Educators and School

• Teams. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

Savage, A. & Shafiei, M. (2007). Effective Academic Writing 1- The paragraph. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Shokrpour, N., Keshavaiz, N. & Jafari, S. M. (2010). The effect on peer review on writing skill of EFL

• students. Khaza Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. Retrieved from http://jhss-khazar.org/wp-

content/uploads/2010/04/0003Shokrpour_Keshavarz_-_Jafari_the_efect_of__peer_feedback-docx.pdf Topping,K.J., Smith,E.F., Swanson.,I., & Elliot A. (2000). Formative peer assessment of academic writing between postgraduate students. Assessment t& Evaluation in Higher Education, 25 (2), 149- 169. Smith, A. F. V. & Strong, G. (2009). Adult Learners: Context and Innovation. TESOL: Alexandria, Virginia. Vygotsky (1978). Mind in sociey, The development of higher psychological processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Xiang, W. (2004). Encouraging self monitoring in writing by Chinese students. ELT Journal, 58(3). 258. Appendices Appendix 1 EDITOR’ S CHECKLIST ON OPINION PARAGRAPHS (For The First Cycle) Put (√) in the column A next to the criteria that the paragraph achieved, and in the column NA for the criteria that the paragraph did not achieve. Suggest possible ways of correction if mistakes occurred. Criteria A NA Possible ways of correction Marking score 10.00 (m)

• 1. The paragraph has a clear topic

sentence. 2.0(m)

• 2. Supporting sentences are clear.

2.0(m)

• 3. The paragraph has a clear concluding

sentence. 2.0(m)

• 4. The paragraph ensures grammatical

accuracy. 2.0(m)

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• 5. Connecting words among ideas are

included. 2.0(m)

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Appendix 2 EDITOR’ S CHECKLIST ON OPINION PARAGRAPHS (For The Second Cycle) Put (√) in the column A next to the criteria that the paragraph achieved, and in the column NA for the criteria that the paragraph did not achieve. Suggest possible ways of correction if mistakes occurred. Criteria A NA Possible ways of correction Marking score 10.00 (m)

• 1. A clear topic sentence.

2.0 (m)

• a. The paragraph has a clear topic.

It is……………………………………………...

• b. The paragraph has a clear controlling idea

It is……………………………………………... 1.0 (m) 1.0 (m)

• 2. Supporting sentences are clear.

How many supporting ideas? ……….

• a. The writer includes clear facts; or/and
• b. The writer includes clear explanations;
• r/and
• c. The writer includes clear personal

experiences. 2.0 (m)

• 3. The paragraph has a clear concluding

sentence.

• a. The topic is restated
• b. The main ideas are restated

1.0 (m) 0.5 (m) 0.5 (m)

• 4. The paragraph ensures grammatical

accuracy. 2.0 (m)

• a. Sentence structures are correct.
• b. There are agreements between subjects and

verbs.

• c. Verb tenses are correct.
• d. Punctuations are used correctly (commas,

periods).

• e. Capitalization is used correctly.

1.0(m) 0.5(m) 0.5 (m)

• 5. The format of the paragraph is correct

1.0 (m)

• a. The sentences in the paragraph have the same

space.

• b. Indenting is correctly used.

0.5(m) 0.5(m)

• 6. The paragraph achieves:

2.0 (m)

• a. Coherence
• b. Unity

1.0 (m) 1.0 (m)

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Appendix 3 A QUESTIONNAIRE ON STUDENTS’ VIEWS OF PEER ASSESSMENT IN WRITING CLASS

• 1. Were you interested in peer assessment in the writing class?
• a. Yes
• b. No
• 2. Was peer assessment useful for your writing improvement?
• a. Yes
• b. No
• 3. In what ways did peer assessment help you? Choose more than one if applicable.
• a. It helped me sharpen my writing theory knowledge.
• b. It helped you avoid getting the same mistakes.
• c. It developed my critical thinking.
• d. It improved my writing abilities.
• e. Others:

…………………………………………………………………………………..

• 4. Were marking criteria necessary for the implementation of peer assessment in

writing?

• a. Yes
• b. No
• 5. In what way do you like peer assessment to be implemented?
• a. In groups
• b. In pairs
• c. Others:

…………………………………………………………………………………..

• 6. What difficulties did you have while implementing peer assessment?

……………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………

• 7. Do you want peer assessment in writing to be implemented in the next semester?

……………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………

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Appendix 4: MARKING SCORES (10.00) No Name Paper 1 Paper 2 1 B N 5.0 6.0 2 C N 5.0 6.0 3 G L 5.0 5.5 4 H N 8.5 9.0 5 H P 7.5 7.0 6 N P 8.0 8.5 7 N D 8.0 8.0 8 N N 6.0 6.5 9 N T 7.0 7.5 10 T N 8.0 8.5 11 T T 7.0 6.5 12 X T 5.0 6.0 13 H L 6.0 7.0 14 H N 8.5 9.0 15 K P 6.0 5.0 16 N L 9.0 9.0 17 P N 8.5 9.0 18 T N 8.5 9.0 19 S N 8.0 8.5 First analysis and synthesis: Scores on Paper 1 Scores on Paper 2 Comparison 5.0-6.0: 37% (7/19) 7.0-7.5: 16% (3/19) 8.0-8.5: 42% (8/ 19) 9.0: 5% (1/19) 5.0-6.0: 26% (5/19 ) 6.5- 7.5: 26% (5/19) 8.0- 8.5: 21% (4/19) 9.0: 26% (5/19) Higher score: 68% (14/19) Lower score: 16% (3/19) Same score: 11% (2/19)

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The Effect of Songs on Writing Compound and Complex Sentences Thi Kim Thi Nguyen Faculty of Foreign Languages Cantho University ntkthi@ctu.edu.vn Writing compound and complex sentences is rarely used by my students in non-major English classes. When some students do try to use compound or complex sentences they

• ften make errors. However, the ability of writing compound and complex sentences is one of

the important writing skills to help students get high scores for fulfilling their subject at Cantho University and for later use in the working environment or further higher education in Vietnam or abroad. An idea which occurred to me was why not use something enjoyable such as pop songs to help the students to remember compound and complex sentences and then use them in their

• writing. Therefore, I decide to plan and implement a ten week action research project to find
• ut the effect of songs on my students’ use of writing compound and complex sentences.

Some songs with compound and complex sentences were to be applied in the class in listening activities, recognizing and analyzing them and singing performance. Then, the students will do some writing tasks with the hope of using them as many as possible. Research question Can the use of pop songs enhance pre-intermediate level university students’ writing compound and complex sentences? Background Throughout time, music has been used for therapeutic and developmental functions by healers, philosophers, scientists, and teachers (Bancroft 3-7). Much previous research has provided insights into the benefits of learning English through songs in the classroom (Schoepp, 2001; Mora, 2000; Liu, 2006, cited in Chen, 2009, p. 17). Australian musicologists Macarthur and Trojer (1985, cited in Stansell, 2005, p.23) claim that methods for teaching music and language could work together to teach students both because they share essential qualities of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and dynamics. In addition, Gardner (1999, p. 41-43) discovered eight distinct domains of intelligence: verbal-linguistic, mathematical-logical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. The linguistic and musical intelligences are separate, but when they work together, the outcome is stronger because of the cooperation.

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Most students learned English as a second language with instrumental motivation. That is, the underlying reason for studying English is simply to pass the exam (Holt, 2001, cited in Chen, 2009, p.16). Therefore, how to motivate them by using different teaching styles is a tough question for teachers. To Cheung (2001), songs which provide learners with relevant and concrete authentic materials are good resources to lead learners to develop a genuine interest in learning English. Several studies have been conducted on the use of songs as an instrument for teaching language which can affect retention of the learners in long term memory (Finacchiaro & Bonomo, 1973; Krashen’s, 1983; Griffee, 1992; Oxford, 1990; Yalch, 1991; McElhinney & Annet, 1996; Widdoson, 1998; Wallace, 1994; Chazin & Neuschatz, 1990, cited in Hassani, M. T., et al, 2014, p.243). Also, Palmer and Kelly (1992) claim that when songs and words match in stress and accent, the learner can experience gains in comprehension of word stress, attention span, anticipation of new text, and memory. In addition, Rauscher, Shaw and Ky‟s study, has generated recurring interest. In it, they tested 36 undergraduates to determine their IQ. Later, after listening to eight minutes and 24 seconds of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, the students scored higher in the spatial reasoning and mathematical sections (Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky). Rauscher concluded that music can be a means to enhance higher brain functioning (Rauscher, et al, 1995, cited in Stansell, 2005, p.16). Chen (2009, p.13) studied the use of English popular songs to enhance elementary school students’ motivation and performance for learning English. Five intact six-grade classes in a public elementary school in Tainan City were selected to be the study subjects in the one- semester research. Four English popular songs were chosen as the teaching materials. The results of this study showed that the majority of students were interested in learning English popular songs and their learning motivation also increased after engaging in this creative teaching activity. As for learning performance, students felt that their English abilities, especially listening ability, have improved after learning the songs. Therefore, it seems that creative teaching enhances students’ performance in many areas so it may be beneficial to teach writing with songs (Schacter, Thum, & Zikfin, 2006). Sequence of Actions To determine how well the students write compound and complex sentences in the first week

• f this project I asked them to write in class:

Pretest: Write a paragraph about “the advantages of mobile phones” (80 to 100 words) Time allotted: 30 minutes. Before writing, the whole class brainstormed some ideas in phrases, and I wrote them on the board and edited them to look appropriate and convincing, and grammar-correct. I also introduced the theory of a well-organized paragraph by using a sample and the students practiced writing the topic sentence and concluding sentence. Then, from the second week to the ninth week, I applied listening tasks of eight songs – filling the blanks - weekly as in the sample following: Careless Whisper – George Michael

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I wish _________ we could both be there. After the answers were given, I wrote some complex sentences on the board to analyze them together with my questions such as the numbers of the clauses, tenses, the names of the dependent clauses, the words beginning the dependent clauses, the uses of these dependent

• nes. The following is one final theory:

…..wish…that……past subjunctive mood (could/would/went/were)…….. (complex sentence with a noun clause as an object): the use of 'wish' here is to say that we would like things to be different from what they are, that we have regrets about the present situation. Then, a practice ‘complete the sentences’ was completed in class such as indicated in the following: I wish that …………………………………………………………………… I went around the class to edit the sentences some students wrote. Through this I recognized some common mistakes and asked three students to write them on the board and I corrected for them and explained the mistakes carefully. After the lesson, I asked the students to take the lyrics home and listen the songs more on Youtube and practice singing with friends at

• home. They could record or film the singing and share this with friends, family, or classmates
• n any means of communication such as phones, Facebook, and email.

On the tenth week, to organize the theory of compound and complex sentences in a system, I applied three review tasks as below: The first review task was filling in the blanks of all sentences of eight songs. If any students could not complete the sentences they were allowed to listen to the songs again. Here is one example of the song Season In The Sun - Westlife Fill in the blanks with words in the box. I wish that we ________both be there. The second review task was completing the sentences, but the sentences were put in categories such as compound sentences, complex sentences with noun clauses, adjective clauses and adverb clauses. Here are examples of some sentences:

• A. Compound sentences
• 1. He washes his clothes, and…………………………………… on the weekend.
• B. Complex sentences

Noun clauses

• 1. He says that…………………………………………………………

Adjective clauses

• 1. I

like the mobile phones which………………………………………………………. Adverb clauses

could when since

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• 1. Though

my parents are far away from me, ………………………………………… A handout related to the second task was collected by me to correct at home. On the eleventh week I handed out the review tasks and reminded students about some mistakes they made. Then, I asked them to do a writing task as following: Post Test: The writing task Your friend, Lan, is living in Ho Chi Minh City. She says she is going to visit you. Write to her and tell her: When can she visit you? Who is going to pick her up? What activities are you going to do together? (80-100 words) Time allotted: 30 minutes Results Thirty-five Law students took part in the pre-test, but only 26 students were present regularly during the research, so only these students’ results were included in the analysis. Any compound and complex sentences was counted in each pre-test of each student. Pre-Test Results Number of compound and complex sentences 0 1 2 3 Number of students 9 11 5 1 Only one student wrote three compound and complex sentences with because, when, and. Five students wrote two, and 11 wrote one, and 9 students didn’t write any compound and complex sentences. The mean number of compound and complex sentences of for the 26 students was 0.9. That means each student wrote only one compound or complex sentence in their pre-test. The structures with ‘when, because, and, but, noun clauses’ were used. One example of the common mistake with sentences with because was ‘We use mobile phones. Because they are convenient.’ They didn’t use a comma before but, and as in this sentence ‘We can call and we can send a message to everyone. However, sentences with when, noun clauses were correct. In the post-test, compound and complex sentences were used dramatically increasingly in the number as well as the kinds although a few sentences are incorrect. Post Test Results Number of compound and complex sentences 2 3 4 6 8 10 Number of students 7 6 5 5 1 1 One student wrote 10 compound and complex sentences and one student wrote 8. The majority wrote 2,3,4,6 sentences of compound and complex. The mean score was 4.0. This Mean: 0.9 Mean: 4.0

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post-test mean was four times greater than the pre-test mean. A variety of structures were written such as sentences with ‘noun clauses, and, but, if, because, then, which, although, than, so that’. Especially, noun clauses increased dramatically after some verbs such as know, think, remember, am sure, am sorry. The mistakes relating to using a comma in sentences with but, and and mistakes with full stops with because nearly disappeared. There were two sentences with than, but one of them had incorrect comparative adjective. There was one sentence with so that. One sentence with although was written, but there was no verb in although clause, no subject in the main clause, and no comma before the main clause as in this sentence ‘Although very busy will pick you at the bus station this weekend’. The majority of compound and complex sentences were in the structures of ‘if, when, because, noun clauses, and, but’ Reflections on the learning processes During the weekly application of the songs, I saw that there was an exciting atmosphere during study. Listening to songs created comfort and relaxation. Some said that they felt less sleepy when songs were used in class. In fact, on the first day of no songs, I saw some students sleep in class, but this almost never happened once I applied songs in the middle of the lesson. In addition, some students said that they liked the content of the songs because they had the same love and life cases as in the songs. Therefore, when the singers were singing, they felt like the real people in their life were talking to them. I saw some students feel very touched when listening to the case of a man who wanted to die in the song Season In The Sun – Westlife. Many students agreed that most singers were their pop idols, too because they sang well and they were good-looking. I saw that they really liked the song “More Than I Can Say”, but it seemed that they did not like “Careless whisper” in spite of its great melody because they did not understand many words and the structure such as “I should have known better than to cheat a friend”. So, I had to translate them into Vietnamese for them. Meanwhile, the song “My heart will go on” was linked to the familiar, famous romance film - Titanic (I reminded them), so when listening to it, they also remembered the content of the film and had great feeling of a touch love story. When I first asked the students to volunteer to sing in class, no one wanted to sing. Later, I suggested singing at home and filming or recording it and sharing, and this worked. This was approved by many and they shared the performance with excitement. Conclusions Based on the findings of this research, I can conclude that the use of English popular songs improved the students’ writing compound and complex sentences in their writing tasks. I also suggest that other teachers should be creative in choosing this method of teaching compound and complex sentences through songs and be careful in finding the song materials to fit the students’ interests, cultures and finding the standard English to improve the students’ knowledge reception and performance.

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There are some suggestions based on the conclusion above:

• 1. It is recommended that English teachers of young adults in universities and colleges use

popular songs in teaching compound and complex sentences to increase the structures’ retention, and improve the writing of these structures.

• 2. In the future, this research should be conducted with the students of other majors such as

social sciences and humanities, natural sciences, and medicine because their interests and competencies can be different. References Chen, et al. (2009). The Effect of English Popular Songs on Learning Motivation and Learning Performance. WHAMPOA - An Interdisciplinary Journal, 56(2009) 13-28. Cheung, C. K. (2001). The use of popular culture as a stimulus to motivate secondary students’ English learning in Hong Kong. ELT Journal, 55(1), 55-61. Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence reframed. Basic Books, New York. Hassani, M. T., et al (2014). The effect of songs on EFL learners’ grammar recall and

• retention. International Journal of Language Learning and Applied Linguistics World

(IJLLALW) Volume, 5(2), 2289-2737 & ISSN (print): 2289-3245. www.ijllalw.org Palmer, C., & Kelly, M. (1992). Linguistic prosody and musical meter in song. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 525-541. Schacter, J., Thum, Y. M., & Zifkin, D. (2006). How much does creative teaching enhance elementary school students’ achievement? Journal of Creative Behavior. 40(1), 47– 72. Stansell, W. (2005). The Use of Music for Learning Languages: A Review of the Literature. Running head: THE USE OF MUSIC FOR LEARNING LANGUAGES: A REVIEW, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois. APPENDIX A: Sample listening tasks of eight songs

• 1. Sealed With a Kiss - Brian Hyland

_________ we’ve got to say good-bye for the summer, darling, I promise you this. I’ll run to tenderly hold you, _________ darling, you won’t be there.

• 2. Big Big World - Emllia

It’s not a big thing _________ you leave me. _________ I open my eyes, you’re gone.

• 3. My Heart Will Go On - Celline Dion

Near, far, _________ you are, I believe that the heart does go on

• 4. More than I Can Say - Curtis/J. Allison

I love you more _________ I can say.

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• 5. Season In The Sun - Westlife

We’ve known each other _________ we were nine or ten. It’s hard to die _________ all the birds are singing in the sky. I wish _________ we could both be there.

• 6. Hello - Lionel Richie

You’re all I’ve ever wanted, _________ my arm are open wide. Are you somewhere feeling lonely, _________ is someone loving you? Is it me you’re________ for?

• 7. Careless Whisper - George Michael

I should have known better _________ to cheat a friend. I wish _________ we could lose this crowd. We’d hurt each other with the things we want to _________.

• 8. The Actor - Michael Learns to rock

Sometimes I wonder _________ you are blind. APPENDIX B: Compound and complex structures and explanations

• 1. Sealed With a Kiss - Brian Hyland

Though we’ve got to say good-bye for the summer, darling, I promise you this. I’ll run to tenderly hold you, but darling, you won’t be there. Though/Although……, ……. (A complex sentence with an adverb clause of concession) …………, but…………… (A compound sentence with “but”)

• 2. Big Big World - Emllia

It’s not a big thing if you leave me. When I open my eyes, you’re gone. If……., …….. (A complex sentence with an adverb clause of condition) When…….., ……………. (A complex sentence with an adverb clause of time)

• 3. My Heart Will Go On - Celline Dion

Near, far, wherever you are, I believe that the heart does go on Wherever…………….,……........... (A complex sentence with an adverb clause of place)

• 4. More than I Can Say - Curtis/J. Allison

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I love you more than I can say. ………comparative adjective + than………(A complex sentence with an adverb clause of comparative) The rules of comparative adjectives: Short adj+er More + long adj Irregular forms: Much – more Good – better Bad – worse …

• 5. Season In The Sun - Westlife

We’ve known each other since we were nine or ten. It’s hard to die when all the birds are singing in the sky. I wish that we could both be there. ……present perfect…….since……simple past……. (A complex sentence with an adverb clause of time) …………..when…………. (A complex sentence with an adverb clause of time) …..wish…that……past subjunctive mood (could/would/went/were)…….. (A complex sentence with a noun clause as an object): the use of 'wish' here is to say that we would like things to be different from what they are, that we have regrets about the present situation. When………….., ………….. (A complex sentence with an adverb clause of time)

• 6. Hello - Lionel Richie

You’re all I’ve ever wanted, and my arm are open wide. Are you somewhere feeling lonely, or is someone loving you? Is it me you’re looking for? ……………., and…………( A compound sentence with “and”) ……………., or…………………………? (A compound sentence with “or”) ……………., but…………( A compound sentence with “but”)

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……………., so…………………………? (A compound sentence with “so”) ….noun/pronoun (which/whom/that) +S+V…….(a complex sentence with an adjective clause) …..noun/pronoun which/who/that +V……(a complex sentence with an adjective clause)

• 7. Careless Whisper - George Michael

I should have known better than to cheat a friend. I wish that we could lose this crowd. We’d hurt each other with the things (that) we want to say. ……………better than……(A complex sentence with an adverb clause of comparative) ….wish…..that……. (A complex sentence with a noun clause as an object) …………noun/pronoun + (that) +S+V…. (A complex sentence with an adjective clause)

• 8. The Actor - Michael Learns to rock

Sometimes I wonder if you are blind. ……..if…………..(A complex sentence with a noun clause as an object)

• a. A yes/no question: Are you blind?

I wonder if you are blind. (To make a yes/no question to become a noun clause, we add “if” before the yes/no question and omit “?” and make the question order to become a statement order.)

• b. A wh-question: where are you from?

I wonder where you are from. (To make a wh- question to become a noun clause, we put wh-word first, and make the question order to become a statement order, then omit “?”.)

• c. A statement: He likes bowling.

She says that he likes bowling. (To make a statement to become a noun clause, we add add “that” before the statement.) APPENDIX C: Practice: Complete the sentences

• 1. Sealed With a Kiss - Brian Hyland

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Though smart phones are expensive,…………………………………………………. English is useful, but ………………………………………………………

• 2. Big Big World - Emllia

If it is sunny this afternoon, ……………………………………………………………… When I am angry, …………………………………………………………

• 3. My Heart Will Go On - Celline Dion

Wherever he goes, …………………………………………………………

• 4. More than I Can Say - Curtis/J. Allison

English is easier than…………………………………………………………

• 5. Season In The Sun - Westlife

I wish that …………………………………………………………….. When I go by bus, ……………………………………………………..

• 6. Hello - Lionel Richie

He likes playing soccer, and………………………………………………………… Do you like eating out, or …………………………………………………………? You’re the person (whom)…………………………………………………………..

• 7. Careless Whisper - George Michael

Men are ………………………than women. I wish ………………………………………………… I like the clothes which……………………………………………………….

• 8. The Actor - Michael Learns to rock

He asks me if …………………………………………………………………………..

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APPENDIX D: REVIEW TASK 1: Fill in the blanks

• 1. ________ we’ve got to say good-bye for the summer, darling, I promise you this.
• 2. I’ll run to tenderly hold you, ________ darling you won’t be there.
• 3. It’s not a big thing ________ you leave me.
• 4. ________ I open my eyes, you’re gone.
• 5. Near, far, ________ you are, I believe that the ________ does go on
• 6. I love you more ________ I can say.
• 7. We’ve known each other ________ we were nine or ten.
• 8. It’s hard to die ________ all the birds are singing in the sky.
• 9. I wish that we ________both be there.
• 10. You’re all I’ve ever wanted, and my arm are ________ wide.
• 11. Are you somewhere feeling lonely, ________ is someone ________ you?
• 12. Is it me you’re________ for?
• 13. I should have known ________ than to cheat a friend.
• 14. I ________ that we could lose this crowd.
• 15. We’d hurt each other with the things we want to ________.
• 16. Sometimes I wonder ________ you are blind.

When if than since looking better Though heart wherever when could

• pen
• r

say if wish loving but

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APPENDIX E: REVIEW TASK 2: Complete the sentences

• C. Compound sentences
• 2. He washes his clothes, and……………………………………on the weekend.
• 3. English is interesting, but ………………………………………………………
• 4. Did you go fishing, or …………………………………………………………?
• 5. ………………………………………….., so he goes on a diet.
• D. Complex sentences

Noun clauses

• 2. He says that…………………………………………………………
• 3. He asks me if…………………………………………………………
• 4. That Mr.Tan is very strict ……………………………………………………..
• 5. They wondered where ……………………………………………………

Adjective clauses

• 2. I like the mobile phones which……………………………………………………….
• 3. They just employ people who……………………………………………………..

Adverb clauses

• 2. If it is rainy tomorrow, ………………………………………………………………
• 3. When I was 10 years old, …………………………………………………………
• 4. Though my parents are far away from me, …………………………………………
• 5. Wherever he lives, …………………………………………………………
• 6. My father is more serious than…………………………………………………………
• 7. People play soccer because……………………………………………..

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Improving Students’ Writing Skills in English Through e-journal Writing Từ Mỹ Thu Can Tho College tumythu@gmail.com Võ Kim Hương Can Tho University vkhuong@ctu.edu.vn It cannot be denied that writing journals is a great way to improve writing skills. So nowadays, writing journals has been popularly used in teaching and learning literature and the second language as well. In our action research, writing e-journals was used as a medium to explore ideas, improve the grammatical points and adjust coherence in our students’ writings. To carry out our research, we followed the experimental design in which e-journal was the independent variable and students’ writing skills were the dependent variables. The participants wee at pre-intermediate level in a writing class at the center for Foreign Languages of Can Tho University. To collect the data and measure the students’ writing ability as well as their attitudes toward writing e-journals, we used three research instruments, pre-test and post-test, questionnaire and interview. The results demonstrated a significant difference in the enhancement of the students’ writing skills at the two points of measurement, before and after writing e-journals intervention. The mean 5.32 after the experiment was higher than the mean 4.50 before the experiment. The questionnaire also indicated that the students’ writing skills were improved positively through e-journals writing and they had positive attitudes toward e-journals writing. Finally, the interviews revealed that most of students expressed their strong preference in writing e-journals. The implication for teaching was that languages teachers can consider using e-journals in writing classes as an activity that helps students improve their writing ability and draw their interest in learning writing. Introduction In our teaching context most of students are at pre-intermediate level and it is true to say that their writing skills are limited. This means they often encounter many challenges in writing such as task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resources, grammar range and

• accuracy. This leads them to be bored in learning writing because of the difficulties they
• encounter. Thus to help our students overcome such difficulties, we not only teach writing

theories but also have to design the writing activities which can draw them in practicing writing and assist them to improve their writing skills as well as enhance their interest in studying writing. William (1957) stated that ‘To improve second language writers’ writing

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ability, they need to do different kinds of writing, and they need to do a lot of it. It is important to include plenty of practice both in and out of class’. We strongly agree with this point of view. Writing a lot is also a good way to improve the writing ability. No one can become a skilful writer without practicing writing. It is possible to say that writing an e-journal is an opportunity for writing practice. Interaction between learners gives them chances to negotiate meanings as well as motivate them. Email is an attractive medium that helps students send and receive the messages quickly. We made a decision to do an action research about the effectiveness of e-journals writing in improving students’ writing skills. The aims of our research were to investigate whether e-journals writing improves students’ writing skills, and to find out students’ attitudes toward e journals writing. As a consequence, two research questions were investigated:

• 1. Do e-journals writing improve students’ writing skills?
• 2. What are students’ attitudes toward e-journals writing?

In our research, our participants edited two-way journals (It’s called email dialogue journal) between the writer and at least one partner about the topics that were assigned by the

• teachers. Jacobs and Chai (1996) wrote that ‘a dialogue journal is for two-way

communication between the writer and at least one, but hopefully more, readers who write their responses in the journal’. Moreover, Jacobs and Chai (1996) also gave the effects of dialogue journals

• Dialogue journals provide students and teacher with a vehicle for real
• communication. As a result, they get to know each other better.
• Students’ fluency is improved, as they can temporarily set aside concern over

accuracy.

• Students receive regular and prompt feedback on their writing. Such

individualized feedback spurs them to write more and to grow better. Students

• ften feel encouraged to write because they know that this individual attention

and response improves each of their journal entries.

• Students write at text levels, not sentence levels. This provides them
• pportunities to practice text cohesion devices such as linking words and

connections between paragraphs.

• By writing regularly, students come to appropriate writing as a tool for thinking

since as they write, new ideas appear and old ideas are clarified significantly.

• Feedback encourages students to think more deeply.

Our research design was an experimental design. The students were asked to write e-journals about their personal opinions or any aspect of the given topic on the email of the class so that they could share their journals together for feedback. This process, introduced four days prior to the writing class, brought greater focus to their writing. In addition, this step really created the students more chances to discover new ideas for discussion in the class. In the class, the students were also trained in the writing process such as exploring ideas, revising the first

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draft on the class email in order to get feedback from the classmates, combining the appropriate ideas and editing a perfect paragraph, then submitting it to the instructor. The control group was taught in the conventional manner. The experiment lasted for two weeks and consisted of two topics. One topic was writing about a vacation, another one is about a festival. We also had our own guidelines for the students in the experimental group:

• Help each other improve their writing by giving constructive feedback. The

writer needs to know what is good as well as what needs to be improved.

• When making comments and offering suggestions for improvement, do it in

an encouraging manner. Make your comment text specific suggesting ways to make the content clearer.

• Be sensitive to your classmate’s feelings and use appropriate language in

telling them what needs to be modified and improved.

• In the feedback, do not offer your own opinion to the content of what is
• written. If you disagree with the writer on some points she‘s made, you should accept

her point of view and relate only to the way the paper is written. Do not give your

• wn opinion on the writer’s opinion.
• Do not write too much, if, in your view, there are many problems with the

draft, just mention the main points. Discussion In this research, we used three instruments: pre-test and post-test, questionnaire and interview to gather the data. Pre-test and post-test were carried out at the beginning and ending of the

• study. The students’ writing performances were assessed and marked. Questionnaires were

used to elicit factual data. Moreover, questionnaires with closed questions were selected to check the students’ attitudes about writing e-journals. The individual interview was informally administered to the participants to investigate their thoughts as well as their interest toward writing e-journals. Research Results Pre-test and post-test were conducted in the experimental group before and after the e-journal writing intervention. The results of pre-test and post-test were shown through the following charts. The data obtained from pre-tests and post-tests were analyzed using SPSS. The results are presented below:

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Paired Samples Statistics Mean N Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean Pair 1 Pre-Exp 4.50 44 1.229 .185 Post-Exp 5.32 44 1.290 .194 It’s clear that the mean score of post-test (mean 5.32) is higher than the mean score of pre-test (mean 4.50). This means that the students‘ writing skills was improved. There is a strong conclusion that writing e-journals is a useful mean to help the students write more effectively.

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Marks

The comparison of the post-tests in experimental group and in the controlled group

Post-control Post-experiment

Students’ writing skills of the experimental group before and after intervention The results from the figure above indicate that the students’ writing skills were positively

• changed. In the post tests, the poor marks (from 2 to 4) decreased. In contrast, the average

marks (from 5 to 6) increased considerably. In addition, the good marks (from 7 to 8) slightly

• increased. It is concluded that the students’ writing skills were significantly improved

through e-journal writing. A questionnaire was used to investigate the students’ attitudes toward e-journal writing. The questionnaire consisted of 16 items designed with 5 scales and 4 clusters: Content, Grammar and Structure, Vocabulary, and Overall effectiveness. The questionnaire sheets were delivered to 44 participants. The data collected were submitted to SPSS to check the reliability. The descriptive statistics test was used to check the mean scores of the questionnaire and four clusters. The results were provided detailed as follows: The reliability of the questionnaire is .7029. It meets the reliable standard of test.

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The mean score of the questionnaire (M = 3.7415) is above the mid level of five-point scale. This indicates the students’ writing skills were improved effectively. In addition, the students had positive attitudes toward e-journal writing. The mean scores of 4 clusters of the questionnaire were as follows: The mean score of cluster 1 - Content (M = 4.0909) is above the average. This finding indicates that an e-journal was the useful tool that helped the students improve the content of their writings. The mean score of cluster 2 - Grammar and Structure (M = 3.6591) is above the mid level of five-point scale. This result showed that most of students improved in their accuracy in using

• grammar. Similarly, the students focused on grammatical points when reading journals and

writing feedbacks. Therefore, it helped the students learn together and self correct their mistakes. The mean score of cluster 3 - Vocabulary (M =4.1591) is above the average. The finding confirmed that most of students increased their vocabulary knowledge thanks to reading e- journals and writing feedback many times. The mean score of cluster 4 - Overall Effectiveness (M = 3.6534) is above the average. The figure of 3.6534 indicated the students’ motivation of writing e-journal was positive. Similarly, the students improved their writing ability through writing e-journals. After analyzing the data from the pre- and post-test and the questionnaire we proceeded to interview 15 students (5 students with the highest marks, 5 students with average marks and 5 students with the lowest marks). Most of students agreed that writing e-journals improved their writing skills as well as language skills and helped in the development of vocabulary. In addition, the students also highly appreciated the effectiveness of e-journal writing. Most of students said that with e-journals writing enhanced their language learning, particularly, they boosted their writing ability. Writing e-journals was an opportunity for them to discuss and learn together. Moreover, writing e-journals stimulated the students’ interest in practicing writing. One of the interviewee’s stated ‘I find difficulty to meet my friends for discussing or learning each other because of lack of time. Thanks to writing e-mail journals, I can save time and can learn from each other. Writing e-journals motivates my language learning’. Another interviewee answered that ‘Through e-mail, I receive many journals from my friends, additionally, I send them my feedback. We can learn together. E- journal writing draws my interest in practicing writing’. Conclusion The analysis of the data from the questionnaire and the interview indicated that most of the students have highly positive attitudes toward e-journal writing. The results from pre-test and post-test and questionnaires indicated that students’ writing ability was improved, specifically in vocabulary, grammar and structures, the content of the writing, cohesion and coherence of the writing were improved. From these results, we expect writing e-journals should be used as an activity for practicing writing in writing classes. We think that writing e-journals is an interesting, motivated, and meaningful writing activity. It will draw students’ interest in learning writing and practicing writing. It is said that ‘Learn to write and write to learn’.

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References Bode, B. (1989), Dialogue Journal Writing. Jacobs and Chai. (1996), Dialogue Writing: Bridge from Talk to Essay Writing. Language Arts. Lee, E.K. (1998), Using E-mail in EFL Writing Classes. The Internet TESL Journal. Staton, J. (1980), Writing and Counseling: Using a Dialogue Journal. Language Arts. Wang, Y.M. (1994), E-mail Dialogue Journaling in an ESL reading and writing Classroom. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oregon.

• William. (1957), Teaching Writing in Second and Foreign Language Classrooms. The

MCGraw Hill Higher Education.

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Helping First Year English Majors Develop Ideas for Writing Descriptive Paragraphs Trinh Boi Ngoc trinhboingoc78@gmail.com Nguyen Thi Tuyet Nhung tuyetnhung2009@gmail.com Faculty of Foreign Languages Tra Vinh University Our context Through our experience in teaching English for many years, we have found that first year English majors usually have difficulty expressing their ideas in written paragraphs. When observing the first year English majors in our writing class at Tra Vinh University, we have seen that most of students’ descriptive writing products are incomplete and unconvincing due to poor or vague ideas. They usually write paragraphs with some missing words or they use some Vietnamese phrases in their paragraphs when doing English writing tests. For these reasons we decided to conduct an action research project on “Helping first year English majors at Tra Vinh university develop their ideas for writing descriptive paragraphs” by designing some useful activities. We also believe that doing action research is significant and beneficial because it helps us to improve our teaching methods and our students’ learning. What are our concerns? In the first and second meetings, we introduced the objectives of Writing 1 course to students, using the current coursebook - Interaction 1: Writing. In this course, the main writing genre was description. In order to know students’ level of writing, we gave them the following writing task “Imagine that you are at the beach. Write a 100-120 word paragraph to describe some activities happening at the beach”. Students were given 40 minutes to write their paragraphs. After that we collected their writing pieces and analyzed mistakes related to developing ideas such as using descriptive adjectives, prepositional phrases of location, appropriate word choice. We found that students had issues with many of the important elements of descriptive writing. For example, they sometimes used Vietnamese phrases in their paragraphs, and used inappropriate word choice regarding descriptive adjectives, nouns and prepositions. In order to assist students improve their writing, we wanted to encourage our first year English majors to develop ideas for writing descriptive paragraphs (focusing on describing people, places and things). Planning We constructed a list of things we should do in the first semester of the school year 2015 - 2016:  Read previous studies  Design various strategies to help our students explore ideas:

• Flashcards

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• Family photos
• Picture drawing and writing
• Task (after implementing those strategies): Base on the given picture to write a 100-

120 word paragraph to describe activities happening at the beach Acting We summarized the two previous studies related to our present study in terms of using pictures to improve students’ writing skills. Ariningsih (2010) conducted a study on “ The Effectiveness of Using Picture Series to Improve the Students’ Writing Skill Viewed From Their Learning Motivation at Sebelas Maret University of Surakarta. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of using picture series and translation in teaching writing to the seventh grade students, explore if using picture series brings students higher motivation, and find out whether there is a relationship between teaching techniques and motivation in teaching writing. The participants of this research consisted of 2 groups: one controlled group and one experimental group. Picture series were used for the experimental group and translation was for the controlled group. The two activities above were implemented 8 times for each group. Then the researcher gave both groups a writing test for analysis. The researcher found: (1) Using picture series is more successful than translation; (2) The higher motivation the students have, the greater theirwriting skill achievement; and (3) There is a relationship between teaching techniques and learning motivation. Prastihan (2014) carried out a study on “Improving Descriptive Paragraph Writing through Animation Pictures of the Eighth Grade Students in SMPN 3 Amlapura in Academic Year 2013/2014”. The purpose of this study was to improve descriptive paragraph writing through animated pictures. There were 35 participants in this study. They were asked to take a pre- test which was carried out in the pre-cycle to identify their ability in writing descriptive

• paragraphs. The researcher found that their writing skills needed to be improved through

Animation Pictures in two-planned cycles. After that the participants did a post-test which showed an improvement of the participants’ ability in writing descriptive paragraphs. From these studies, we can see that both had a focus on the impact of using pictures for writing descriptive paragraphs. The findings of these studies also show the positive effects of using pictures for writing descriptive paragraphs. In the context of our study, we focused on the three strategies which are from easy to more difficult steps and they are related to each other. Our first strategy was using flashcards. We provided students with various descriptive adjectives related to people, things and places. We showed some flashcards including pictures and descriptive adjectives on the screen and asked students to match the pictures with the appropriate adjectives. Next, we demonstrated only pictures on the screen and let them think and write down the adjective which described each

• picture. Describing family photos was employed as our second strategy. We asked each

student to bring a family photo to class and called some of them to describe their photos in front of the class by combining the descriptive adjectives they have accumulated with prepositional phrases and grammatical structures to describe people, things and places in the photos while the other students listened and made notes. After that we chose some students to report what they heard without looking at the photos. With this strategy, students can develop not only writing skills but also listening and speaking skills. Moving to a more difficult strategy was using picture drawing and writing activity. We asked students to work in pairs and gave pictures to one student only (Student A), and blank pieces of paper to the other

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student (Student B). Next, Student A described their pictures and Student B listened carefully and drew a picture. Then, the two students compared their pictures. Finally, they wrote their own descriptive paragraphs based on the pictures. This activity also helps students to develop the skills above. Besides, it stimulated their extrinsic motivation and created an exciting atmosphere in the classroom. After implementing the strategies above, we wanted to test the participants’ ability in writing descriptive paragraphs, so we designed a test with a given picture about some activities happening at the beach. Students were asked to write a descriptive paragraph in 40 minutes. Observing Our students were highly motivated in participating in the activities of using flashcards, family photos, picture drawing and writing. Students not only relaxed their mind but also linked the visual aids with the meanings of words, especially descriptive adjectives, nouns relevant to people, things and places as well as prepositional phrases of location. Moreover, learning vocabularies by using those strategies supported students in developing their long- term memory and accumulating their vocabulary. At the same time, they had a chance to practice listening and speaking skills with their partners, group members and the whole class. Also, the interaction among students gradually improved. When observing students’ writing products after implementing those strategies, we found that some students had made progress in using descriptive vocabularies and prepositional phrases

• f location, described pretty enough details of the pictures, and their writing pieces were

much more convincing in comparison with their previous writing products. Reflecting Teaching writing descriptive paragraphs through pictures brings benefits to both us and our students about the cultural and social background in Vietnam and Western countries. Moreover, students have changed their attitude towards learning writing skills. They become more active and enthusiastic to participate in our activities thanks to colorful images. In addition to some positive effects of using various strategies for teaching descriptive writing we discovered some following issues that should be improved in the next cycle. The first issue was that some weak and average students couldn’t find English words which were equivalent to some activities/ actions shown in the pictures. As a result, they sometimes ignored some actions in the picture, used Vietnamese phrases, asked us or better students for

• help. To these students, we think that when asking students to describe pictures, we can assist

them by giving some cues/ hints (English vocabulary) in advance. Then we ask students to work in pairs or groups to match the cues/ hints with the actions in the pictures by guessing. Besides, we learn that it is essential to pay attention to students’ levels when asking them to work in groups to make sure that students with various achievement levels work together. Picture preparation was our second concern. Because of time limitations and a heavy timetable, it was sometimes difficult for us to find pictures that were clear and suitable for the writing topic. To cope with this problem, we intend to get the assistance from our colleagues who teach the same writing course by asking them to collect and share pictures, in order that a pool of useful pictures is developed. We can also ask students to help develop a pool of good pictures. We can give them a topic in class after which they try to find pictures related to the topic at home. After that they bring their pictures to class and display them on the wall. Students go around the class to vote the best picture for the given topic.

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Conclusion We feel pleased with our students’ results. We and our students become more confident and are stimulated in teaching and learning writing skills although we identify some issues generated when applying those strategies. Therefore, we need to conduct another cycle because we think that action research helps us discover both our teaching and our students’ issues to overcome them in time and to better the quality of teaching and learning. References Ariningsih, D. (2010). The effectiveness of using picture series to improve the students’writing skill viewed from their learning motivation (An Experimental Study in the Seventh Grade of SMPN 1 Tanjunganom Nganjuk in the Academic Year 2008/2009). Doctoral dissertation, Universitas Sebelas Maret. Pavlik, C & Segal, M.K. (2007). Interactions 1: Writing. (Silver ed.). New York: NY: McGraw-Hil Companies, Inc. Prastihana, I G.P. (2014). Improving descriptive paragraph writing through animation pictures of the eighth grade students in smpn 3 amlapura in academic year 2013/2014. Unpublished thesis. Mahasaraswati Denpasar University.

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Appendix Writing task (after implementing three strategies) TRA VINH UNIVERSITY SUBJECT: WRITING 1 CLASS:……………….. WRITING TEST (Chapter 2) NAME: ………………………… STUDENT’S CODE:………………….. Time allotted: 40’ Look at the following picture and write a paragraph to describe it:

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Improving Students’ Short-term Memory through Retelling in the Source Language Truong Thi Ngoc Diep School of Foreign Languages Can Tho University ttndiep@ctu.edu.vn Introduction Short-term memory helps us to retain, store and recall experience, which is important in our daily life, and even more important in the learning process. Language learners are required to have good short-term memory in order to become competent consecutive interpreters (Gile, 1995b; Nolan, 2005). However, it is quite difficult and problematic for those who first enroll in the course for training this memory due to these following reasons. First of all, due to the structure of the brain, it is difficult to remember proper nouns, numbers, the order of information, and the density of information. Also, it is quite challenging to recall information unrelated to previous knowledge or with clear cut links in a short period of time. In the context of consecutive and simultaneous interpretation, the power of memory is pivotal for successful transferring messages accurately and fully from one language into another. For trainee interpreters to know better what challenges will them and what they should do to

• vercome those difficulties in interpreting assignments, Gile (1991) proposes the Effort

Models for interpreting, where he presents the indispensable stages of interpreting. He suggests that with its significance, memory skill should be offered to prospective interpreters at the very early stage of the training program. Secondly, despite the important role of short-term memory in interpretation, students have not received adequate practical suggestions and exercises from their lecturers in order to improve their memory for better interpretation. In fact, according to Tran’s survey (2006) about the frequency of the English instructors giving suggestions for students about short- term memory, 45% of the participants stated that their instructors sometimes offered them practical suggestions and exercises on applying short-term memory for interpreting. Also, 32.5% of the respondents reported that they were rarely given helpful recommendations for improving interpreting skills via short-term memory practice by their instructors. Finally, along with other lecturers in the Department of English Language and Culture, School of Foreign Languages, Can Tho University (CTU), I am usually assigned to teach the two courses Basic Consecutive Interpretation 1 and 2, which are to help develop students’ foundation skills of consecutive interpreting with a focus on memory training. I have noticed that the CTU lecturers have applied a variety of commonly suggested memory training methods namely retelling in the source language, shadowing (Zhong, 2003), mnemonic to memory (Ballester & Hurtado, 1991), short-term memory exercises with inference (Tran, 2006) since 2008 when the interpreter-translator training program was offered here. However, no formal study into the current classroom practice of these methods has been

• implemented. I, therefore, would like to investigate how CTU students majoring in English

translation and interpretation perceive the benefits and the drawbacks of memory training tasks so that they may improve their interpreting. Among the above mentioned methods, I usually introduce Retelling in the Source Language to students for their memory enhancement in the very first course of interpretation training. If the advantages and disadvantages of this memory training method were identified, CTU lecturers including me would be able to modify their syllabus, design more effective tasks for classroom practice as well as self-study so that the learning outcome would be more productive. Once the students

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had developed a good short-term memory, they would be able to encode and decode information well for good quality interpretation. In order to have better insights into the CTU students’ perception of the method Retelling in the Source Language in memory training for consecutive interpreting skill, the following research questions are raised:

• 1. How do CTU students majoring in translation interpreting describe the role of

memory training in their interpreting?

• 2. What are the students’ perceptions of the benefits, if any, which the practice of

Retelling in the Source Language every week brings to them?

• 3. What difficulties do students think they have encountered in their weekly practice of

Retelling in the Source Language method? From my occasional observation for the past three years, the frequent complaint of CTU students majoring in English translation and interpretation when taking final exams in consecutive interpreting was that they could hardly remember what they had recently heard. Therefore, their interpretation was inaccurate, incomplete and the final grades were not

• satisfactory. I thought that I should offer more chances for students to practice memory skill

through Retelling in the Source Language. The study was implemented in my own class since I intended to apply the memory training method Retelling in the Source Language on the weekly basis. One of the objectives of the course Basic Consecutive Interpretation 1 was the students would be familiar with techniques for skill development in an interpreting process. Thus, at the end of the course, they could listen, understand and interpret a 2-3 minute talk from English into Vietnamese or vice versa. To do this well, they should be equipped with an effective short-term memory. Similar to Gile’s belief in the benefits of early introduction of memory training to the trainee interpreters (1991), I was quite confident that regular practice of the chosen method at this very first stage of interpreting training would gradually develop the students’ short-term memory for good interpretation. I decided to be both an instructor and a researcher in this class. As an instructor, it was convenient for me to adapt the task to suit my students’ learning. As a researcher, I could easily observe and record their performance, then modify the practice exercises so as this memory training method could benefit my students most. Although the findings of this research might be somewhat subjective when I was a researcher and a lecturer (Brown, 2002; Vásquez, 2015), I thought that this dual role brought more advantages to our teaching and learning process due to my thorough understanding of the teaching context and materials. Investigating Previous Information Short-term Memory and Consecutive Interpreting According to Zhong (2001), short-term memory or “primary/active” memory, is a kind of memory helping us to store a limited piece of information in a very short time of about 15-30

• seconds. In such limited time, ‘we can only remember six or seven items only as long as we

give all our attention to them’ (Smith, 1985 cited in Tran, 2006, p. 4). Interpreting is a process of orally rendering a message from one language into another one (Dang, 2007). Interpreters can be required to interpret either consecutively or simultaneously. In consecutive interpreting, the interpreter produces a rendering of a speech after the speakers finish speaking while in simultaneous interpreting, the interpreters have to interpret nearly at the same time with the speakers’ talking. The requirements for both modes of interpretation are that the rendering of the message should be accurate, complete and faithful. In order to meet such requirements, the interpreters need to be good at listening for understanding the

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message delivered in the source language and memorizing it well before transferring it into the target language. In his Effort Model for consecutive interpreting, Gile (1995b) divides interpreting process into two phases: a listening and reformulation phrase and a reconstruction phase. Short-term memory (M) is required in Phase One and then becomes pre-condition for re-expression of the message in target language in Phase Two. The formulas in Figure 1 help explain Gile’s emphasis on the important role of short-term memory in consecutive interpreting. PHASE 1: Listening and Note-taking I = L + M + N PHASE 2: Reformation I = Rem + Read + P Figure 1: Gile’s Effort Model for Consecutive Interpreting In Phase One, namely a listening and reformation phase, the interpreter listens (L) and analyzes the source language speech while making use of short-term memory (M) between the time of hearing what is said and the time of writing it down in the notes (N). In Phase Two, called a reformation phase, by retrieving the message from the short-term memory (Rem) , the interpreter reconstructs the speech, reads the notes (R) and produces it the target language. In fact, other authors share Gile’s view on the significance of short-term memory and its training in interpretation (Fangqin, 2004; Kriston, 2012; Zhong, 2003) and empirical research results confirm that point (Bajo et al., 2001; Tran, 2006). In her study on how to improve short-term memory in interpreting, Tran (2006) investigated the use of short - term memory in interpreting among English students in HUFS and the major difficulties facing them. Her findings showed that nearly half of the students (46.66%) tended to forget what was said very quickly (from 6-30 seconds), but only 10% of them reported that they had “often” practice in short-term memory in interpreting. The most popular methods were tape interpreting (40%) and peer interpreting (31.67%). The author concluded that most students who wished to be more confident in interpreting were not successful in managing information from the speakers and found it hard to render it in the target language, which was determined by their short-term memory. To solve difficulties facing interpreters in short-term memory in interpreting, many strategies and tactics and methods are suggested (Fangqin, 2004; Han, 2006, 2007; Hatim & Munday, 2004; Jones, 2002). The common characteristics of these strategies or measures for improving short-term memory include regular practice, repeated the activities with increasing length, weight and with different speech types as well as a variety of materials. The more the students practice, the better their short-term memory becomes, which is conducive to high quality interpretation. Retelling a Story in the Source Language This is a method for memory improvement in interpreting. After listening to the trainer tell or play a recording ONCE, the trainees are asked to reproduce the text with the same language

• f what is heard and their taking notes is not permitted. Four types of tactics in Retelling a

Story in the Source Language are suggested by Zong (2003) including Categorization: Grouping items of the same properties; Generalization: Drawing general conclusions from particular examples or message from the provided text; Comparison: Noticing the differences and similarities between different things, facts and events; Description: Describing a scene, a shape, or size of an object, etc. Trainees are encouraged to describe, summarize, and abstract the original to a large extent in their own words. These exercises help the students train their memory to work effectively with the most popular speech types in use nowadays. They will have opportunities to familiarize themselves with how to listen, understand and memorize the information of each speech type. In fact, it

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is quite convenient for trainers to prepare materials and easy for the trainees to practice, yet the practice is interesting and effective. Similarly, Robert (2014) suggests using available recordings for saving time and effort in preparing the material and the trainees can easily practice memory improvement program. So far, no empirical research on the use of one short-memory training for consecutive interpreting has been found. Therefore, I would like to apply one method, observe the students’ performance and record their perceptions of the method. The findings would reflect the practical aspects of my teaching and thus was very useful for me to make changes in

• rder to improve my teaching.

Research Paradigm and Methodologies Used For the students to participate in this research, they are required to have completed upper intermediate English courses and started advanced courses in their major. Having taken these courses, the students are assumed to have mastered English and Vietnamese languages as well as fundamentals of translation and interpreting. In fact, 23 CTU third year students majoring in translation and interpretation who enrolled in the course of Basic Consecutive Interpretation 1 met the criteria and were chosen as participants. The study time lasted a semester of 15 weeks from August to November, 2015. Most class meetings were at the interpretation training room of the School of Foreign Languages, Can Tho University. Every week, there were two class meetings and the students practiced Retelling in the Source Language in both Vietnamese and English for 30 - 45 minutes. The participants were required to tell what was said in the source language individually immediately after the recording stopped. They took turns to speak aloud what they had heard

• r sometimes told it to themselves. Any student who could not tell anything would make a

signal to pass his/her turn to speak to the person next to him/her. The recording was played the second time for them to double check the information or to analyze the message. The method was rather simple and took roughly 5 minutes to introduce, so the fact that 52.2% of the students had the prior knowledge of the method (See Appendix 1) did not influence the research results much. Materials were texts or audio/video clips from different sources to introduce various features

• f speech types and accents to the students. The speech was arranged from descriptive,

narrative to argumentative types with an increasing length from 2-3 sentences of 30 words to 6-7 sentences of 150-180 words. The research method in this study was mainly descriptive. By using data from the questionnaire and final exam results, I hoped that the research results would best reflect my current teaching from the students’ point of views as well as illustrate the influence of making change in teaching practice on the students’ performance. The survey included a 9-item questionnaire about the students’ thoughts on the role of Retelling in the Source Language as a method to improve their short-term memory in consecutive interpreting (See Appendix 2). There were four main aspects in the survey: a/ Students’ views on the role of memory training in interpreting. b/ Students’ self-evaluations of the effectiveness of the method on their short-term memory enhancement. Two open-ended questions were about their perceptions of the advantages and difficulties in practice this method throughout the semester. The questionnaire was designed using Google Form and distributed online. The responses were recorded for analysis. The results of final exams would present the students’ interpreting performance after a semester using this memory training method. In the final exam, the participants were to listen to a conversation in English twice. In the first time they listened to the whole conversation and in the second time they listened to 10 intervals of the conversation and interpreted each part of the conversation into Vietnamese. I recorded their interpretations and assessed them

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using the current evaluation criteria of the Department of English Language and Culture. The data was processed using Excel software and analyzed and reported. Results and Conclusions Students’ Perceptions of the Role of Short-term Memory in Their Interpreting: Figure 2: Students’ perception of the role of short-term memory in consecutive interpreting. Figure 2 reveals that all of the participants recognized the importance of short-term memory in consecutive interpreting. With this good awareness of the significance of memory skill, it could be concluded that the students might have serious attitude towards their learning. Students’ Reflection on the Effectiveness of the Method on Their Memory Capacity: . My memory capacity Memory capacity 90 – 10 % 8 – 9 9 % 70 – 79 % 60 – 69 % 50 – 59 % 40 – 49 % 30 – 39 % 20 – 29 % 0 – 19% Before the course 1 5 9 5 2 1 % % 4. 3 % 21. 7 % 39. 1% 21. 7 % 8. 7 % 4. 3 % 0% After the course 5 10 5 1 1 1 % 2 1. 7 % 43 .5 % 21. 7 % 4.3 % 4.3 % 4. 3 % % 0%

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Figure 4: Students’ self-evaluation of their memory capacity before and after the course There was a significant increase in the number of students rating their memory capacity in the higher proportion. Before the course, only one student ranked his/her memory capacity at 70 - 79% and no students’ memory capacity was ranked higher. In contrast after the course, 10 students (43.5%) ranked their memory at 70 - 79%, and at the 80-99% rank, the number of students rose greatly from 0% to 21.7 %. There was no student ranking his/her memory capacity at the rank lower than 30%. This suggests that the practice of Retelling in the Source Language contributed to this positive change although other factors might have impacted on this. The students’ belief in the effectiveness of the practice exercises was clearly shown in Figure

• 5. All participants reported that the application of Retelling in the Source Language was

effective and extremely effective (73.9% and 26.1% respectively). Interestingly, the participants’ responses corresponded with previous studies discussed above. It can be seen clearly from Figure 5 that a majority of students agreed that their regular practice of the method had positive impact on their memory. This shows the effectiveness of the method in the learning and teaching process. This supported the confirmation by their increase in memory capacity in Figure 4 Figure 5: The effectiveness of the method Students’ Perceptions of the Benefits of Retelling in the Source Language

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The data from the first open-ended question identified the advantages that Telling in the source language brought to the students. The most common mentioned benefits included ‘remember more information in a longer time’ (34.8%); ‘help the brain become flexible and quick in processing the information’ (26.1%) ‘know how to sort information before reproducing it (26.1%) ‘be used to different accents and dialects’ (26.1%) ‘grasp the ideas in a limited time’ (21.7%), ‘improve my listening, understanding and remembering the message’(21.7%) ‘familiarize with the working condition under high pressure (21.7%), ‘improve my speaking skill (17.4%) ‘interesting clips on various topics facilitates effective learning (17.4%), ‘improve my power of concentration (13%), ‘useful content benefits my background knowledge (8.7%) ‘remember Vietnamese better since it is my mother tongue (4.3%). These advantages were directly conducive to memory and interpreting skills. They described various aspects of the effectiveness of the training method in consecutive. Students’ Perceptions of the Difficulties of Retelling in the Source Language The application of Retelling in the Source Language, however, had certain problems and the causes of these difficulties were presented in Figure 6. Q9: The reasons of my difficulties in short-term memory are Brain structur e Topic/conte nt of source- language information External environme nt Concentrati

• n ability

Psycholog ical factors The source languag e the media used in the clip (audio

• r video)

Other 2 11 2 3 2 1 2 8.7% 47.8% 8.7% 13% 8.7% 4.3% 8.7% 0% Figure 6: Causes of students’ difficulties in short-term memory training In Figure 6 the most topic/content of the source language made it most difficult for the students to remember (47.8%). Their limited concentration ability also prevented them to perform well in the training. Equal proportion of the students (2, accounting for 8.7%) mentioned their brain structure, external condition, the media used in the clip and psychological factors. One of them (4.3%) chose the source language as a reason for their difficulty in practicing the method. Similarly, from the open ended question, the participants mentioned similar difficulties in their answers. The most negative points of the methods were that ‘English as a source language’(21.7), ‘the bad quality of the sound from the audio/video clips especially the sound’ (17.4%), ‘boring and ‘dry’ topics like political and economic news’ (17.4%) ‘too much information to remember in later time of the course’. Other students mentioned the learning conditions of the classroom. Two students (8.7%) stated that they sat far from the speakers and found it hard to hear clearly what was said. Class meetings were in the afternoon when it was hot and the students easily got tired and could not concentrate or did the training tasks effectively. The respondents gave contrasting ideas about practice time. Three students said that the practice time was too long, which made the training more challenging to them, but another two mentioned that it was too short. This contradiction could be seen in Figure 7. Q3: The time for the practice of "Retelling in the Source Language" every week is enough for me to improve my memory skill. Scales 1 (strongly agree) 2 (agree) 3 (neutral) 4 (disagree) 5 (strongly disagree) No of answers 5 8 5 5 percentage 21.7% 34.8% 21.7% 21.7% 0%

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Figure 7: Students’ perception of practice time In Figure 7, nearly half of the students agreed that weekly practice time was enough while the

• thers disagreed (21.7%) or had no ideas (21.7%). It could be because of their different

preference of the topics for practicing. Waiting for their turns could be exhausting. In the later part of the semester, the longer and more complex speeches could be hard for those students who were not healthy physically and emotionally. In fact, one of the students revealed that she/he found the practice difficult due to his/her mood. Students’ Interpreting Performance: The data from the results of students’ final exam showed their interpreting performance. Figure 8: Students’ results in the final exam in consecutive interpreting. Most students’ interpreting performance was ranged average (C: 22.7%; C+ : 9.1%; B: 27.3%). The number of the students performed well and very well in the final exam was 5 and 3 accounting for 22.7% and 13.6% respectively. One student was absent on the test day, accounting for 4.3% of the population, yet this did not mean his/her performance was below the average. Therefore, it could be concluded that their consecutive interpreting skill was at an average level on the marking criteria of the school. Analysis of the questions revealed the following results: 1) All of the participants were well aware of the significance of short term memory in consecutive interpreting. 2) They considered the use of Retelling in the Source Language as an effective memory training method which helped enhance their memory capacity. 3) Although most of their final exam results were just average on the school marking scale, the significance increase in their memory was an encouraging result of the appropriate change in my teaching practice. 4) Most of the benefits of the method listed by the students were, in fact, beneficial to their short-term memory. 5) The most commonly mentioned difficulties were their capacity of listening to English speech, their power of concentration, unfamiliar the topic/content as well as the environment conditions. Implications and Recommendations In conclusion, my research results can be used as a reference and they could be useful to those who wish to train students to be good at memorizing information for interpreting. The students majoring in translation and interpretation would use the results of this study for better understanding of memory training and interpreting. The students may consider

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applying the method in their self - study by using available materials for practice from various mass media. More practice with English as the source language is necessary for them so as to retell the information with fewer mistakes and more adequately. Also, both students and practitioners may find useful information in this report for their professional

• development. For those who are interested in doing action research could start investigating

the similar topic in their own context by using this method and reporting its impact on their teaching practice. They may also choose to join me in the cooperative action research on the use of this method in the next school year. I am going to observe how effective the method is by making some changes to solve the causes of difficulties stated by the students. First of all, the clips will be better. Second, recordings the performance of selected 3-4 participants in every class meeting will be conducted and they will be another source of data for analysis. Third, if possible, the course will be in the morning and Retelling in the Source Language will last less than 30 minutes for the class of fewer than 20 students. Hopefully, the coming application would be better and help the students perform better in the interpreting exam. References Bajo, M. T., Padilla, P., Muñoz, R., Padilla, F., Gómez, C., Puerta, M. C., et al. (2001). Comprehension and memory processes in translation and interpreting. Quaderns. Revista de traducció(6), 27-31. Ballester, A., & Hurtado, C. J. (1991). Approaches to the teaching of interpreting mnemonic and analytic strategies. In C. Dollerup & A. Loddegaard (Eds.), Teaching Translation and Interpreting (pp. 237-245). Denmark: John Benjamins. Brown, B. L. (2002). Improving Teaching Practices through Action Research The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dang, T. X. (2007). Translation Theory Coursebook. Ha Noi: Ha Noi Univesity. Fangqin, L. (2004). On the Strategies of Memory in Consecutive Interpretation. Chinese Science and Technology Translator's Journal, 4. Gile, D. (1991). Basic Theoretical Components in Interpreter and Translator Training. In C. Dollerup & A. Loddegaard (Eds.), Teaching Translation and Interpreting (pp. 185- 194). Denmark: John Benjamins Gile, D. (1995b). Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: : John Benjamins. Han, X. (2006). Tactics for Skills Training in Interpreting Teaching. Journal of Nanchang Institute of Aeronautical Technology, Social Science Edition(1). Han, X. (2007). On the Cognitive Analysis of Memory Mechanism and Strategies of Memorization in Consecutive Interpretation. Journal of Nanchang University (Humanities and Social Sciences)(5). Hatim, B., & Munday, J. (2004). Translation : An advanced resource book. London: Routledge. Jones, R. (2002). Conference Interpreting Explained (2 ed.). Manchester: St.Jerome. Kriston, A. (2012). The Importance of Memory Training in Interpretation. Professional Communication and Translation Studies, 5(1-2). Nolan, J. (2005). Interpretation: Techniques and Exercises: Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Robert, R. P. (2014). Enhancing Short-Term Memory for Accurate Interpreting. The ATA Chronicle, XLIII,(7). Tran, D. T. (2006). How to Improve Short-term Memory in Interpreting. Ha Noi University

• f Foreign Studies, Ha Noi.

Vásquez, V. E. L. (2015). Teachers as Researchers: Advantages, disadvantages and challenges for teachers intending toengage in research activitie. Retrieved September 9, 2015, from https://www.academia.edu

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Zhong, W. (2001). Interpreting Training: Models and Contents and Methodology. China Translators' Journal(19). Zhong, W. (2003). Memory Training in Interpreting. Translation Journal, 7 (3). Appendix 1: Summary of the responses QUESTION 1: I think short-term memory is important in the process of consecutive interpreting QUESTION 2: I have known the method "Retelling in the Source Language" before attending Interpretation I Course. QUESTION 3: The time for the practice of "Retelling in the Source Language" every week is enough for me to improve my memory skill.

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QUESTION 4: It is easy for me to memorize the information from the audio clips for practicing memory skill. QUESTION 5: I have practiced Retelling in the Source Language in the classroom only. QUESTION 6: My memory capacity before the course was about & QUESTION 7: After Interpretation 1 Course, my memory capacity is about

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QUESTION 8: The reasons of my difficulties in short-term memory are QUESTION 9: How effective is the method "Retelling in the Source Language" in your STM training?

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Appendix 2: Questionnaire IMPROVING STUDENTS’ SHORT-TERM MEMORY THROUGH RETELLING IN THE SOURCE LANGUAGE QUESTION 1: I think short-term memory is important in the process of consecutive interpreting. 1 2 3 4 5 Strongly agree      Strongly disagree QUESTION 2: I have known the method "Retelling in the Source Language" before attending Interpretation I Course.  Yes  No QUESTION 3: The time for the practice of "Retelling in the Source Language" every week is enough for me to improve my memory skill. 1 2 3 4 5 Strongly agree      Strongly disagree QUESTION 4: It is easy for me to memorize the information from the audio clips for practicing memory skill. 1 2 3 4 5 Strongly agree      Strongly disagree QUESTION 5: I have practiced Retelling in the Source Language in the classroom only. 1 2 3 4 5 Strongly agree      Strongly disagree QUESTION 6: My memory capacity before the course was about  90% - 100%  80 % - 89%  70 % - 79%

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 60 % - 69%  50 % - 59%  40 % - 49%  30 % - 39%  20 % - 29%  0 % - 19% QUESTION 7: After Interpretation 1 Course, my memory capacity is about  90% - 100%  80 % - 89%  70 % - 79%  60 % - 69%  50 % - 59%  40 % - 49%  30 % - 39%  20 % - 29%  0 % - 19% QUESTION 8: The reasons of my difficulties in short-term memory are  Brain structure  Topic/content of source-language information  External environment  Concentration ability  Psychological factors  The source language *  The media used in the clip (audio ỏ video) 

• ther: ………………………………………….

QUESTION 9: How effective is the method Retelling in the Source Language in your short- term memory training?  Extremely effective  Effective  Ineffective  Very ineffective QUESTION 10: What are the benefits of Retelling in the Source Language in short term memory training? QUESTION 11: What are the difficulties you have when practicing Retelling in the Source Language?

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Improving Students’ Oral Presentation Skills Through Principles and Models Tran Thi Thanh Quyen School of Foreign Languages Can Tho University thanhquyen@ctu.edu.vn Introduction As a young teacher, many problematic things have occurred in my teaching practices which really bother me; but in the end, they inspire me to try more and more to find ways to improve not only my teaching but also my students’ performance. In this semester, I have been responsible for teaching my students the Listening and Speaking 1 course. The aim of this course is to enhance the students’ communication skills. However, as usual, I have noticed that most of my first year students struggle with oral presentation skills since they have had very little, or no practice, in speaking English when they were at high schools. They are afraid of speaking in public and have no ideas about what to do. Yet, in order to fulfill this course, they have to make at least one oral presentation in groups of four or five to foster the learning of the course material. More importantly, oral presentation skills are quite essential for my students because they have to do many more presentations during four years of study in Can Tho University. They; therefore, need to master principles or ways to conduct good presentations to become effective presenters and communicators. This is relatively harmonious with the requirements

• f our society in the 21st century. That is why I really want my students to understand that

they need to perform well in communication and presentation to show how active, creative, good at critical thinking and problem-solving they are. These characteristics can only be built and reinforced by practice. Oral presentation skills are, therefore, quite beneficial not only for their current study but also their long-term career in order to succeed in their future

• workplace. Indeed, oral presentation skills are essential for employability and true academic

study as they lead students to enter into debate and sustained reasoning (Morley, 2001). For these reasons, I was really eager to carry out the action research with the purpose of improving my first year students’ oral presentation skills by giving them principles on conducting a good presentation accompanied with good models. It was hoped that I could help my students perform better in their group presentations as well as improve my teaching

• practices. This led to my research question of: “In what ways does providing models and

principles on making oral presentation improve my students’ oral presentation skills?” Literature Review There have been some different methods of conducting good presentations proposed by

• researchers. According to Carroll (2005) the content element of the presentation includes

aspects that need to be assessed such as knowledge shown, logical appeal, fielding of

• bjections, questions posed, improvisation shown, and conclusion. Separating a presentation

into meaningful sections achieves some of the cognitive work for the audience (Platow, 2002). However, I decided to adjust and implement the guide on oral presentation skills based

• n the ideas of Carl Storz et al. (2002) to train my students about principles in doing

presentation because it is quite concrete with many useful details for the inexperienced like my first year students. The guide encompassed the three main parts of a presentation e.g. the

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introduction, the body, and the conclusion. Other important techniques such as how to get the audience engaged in the presentation, how to deal with difficult questions, how to use the body language correctly and effectively, are also introduced (Appendix A). In this action research I tried to focus on improving my students with more specific aspects which are categorized into four themes: 1. Verbal proficiency: accuracy in grammar, pronunciation, and fluency 2. Body language: eye contact, posture, and gestures 3. Quality of content: level of interest, relevance to the topic 4. Interaction with audiences Methodology The subjects were ten undergraduate students with a language proficiency at about the pre- intermediate level and below. These students comprised two groups from a total of 40 students in the class. Data were collected through two sets of observation forms and two sets of video recordings. In assessing speaking activities in a presentation it is difficult to avoid subjectivity since there is no concrete evidence. Consequently, one way to address this problem is to video record the performances, allowing them to be viewed as many times as necessary to accurately evaluate the speaker’ strengths and weaknesses (Christianson, Hoskins, & Watanabe, 2009). Process The students were informed at the beginning of the course that they were required to make

• ral presentations in groups of four or five. Each group leader randomly chose a topic and the

group had two weeks to prepare. They made their presentations in front of the class without any help from the teacher.. After that, the teacher spent nearly two periods to guide the students on how to do good oral presentation skills with a handout and gave them links to watch samples of good and bad presentations. The two groups were asked to adjust, edit, and rehearse their presentations in a week before they performed the second time. The teacher recorded the first and second performances to compare and evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. Results and discussions The students’ performances before the teacher’s training The first two groups of students were asked to do oral presentations with the assigned topics

• n their own without any help of the teacher. As predicted, their performances were quite

poor even though they tried their best and prepared rather carefully. Half of the students had no interactions with their friends or the audiences at all. Instead, they looked at the computer screen or PowerPoint slides or even the ceiling. It is said that they were influenced by the learning styles in high school where they used to read aloud what they have already studied to their teacher alone without any interactions with their classmates. Some had little eye contact with the teacher and their friends, and only one student was relatively confident since he went around the classroom to have sort of interview with some

• audiences. However, the way he did this seemed quite clumsy.

Seven of the students did not perform any meaningful body language or postures at all. They just stood still and looked very serious, and one student moved the body all the time as if he

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was dancing. The other three students used facial expressions and the movement of their hands to convey the ideas. Asthe students were in the first semester of the school year, it was unavoidable for them to control all of the grammatical errors and pronunciation mistakes. Most of them forgot to pronounce the final sounds such as /s/, /iz/, /z/, ed-endings and consonants, and sometimes mis-stressed some words, for instance, /ˈmjuziːəm/ instead of / mjuˈziːəm/, /ˈkoriən/ instead of /kəˈriən/, and so on. They also made some grammatical mistakes, but as the teacher gave feedback after the presentations, the students looked surprised and a little frustrated because they said that they could avoid these silly mistakes. This could be explained in that the students had very strong knowledge about English grammar studied in high school but they had no environment to practice or employ grammar points in conversations with their friends. One of the group leaders said that this was the first time they did presentation in front of their friends in English so they had prepared carefully and had a lot of rehearsals prior to the presentations. Both groups did very well with the content. They divided the content into separate parts very clearly so that it was easy for the audiences to follow. The information was ultimately related to the topics. Additionally, the first group prepared an interesting game i.e. cross word with pretty presents which were so attractive and got their friends engaged into the game. However, the way they conducted the game was chaotic. They could also use beautiful and authentic pictures to illustrate the ideas, but only a few students could make use of these

• photos. The others just let them go by meaninglessly.

The students’ performances after the teacher’s training Approximately ninety percent of the students performed their presentations well after the teacher gave them lessons on how to do good oral presentations. What could be clearly seen

• r observed was that the students had very professional styles when presenting from how to

greet the audiences, how to introduce their friends, how to arouse the audiences’ interest into the topics. For example, the group which presented the topic about “money” told their friends how important money was in people’s lives, especially for students who lived far away from home, how to manage money really caught their attention. The other group began their presentation with a story “A friend in need is a friend indeed” to introduce the topic of “Friend”. Unlike the prior presentations, the students now attempted to have eye contact with friends from different corners of the classroom. Many of them moved around and confidently had short direct conversations with the audience to get them involved in their presentations,. The students also started to use some body language such as: turning their hands upside down, pointing at the screen or slides with full hand, smiling more. To sum up, the students had better interactions with audiences and better use of body language. In terms of verbal proficiency, even though the students were asked to cross-check and rehearse their work carefully before performing the final products in the front, they still made some grammatical errors. It is believed that when they have finished two or three more English grammar courses, they will not commit as many grammatical mistakes. Although common pronunciation problems were clearly figured out, students still sometimes forgot to pronounce final sounds or mispronounced some words.

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An unexpected finding was that the students gained high quality of content in their presentation before and after the intervention. The information conveyed was completely relevant to the topics, but more interesting activities, dynamic games, lively songs and videos were also used after the training. Conclusion The results showed that the students made great improvemens in oral presentations after the teacher’s training. The students all agreed that the lesson the teacher conducted was very important and useful for them to have ideas on how to conduct a presentation effectively. Indeed, the students gained essential knowledge, skills and principles on doing oral

• presentations. They all became better presenters, and what differentiated their scores was just

their language proficiency which needed a lot of their time and effort to build up. With very positive findings, teaching principles and giving models on doing oral presentations was found to be highly recommended to add to the curriculum, especially for first year students since they have never done any in English before and they will do many more presentations later all during four years of study at University and also for their professional development in their future workplace. References Carl, S., et al. (2002). Oral presentation skills. The Institut national de telecommunications, Evry, France. (Retrieved from http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/txie/publications/oral_presentation_skills.pdf) Carroll, C. (2005). ‘Assessing Project-Based Learning: A case study of an undergraduate selling and sales management module at the University of Limerick’ in Barrett, T., Mac Labhrainn, I., Fallon, H. (Eds). Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-based Learning. Chritianson, M., Hoskins, C., & Watanabe, A. (2009). Evaluating the effectiveness of a video recording based self- assessment system for academic speaking. Language Research Bulletin, 24, 1-15. (Retrieved from http://web.icu.ac.jp/lrb/docs/Christianson-Hoskins-Watanabe.pdf) Morley, L. (2001). Producing New Workers: Quality, Equality and Employability in Higher

• Education. Quality in Higher Education, 7(2), pp.131-138.

Platow, J. M. (2002). Giving professional presentations in the behavioral sciences and related

• fields. New York: Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Appendix A PRINCIPLES ON GIVING PRESENTATION

• I. PREPARATION AND PLANNING

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF Who is the audience? Do you need an overhead projector or a screen? Do you need an adapter or extension lead? Can the information be seen? Do you need a pointer? Will you need to dim the lights or draw the curtains? Are you going to need handouts or any other documents? How many? Other Am I dressed appropriately? Shoes polished? Are my hands and fingernails clean?

• II. STRUCTURE OF AN ORAL PRESENTATION

II.1 THE BEGINNING OR THE INTRODUCTION II.1.A Get the audience's attention and signal the beginning.

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• Right. Well. OK. Erm. Let's begin. Good. Fine. Great. Can we start? Shall we start? Let's

get the ball rolling. II.1.B Greet audience. Hello ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon esteemed guests. Thank you for your kind introduction II.1.C Introduce oneself Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce myself. Good morning everyone, I'd like to start by introducing myself. My name is... II.1.D Give title and introduce subject Today I'm going to talk about... The subject of my presentation is... The theme of my talk is... My talk will last about 15 minutes II.1.E Announce your outline. 2 or 3 main points are usually enough. Concerning grammar the headings of the outline should be of the same grammatical form. I have divided my presentation (up) into Y parts. II.1.F Make a transition between the introduction and the body. Now let us turn to point one. Let us now move on to the second part, which is, as I said earlier…. II.2 THE MIDDLE OR THE BODY II.2.A Content. What information should you give in your speech? All your information should support your purpose. In most cases you will have to limit the content, as time is usually precious! II.2.B Quantity How much information should you give? Don’t forget to illustrate through examples. II.2.C Sequencing your ideas. Organizing your ideas: logical; chronological order; from general to specific; from known to unknown; from accepted to controversial; cause/effect; problem/solution. Whatever sequencing you choose, the headings should be all of the same grammatical form. II.2.D Keeping the audience's attention. The beginning and the end or the first and last parts of a talk are what listeners will remember best. Think of ways you can keep the audience's attention throughout the rest of the speech. II.2. E Signposting or signaling where you are. To be clear and concrete. Use examples, rephrasing, summaries etc.: To give an example: Now let's take an example. Let's see this through an example. For example, For instance, e.g. To rephrase: Let me rephrase that, In other words ,… To refer to what you have said previously: As I have already said earlier... As we saw in part

• ne...

II.3 THE END OR CONCLUSION The end or the conclusion of your talk should include: a brief reminder of what you tried to show in your speech, a short conclusion, thanks to the audience for listening, and an invitation to ask questions, make comments or open a discussion. Do not introduce new information.

• III. VISUALS

What should you put on a visual? key words, technical words lists, examples, diagrams, charts Size, layout, font (typeface) and size, colors. Size - A4 Font size - 20 for main headings, 16 for subheadings, 14 for other text.

• IV. BODY LANGUAGE

The golden rule is "Be natural and relax!" What is body language? Eye contact, facial expressions, posture, movements, gestures.

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Positive body language: eye contact to keep audiences' attention (Asian audience might feel aggressed.) facial expressions should be natural and friendly. Don't forget to smile. • raise eyebrows to show surprise • open eyes wide posture – stand straight but relaxed (do not slouch or lean) movement - to indicate a change of focus, keep the audience's attention • move forward to emphasize • move to one side to indicate a transition gesture • up and down head motion or other movements to indicate importance • pen or pointer to indicate a part, a place (on a transparency). • shrug of the shoulders to indicate "I don't know!" Negative body language: loss of eye contact, looking at notes, looking at screen, at the board, at the floor, don't stare, back turned to the audience, hands in pockets

• V. VOICE AND PRONUNCIATION

Voice should be loud enough and avoid monotonous. It puts the audience to sleep. Pronunciation should be correct. Appendix B The Student’s Oral Presentation Performance Observation Form Name: ___________________________ Group: ______________________ 1. Verbal Proficiency Grammar: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Pronunciation: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Fluency: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 2. Body Language Eye contact: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Posture/Gesture: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 3. Quality of Content Interestingness: ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ Relevance:

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_____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 4. Interactions with audiences _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 5. Overall Impression Strong points: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Weak points: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________

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Using Follow-up Questions to Help Students Avoid Using Simple Verbs When Answering Questions Ly Thi Anh Nguyet Socio-Economic Faculty Vinh Long Community College ltanguyet@vlcc.edu.vn I have been working as a teacher of English to non-major students at Vinhlong Community College for 20 years. The college now is 35 years old; it is located in the Mekong delta and is about 30 km to Cantho city. Our students come from every part of the province. English is taught as a compulsory subject in secondary and high schools. After 7 years at school students study quite a lot of English, especially grammar and vocabulary. The final tests are always in written form, and this means that listening and speaking skills are not paid much attention. At Vinhlong Community College students learn English for three semesters with 10 credits (3 credits for semester 1, 3 credits for semester 2, and 4 credits for semester 3). The coursebooks used are Solutions (Elementary and Pre-Intermediate), including students’ books and workbooks. The books contain integrated skills in which learners are trained the four language skills – listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Students are evaluated by the following processes, attendance, classroom participation and listening minitest (scored 3 marks) and the final written test (scored 7 marks). Because students’ English is assessed by the result of their written test, they tend to pay less attention to their speaking skill. They do not mind if they make mistakes in their speaking. Many teachers do not try to ask their students to produce and reproduce better English sentences because they think that correcting mistakes in class often takes much time, and as a result errors follow errors. During my teaching time at the college, I have noticed that my students often make mistakes in giving full answers. When they are asked to answer questions orally, they tend to repeat the simple verbs in their answers, regardless of the verb tenses in the questions. For example, with the question like ‘Where does he come from?’, the answer is nearly always ‘He come from the countryside’. The mistake here is of the verb form. I am a Vietnamese teacher, teaching English to Vietnamese students, it is said that the Vietnamese language has no distinguishing partials in verb form like in the English language, and this means that my students’ errors are natural and unavoidable. However, as an English teacher, regardless of the features of students’ mother tongue, I have to try to find better ways so that my students can use the target language correctly.

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I think of how to help my students to avoid mistakes in verb forms. Many times I give them a lot of theory so that they will remember the rules. However, I found that just emphasising the rules and the theory does not improve the students’ work. Many of my students still make the same mistakes. Being an experienced teacher, I decided to change my ways so that I can help my students make better progress in their learning. Instead of correcting their mistakes immediately by asking them to repeat the right answer after me, I decided to use follow-up

• questions. I think that in this way my students can self correct.

In the first semester of this school year 2015 – 2016, I taught English grammar. The text book used was Interaction 1, Grammar (2007). Interactions Silver Edition is a fully-integrated academic skills series in which language proficiencies are articulated from the beginning through advanced levels within each of the four language skill strands. For each chapter in the grammar book, the authors provide not only grammar structures, like other books, but they also create grammar contexts so that students can use the target language effectively and

• authentically. The students in my class are the major – English freshmen, studying English to

become English teachers and interpreters. The first problem I addressed refers to the simple present tense of the verbs ending in –ch, - sh, -ss; -x, -z with the third person singular subjects (he / she / it). When being asked questions like ‘What does he watch on TV every Sunday?’ students’ full answer is ‘He watch cartoons’. As a teacher, I repeat their answer with the main stress in verb correction ‘He watches cartoons’. I keep on asking more questions like ‘Does he watch Tom and Jerry?’, and then I repeat their answer, focusing much on the correct verb form like ‘Yes, he watches Tom and Jerry. He watches it every Sunday on CNN channel’ (for the questions How often does he watch Tom and Jerry? On what channel does he watch it?). Students begin to notice that they are making errors mistakes in using the verb form, and for the fourth follow up question they give the completely correct answer for the verb form. The simple past tense also causes a wide range of problems in pronunciation of –ed ending in

• verbs. To verbs ending in /t/ and /d/, –ed is pronounced /id/, and this does increase the

number of syllables, but most of my students forget to pronounce it because they tend to repeat verb form in the questions, not the past form. On the other hand, most of my students add another syllable /id/ to all regular past forms. For example, instead of pronouncing /stopt/ in stopped, students pronounce /stopid/, /laikid/ in liked, /oupenid/ in opened, and so on. With a few first follow-up questions, my students do not recognize their mistakes immediately, even some are a little bored and unpleasant because the teacher keeps on asking them to repeat and asking more questions. I do not explain the reason why the students have to do what I require. After many similar situations, the students can notice by themselves the purpose of what I do. Here I do not mention the rules automatically; many students know the rules very well. What I expect in my students is that they have the habit to use the target language freely and naturally. Follow-up questions are usually use words such as What? How? When? Who? Which? Why? (or How come?), and the words like Describe, Tell me about …, What do you think about….

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These sorts of questions and words are used when the listener hears something and wants to know more about what the speaker is telling, thus the follow-up questions are usually related to what students just said and they help to keep the conversation flowing in an open and engaging way. The above in-classroom cases are just some of my own techniques in helping my students to avoid simple verbs in their answers to questions. I build ways to ask questions effectively. First of all, I limit asking closed-ended questions as follow-up ones. These kinds of questions are usually yes-no questions which require a short or single-word answer; they are used to

• btain facts or specific pieces of information, and the answers require little or no thought. In

correcting my students’ mistakes in verb form, I ask a few closed-ended questions first because they are easy to answer and I want to gather some facts. However, asking open- ended questions can help to avoid the limits in closed-questions. An open-ended question requires a full answer that gives personal feelings, opinions, or ideas about a subject. Here are some examples of open-ended questions: What happened after you left? How did everyone like the food? What do you think about your new school?. Open-ended questions therefore encourage students’ talking and creative thinking. Last week was the time for midterm test. This was an oral test to evaluate students’ language proficiency and preciseness in their speaking skill. Students talked about their family, their class and their childhood experiences. After each presentation, the teacher asked many more questions to clarify their speaking. My students were self-confident enough to speak English and give the answer to each question, grammatically correctly. The most encouraging result was that they made very few grammar mistakes in verb forms. After the midterm test, nearly all of my students were able to produce the answers to the questions grammatically correctly. In addition, their speaking ability has improved

• dramatically. As a teacher, I recognize that the effort as well as the helpfulness and the

patience of the teacher in asking further questions plays an important role in helping students to self - correct their mistakes. I hope that this little action research will give much support to the English teachers so that their students can study better and more effectively.

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Enhancing Students’ Out-of-class Listening Practice by Using Extensive Listening To Quyen Luong Kim Hoa Ngo English Department Kien Giang Community College quyen.ltt@kgcc.edu.vn hoa.ntk@kgcc.edu.vn Introduction At the first semester of the 2015-2016 school year, one of us took responsibility to instruct a listening clas, namely Listening 2, for eighteen second-year English majors. The course lasted fifteen weeks with two learning periods per week which was insufficient time for students to develop their listening skills properly if there was not any further out-of-class

• practice. Therefore, at the beginning of the semester, the students were introduced to some

websites and textbooks for further listening practice by themselves and informed that they needed to do more practice on their own to develop their listening competence in parallel with their listening lessons in class during the semester. However, after the first two weeks, the teacher found out that most of the students did not do any out-of-class practice with the textbooks or websites introduced except for the listening homework in their coursebook which the teacher assigned for them. When asked for the reasons, some of them said that they could not afford to buy the books. Some mentioned that they could not manage their time to do such kind of listening practice. Some responded that they were living in boarding houses and there was no Internet available for them to use. For the others, they had to do their listening practice by borrowing their friends’ laptops, so it was very hard for them to manage to carry out their own practice properly. In addition, the teacher knew that there were still lazy students who were not aware that they should do any further practice. The teacher then told the problem to another teacher who was also the colleague carrying out the action research reported in this article. We discussed together and decided to do an action research on implementing extensive listening for the students to do as out-of class activities in parallel with the available intensive listening program of the required curriculum. More importantly, we both agreed that some practice needed to be carried out under the control of the teacher with special treatments to encourage practice taking place regularly as expected. This action research project was conducted to answer the question “In what ways can extensive listening enhance students’ out-of-class listening practice?” Extensive Listening Extensive listening refers to all types of listening that helps students to gain listening proficiency through being exposed to a large amount of comprehensible input at or below their fluent listening ability (e.g., Warning, 2003; Reinder and Cho, 2010; Renandya and Farrell, 2011); Ucán, 2010). More importantly, students should be able to listen to particular

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materials without the fear of tests or pre-set questions. Hence, students should be provided

• pportunities to choose the listening materials by themselves depending on their interests.

They can do their listening practice at anytime and anywhere they want because the main focus is encouraging them to learn by undertaking a great deal of enjoyable listening. Extensive listening should develop students’ listening skills. According to Renandya and Farrell (2011), students who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) have difficulties in recognizing words in speech because they are often pronounced in different forms when they are linked together. In addition, students cannot always understand the words they have already known in the fast speech. As a result, they cannot understand the message of the

• speech. The researchers believe that extensive listening with a lot of meaningful practice can

help EFL students to overcome such listening difficulties to develop their listening skills. Furthermore, extensive listening is claimed to motivate students to do more listening and form habits of listening practice (Takaesu, 2013; Reinder and Cho, 2010). Since the students listen for their own interests and the listening materials they choose can be at or below their listening ability, they will find it easy to understand what the speakers say. To achieve a level

• f success in listening to a foreign language will motivate students to continue to undertake

listening practice on their own. What we did At first, we met with the students to ask for the listening topics they were interested in and decided to choose nine topics including hobbies, jobs, sports, families, food and restaurants, travelling, television, music, and films. Then, we decided to make a collection of audio files for the students to make sure all the students had the listening materials to practice. We spent

• ne week choosing audio files from different sources, mainly coursebooks. We made a

collection of ninety listening audio files from beginning to intermediate level. Next, we met the students again and introduced them to what they were going to do in out-of- class listening practice in parallel with the lessons in class. We copied the audio files to their

• USPs. We also told them the purpose of their upcoming listening practice and rules to ensure

their listening practice took place properly, including the following information.  The out-of-class listening practice was aimed to help the students to do regular listening practice outside the class.  There was no punishment if the students did not join in the practice; however, they were encouraged to do it for their own development of their listening skills.  The students had the right to choose any listening audio files from the collection to listen for pleasure at anytime and anywhere after class.  There were no tests for the extensive listening practice, but each student had to make their own journal for their listening practice with at least fifty journal entries for fifty listening texts within seven weeks (at least seven entries for one week). The entries could be in any of the following forms: (1) a summary of a listening text, (2) notes of what they heard or any inferences they could make from the content of the listening, (3) students’ feeling(s) about the content of the listening text or lessons learned from what they heard, (4) students’ reflections on the listening strategies they applied after listening to a particular content, (6) new words or new structures they learned from the listening content.

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 Students would get one extra mark added to their two required progress tests of the available curriculum if they completed their journal products as required.  Students needed to show their journals at the end of each week for the teacher to keep track with their process of doing out-of-class listening practice. If there were two times they did not submit the journal weekly, the extra mark would be deducted 0.5 marks; if they did not submit it four times, they would get no extra mark. After that day, the students did their out-of-class listening practice during the next seven

• weeks. In the first two weeks, they regularly met us for advice about the listening strategies,

the ways to write the journal entries, the problems with borrowing their friends’ laptops, etc. After seven weeks, we collected the students’ journals, and considered to give one extra mark for the two required progress tests to each student. We also asked the students to write down their thoughts or reflections after seven weeks of doing out-of class listening practice about what advantages they got from the practice as well as the difficulties they had and whether it was necessary to continue this kind of practice in the future. Results We received eighteen journals from the eighteen students with the total entries ranging from fifty to seventy-five entries. All of the students received one extra mark. The results show that the students did their listening practice weekly during the seven weeks, which indicates that they are motivated to do more listening practice with this kind of this out-of-class listening practice under the help and control of the teacher. Furthermore, the results from the students’ reflections indicate that the students were interested in doing this kind of listening practice and wanted to continue to do it in the future. It could be drawn from their journals that that they liked it not only because they got one extra mark but also because this kind of out-of-class listening practice provided them with

• pportunities to do more practice to develop they listening skills. In addition, it helped them

to be more responsible to their own study. It also helped them to improve their writing skills and they learned a lot of new words and grammatical structures which were helpful for developing other communication skills as well. Some of the students revealed that they were gradually overcoming their fear of learning listening skills. Their journals also indicated that they had only one main problem with borrowing a laptop for practicing because some of them did not have their own. It is also interesting that they had some suggestions which were worth being considered for better application of the extensive listening outside the class in the future. They suggested that the library should provide more computers for the students to do more practice because at the time there were only three

• available. Another suggestion was that as writing journals, the teacher could organize some

discussions for the students, especially those who listened to the same topics, to meet and share their ideas to develop their speaking skills . Conclusion The results from the seven weeks of implementing extensive listening as out-of-class listening practice under the guide and control of the teacher suggest that extensive listening does enhance out-of-class listening practice with positive responses from the students to the implementation. In addition, because the time limitation when we started the action reseach, we could not choose authentic listening materials for the students to try, but only simplified ones from the

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available coursebooks. This partly took out the opportunities for the students to experience the authentic listening practice which would be more real. It is suggested that further help for those limitation and the considerations to the students’ suggestions need to be carried out so that the extensive listening could be applied more effectively in the future. References Reinder, H. and Cho, M., Y. (2010). Extensive Listening Practice and Input Enhancement Using Mobile Phones: Encouraging out-of-class Learning with Mobile Phones. Retrieved from www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej54/ej54m2/ Renandya, W. A. & Farrell, T. S. C. (2011) ‘Teacher, the tape is too fast!’ Extensive listening in ELT. ELT Journal 65(1) 52-59. Takaesu, A. (2013). TED talk as an Extensive Listening Resource for EAP students. Language Education in Asia, 4(2) 150-162. Ucán, J., L., B. (2010). Benefits of Using Extensive Listening in ELT. Retrieved from http://fel.uqroo.mx/adminfile/files/memorias/borges_ucan_jose_luis.pdf Waring R. (2003). The Relationship between Extensive Reading and Extensive Listening. Retrieved from www.extensivereading.net/er/ER-JALT2003/JALT2003-waring.doc

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Improving Teacher- Student Interaction in a General English Classroom Tran Thi Diem Can Department of General English and English for specific purposes Can Tho University Introduction Interaction is the heart of communication. Teaching and learning occur through social interaction between teachers and students. Because the main aim of learning a language is to use it in communication in its spoken or written forms classroom interaction is a key to reach that goal. However, the most common problem for teachers who have been teaching general English classes is dealing with an inactive class, where students are not reacting to either teachers or classmates. Moreover, students especially try to avoid interaction with the

• teacher. In my case, I am teaching a group of thirty-three students of General English 2

majoring in Economics at Can Tho University. In the first week I went to class I asked students something about their individual information and learned new unit: Teacher: Who can introduce yourself, please? Students: (No response from the students) Teacher: Student A, please, What is your major? Students: (No response from the students) Teacher: My major is..................... Students: (Look at the Student’s card, no response) Teacher: Student B, please, What is your hobby? Teacher: My hobby is.............. Students: (Look at the next student, no response) Teacher: Student C, What is your favorite food? We can answer: My favorite food is........ Students: (No response and look at one another) Teacher: Okay, right!, Today we would like to study Unit 1: Food. Open your book page 5, please! Teacher: Look at the photo and tell me What can you see? What is he cooking? Students: (No response from the students) Teacher: He is a noodle chef and he cooks in a street café in Chinatown, Thailand. Can you cook? And what dishes can you cook? Students: (No response) Teacher: Look at page 6, work with your partner and discuss what type of foods Students: Look at their books and keep silent Teacher: Do you have any question? Do you understand everything? Students: (No response from the students) I felt very sad and angry, but I also tried to finish that lesson. There was no response or reaction from students. This can be a frustrating experience for both sides. Actually, there

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will be times that no student can answer my questions. Among of them, some students do not

• ften answer and other can understand the questions, know how to answer and even if they

are able to produce the answers well, they also keep silent. Furthermore, students can be reluctant to give feedback or ask teacher a question in front of the class. This action research would like to identify this problem and create a more interactive teacher-student interchange in one class of general English 2 students. Action research defined Action research is concerned with trying to improving one specific technique of the teacher in a particular classroom by using empirical measurement. Theories of communicative competence express the importance of interaction. It can be said that through interaction, students can enhance their language store as reading or listening skills or even the output of their fellow students in discussions. Students learn and absorb knowledge and information in real life exchanges (Jones, 2006, p. 269-299). From the beginning of language study classrooms should be interactive in English as a Foreign Language teaching because teachers could keep an interaction going on smoothly (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005, p.165-227). In addition, teacher-initiated classroom research is found to increase the teacher’s understanding of classroom teaching and learning and to learn about improvement in classroom practices. Action research mainly involves small-scale investigative projects in the teacher’s own classroom. This usually includes having an

• bserver collect data, and developing a plan to bring about the desired change of teacher

together, acting on the plan, and then observing the effects of the plan in the classroom (Richards, Platt & Platt, 1992). Class description The class in this study observed was a group of thirty-three students of General English 2 majoring in Economics at Can Tho University. The aim of this compulsory class is to teach the students General English conversation, reading, listening and writing skills. Their English ability level ranged from upper beginner to intermediate. During the observation period, the students appeared motivated and attentive in the class and seemed to be enjoying the class. Problem identification The students of General English 2 initially did not respond willingly to my questions and did not take part in class discussions. Moreover, students never asked any questions about the related lessons or situation that they needed to solve. Therefore, I received very little feedback from students orally or in writing. In my opinion, most of the students in the class sat looking straight ahead using minimal facial expressions, gestures and verbal utterances. What I want is for the students to be more demonstrative and more communicative in their

• feedback. I need the students have behaviors such as asking questions, making comments and

to responding with nods and shakes of the head, with sounds of agreement or sounds of

• understanding. Finally, I want students to be both reactive and proactive.

Observation

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I observed the class in the first three weeks of the semester and collected data as well as information by recording and taking photos. In the first 30 minutes of each lesson there were some questions about themselves and conversation about the unit. After that the class went through an intermediate level oral dialogue or conversation. I divided the class into two groups ( Group 1: 16 students, Group 2: 17 students). With Group 1 I asked the students had to answer my questions, listen to the conversation and fill in the blank in the books. After that individuals read out the conversation. Next, they completed an exercise consisting of short or long sentences based on the requirements of each lesson. The teacher then talked about the grammar points of the exercise and went on to probe for

• comprehension. For example of Unit 5:

Teacher: Do you have any questions? Do you understand everything? Students: (no response from the students) Teacher: Okay, how many people were speaking? Students: (no response) Teacher: What are they talking? Students: (no response) Teacher: There were three. Three people. Are they customers and the waiter? Students: (no response) Teacher: Listen conversation again? Students: (no response from anybody) Teacher: Do you need I translate the conversation into Vietnamese? Students: ( looking at one another) I asked a few other questions which also drew no response or reaction from the students. The students then had to answer some questions about the conversation in their book. Most of the students seemed to have little trouble doing this, and if there were any questions, they readily asked the student sitting next to them. The second group of the class was devoted to pair work using the phrases and vocabulary from the conversation in role play. The students seemed to enjoy this, and most tried to create their own conversations. I circulated the room checking on the progress of each pair. The class atmosphere was markedly different from the first half of the class with chatter and

• ccasional laughter filling the air. The students fluently answered most of my questions, and

some even asked their own questions. After the ninth class of the semester, I combined pair work and group work as well as giving the grammar and vocabulary to students when they answered the questions or made the

• conversations. For instance, at the beginning to the listening skill, the teacher reminded the

class of the “rules”. After playing the taped dialogue or conversation twice, the teacher began talking about them, making grammar and usage and social points, interspersed with questions about the passage and teacher explanations. This went on for about twenty minutes and included general comprehension check questions such as “do you understand?” and “are you

• kay?” as well as specific questions about the dialogue or conversation. Regarding general

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comprehension questions, most of the students did nod in response and a few answered “yes” to these questions. It was believed that they did, in fact, understand. When I asked specific questions I tried to be friendly and I move closer to the students. When I looked specifically at a student, or pair of students, and repeated the question, the students usually tried to

• answer. In general, I noted that I was paying much more attention to the students, moving

closer to them, and looking at specific students and trying to make a better connection with

• them. Instead of asking questions with the feeling that they really were not going to be

answered anyway, as before, I made a greater effort to communicate the questions, and acted as if I expected to get responses. It can be illustrated that the students generally understood my questions. It was felt that there was something else that kept the students from responding voluntarily in the class-teacher dialogues or conversation. Since most General English 2 students are taught to listen and not to question a teacher in class, students have little or no experience in in-class interaction with the teacher, such as questioning or commenting or giving feedback. Students are usually taught to be quiet and respectfully listen to the teacher. By teaching the students that class interaction with the English teacher is not only acceptable, but normal, useful and beneficial, it was believed that the students would become more interactive with the teacher in teacher- class interaction. To implement and gain the results I followed and answered these questions:

• How do I encourage students to be active and interested?--> From the first day,

demonstrate and talk about my own enthusiasm for the course materials, and how it helps me

• personally. Look for ways to connect the material to the lives of my students. Second, create

a “need to know”. As I am preparing my lesson plans, ask myself - why would a student need to know this? This helps me think about material in terms of its relevance to students’ lives.

• How do I encourage students to prepare for class? --> First, give students some kind of

assignment, make sure the assignment is not just busy work. Design it to be relevant and use whatever the students have prepared directly in class, ask a few study questions, give a short quiz, ask students to write a response to the reading. I also could require a short assignment with each reading, conversation or writing task, but they do not all have to be graded. Besides, I tell students that out of the 8-10 assignments they would turn in, A would be

• graded. These would be done at random so it is important that each assignment is completed.

This would help with my grading workload. Moreover, when assigning reading or speaking skills give the students a few questions on which they must take a stand and discuss at the next class meeting.

• How can I make student effectively interact in the class? --> Find out about my

students’ interests, experiences and hobbies. As often as I could I linked the content of the lesson to students’ interests. Furthermore, I used to lots of examples, illustrations, or stories, correct mistakes and admitted the lack of knowledge, talk less than my students do. I encourage interaction among students by using group work, discussion, trying brainstorming, role playing, whatever I feel comfortable with. Especially, I give them positive feedback, praise and made eye-contact, smile or nod. Last but not least, I usually engage students in

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their learning. Activity is much more motivating than passive listening or passive responses. The students would do and learn more about it. Conclusion As can be concluded that the results of this action research were not as successful as hoped. For example, the students needed to be prompted with eye contact and a repeated questions from the teacher, and when they did not understand something, they still did not interrupt the teacher with a question. The students interacted with the teacher by nodding, some did answer the questions, and two, on their own initiation, even asked questions before the class. In modern teaching and learning methods, the effect of the teacher becoming more concerned with the interaction which contributed to the improvement could not be anticipated. There seemed to have been some success in instructing and reminding and then expecting the students to become more interactive with the teacher. References Richards, J. C., Platt, J., & Platt, H. (1992) Dictionary of language teaching & applied linguistics (2nd ed.). Essex: Longman. Elli, R. & Barkhuizen, G. (2005). Analysing Learner Language. Oxford University Press, p.165-227. Jones, R. H. (2006). Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Vol. 28 No. 2 Cambridge University Press, p, 269-299.

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Enhancing Productive Teacher Collaboration in Instructional Teams Phan Thi Minh Tuyen ptmtuyen@agu.edu.vn Nguyen Thi Anh Nguyet ntanguyet@agu.edu.vn Faculty of Foreign Languages An Giang University, Viet Nam Introduction Vietnam’s open-door policy, coming into existence in 1986, has resulted in cooperation between Vietnam with every nation regardless of political difference and a free, market-

• riented economy. This helped to attract a significant flow of foreign investments and visitors

to Vietnam. Therefore, English has been considered an important subject taught at all education levels from the third grade of primary school to higher education. In recent years, building a verified English training program and curriculum that places much emphasis on flexible teaching, learning and assessment, especially problem solving in real-life situations and language skills development, has challenged all teachers of English in Vietnam in general and at An Giang University (AGU) in particular for the purpose of helping undergraduate students match the exit requirements for English language competency B1, B2 and C1. For some time a number of AGU teachers of English have worked with teams and colleagues in the same faculty to plan the curriculum and syllabuses as well as strengthen their instruction, thus improving learning outcomes for students. Nevertheless, it seems that the existing collaborations have not received full attention and supports from all members of the teaching staff making it difficult to reach the ultimate goal. Research has indicated that schools characterized by higher levels of collaboration have higher levels of student achievement (Goddard, Goddard, & Tschannen-Moran, 2007; Goddard, Miller, Larson, & Goddard, 2010). Although calls for collaboration have become widespread, few studies have investigated the effects of teacher collaboration in practice at

• AGU. This study was conducted to provide a general descriptive account of the kinds and

quality of collaboration that exist in instructional teams of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at AGU, and the impact of teacher collaboration on student achievement. Research questions The research was conducted to answer the following research questions:

• 1. What are the benefits of strong and effective collaboration among teachers of English at

AGU?;

• 2. What measures can be used to build up stronger collaboration?
• 3. How can AGU sustain strong collaborative teaching staff over time?

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Literature Review The guiding developmental theory for this action research was closely related to such issues as (i.) the role of teacher collaboration, (ii.) variation by teacher and school characteristics, (iii.) links between collaboration and student achievement. The role of teacher collaboration For several decades, researchers, practitioners, and teachers have advocated for teacher collaboration in different educational settings (Friend & Cook, 2009; Pounder, 1998, 1999). Through professional conferences, school-based communities or instructional teams/groups, collaboration among teachers helps to improve efficacy, foster attitudes toward teaching, enhance greater understanding of students, and build higher levels of trust (Pounder, 1999). Variation by teacher and school characteristics According to Goddard (2007), there are significant differences in teachers’ collaboration in terms of decisions about instructional improvement, such as selecting instructional approaches and evaluating curriculum. Foundation’s study (2009) also identified variations in teachers’ meeting time and frequency, peer instructional feedback, the extensiveness and helpfulness of collaboration that teachers reported in their instructional teams impacted upon the quality of collaboration. Links between collaboration and student achievement Much previous research has focused on discovering positive effects of collaboration on teachers in practice, as opposed to more direct effects for students, because teachers have to deal with most of the substantial obstacles. Emerging studies show that teacher collaboration has been linked with more effective performance for students (Goddard, 2007; Louis, 2009). Besides, some case studies and empirical research indicated that all collaboration are not equally productive and opportunities for teacher learning depend on the interactional norms. Several studies have also attempted to identify features of good teacher collaboration. Two kinds of collaboration that help to promote student’s effective learning are (1) collaboration focused on analyzing student data and developing instructional responses and (2) collaboration focused on current curriculum and instructional decision making. Methodology Before carrying out this study, the researcher held a short faculty meeting to ask all 30 teachers in the Faculty of Foreign Languages for their ideas of participating in a survey about improving teaching results. There, the research proposal was presented so that everyone had a general idea of what they were going to do and how they could assist in contributing to the success of the study. Once everything was transparent, the study officially proceeded. The researchers, who are members of the Faculty, spent much time in informal conversations, chatting in person in coffee shops and even on the phone in order to get participants’ ideas on the teaching courses. The first discussions conducted were mostly about (1) the teaching materials - whether the recently used books were still suitable or needed to be updated for the upcoming semester; (2) the references - which other books could be used during this time from the teaching experience of the previous semesters to support their teaching;

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(3) evaluations - what kinds of formative or summative assessment should be employed in a particular class? How many tests should there be in each course? What form: oral or written is it? How many percent is each test worth? After all of the sharing and negotiation, group members chose a time when shared, online, with one another the teaching materials and other references that they had found to be useful, so that the others who are new or maybe out of date can refer to as a good source for their teaching. The second meeting was two weeks after the first one. This was both in person in café for breakfast and by phone, which depended on whether teachers were too busy to meet or not. This time, we mainly discussed about the students, their attitude and creation toward the

• subjects. Then, we shared with each other how to release each person’s worries.

About the middle of the semester when everything almost got on track, and everyone really knew what they were doing and were confident with their recent teaching, the third gathering took place. This time, we reminded each other of the upcoming mid-term exam for each different subject. Teachers discussed the following: When should the test be? What kind of test should be employed? Who has the reference test? Was this suitable for every class? Then, we came up with the final idea. A monitor was selected to urge everyone to finish their work

• n a set day.

The last meeting was two weeks before the end of the semester. This was the time when everyone had a chance to reflect on what had happened so far in each class during the course. Afterward, we discussed what and how we were going to test students at the end of the

• semester. It was a chance for everyone share their ideas and draw out conclusions of what

should be done to help students obtain better results in the future. Discussions After some informal meetings carried out occasionally during the semester, the researchers found out that the more times we met and discussed together, the more confident and successful we became about teaching. Obviously, many teachers reported that they were very pleased with this year teaching and felt happy with not only their lessons but also the working

• environment. They seemed to be in a big family where everyone could share many things and

get good ideas from the others. Consequently, they could know what to do and how to do it. More importantly, they were able to get help when in need. Last but not least significant is that all teachers who were teaching the same subjects did not need to worry about who was going to give the test, how was it and whether their students could do the test or not because they all were in agreement from the beginning to the end of the course. Conclusions It was obviously that the frequent meetings and discussions enhanced the collaboration among teachers at AGU. As a result, the teaching and learning outcomes were much

• improved. Besides, almost every teacher was happy with their teaching and confident with

the outcomes. Furthermore, the survey also revealed that most participants expressed the wish of maintaining this kind of activity for the next semesters. In their own points of view, these gatherings strengthen both their teaching ability and relationships. Nevertheless, there was someone who was not willing to come and share about their work because they always

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thought it was their own business. It made no sense and was a waste of time for them to come and meet others. For collaboration to be totally effective there needs to be a commitment that everyone involved in the study must appear at appointed times at the beginning of the school semester. Besides, once taking part in the process, all participants need to contribute to the discussion as well as complete tasks assigned. By doing that we can build up strong collaboration among English teachers at AGU. It cannot be denied that the abilities and level of cooperation among teachers at AGU are

• high. However, because of time limitation and work load, it was hard for us to seek time to

get together. Therefore, it was highly recommended that English teachers at AGU should get together more often and be willing to talk and share with others about the work whenever necessary to sustain a culture of strong cooperation. References Foundation, M. (2009). The MetLife survey of the American teacher: Collaborating for student success. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509650.pdf. Friend, M., & Cook, L. (2009). Interactions: Collaboration skills for school professionals (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goddard, Y. L., Goddard, R. D., & Tschannen-Moran, M. (2007). A theoretical and empirical Goddard, Y. L., Neumerski, C., Goddard, R. D., Salloum, S., & Berebitsky, D. (2010). Is Louis, K. S., Dretzke, B., & Wahlstrom, K. (2009). How does leadership affect student achievement? Results from a national survey. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego. NY: State University of New York Press. Pounder, D. G. (1998). Restructuring schools for collaboration: Promises and pitfalls. Albany,

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Enhancing Student Collaboration in Doing ELT Assignments Nguyen Thi Thu Lan thulan68@gmail.com Bui Hong Ha buihongha2802@gmail.com Department of Foreign Language Dong Nai University Introduction In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the number of English teachers implementing student-centered instruction in the classroom in which group-work is highly

• encouraged. It is argued that students will develop their academic language proficiency by

collaborating and communicating with one another. The concept of student collaboration – working in a pair or group of learners for the purpose of achieving a certain learning

• bjective – has evolved over the past forty years and is still being widely researched.

Dooly (2008) states that collaborative learning means that “students are responsible for one another's learning as well as their own and that reaching the goal implies that students have helped each other to understand and learn” (p. 1). In ESL classrooms, collaborative learning is regarded as having many potential benefits such as establishing an effective student network, giving students more learner autonomy, stimulating their critical thinking, reducing assignment anxiety, developing their self- management skills, fostering their interpersonal relationships and so on. This action research project is designed to help English teachers promote collaborative learning experiences in Methodology classes. It will explore issues affecting student collaboration as well as putting forward some specific recommendations for teachers who would like to enhance the contribution of every group member in homework assignments. Research question With the purpose of finding some ways to foster student collaboration when working in pairs

• r groups to improve the effectiveness of learning in Methodology classrooms, this study

consists of two separate phases. The following research question is addressed: In what way can university lecturers enhance student collaboration in doing ELT assignments? Context and participants We are both working as English teachers in the Department of Foreign Language at Dong Nai University. We teach intermediate classes of twenty-one-year-old college students. Most

• f the students are rather attentive, active, enthusiastic, and cooperative in classroom
• activities. However, whenever we require them to do assignments in pairs or groups, they do

not make an equal contribution to their homework. One day, after one student came to us and complained about her friend who did not get involved in doing an assignment, we began to question ourselves “Why don’t all of the group members contribute to the assignments?” We came to the realization that we need to investigate the issues and explore some possible measures to enhance student collaboration in their Methodology group-work activities. In order to yield context-specific and in-depth information about the research phenomenon under investigation, the study was conducted in our institution, Dong Nai University. The subjects of our research included two classes of 100 seniors who majored in English. These

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students have been learning English for at least nine years at secondary school and high

• school. At the time of our survey, they have been studying together at the Department of

Foreign Language, Dong Nai University for approximately three years. Although there are some differences depending on their ages and educational backgrounds, all students’ levels in terms of their English proficiency would be classified as intermediate. Research Methodology Triangulation was employed in the two phases (5 weeks) of this action research since no single method was considered the best. Brown and Rogers (2002, p. 243) assert that “if data are examined from two view points, the possibility of getting credible findings will be maximized” Phase one - Exploring the issue A mini-test and interviews were used to identify whether the issue existed as one student had

• complained. After a one-hour lecture and guidance on how to develop oral communication

skills in class, students were given a group assignment. They were supposed to cooperate with their group members so as to complete the worksheet and hand it in one week later. To find the answers to twenty items in the worksheet, they had to read the chapters required in their own time, gather the essential information, discuss their answers and finish the assignment. After submitting their group assignments, they were given a mini-test with items randomly taken from the worksheet. They were allowed to use materials as they were working in groups but not to talk with their group members. The aim of this stage is to explore their participation and contribution in groups through comparing the score gained in groups with that of each individual. Next, ten representatives, one randomized student from each group, were interviewed. Semi- structured interviews (Appendix A) were used because they still “have a structured overall framework” (McDonough & McDonough, 1997, p. 183) but give “the interviewee a degree

• f power and control over the course of the interview and the interviewer a great deal of

flexibility” (Nunan, 1992, p. 150). The purposes of these interviews were to investigate the way students learned in groups, to find out the obstacles they encountered, as well as to have a really useful and detailed insight into their attitudes towards every member‘s getting the same score in doing the ELT worksheets. The discrepancy between group scores and individual test scores indicated that many students did not take part in group work. Data collected from interviews also helped double confirm the issue. After some time considering what occurred in the previous procedures, we realized that our concern was to draw up a plan of action. Having acknowledged a teamwork-related issue in our teaching, we read a range of articles, consulted some experienced colleagues and finally decided on an action plan. Phase two- Plan of action (improvement) Re-organizing groups was the foremost thing to do. Students were allowed to self-select into groups as the assignment was done outside the class and they needed to find convenient times for all members to meet. Sapon-Shevin and Shniedewind (1991) suggest giving students freedom of choice about what and with whom they will collaborate (Sapon-Shevin & Shniedewind, 1991, cited in Jacobs & Hall, 2002). Each group was asked to choose a leader whose responsibility was to make a plan for the group study, for example where and when the members could meet, to complete and hand in the group itinerary (Appendix B) with the

• assignment. Students were also reminded that the leading role would be rotated in subsequent
• assignments. With the teachers’ scaffolding, group policy and expectations were set up for

their next assignments. Secondly, in-class presentations and micro-teaching were randomized by the teacher rather than the groups. The group assignment for the next chapter Teaching Writing consisted of

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two parts, theory and practice. Students had to submit the assignment and group itinerary prior to our lecture. Like the previous assignment, individuals had the same content worksheet but different a design to be completed under the teachers’ strict supervision. As for the theoretical part, the teacher presented the main points clarifying anything unclear and asking one randomly nominated member to summarize or re-state key concepts on teaching writing especially what was included in their assignments. For the practice, each group was assigned to a “Write” section in English 8 and asked to prepare for their micro-teaching. Poor performance would be recorded and would affect the final score. The main purpose of randomizing is to encourage effective cooperation between group members. Additionally, after completing the two-week group assignment, students were asked to reflect

• n their collaborative learning and complete their self- assessment and peer-assessment.

(Appendix C) Results and discussion The planned research eventuated as two different-but-related cycles, and the detailed findings

• f each cycle are presented in this section. Table 1 indicates how effective ELT group-work

activity is by comparing the group scores with individual scores. Table 1: Discrepancy between group scores and individual scores (cycle 1) Discrepanc y (individual score – group score)

• 7
• 5
• 4
• 3.5
• 3 -

2.5

• 2
• 1.5
• 1
• 0.5

0.5 1 2 2.5 3 Number of students 3 2 3 6 7 4 5 11 7 6 10 7 19 5 3 2 The gap between group scores and individual scores in cycle 1 is distributed in a large range (from -7 to 3). Over half of the 100 participants did not acquire any knowledge from the discussion, especially those three students with a minus-seven-point discrepancy and two students getting minus-five-point discrepancy. However, there were still 36 students achieving better individual results in comparison with working in groups. Moreover, 10 students gained the same score in both assignments. It is worth noting that the majority of students did not participate in the group-work assignments actively. It seems that only a few enthusiastic and hardworking students who did the reading at home and discussed the topic could complete the ELT group worksheet well, and that each member did not get their turn to contribute and make suggestions actively. The results of the semi-structured interview provided more accurate and detailed information about how ten different students worked cooperatively in their groups. All of their groups had four members but no group leaders. The majority of interviewees (90%) held a positive attitude towards online studying. It was reported that Facebook and Viber played a significant role in the success of collaborative learning due to convenience and popularity. Additionally, almost all of the groups just gathered from one to two times to do the ELT assignments and

• nly one group needed more than three meetings. In terms of challenges, about three-

quarters of the students had difficulty in decreasing the intellectual costs and increasing the creativity and productivity of their groups. Ten percent and 5 % of the number of participants found it hard to arrange the meeting time and to choose the venue respectively. In the interview group of ten participants, seven people liked working in groups and getting the same score as the other members, whereas three people did not because of the ‘free-riding’

• issue. At the end of our interviews, three students advised teachers to facilitate, instruct,

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monitor and check students’ group-working processes more regularly. Four people suggested that disagreements among members should be dealt with effectively such as looking up to the ideas of other members, arguing politely and respectfully, and understanding that some negotiations and compromises are useful. The others admitted having very little experience in increasing individual accountability and really wanted to improve it. It was found in cycle 1 that group members cannot work effectively, which negatively impacted on their progress due to two common problems connected with not only lecturers but also individual students. In terms of teaching methods, the teachers did not draw their students’ attention that group work is beneficial to the acquisition of ELT knowledge which comes mostly through extensive reading, discussion and negotiation. As for learning strategies, Dong Nai University students are neither autonomous nor responsible learners. According to Gokhale, the learners “are responsible for one another's learning as well as their

• wn. Thus, the success of one learner helps other students to be successful” (as cited in Laal

& Ghodsi, 2011, p. 487). In fact, each of the members needs to be equal in their pursuit of a common learning objective, and their contributions must be all equally valuable. In order to reach the full potential of group-work activities, research by Johnson and Johnson (2008) points out “five essential elements must be carefully structured into the situation: positive interdependence, individual and group accountability, promotive interaction, appropriate use of social skills, and group processing” (p. 406). With these realizations and the results of our first study, we formulated the following action plan focusing on assisting students to develop their learning strategies in ELT group-work assignments. Stages of action plan Objectives based on five elements of collaborative learning Group policy and expectations are set up for the

• assignments. For example, they should not only facilitate

each other’s effort but also challenge each other’s ideas, and all members must participate actively in group activities. Positive interdependence Promotive interaction Individual and group accountability One student must be chosen for leadership skills. Appropriate use of social skills Group processing Group leaders prepare and submit the group itinerary ensuring individual accountability. Individual and group accountability Groups are asked to work in groups and complete one single worksheet. Promotive interaction Positive interdependence Randomly drawn students sum up or re-state key concepts by completing the summary given by the teacher in class. Individual accountability Individuals do the quiz independently in class. Individual accountability Students give their own private reflections on their collaborative learning through a self and peer evaluation form. Group processing To examine the issue of whether or not our new teaching methods promoted students’ interaction, participation and responsibility in working in pairs/groups we needed to analyze the results of cycle 2 and compare them with those of cycle 1.

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Table 2: Discrepancy between group scores and individual scores (cycle 2) Discrepancy (individual score – group score)

• 4
• 3.5
• 3
• 2.5
• 1.5
• 1
• 0.5

0.5 1 2 2.5 Number of students 2 1 1 3 1 7 23 24 12 7 13 6 A clear overall trend in this phase is that more students participated actively in the learning process and improved their ELT knowledge. Unlike the cycle 1, the differences between group scores and individual scores in cycle 2 were distributed in a smaller range (from -4 to 2.5). More than a quarter of the students (38%) received a similar result in two worksheets, and there was a fairly large number of participants achieving better learning

• utcomes. Among 38 people not acquiring much knowledge from the group-work activities,

23 students had minus-zero-point-five discrepancy which did not represent any clear changes between individual and group scores. As the difference among -0.5, 0 and 0.5 is rather small, we classify the three aforementioned categories into one group “No change”. The other two groups are “negative change” (less than – 0.5) and “positive change” (more than 0.5).

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It is apparent that collaborative learning is beneficial for student’s acquisition of ELT

• knowledge. It is quite likely that together the students will accomplish more than working

alone and they will have more fun in the learning process. There was a dramatic decline of 33% in the quantity of students having a negative learning outcome (from 48% in cycle 1 to 15% in cycle 2). As a result of effective group-working techniques provided by the teachers, the number of participants who achieved the same score in cycle 2 nearly triples that of cycle

• 1. As for positive changes, it is worth pointing out that approximately an equal number of

students got better individual results (29% and 26% for cycle 1 and cycle 2 respectively). As soon as we collected and analyzed self and peer evaluation forms, we concluded that almost all individuals talked in great detail about their understanding, knowledge as well as viewpoints in the group meetings. Obviously, there were nearly 60 students whose participation exceeded their group’s expectations, and 22 students were reported to have contributed actively. Only 18 participants made a minor contribution to the success of the

• group. However, according to the peer evaluation, there was still a very small number of

students (2 people) did not collaborate and communicate with other group members. The research findings as well as the aforementioned comparison reveal that students’ learning efficiency is related tothe collaborative learning techniques implemented. In fact, collaboration gives students a great number of opportunities for discussion, clarification, negotiation, cognitive rehearsal and autonomous learning. Laal, Naseri, Laal and Khattami- Kermanshahi (2013) classify potential advantages of collaborative learning in four categories: social, psychological, academic and assessment benefits. They also illustrate the benefits of collaborative learning: In a brief review, CL develops social interactions, increases positive social behaviors such as honor, unity, friendliness and reduces violence. From the psychological aspect, CL increases self-esteem and involves the members to take part and responsibility for the outcomes to a greater extent. CL has many academic advantages as it improves the skills of problem- solving and increases higher level of thinking. CL techniques use many alternate assessment methods which include both group and individual assessments (2013, p. 1430). Conclusion

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It cannot be denied that many advantages like higher academic achievement as well as greater productivity are the significant benefits of collaborative learning. The results of this action research project suggest a procedure of teaching techniques leading to students’ academic development in ELT group-work assignments. First, teachers should make a presentation encouraging the students to work with other learners in a playful but purposeful way. More importantly, we will nurture the collaboration in group-work activities by providing students with some learning strategies concerning leadership skills, autonomous leaning, social competence, self-esteem, and self-regulation. Moreover, the instructors should control their students’ own collaborative learning process via the reports or reflections on some particular activities in their group meetings. We strongly believe that our recommendations for enhancing student collaboration in doing ELT assignments are applicable to many other subjects in our institution because most of Dong Nai University learners share the same learning styles. Hopefully, our action research results can help teachers become more aware

• f the benefits of student collaboration in language teaching and learning as well as adjust

some appropriate teaching strategies to increase students’ involvement in group-work activities. References Brown, J. & Rogers. T. (2002). Doing second language research. Oxford: OUP. Dooly, M. (ed.). (2008). Telecollaborative Language Learning. A guidebook to moderating intercultural collaboration online. Bern: Peter Lang. Jacobs, G. M, & Hall, S. (2002) . Implementing Cooperative Learning. In Jack C. Richard & Willy A. Renandya (Eds.) Methodology in Language Teaching. Cambridge: CUP. Johnson, D. W. & Johnson, R. T. (2008). Cooperation and the use of technology. In Spector,

• J. M., Merrill, M. D., Merriënboer, J. V., & Driscoll, M. P. (Eds.). Handbook of

research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Laal, M. & Ghodsi, S. M. (2011). Benefits of collaborative learning. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 31(2012), 486-490. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/224766541_Benefits_of_collaborative_learni ng Laal, M., Naseri, A. S., Laal, M. & Khattami-Kermanshahi, Z. (2013). What do we achieve from learning in collaboration?. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 93(2013), 1427-1432. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042813035027 McDonough, J. & McDonough, S. (1997). Research Methods for English Language

• Teachers. London: Arnold.

Nunan, D. (1992). Research Methods in Language Learning. Cambridge: CUP.

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Appendix A INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What is your group number? 2. How many people are there in your group? Who is your group leader? 3. How many times did your group members study together? 4. How many students participated in the group discussion? 5. Are you satisfied with every member’s getting the same score? Why / Why not? 6. Did your group study online? What software/ application did you use? (Facebook, Zalo or Viber?) What benefits did they bring to? 7. What problem did your group encounter when doing the ELT assignment? (Time, Place or Group member’s attitude?) 8. Do you like working in groups? Why/Why not? 9. How will you evaluate the contribution of each member in your group? Arrange them from the highest (4) to the lowest (1)? 10. What do you suggest for better group-workingAppendix B ITINERARY FOR GROUP-WORK ASSIGNMENT Group number: …………………………………………………………… Group leader’s name: …………..……………………………………… The objective: ……………………………………………………………… Venue for group-work:…………… …………………………………… Expected number of times we work in groups:…………….. How we divide specific group tasks Name 1. 2. 3. 4. Tasks Group leader’s plan for group-work Weeks Procedures + Contents Week 1

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Week 2 Week 3 Appendix C SELF AND PEER EVALUATION FORM Please give yourself and other group members a mark for the contribution made during your group assignment. Rate the contribution on the scale from 0 to 3 (0: no participation, 1: minimal participation, 2: active participation, 3: extremely active participation). You could give further explanations for your rating Group members’ names Rating Further explanations Your name: ………………………………….. 1………………………………….. 2………………………………….. 3…………………………………..

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How Can the Use of Blackboard and Transcribing Help English-major Students’ Listening Skills? Pham Thi Kim Dung Dong Thap University ptkdung@dthu.edu.vn Introduction Learning any language is difficult and English is not an exception. Among the four skills of this language, listening seems to scare students the most (Huang, 2005). Reading allows students time to see and to look up the meaning of the words they do not know, and in writing and speaking they can actively use the words they know to express their ideas even if they are not very good ideas. In listening, however, they have to catch the sounds and the words to understand the speakers. This does not mean that when they can hear all the sounds, they can then understand (Huang, 2005). Instead, the listeners need to memorize, analyze and process the information so that they can master the message transferred. Therefore, there has been much research (Oxford,1994; Guhde, 2003; Vandergrift, 2004; Goh, 1998) in relation to L2 listening aiming at minimizing the obstacles as well as promoting students’ motivation in listening courses. One of such attempt is to provided students opportunities to write out what they hear and to practice their listening every day because it is believed that “practice makes perfect” (Hagger, Burn, Mutton & Brindley, 2008). However, how to control students’ daily practice is a big concern, not only for teachers, who are directly involved in the classroom, but also for language researchers. Besides, the effectiveness of this technique is still a controversial issue. That is the reason why this case study has been conducted to contribute a voice to the existing literature and to examine the effectiveness of this technique as well as the daily practice in learners’ listening development through a study with two groups of students who are taking listening courses. The Blackboard System The Blackboard system of Dong Thap University is an online interactive system between lecturers and students in which the lecturers can upload their teaching documents, subject

• utline, learning resources; post their announcements and, most importantly, interact with

their students. The lecturers can create groups and manage these groups’ members and their

• works. Students can post their assignments or questions so that the teaching and learning

process can be easier and more professional. Hagger, Burn, Mutton & Brindley (2008) confirmed that regular practice can help students improve their skill and, as a result, this can raise their interest in learning the language. The more they practice, the better they can understand and the more they understand, the more they want to practice. This cycle continues and results in a natural progress of skills. However, listening skill seems to be a tough skill for students and it is easy for them to get bored if they cannot understand what they are listening to (Huang, 2005). Besides, it is not

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easy for teachers to control and manage whether students practice at home and how often they do it. This study investigates the use the Blackboard system to manage this process to determine whether students practice listening skill regularly and how much they can develop their skill. Two main questions will be answered:

• 1. Can doing transcription help students’ listening capability or it is just a waste of time?
• 2. Can this technique help to form a better habit for students in relation to their volunteer

practice? Participants The participants were 40 third-year students taking the course of Listening 5 (the second to last course of listening in their degree). The students were divided into two groups. The first group, the control group, studied listening skill without being asked to listen to English and write down what they hear every day (they can do it voluntarily), and the second group, the experimental group, was asked to listen to English and write down what they hear at around 100 words every day on Blackboard. This is the first time they have been asked to write down about 100 words every day what they hear in English. Apart from this kind of homework,

• ther factors of the teaching and the learning process between the two groups was identical.

In terms of ethical consideration, the participants are voluntary and are fully informed about the purpose and procedure of the research and they can withdraw at any point during the

• study. All the related documents such as Participant Information Statement, Consent Form

and Withdrawal of Consent are clarified before the study starts. The participants’ experience and their ideas are used only for the purposes of this research and are anonymous. Besides, they are free to review the study’s results. Also, it is ensured that there are no risks, harms or discomfort to the participants. Methodology The study was conducted by applying the combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods in which 40 students of English-major were involved and divided into two different groups (control and experimental). All the students were following the same process, textbook, documents and other factors, except the homework which was done by the experimental students every working day (5 days a week) and a set of questions was designed to take the feedback from the same group. At the beginning of the research, both groups of students took a placement test to evaluate their listening ability. After four weeks of conducting the study, students took the second test to see if they improved their skill and at which level. Doing transcription is only an alternative request to ask students to listen more carefully and more often. This technique also benefits students in terms of spelling the words they listened to. Experimental Procedure At the beginning of the week, the teacher would set up the daily assignments by posting topics on Blackboard

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Figure 1: Posting topics for a week (from Sep 21st to Sep 25th The students in the experimental were then asked to reply to the posts and post their homework every day by 11:59 p.m. Figure 2: Some of students’ post samples(on Sep 24th) Students were asked to write down what they can hear from the audios or videos they had found in relation to their interests and the link of the resource. Figure 3: A student’s post (on Sep 24th) The teacher then used the link provided to check and give comments. Results and Discussion

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The following chart illustrates the number of students who took the listening test and had at least 60 % of correct answers. Result chart: Number of students who got at least 60% of the listening test It can be seen that at the beginning of the research, students in the control group had slightly better listening ability than those in the other group (12 and 11 students respectively). After four weeks of studying, both groups experienced an improvement in their skill and the experimental group got even higher scores at 90% compared to 75% of the control group. The tests were taken from the Ielts books at band score 4-5 for the first test and 5.5-6.5 for the second test to make sure that the second test would not be easier then the first one. In terms of feedback from the experimental group, the results showed that 100% of students from the experimental group showed their positive feedback in different ways. Each student

• f the experimental group had 20 posts during the time of the study. They said that this

method helped them to form good habits of listening to English every day, which they had not had before. It also benefited them in terms of improving their listening skill. Figure 4: One of the student’s feedbacks (which showed that this technique formed their new habit) Besides, these students could improve their other language skills after watching or listening to videos or audios that talked about how to improve English skills

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Figure 5: One of the student’s feedbacks (which showed that this technique improved their other skills) The most significant result was that the students recognized the benefits of their daily practice and that they would continue to practice even if there was no request from the teacher. Figure 6: One of the student’s feedback (which showed that they would continue to practice without teacher’s request) Conclusion Although applying this technique may take the teacher a lot of time to post their requests, watch the videos or listen to the recording that students post to check if what they write is correct and give comments, it also takes students time to spend more on their practice and posting their homework on the system, the benefits of this approach are valuable and worthwhile to apply. They can improve students’ skills by listening to the audios or watching the videos carefully and frequently so that they can write down what they hear. This also helps them to pay more attention to spelling. Besides, most of the participants form new good habits of listening to English, both for exercise or entertainment, every day. References Coates, H., James, R., & Baldwin, G. (2005). A critical examination of the effects of learning management systems on university teaching and learning. Tertiary education and management, 11, 19-36.

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Dinkelman, T. (2003). Self-study in teacher education a means and ends tool for promoting reflective teaching. Journal of teacher education, 54(1), 6-18. Goh, C. C. (1998). How ESL learners with different listening abilities use comprehension strategies and tactics. Language Teaching Research, 2(2), 124-147. Guhde, J. A. (2003). English-as-a-second language (ESL) nursing students: Strategies for building verbal and written language skills. Journal of cultural diversity, 10(4), 113. Hagger, H., Burn, K., Mutton, T., & Brindley, S. (2008). Practice makes perfect? Learning to learn as a teacher. Oxford Review of Education, 34(2), 159-178. Hamilton, M. L., & Pinnegar, S. (1998). Conclusion: The value and promise of self-

• study. Reconceptualizing teaching practice: Developing competence through self-study, 235-

246. Hiltz, S. R. (1986), The “Virtual Classroom”: Using Computer-Mediated Communication for University Teaching. Journal of Communication, 36: 95–104. doi: 10.1111/j.1460- 2466.1986.tb01427.x Huang, J. (2005). Challenges of academic listening in English: Reports by Chinese

• students. College Student Journal, 39(3), 553.

Maor, D. (2003). The teacher's role in developing interaction and reflection in an online learning community. Educational Media International, 40(1-2), 127-138. Oxford, R. L. (1994). Language learning strategies: An update. ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, Center for Applied Linguistics. Vandergrift, L. (2004). 1. Listening to Learn or Learning to Listen?. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24, 3-25. Wilson, G., & Stacey, E. (2004). Online interaction impacts on learning: Teaching the teachers to teach online. Australasian journal of educational technology, 20(1).

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Enhancing Pedagogical Students’ Teaching Methodology Through the Use of Video Phan Van Chi An Giang University pvchi@agu.edu.vn Introduction An Giang University is applying a credit based training system, so the time for teachers and students to meet each other in the classroom is very limited, whereas there is a great need for future teachers to practice their teaching methodology before they move to high school to do their real teaching there. Therefore, finding time and ways to do this is really hard for many teachers who are responsible for teaching methodology courses. In reality, to be able to be effective in the real classroom each student needs to practice teaching each kind of lesson least two or three times with the clear guidance from their teacher. Given the time constraints it is nearly impossible for teachers to help all students with teaching practice. To solve this problem requires both teachers and students to undertake a lot of hard work

• utside the classroom to meet the training outcomes. In a classroom, the teachers mainly give

clear guidance and instructions for students so they can carry out the task at home. Techers evaluate students’ performance or homework in the classroom because there is very little time for students to practice their teaching in the classroom. From my own teaching experience, preparing good plans for students to practice teaching outside school and recording them as video clips for discussing in the classroom later is the best way to help all future teachers build up their professional competence and gain enough experience for their real teaching in the future. That is why this study should be considered seriously to see how much teaching outside the classroom and filming it for further discussion enhance future teachers’ teaching ability. The aims of the study This study aims at investigating the effects of micro teaching outside of the classroom and making videos for further discussion on students’ teaching methodology development. In this study students were asked to record or to make videoclips of the lessons that they taught outside school (they work in groups) then they will bring it to the classroom for discussion. Planning stage Giving tasks Planning for teaching Receiving feedbacks Making clips Posting on the internet Discussion

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I designed and gave detailed tasks for students to work at home. In the tasks, I put the focus

• n the following aspects.
• What to teach: to help future teachers be familiar with high school language lessons and

apply teaching methodology in real teaching, after finishing each theory lesson in the classroom I asked my students to choose lessons which are relevant to high school English teaching programs. All the groups would teach the same lesson so that comparison among groups was facilitated.

• How to teach: after choosing the lesson to teach, each group quickly made a detailed

teaching plan for their lessons and posted them on Facebook so that all students and the teacher could read and give feedback to each other. The end result was that they had final draft of a teaching plan with useful feedback from teacher and friends. After the final planning was done, I asked all the groups to convert the paper-based teaching lesson plan into e-lesson plans and continued to post power-point lessons on Facebook or Youtube so that teachers and classmates from other groups could give feedback.

• Teaching: Finally, it was the time for group teaching. In a group of 6 each student had his or

her role through the lessons. They each took their turns to be teacher, camera man and

• students. The teacher was outside somewhere and could know very well how the teaching

was carried out by watching it on Facebook.

• Discussion and feedbacks in the classroom: After watching videos from all the group the

teacher selected out both good and bad ones for the whole class to watch together and

• discuss. Before watching and discussing, students were well directed with what to do before

and after watching to help students know what to note down while watching. In the discussion, teacher pointed out all the issues to students and made sure that all students had a chance to say something about their friends’ teaching. This helped develop students’ critical thinking as well. Finally, it was the teacher’s task to explain and make it clear what students had performed well and not well in their teaching and gave appropriate advice for students. Data collection To get sufficient information to answer the question “How does micro - teaching and making clips for discussion help future teachers develop their teaching methodology” data were collected from three sources: videos, interviews and classroom observation. During the study, each group demonstrated four micro lessons relevant to the four main topics in the teaching methodology course: eliciting; classroom language; giving instructions, teaching vocabulary. The videos recorded by students were analyzed to see how well students performed in their sample teaching. Apart from videos recording, in this study an interview checklist was also designed to further explore students’ feedback on the effects of micro- teaching through videos. The questions in the interview checklist related to the following issues: the students’ attitude toward teaching practices with videos; what they learned through this kind of teaching; their suggestions for the use of this type of teaching in other courses on teaching methodology. Findings

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Eliciting the meaning of new words. As mentioned above, the aim of recording videos in this study was not only for students to see their strengths and weaknesses through teaching but also for the teacher to see how well students applied the theory of teaching methodology into their teaching practices. The first point that the teacher wanted to see was the students’ ability to elicit new words in the classroom. The result showed that all the students in the five groups applied very well the techniques to elicit the meaning of new words. In their teaching, students used various teaching strategies for eliciting such as mimes, visual aids, realia, situations, examples and translations in their teaching. Students proved themselves able to prepare teaching aids such as flash cards, drawing picture and using realia and so on. When asked about this type of teaching in relation to the time it took to prepare for their teaching 85% of the class answered that they had enough time to prepare the pictures, flashcards, realia. The other surprising finding was that students used questioning strategies very well while eliciting new words in their lessons. They did use graded questions while asking students questions in class. More than 90% of students said that they learned many things from the discussions after watching the videos. This means that watching and discussing the sample teaching is a good way for students to learn from each other. Giving instructions Apart from eliciting, giving instructions is also one of the main contents of this course. What was reflected from the results was students could put all the basic principles in their teaching; “short- clear – simple” “say –do and check” “step –by –step”. Thanks to the process from planning the lesson (both paper based and e-versions) students had worked in groups and reminded each other about how to use these principles in teaching. The information collected from interviews indicated that 85% of the students admitted that they repeated their teaching at least twice for each lesson and this helped them gain enough confidence and teaching experience from their partners. Also data collected from the interview showed that 95% of the students in four groups did apply peer feedback before teaching the lesson. 95% said that they learned from each other through micro teaching, all students were eager to share ideas and opinions with each other. After each teaching practice, students had chances to see how well they taught. From my

• bservation students were very eager to watch videos and give feedback to the other group
• members. Students noted down good and bad points from the sample teaching. These are

precious lessons for them to learn and help them to do better next time. When being ask about the effects of sample teaching and the video discussion on students’ teaching methodology 96% of the students said that their teaching methodology has been improved greatly. More than 90% of the students answered they gained much experience from this kind of teaching. 100% students agreed that they felt confident while they were teaching. Conclusion What were found in this study is that most of the groups did very well in their teaching practice at home thanks to well designed tasks given from the teacher. In each task, the teacher gave very clear instructions; what to do, how to do it, and steps to do it, and motivated students with compliments, and rewarding good performance with good marks.

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Through sample teaching, and making and watching videos in groups students had a lot of time to look back on their work and self –correct the mistakes. The result of the study showed that, students not only applied the theory about teaching methodology learned from the course but they also learned and shared experiences among members in groups and with other groups as well. What makes teacher and students really happy from the course is that more than 30% of the students got A marks and 55% got B, only 15% got C. In general, basing what were found in this study I can conclude that micro-teaching practice and video clips had very positive effects on pedagogical students’ methodology development. Beside the positive effects produced this study also had something that the teachers need to pay much attention to. During the time students did their micro teaching outside school, teacher couldn’t be side by side to give help. Some shy or weak students just stood outside filming the videos and did no teaching. Besides, given the limitation of technology used in the study such as cameras, projectors, microphones and so on, students in some groups sometimes found difficult to make video clips. They had to wait and get the camera or other electronic devices from other groups. Finally, finding a place to carry out teaching was also a challenge for students. The school has no practice room for students, so they had to plan everything and sometimes, not all groups could carry out the plan successfully. It is obvious that self-learning is always an important part of students’ academic life. That is why in teaching teachers it is necessary to find out feasible way for students to carry out self learning at home. Before giving a task for students to practice outside of school, the teachers should give clear guidance and instructions for students, to make sure that all of them know what to do, how to do, when to do it. References Bygate, M. (2001). Effects of task repetition on the structure and control of oral language. In

• M. Bygate, P. Skehan and M. Swain (eds). (pp. 23-48).

Candlin, C., Murphy, D. (1987). Language learning tasks. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. :Prentice Hall. Cotterall, S. (1995). Developing a course strategy for learner autonomy. ELT Journal,49/3. Estaire, S., & Zanón, J. (1994). Planning classwork: A task-based approach. Oxford: Heinemann.

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Motivating Non-English Major College Students’ Speaking Through Task-Based Language Teaching Phan Huýnh Nhâ̤t Thanh Faculty of Economics – Social Sciences Vinh Long Community College. phnthanh@vlcc.edu.vn I’m teaching a “low-intermediate” English class of 35 students in Vinh Long Community College where most of students come from different parts of Vinh Long province and some

• ther neighboring provinces such as Tien Giang, Đong Thap and Ben Tre. All of them are

teenagers (18 - 19 years old) and have received 7 years of studying English. The focus of the class is on four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, I noticed that most students were reluctant to interact or share their ideas or

• thoughts. Often they took a very long time to produce a single sentence. What factors prevent

them from speaking English in the classroom? and How can I increase confidence and communication among my learners? In order to find the answer to these questions I decided to have a class chat for 15 minutes at the end of the third class session. I asked students about their problems in English and why they did not like participating in speaking classes. There was some hesitation, but then one female student asked me if she could reply in Vietnamese. After that, many more were encouraged to take part in the conversation. I had to allocate

• turns. What the students said in this session convinced me that my students refused to talk

because of their shyness. Furthermore, they did not have sufficient English vocabulary to express what they want to say. All these things lead me to think about some strategies to motivate my students to speak. I wondered whether applying task-based language teaching encouraged non-English majored college students’ speaking or not. To start off I first looked for the literature reviews to find out more about task-based language

• teaching. There was a wide literature on this approach, but I chose and cited some literature

which related to my study. According to Hu (2005) “Task-based Language Teaching is the lastest methodological realization of communicative pedagogy” and Prabhu (1987) reported that “Task-based Language Teaching is a good way of education and language practice as effective learning occurs when students are fully engaged in a language task, rather than just learning about language”. Nunan (2006) highlighted some characteristics of this approach: “(1) an emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language, (2) the introduction of authentic texts into learning situation, (3) the provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only

• n language but also on the learning process itself, (4) an enhancement of the learner’s own

personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning, (5) an attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the classroom”. The

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heart of this approach is the task and Nunan (1989) defined “a communicative task is a piece

• f classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or

interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form”. In addition, task-based language teaching is typically based on three stages (proposed by Willis, 1996). The first of these is the pre-task stage, during which the teacher introduces and defines the topic and the learners engage in activities that either help them to recall words and phrases that will be useful during the performance of the main task or to learn new words and phrases that are essential to the task. This stage is followed by what Willis calls the "task cycle". Here the learners perform the task in pairs or small groups. They then prepare a report for the whole class on how they did the task and what conclusions they

• reached. Finally, they present their findings to the class in spoken or written form. The final

step is the language focus stage, during which specific language features from the task are highlighted and worked on. Feedback on the learners’ performance at the reporting stage may also be appropriate at this point. A balance should be kept between fluency, which is what the task provides, and accuracy, which is provided by task feedback. The above definitions, characteristics and the framework developed by Willis encouraged me because I realized that task-based language teaching fits the aim of developing learner autonomy and communicative competence. Thus, I decided to implement this approach into my classroom in the first semester of the school year 2015 - 2016. I shared my plan with my head teacher. We discussed what to do next and then spent two weeks to prepare carefully for a set of tasks used in five speaking topics, including food and drink, recent events, future plans, hometown, hobby which students had to practice in their

• course. Because my students are not good enough at speaking English and lacked vocabulary,

we focused very much on the pre-task and task cycle stage. At the first stage, we used photos, word prompts, or mini games not only to activate students’ passive words, but also to provide new ones. During the task cycle stage, they were required to work in pairs or groups in order to engage them in communicative activities so that they could practice sharing their ideas or expressing their thoughts naturally, and step by step they would be more confident. In the final stage we asked the students to report in spoken or in written form on the topic they chose. As it involved a small sample and related to students’ motivation, the use of quantitative data could not be justified. So, the research was set within a qualitative paradigm. I observed my students’ participation and performance in each speaking topic. In addition, we designed the form for students’ self evaluations. For the five topics the format and content was the same, but we replaced the name of the topic. Students’ self evaluations were collected after every speaking topic. Here was the sample of students’ self evaluations for topic 1 (Food and Drink)

• 1. Now I can

Yes No I don’t know talk about my favorite food and drink. ฀ ฀ ฀ ask and answer about what I usually have for ฀ ฀ ฀ breakfast/lunch/dinner. describe my meals. ฀ ฀ ฀ write about my favorite food and drink ฀ ฀ ฀

• 2. My work in this speaking topic was

  

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The research was carried out during a 50 minute class per week over five weeks. At the first trial session, I recognized that students did rather well at the pre-task stage but some of them were still shy to do tasks in pairs or groups. Therefore, I walked around to help and encourage their speaking. The following topics were carried out smoothly. They liked sharing their ideas with other students. The atmosphere in the classroom was more interesting although it was a bit noisy. It is fine for me because I think it is good noise. Five weeks went quickly and at the end of the last topic I was very glad when my students were very eager to take part in the tasks, spoke in English during working in pairs or groups. In addition, my students’ self-evaluation encouraged me a lot. One of the findings which emerged was the increased level of confidence. There was an increased number of students who felt confident in their speaking. (See Table 1 below). In the first topic more than half the students thought that they were not good at speaking, but this number decreased after each week. Table 1: Students’ self - evaluations for their work Topics Students’ self - evaluations Very good Good not good Food and Drink 5 10 20 Recent events 5 14 16 Future plans 5 20 10 Hometown 6 22 7 Hobby 8 24 3 From my observations I believed that the tasks had the students practice speaking English more conscientiously. The results were showed clearly in the Table 2. In most cases, especially in the last topic students (30 out of 35) evaluated their improvement in their speaking skill. They reported that after this topic they could talk, describe, ask and answer about hobbies.

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Table 2: Students’ self – evaluations for their speaking ability Topics Students’ self – evaluations Yes No I don’t know Food and Drink 15 9 11 Recent events 19 8 8 Future plans 24 5 6 Hometown 26 4 5 Hobby 30 2 3 All in all, the outcome of the research was pleasing in that it achieved its aims. I was satisfied with the students’ quick responses to the changed teaching approach and felt relieved that they could finally let go of the early shyness and tensions, focus on their own speaking, and achieve their learning goals. However, I felt a bit disappointed because there were about 3 or 5 students who still had difficulty in practicing speaking. It seemed that my efforts to motivate them were useless. If I have a chance, I want to know the reasons so that I can help them to overcome their problems. I want to revise the tasks and activities used this semester to make them more useful, interesting and practical and use the questionnaire to measure students’ motivation after I implement the new approach in the future. References Hu, G. (2005). English language education in China: Policies, progress, and

• problems. Language Policy, 4(1), 5-24.

Nunan, D. (1989). Designing tasks for the communicative classroom. Cambridge University Press. Nunan, D. (1991). Language teaching methodology. Printice Hall, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore.. Nunan, D. (1999). Second Language Teaching & Learning. Heinle & Heinle Publishers, 7625 Empire Dr., Florence, KY 41042-2978. Nunan, D. (2006). Task-based language teaching in the Asia context: Defining'task'. Asian EFL Journal, 8(3). Nunan, D. (2005). Important tasks of English education: Asia-wide and beyond. Asian EFL Journal, 7(3), 5-8.. Prabhu, N. S. (1987). Second language pedagogy (Vol. 20). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, J. (1996). A framework for Task-based learning. Longman. Willis, D. & Willis, J. (2001). Task-based language learning. In Carter, R. & D. Nunan (Eds.), The Cambridge guide to teaching English to speakers of other languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Motivating Non-major Students to Study General English Bao Tram Nguyen Department of Foreign Language Education The University of Dong Thap, Viet Nam nbtram@dthu.edu.vn Introduction In Viet Nam, English has become a compulsory subject at schools, colleges, and universities. However, the number of students who realize the significance of learning English is not very

• high. To them, English is just a very difficult subject and if it was optional, they would not

choose it. As a result, after more than 7 years studying English at primary schools, secondary and high schools, they enter the university with a very low ability in using English. In fact, most of students of my university are not good at studying English and they don’t have high motivation in studying it caused by different reasons. First, a large number of students come from rural areas of the Mekong Delta where people are more concerned with their livelihood than with studying, or there is a lack of suitable conditions for teaching and studying English. Moreover, these students often say that: “After graduating, I will come back and work in my hometown, so my future job doesn’t really need the ability of using a foreign language”. So to them, studying English is quite useless and they are forced to do it. This is the reason for their demotivation of studying in my General English classes. Teaching Context As a teacher of English, my duty is teaching English to both major and non-major students. According to the curriculum of my university, non-major students have to learn 5 credits of General English, then they will take the exam and they must reach B1 level in the 6 levels of CEFR if they want to receive their university degree. My students use the New Headway as their course book for two semesters. My trouble in teaching these classes is my students are so passive. They learn quietly, and are afraid of speaking, answering questions and too lazy to practice at home or do homework. This causes the classes to become boring for both students and teachers. How to change? I started asking my students about the reasons for their attitude in my general English class. The answers I received included: “I don’t like to study English because it is so difficult”, or “I speak English very badly, so I’m afraid of speaking in class”. Some students shared they don’t like to study English because they don’t feel it interesting in class. Fifteen percent of the students said they love English because it is very meaningful, helps them find good jobs in the future, and helps them communicate with foreigners, listen to music or watch film in English. It seems that my students lack the motivation in studying English while “the importance of motivation in enhancing second/foreign language learning is undeniable.”(Atef, 2009). Gardner (2006, p. 241, cited in Atef, 2009) posits that “students with higher levels of motivation will do better than students with lower levels”. He further adds that “if one is motivated, he/she has reasons (motives) for engaging in the relevant activities, expends effort, persists in the activities, attends to the tasks, shows desire to achieve the goal, enjoys the activities, etc” (Gardner, 2006, p. 243). For this reason, I decided to change my lesson

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plan by adding some physical activities which encourage my students to practice the target language in different way - learning by doing. Research question: Do physical activities enhance non-major students’ motivation in studying General English? Participants There were 89 participants from two General English classes involved in this study. All of them were first year students studying different majors. Each participant has at least 7 years

• f studying English. 85% of them don’t like English because it is a very difficult language,

the others do like English because they think it is useful for their life. Research procedure The experimental process lasted in 3 weeks and has 3 phases  Phase 1: Questionnaire to collect the data of participants’ background and their interest in studying English  Phase 2: Three-week experimental teaching. Physical activities were organized while teaching the first four units in the textbook as follows: N0 Target language issues Activities 1 Introduce yourself and ask your friends’ name The English alphabet After introducing the target language, Teacher asks students to make a U shape starting with the person whose first name is the first letter in the Alphabet. To do this, the students have to come to their friends, first introduce their name and ask their friend’s name so that they can decide where should they stand (on the left or on the right

• f that friend)

After 5 minutes, the U shape will be formed and the teacher checks it by asking students tell their name and even spell it. 2 Numbers Teacher asks students to count the numbers then make a line along the aisle starting with number one, anyone who says the wrong number will go to the end of the line. Mini game: Students listen to the Ten Little Indians song. Teacher stops at which number, the students have to make a group of that number. 3 Reading text Race – reading 4 Introduction of your family Students draw (or take)1 photo of their family and introduce the family to their friends who are sitting at the other tables. Later, in each class, 3 students will stand in front of their

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friends and do the introduction. 5 Leisure activities Playing game: guessing by watching Each team’s member goes to the board to choose one activity and use their gesture, action, emotion to illustrate the activity for their team to guess. 6 Jobs / review the lessons Ask students to stand up, who can say one job or one thing they learn from the chapter is allowed to sit down.  Phase 3: Questionnaire to collect data of participants’ attitude towards the implementing physical activities in their English class. Results The result from my observations was quite surprising. At the beginning, with activity 1, the students were still ashamed. They moved very slowly. But after a short time of asking to know the names and hometown, they became more confident. In addition, I really like the race-reading activity because it involved all students, even some passive ones. The class was so exciting. When checking the answers, students competed to raise their hands to give the

• answers. This also improved the cooperation between the students so that they can practice

the target language confidently. I also love the introduction activity, after three weeks the participants were now quite confident standing in front of their friends to talk about their family. The results from the questionnaire showed that 80% participants said they started to enjoy studying English because of the activities the teacher organized in class when studying the first four units. One participant shared: “I liked all the activities organized in class because thanks to them, I found English was not as difficult as I had thought. Moreover, I feel more confident in speaking English.” Furthermore, when asked “Do you think the physical activities help students learn English better”, 90% of the participants agreed, just 10% of them said that a lot of activities made them quite difficult to concentrate on the lesson. This result made me think that overusing the physical activities may be a drawback; therefore, the teacher should balance the activities so that they can fit all students’ learning styles. Conclusion The three-week experimental study indicated that learning English can be motivated by physical activities and students can learn English better if they have good motivation in

• studying. This study is very meaningful to me because there is no doubt that teachers are

motivated if their students do well and enjoy learning. References Atef, A., (2009). Motivation and Attitudes Towards Learning English: A Study Of Petroleum Engineering Undergraduates At Hadhramout. Retrieved from http://www.ukm.my/ppbl/Gema/pp%2029_55.pdf Elliott, S., (2013). Thirteen Ways to Build Positive Learning Attitudes: a Key to Successful

• Teaching. Retrieved from http://edge.ascd.org/blogpost/thirteen-ways-to-build-

positive-learning-attitudes-a-key-to-successful-teaching

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Gardner, R. (2006). The socio-educational model of second language acquisition: a research

• paradigm. EUROSLA Yearbook, 6, 237–260.

Penny, U. & Andrew, W.(1992, March). Five-Minute Activities _ A Resource Book of Short

• Activities. Cambridge University Press.

Samar, R., (2014, July 4). Students’ Attitude towards English Language Learning and Academic Achievement: A Case of Business Students in Punjab. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/7568752/Students_Attitude_towards_English_Language _Learning_and_Academic_Achievement_A_Case_of_Business_Students_in_Punj ab

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Stimulating Non English-Majored Students through Drama Performances Phuong Thuy, Ho School of Foreign Languages Can Tho University hpthuy@ctu.edu.vn Introduction At the end of 2014, Can Tho University honorably welcomed the announcement that two educational advanced programs had been certified with AUN-QA (Asean University Network

• Quality Assessment), one of which was Advanced Biotechnology. This program, which was

established with the strong support from Michigan State Universit,y was considered as a model of innovation for Vietnamese education. The program aimed at training engineers with biotechnological knowledge and skills in an English learning environment to meet regional and international standards. Therefore, most courses are conducted in English by selected lecturers at Can Tho University and from overseas. The selection of students for the course is determined by the 30-40 candidates who obtain the best English scores in the English proficiency test. To assist students, after an intensive two-month course to develop their English communication skills, another 45-period subject called Advanced English 1 was included into the curriculum to not only equip learners with more sub-skills to become competent English users but also to prepare them for the ability of dealing with their major taught in English in the coming semesters. I am responsible for such an additional subject in this semester. It was out of my expectation when I read the academic report from the last two-month course. There were suprisingly 46 members on the list, but not all of them had gained satisfactory

• results. In fact, I thought it would be quite challenging to manage a large class with different

levels of learners while trying to reach the teaching objectives. However, from my personal experience with many previous courses, I was certain that my students could be the smart

• nes, so I was eager to create a friendly and co- operative environment for them to practice

problem-solving as well as to develop an active leaning process using an inquiry- based

• approach. In addition to the formal class sessions for 15 weeks, I designed an outside

classroom activity for them to encourage their love of communicating in English, to let them prove their creativity and to demonstrate their teamwork spirit. Procedure for the action research I organized a competition in drama performances among groups to determine whether this could be a motivating device for my students. I decided to give 15 % of the assessment for such a time- consuming and labour- intensive activity which was a “secret” at the beginning

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• f the course. It has taken nearly three months to get the final evaluation from students’

reflections. Due to the huge class size, I had changed my plan slightly. The class had been randomly divided into two groups for two different purposes. Sixteen students were allowed to form eight pairs for Book Reports as described in the syllabus outline. Each would find any kind of book of their interest written in English and take turns to give 10-minute book reports in front

• f the class from week four onwards. The book reporters could present their selected work by

following a guideline and they were encouraged to use certain visual aids. It was hoped that not only their reading skill could be improved but also their presentation skills could be

• developed. It was also expected that the audiences would benefit greatly from widening their

knowledge in different fields and practicing listening- speaking skills as well as sharpening their ability of criticism. The rest of the class was set into larger groups with six members in each. Each team would have ten weeks to prepare for the final project: performing a 20-minute drama. Actually, the instructor acted like an outsider by just asking them what they had done so far, whether they got any trouble and reminding them of the deadline. The future actors/actresses were free to decide their topics, write scripts, role cast and the like, but they had to ensure the performances would be ready by the end of week thirteen. Due to the learning environment, they were required to film their plays elsewhere and use any devices to support the display. In both cases, the audiences were advised to take notes on the evaluation sheet and feel at ease to ask question or make comments. Their reflections were another kind of evidence for their active participation in class activities - a criterion for 10% of their academic achievement. Week thirteen came with great curiosity and joy. The Drama Show took place in an average- size but well-equipped hall with a nice projector and a large screen. The reason for not having a “live show” was that they could not find a place and time for changing clothes, applying mak up and changing scenes. Five teams were thrilled to “advertise” their products. The hall excitedly welcomed so many wonderful plays with meaningful messages such as old age, friendship, art, and other living

• values. It was so enjoyable to recognize that a timid girl turned into a naughty maid in The

Prince of Egypt; a talkative boy became a retired man sadly recalling his golden past in The Nursing Home. Even some students had an opportunity to prove their drawing ability and dancing skill in The Last Leaf , Five Years After or Friends in Need. The class was impressed so much with the beautiful costumes, the romantic scenes, the meaningful plots and the talents of the performers. All five plays received high compliments and ranking from the audiences later all. In the following week, as a part of the writing assignment, the students were asked to write their reflection on the topic: “As an audience or a performer, which extra activity in the

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English course do you prefer: giving a book report or taking part in a play? Should drama be applied as a useful activity for English learners?” The students revealed their true love towards the two activities thanks to many advantages, but within the scope of this action research, I would like to focus on their reactions towards drama performances. Forty-six answers brought the instructor a sense of “no pain, no gain.” Conclusion The in-depth analysis from their writing indicates that all of the members of drama teams had to undergo many ups and downs because they faced so many difficulties. For example, they had to read several stories to decide the content of the play. They came to determining the plot with too many ideas for adding this, crossing out that. The choice of actors and actresses was also problematic. Some could speak English quite well, but they were not gifted to act

• ut. Moreover, time for meeting, places for filming, techniques of using the camera,

designing clothes and so on did throw them into a terrifying mess. The five teams had never believed they could be successful until the deadline. Looking back at the challenging journey, the majority of the participants emotionally shared the values they earned. First, they could improve their learning to the great extent. In order to find the striking plot, each member was forced to read at least two short stories or imagine their own in English. After having the framework, they had to simplify the language and even had to translate some conversations into English. To make sure the audience could understand, they had to pilot their plot with some available foreign experts. By chance, they improved their communication with native speakers, their choice of vocabulary and spoken

• grammar. After getting a role, each member had to practice reading aloud with good

intonation and perform in front of the mirror as much as possible till the characters became part of their life before the final rehearsal. What is more, they all valued the time working

• together. The team spirit was raised day by day in spite of many unavoidable arguments.

They learned to support the leaders, to negotiate, to manage time and to appreciate their

• partners. Without real directors, many teams learned to work out more than expectations,

creating proper actions, clothing and video clips to ensure everything fitted well with their

• bjectives.

Not all things were positive. A few students complained about the large amount of time spent

• n groupwork. If they had given a book report, they could have prepared an informative

presentation in four or five days only. Time could be spent on other subjects as well. One difficulty was related to finance. Getting around, designing scenes and costumes cost money. They had to cut some of their material needs for the artful value. Taking all into consideration, I -the researcher- assert that the advantages of creating drama performances outweigh the disadvantages in the English learning process. It provides not

• nly for relaxation but for stimulating students’ capacity to keep up with problem-solving

situations, to get used to learning by discovering and enhancing their social skills. Next time I will take greater notice of students’ personalities and backgrounds to arrange mixed team and

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I will decide on a higher making scale instead of giving just 15% for the assessment. This extra activity should be refined to apply for the best in the following courses.

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Lecturers’ and Students’ Challenges in Doing Research in Education The Mekong Delta Case

Trinh Quoc Lap tqlap@ctu.edu.vn School of Foreign Languages Can Tho University Abstract This study investigated lecturers’ and students’ challenges in doing educational research. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Nine lecturers and fifteen students from the Mekong Delta participated in the interviews. Results indicated that participants’ difficulties in doing educational research included shortage of knowledge, experience and lack of self- study skills in doing research; complicated paperwork, especially financial settlement procedure, was found to be a big hindrance contributing to participants’ challenges in doing research in education. Introduction The aims of research are to discover or confirm facts or to investigate a new problem or topic plays an important role in science (American Psychological Association, 2014). In education, research makes a significant contribution to quality education and effective teacher education (Brindley, 1992). This could explain why promoting research and improving its quality has become a main focus of worldwide education systems; Vietnamese higher education does not stay out of this mainstream (Pham, 2006). A big body of research revealed much of challenges novice researchers face in doing research (Dupont et al., 2013). Some difficulties are related to researchers’ research competence, academic writing (Fadda, 2012; Keck, 2014). Some difficulties lie in their psychological problems during their research work (Single, 2010; Solomon & Rothblum, 1984). In the context where this study was conducted, research work in educational sciences was found to be far from satisfactory (Doan & Nguyen, 2005). Then the study was of big significance in shedding light into what could be done to promote the development of educational research among lecturers and students in schools of education in the Mekong Delta.

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In doing studies in any field, researchers are expected to show their ability in handling many cognitive activities including developing a research proposal, reviewing literature, designing method for data collection, conducting experimental studies, interpreting the results of the study, and making conclusions or recommendations (Biggam, 2011). Topic selection is the first stage of any research project. Novice researchers, however, may be into trouble from the beginning when they select a topic without convincing rationale, improper consideration and focus. A convincing rationale of a study proves that the research topic is appropriate with the researcher’s field and the research findings could make a contribution to knowledge (Thomas & Brubaker, 2001). According to these authors, many researchers think of a research topic all of a sudden without a rationale. Some others could provide a rationale, but it does not usually satisfy the requirements of appropriateness and contribution. In searching materials for their research project, researchers have to tackle a laborious task, locating relevant materials. A more popular term referring to materials for research projects is literature which is defined as:

… Professional literature includes books, academic journals, popular magazines, newspapers, research reports, proceedings of academic conferences, and material

• n the internet. (Thomas & Brubaker, 2001, p.23)

Researchers’ incapacity to locate the literature is even more serious. Being unable to identify information needed, to get access to reliable sources, and to read with a desirable speed is commonly observed among novice researchers (Biggam, 2011; Bury, 2011; Leckie, 1996). Administering research instruments takes place when data collection is done (American Psychological Association, 2014). Different obstacles pertaining to each type of research instrument and administration of these instruments are observed in data collection (Thomas & Brubaker, 2001). Thinking is split into different kinds, namely skills of problem solving, decision making, and conceptualizing, skills of information processing, and skills of critical thinking (Beyer, 1988). Chaffee (2012) claims that critical thinking is not just one way of thinking but an approach to

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understanding how a person makes sense of a world affected by plenty of factors. Critical thinking, therefore, is described and analyzed in bodies of literature in various aspects. In academic writing, critical thinking is the key to successful writing (Bayat, 2014; Flower & Hayes, 1981; Gillet et al., 2009; Paul, 1988). It is critical thinking that generates ideas, and arranges them together with vocabulary, and structures, creating a reasonably meaningful text (Vallis, 2010). Critical thinking draws much attention from educators and scholars in educational research. This type of thinking is described as a process of stating the problem, constructing a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, making inferences and judgment, according to Kazanci (as cited in Bayat, 1989). Bayat (1993) defines critical thinking skills as a set of problem identification, defining its limits, illustrating positive and negative sides of the options, solution and evaluation. As can be seen, critical thinking skills are closely associated with each phase of a thesis project. This Study The study was designed as a descriptive study on lecturers and students in the Mekong Delta. Qualitative data were collected to find out lecturers’ and students’ difficulties in doing educational research. Grounded theory approach was used. Nine lecturers and 15 students were invited to participate in this study. Sampling was conveniently selected. The nine lecturers are working for faculties of education and college of teacher education around the Mekong Delta. Student participants are from the faculty of education in two universities and one college in the region. The interviews were carried out with lecturers and students to gain in-depth understanding of difficulties faced by participants. Interview questions elicited data on what challenges lecturers/ students face in doing research in education. The interview began with an open question asking participants to identify challenges lecturers or students faced in doing research; then deep discussion into knowledge and skills required of researchers were conducted; all data were analyzed, using grounded theory approach. Results Participants’ shortage of knowledge and skills in doing research

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Twenty one interviewees (7 lecturers and 14 students) believed that they the biggest trouble for them was shortage of knowledge and skills in doing research. They said,

… Though I took courses on research methodology, I could not do a research so far; I need to learn more about how to research. (Lecturer 3) ….. It is difficult for me to do a research, so I have not applied any funds for any research projects…. (Lecturer 6) …. I think I will take the course work instead of doing a research… because it is complicated to do a research and I do not think I can do it. (Student 9) …. My friends told me that it is time-consuming and a big headache to do research,.. I am not capable of doing it. (Student 14)

More than half of participants identified specific difficulties they had in doing research such as selecting a research topic or reviewing literature. They shared,

… Selecting the research topic was very hard for me. I remembered that I changed many times, but finally I could not choose a good one… I felt disappointed of myself…. (Lecturer 2) … My friends and I had a hard time in selecting what areas to do our investigations (Student 11) … How to write a chapter or section on literature is my big problem… (Lecturer 6)

Limited Resources Finding literature related to the research topic played an important role to the whole study. However, some difficulties arising were limited database of the school and unreliable resources online.

… I did not find the school online resources useful. I could hardly find literature related to my research field in education. (Student 1) …The problem was the database of school was sometimes inaccessible. Some articles could be downloaded while the others could not… (Student 3) ….. We could not get access into prestigious resources. (Lecturer 5)

Participants’ Distraction Distraction was problematic among most of lecturer and student interviewees. Participants interviewed faced up distraction from their work or family duties or both of them.

One reason why I would not participate in research projects recently due to my experience doing one research project. I was teaching at a university and also some extra-

• classes. I had to work to earn money for my family. I could not arrange my time

properly; I suffered from stress and pressure… (Lecturer 1) At the time I was writing the report of my study, there was something wrong at my family, putting me under much pressure. I suffered much and could not write anything… (Student 12)

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Participants’ Lack of Critical Thinking Skills When being asked about participants’ challenges in writing literature, most students showed that they were not able to present their argument, explanation, or evaluation after reviewing the literature. Many students (12 out of 15) and half of lecturers (6) said that they just paid attention to paraphrase and summarize what was presented in literature they read. In general, student participants did not consider showing their own voice in writing their research reports. For some students, they just showed their agreement and disagreement towards the literature and the relation between the previous studies and theirs.

I did not criticize, explain, or argue with what was said in the literature. …. I could not relate my findings to the literature since I could not find any study related to what I was

• doing. (Student 9)

Administering research instruments Researchers either doing descriptive or experimental studies met with difficulties in designing and administering research instruments. Their difficulties varied due to their own specific research contexts.

In my study I needed to observe classes at elementary level to see the interactions between teacher and children. It was not allowed to do that since the principal of the school, so I could not collect the data I wanted. (Lecturer 3)

Other Challenges Almost all lecturers perceived that paperwork for completing research projects, especially financial settlement procedure was too complicated, which made them loose interest in doing research.

Paperwork in financial settlement made me feel under pressure. One reason I do not want to do research is the heavy paperwork I have to do. (Lecturer 7) I do not have motivation for research; no strong requirements or clear benefits from doing it. (Lecturer 8) Data analysis is a big problem for me. (Lecturer 1)

Conclusions and Suggestions Data analysis emerges two prominent themes of challenges researchers face in doing research in education. It was reported that these challenges included: participants’ shortage of knowledge and skills in doing research (e.g., selecting the topic, writing literature review

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critically, data analysis) and the support of the organization (e.g., improper facilities, motivational issues and heavy paperwork). The author of this article would like to make some proposals which aimed to promote the development of research in education further. (1) Professional training in doing educational research in light of competence-based approach; focusing on how to help learners select the topic, decide on proper design, administer research instruments and analyze the data collected. (2) It is a good idea to help researchers start action research projects. (3) Developing a system of research supervision is desirable; building a learning community on doing research is essential. (4) Organizations should have incentives policies for lecturers who perform well in their research activities (5) Those in education are required of doing research in education. (6) Paperwork in relation to applying for research funds and financial settlement should be re-considered. References

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Flower, L. & Hayes, J.R. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College composition and communication, 32 (4), 365-387. Gillet, A., Hammond, A. & Martala, M. (2009). Successful Academic Writing. New York: Pearson Longman. Keck, C. (2014). Copying, paraphrasing, and academic writing development: A re-examination of L1 and L2 summarization practices. Journal of Second Language Writing, 25, 4-22. Leckie, G. J. (1996). Desperately seeking citations: Uncovering faculty assumptions about the undergraduate

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