A study on applying group discussion approach to enhanse speaking skills of English for the first year students at An Duong Vocational Middle School

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study was carried out to investigate students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards applying group discussion to promote speaking English in the class of non-major English intermediate students of An Duong Vocational School. The study was designed to answer the two following questions: 1. How will the group discussion (GD) model under the cooperative learning instruction in the EFL classroom help the teacher– researcher to enhance the first year students at An Duong Vocational School to speak English? 2. What can the researcher learn from implementing the GD model under the cooperative learning instruction to improve EFL teaching speaking skill for the students of An Duong Vocational School? A detailed questionnaire was used as the measuring instrument. Data for the study is gathered by the survey questionnaires. 100 copies of survey questionnaires are delivered to the students to learn about their opinions toward applying group discussion approaches in speaking class. And 7 other copies are also distributed to teachers of English to find out the difficulties and achievements when using group discussion to enhance their students’ English speaking in the English class at the same time. The findings show that students are interested in speaking English in group discussion because they can feel confident to communicate and share the ideas in groups. And the findings also indicate some problems teachers of English meet in using group discussion besides the advantages it brings about. All of them are presented in the main part of the study. Basing on such findings, some practical recommendations for the students, the teachers and the administrators at An Duong Vocational School were proposed to develop students’ ability to communicate successfully. It is hoped that this thesis will help the other teachers of English be aware the usefulness of group discussion techniques and apply it in their English-speaking teaching.