i
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST - GRADUATE STUDIES
 *  NGUYỄN THANH BÌNH

DESIGNING ORAL COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES
FOR AN ENGLISH CLUB AT XUAN HUY HIGH SCHOOL
TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING COMPETENCE Nghiên cứu thiết kế các hoạt động ngôn ngữ giao tiếp bằng lời
trong câu lạc bộ tiếng Anh trường THPT Xuân Huy
nhằm nâng cao năng lực nói của học sinh
M.A MINOR THESIS

FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE: 60140111
SUPERVISOR: Dr. DUONG THU MAI iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I wish to send my sincere thanks to my supervisor, Duong Thu Mai,
Ph.D. for her valuable guidance, helpful suggestions and critical feedback throughout
the research.
Also, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to all the lecturers in the
Department of Postgraduate Studies, College of Foreign languages, VNU for their
useful lessons from which have inspired me to conduct this thesis.
I am greatly indebted to my students- the members in Xuan Huy English Club
and my colleagues at Xuan Huy high school for their participation and assistance
without which this study could not have been successful.
Last but not least, I would like to express my special thanks to my loving
parents, my husband, my children and my close friends who offered me their love,
care, support and encouragement so that I could accomplish my study.


speaking competence. The finding also discovered students‟ good and bad perception
about applied oral communicative activities.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
ABSTRACT iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS v
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vii
LIST OF TABLE AND FIGURES viii
PART A: INTRODUCTION 1
1. Rationale 1
2. Objective of the study 2
3. Research questions 2
4. Scope of the study 2
5. Methodology 2

2.3. Data collection 16
2.3.1. Data collection instruments 16
2.3.2. Data collection procedure 18
2.3.3. Data analysis procedures. 19
CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 20
3.1. Students‟ need analysis and teachers' interview 20
3.2. Students‟ perceptions about English oral communicative activities 26
3.3. Findings from English observation 30
CHAPTER 4: DESIGNING ORAL COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES 32
4.1. Face to face games (group work) 32
4.2. Face to face game (Pair work) 33
4.3. Circle conversation (group work) 34
4.4. Language Camp (group work) 34
4.5. Treasure hunting? (Group work) 36
4.6. Question bags. (Group work) 36
4.7. Mystery crosswords. (Group work) 37
PART C. CONCLUSION 38
1. Major findings 38
2. Limitations and suggestions for further study 39
REFERENCES 40
APPENDIX
vii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
viii
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
1. Figures:
Figure 1: How oral communicative activities can help students 26
2. Tables:
Table 1: How oral communicative activities can help students 22
Table 2: Patterns of speaking activities teachers often use to teach speaking skills in
classroom 23
Table 3: Students‟ preference for the types of oral communicative activities 24
Table 4: factors may encourage students to communicate in oral communicative
activities. 25
Table 5: What teachers should do to create good relationship and to help students in oral
communication. 25
Table 6: Frequency in organizing oral communicative activities 27
Table 7: The content of oral communicative activities 27
Table 8: the most suitable way that teachers or facilitators give feedback with students'
wrong answers 28
Table 9: Students‟ assessment about oral communicative activities 29
Table 10: Students‟ assessment about their friends' enjoyment with all oral
communicative activities 29
Table 11: The most effective pattern to improve students' speaking competence 30
Table 12: Assessment about oral communicative activities students participated in 30
Table 13: What teachers did to create good relationship and to help students in oral
communication. 31
Table 14: Assessment about the time spent on applied oral communicative language
activities. 32
Table 15: Assessment about the content of oral communicative activities 32
Table 16: The effectiveness of oral communicative activities 33

This actual requirement sets a challenging task for teachers of English in Xuan
Huy high school, which is to design communicative activities which can provide
students with “real” contexts for negotiating meaning so that they can develop
communicative competence. This is also the reason why this study in designing oral
communicative language activities for an English club at Xuan Huy high school to
improve students‟ competence was conducted with the hope of enhancing the ability to
speak for students. Helping students to have better English speaking competence also
means helping them in choosing their field of study and looking for opportunities in
the future.

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2. Objective of the study
For the above-given reasons, the main purposes of the thesis are as the following:
(1) Discussing the needs for improving speaking competence of students from Xuan
Huy High school.
(2) Investigating the effectiveness of designed oral communicative language activities
for an English club at Xuan Huy high school to improve students' speaking
competence.
3. Research questions
The study intends to find out the answers to the following questions:
What are the students‟ needs about activities to improve their speaking
competence?
What are the teachers‟ needs about activities to improve their students‟
speaking competence?
Which oral communicative language activities should be designed for an
English club at Xuan Huy high school to improve students' speaking competence?
What is students‟ perception of the designed activities?
4. Scope of the study
At present, speaking a foreign language represents one of the essential
requirements of today's society. Besides other skills and knowledge, it is considered one

Teaching, teaching speaking according to CLT, English speaking club in CLT.
Chapter 2 presents the methodology of the study including the background
information of the context where the study is conducted, the subjects, the instruments
used to collect data, and the procedures of data collection. Furthermore, a detailed
description of data analysis is presented; and some explanations and interpretations of
the findings of the study are given in this chapter.
Chapter 3 Designing oral communicative activities
Chapter 4 Provides finding and discussion of the study.
Part C: Conclusion Gives recapitulation summarizes the main points which have
been explored in the study, and made some recommendations on how designing oral
communicative language activities should be used to improve students‟ speaking
competence. It also discusses the limitations of the study and makes some suggestions
for further research.
PART B: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
As a way of start, the study provides the notions of Communicative Language
Teaching and theoretical background about Teaching speaking according to
Communicative Language Teaching and English Speaking Clubs in CLT.
1.1. Communicative Language Teaching
1.1.1. The concept of Communicative Language Teaching.
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an approach to the teaching of
second and foreign languages that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the
ultimate goal of learning a language. It is also referred to as a “communicative

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approach to the teaching of foreign languages” or simply as the “Communicative
Approach” (CLT, 2003).
Communicative language teaching makes use of real-life situations that
necessitate communication. The teacher sets up a situation that students are likely to
encounter in real life. Unlike the audio-lingual method of language teaching, which

bring the real world elements into the classroom. Situations are simulated but

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interaction and task complete within real-time are genuine. Role-plays centre on
communicative functions.
In addition, fluency is an important dimension of communication. The objective of
language learning is to communicate; attempts to communicate are encouraged at the very
beginning. Errors are unavoidable but accuracy is judged in context rather in structures and
forms. Learning is a process of creative construction and involves errors.
1.2. Teaching speaking according to Communicative Language Teaching
1.2.1. Definition of Speaking
As noted in Bygate‟s opinion (1987), speaking is considered as a skill, not just
knowledge because the speakers not only know how to make utterances and adapt them to
each circumstance but also have a skill of making fluent conversations. Moreover, he
distinguished the term of “skill” into two basic ways: “motor - perceptive skills” and
“interaction skill”. He clarifies that the former involves perceiving, recalling, and
articulating in the correct order sounds and structures of the language and the later is the
skill of using both knowledge and motor - perceptive skills to achieve communication.
Furthermore, interaction skills can involve the management of interaction which illustrates
the way to make communication smooth and the negotiation of meaning which considers
about how utterances are understood explicitly.
Another distinction when considering the development of speaking skills is
between monologue and dialogue. According to Richard (2008), who expanded Brown
and Yule‟s framework

(after Jones (1996) and Burns (1998), the functions of speaking,
can be classified as interaction, transaction and performance. In his research, each of
these speech activities is quite distinct in terms
of
form and function and requires

According to Oxford Advance Dictionary by Hornby, competence is (of person)
having ability, power, authority, skill, knowledge, etc, (to do what is needed). While
according to Chomsky (1998) the meaning of ability or competence is “the speaker-
hearer‟s knowledge and ability thus includes concepts of appropriateness and
acceptability. The study of competence will inevitably entail consideration of such
variables as attitude, motivation, and a number of socio cultural factors”.
Nolasco (1997) notes that speaking ability is not fluent speaking but
conversation, speaking competence means conversation ability or conversation skill. It
performs mutual interdependent, interactive nature of conversation. It is an awareness
activity as well as feedback activity so that a series of tasks is developed to sharpen the
students‟ awareness on the activity and assess their own progress performance. When
those awareness and feedback activities done gradually, automatic conversation
becomes accustomed; speaking ability, in this case, conversation skill, needs gradual
practice-controlled, awareness, and finally fluency conversation.
1.2.4. Communicative activities in CLT
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is the most influential language
teaching methodology in the world. CLT views language as a vehicle for
communication, and communicative competence as its aim of teaching.
Communicative activities include any activities that encourage and require a learner to
speak with and listen to other learners, as well as with people in the program and
community. Communicative activities have real purposes: to find information, break
down barriers, talk about self, and learn about the culture. Even when a lesson is
focused on developing reading or writing skills, communicative activities should be
integrated into the lesson.

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Furthermore, many researchers in CLT define that language learning should not
only focus on the grammatical structure of the language but also on language use in
real-life situations. In addition, in the classroom setting, CLT requires more than just
attention to strategies for presenting the structure and the functions of language.

something to happen such as expressing pleasure, charming listeners, etc and select the
language they think is appropriate for their purpose. In order for communication to be

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successful, there should be a desire for the communication to be effective both from the
point of view of speakers and listeners. In most of the processes of communication, the
roles of speakers and listeners are interchanged; information gaps between them are
created, and then closed with the effort from both sides.
1.2.6. Types and design of oral communicative activities
A great number of oral communicative activities are mentioned in teaching
methodology books, and their classification is distinguished according to each author's
point of view.
Littlewood (1981) suggests the two sets of activities. The first type is
“functional communication activities” involving only communication of information in
which the learners identify similarities and differences in a set of pictures, discover
missing features in a map or picture, reconstruct story sequences or problem-solving
tasks. The second type is “social interaction activities” in which the learners use
English as a teaching and learning medium in order to implement conversation,
discussions sessions, dialogues, role plays, stimulation, improvising and debates in
classroom context. Different from the perspective about types of activities of
Littlewood, Harmer (1983) defines a distinction between “practice” activities and
“communicative” activities in which oral “practice” activities include “oral drills,
information gap activities, games, personalization and localization, oral activities”
and “communicative” activities consist of “reaching a consensus, relaying
instructions, communicative games, problem - solving, interpersonal exchange, story
construction, simulation and role play”. What‟s more, activities may also be clarified
as activities for accuracy that aim at learners‟ competence in producing right words,
phrases or sentences and activities for fluency that aim at learners‟ capacity to
maintain the flow of speech with ease and comfort.
Similar to Harmer, Ur (1981) offers a variety of types of oral activities,

Language is of an acceptable level: Students express themselves in utterances that
are relevant, easily comprehensible to each other, and of an acceptable level of
language accuracy.”
In addition, Ur (1996) describes some problems happening to the students. Firstly,
they are often inhibited about trying to say something in English in class, but they are
often worried about making mistakes, fearful of criticism or losing face, or simply shy
of the attention that their speech attracts. Secondly, even though they are not inhibited,
they cannot think of anything to say or have no motive to express themselves. Thirdly,
some students have low participation in the speaking practice. Furthermore, in classes,
the mother tongue often dominates while the target language is simply neglected.
Knowing these things can help teachers understand and design oral communicative
activities carefully to avoid these problems.
From the point of view of above researchers, it is possible to say that speaking
activities can be characterized as more or less interactive. Putting learners in pairs or
small groups is the good way to motivate learners in each other communication
perfectly. For these reasons, it is crucial for teachers to provide more and more
interesting speaking activities for students to practice creative uses of the language. In

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the framework of this study, the oral communicative activities will be selected from
the perspective of the researchers mentioned above:
Dialogue
It gives students opportunities to practice and revise the rhythm, intonation as well
as the speech sounds correctly. Through practicing dialogue, students are able to know
how to express ideas in such variously communicative context.
Information - gap
This activity is one of the easiest and most interesting forms of communicative
activity in the speaking class. The students can implement by the way in which one
person shares information which the others don‟t know in pair or group work. This
kind may encourage students‟ thoughts and highly motivate.

they possess to complete the game.
1.2.7. Evaluating oral communicative activities
Researchers convey different perspectives to the aspects of oral communicative
activities. Patton (1988) defines evaluation as: “The practice of evaluation involves the
systematic collection of information about the activities, characteristics, and outcomes
of programs, personnel, and products for use by specific people to reduce
uncertainties, improve effectiveness, and make decisions with regard to what those
programs, personnel or products are doing and emphasizes a systematic collection of
information about a broad range of topics for use by specific people for a variety of
purposes”. This definition is quite useful as it is comprehensive, flexible and broad. In
this study, the author mainly focuses on some main checklists to evaluate the oral
communicative language activities.
The evaluation of the oral course is mostly based on the students' classroom
performance. According to Brumfit (1984), the fluency and accuracy are also the
criteria to evaluate communicative activities. He suggests that “ the demand to
produce work for display could be supplied conflicted directly with the demand to
perform adequately in the kind of natural circumstances for which teaching was
presumably a preparation. Language display for evaluation ended to lead to a
knowledge, problem solving and evidence of skill-getting. In contrast, language use
requires fluency, expression rules, a reliance on implicit knowledge and automatic
performance ”. In addition, Richards (2005) also proposes a list of criteria for macro
level of evaluation which concerns three factors namely teachers, learners and tasks.
Due to the focus of this study, the criteria concerning learner factors are presented here.
Therefore, there are six criteria will be applied in this study as following: The
organization, the procedure, the atmosphere, teaching strategies, teacher‟s qualities and
learners.
As mentioned above, the main criteria for evaluating speaking activities are
whether enough different types of speaking activities are relevant to language input
and communicative aims or not. When evaluating activities, teachers consider
speaking topics, students‟ interest in practicing speaking. Teachers will have a good

Communicative Language Teaching has been widely explored and studied by
many researchers in the field of English language teaching. There have been a lot of
researches and theories in the last twenty years which involve interaction between
learners in the world and in Vietnam.
The thesis by Wang Cheng-jun, 2006 was “Designing Communicative Tasks for
College English Courses”. In the thesis, the author gave a brief account of
communicative tasks design, points out the key issue in designing communicative
tasks for college English language teaching.
The second thesis was “Designing some extra speaking activities based on
business English for pre-intermediate second year students of faculty of economics-
Vietnam National University, Hanoi” which was written by Nguyen Thi Hong Van,

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2006. In the thesis, the author gave her students questionnaire to have an overview of
real conditions directly influencing on the effectiveness of the activities, and then she
presented several mostly common and effective activities as the representatives due to
the limit of Minor Thesis framework.
The thesis by Le Thi Huong (2007) was “Designing extra speaking activities
based on “English for Tourism” for third year students at Tourism Faculty, CSSH –
VNU”. With the hope of motivating students to speak more in class, the author
analyzed the situational needs and students‟ needs. The results of this analysis were the
basis for designing some extra speaking activities. The author made a great
contribution to the teaching and learning ESP at Tourism Faculty, CSSH – VNU.
However, this is the first study that specifically deals with oral communicative
language activities in Xuan Huy high school context. Hence, this study was carried out
to design some oral communicative language activities for the English Club to
improve speaking competence in the Xuan Huy high school context.
Summary: Chapter 1 has presented some theoretical background knowledge
related to the topic of the study. It has discussed some concepts and ideas concerning
to the issue of speaking in general and oral communicative activities in particular.

improve English abilities, especially in communication and in the specialized fields
such as learning, hobbies, films and cinema, friendship, etc. For those purposes, the
administers of the club, with many helps, have planned and organized many meetings
of English Club in school year with the criteria: Creating a fun and relax atmosphere
for all club‟s members; Supplementing English skills naturally through games,
conversations and other activities such as celebrating the St. Valentine‟s Day,
Christmas‟s Day, Teacher‟s Day, The Language Day, Everyone in the English Club
does all the activities, no one says „no‟ to anything, everyone has a lot of fun and they
are all friendly with each other.
2.1.2. Students at Xuan Huy high school
The majority to students in the study Xuan Huy high school come from
communes in Yen Son district where there are difficult situations for living and
learning. Most of their parents are farmers. Some of them do not spend much time for
their children. Most of students received their primary and secondary education at
Chan Son, Thang Quan, Tu Quan, so the learning conditions are very poor and they
deprived of chances to speaking English. Most students are good at grammar, but bad
at listening and speaking skills so that using English to communicate is a big challenge
for most of them. The foundation of English clubs has created an environment for
students to learn more effective. Joining English club all the students always attend
with serious attitude. Moreover, they really want to improve their speaking
competence.
2.1.3. Teachers at Xuan Huy high school
The staff of English teachers, the school has 7 English teachers consisting of 1
male and 6 females, who are aged from 32 to 54. They have few opportunities to
upgrade their teaching, and do not have good teaching facilities and materials to help
their work. For example, because of limited facilities condition, teachers have to teach

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in large-sized classes. There are at least 40 students for each class. Therefore, teachers
will face with some problems in monitoring work, giving feedback, setting up

difficulty is that English is not paid much attention by most of students in school. The
second is that teachers have to teach in the large size classes. Therefore, teaching
English speaking is very difficult for teachers. The third problem is that most of the

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students are lack of background knowledge from lower secondary schools. The last is
the lack of materials and facilities.
When Xuan Huy English Club was founded, some of the students with the
passion of English had a place for exchanging and learning outside of class time. It is
advisable for the teachers to employ various oral communicative language activities to
arouse students‟ interest in learning English speaking. They, then, may improve their
speaking competence and other language skills.
2.3. Data collection
2.3.1. Data collection instruments
In order to carry out this research, the researcher used different types of research
instruments such as questionnaires and interviews. Added to that, English Club meeting
observations were also employed to supplement for the above instruments.
2.3.1.1. Survey Questionnaires for students
The instruments used in this study consisted of two questionnaires: A need
based questionnaire and a perception one. Survey questionnaires are considered as one
of the most effective instruments for collecting data. According to Gillham (2004),
using questionnaires has some advantages: They are low cost in time and money; the
inflow of data is quick and from many people; data analysis is relatively simple and
question can be coded quickly; there is lack of interviewer bias.
Although the questionnaire is the main instrument, this study encompasses the
use of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The qualitative data are gained
from the interviews with teachers of English when developing and revising the
questionnaire. After this step, quantitative data are obtained from the self-report
questionnaire with the students. In order to make sure that the participants can
understand correctly the content of the questionnaire, the questionnaire items are

the literature review of good oral communicative activities (Section 1.2.7 chapter 2) Part
I was the same as part I in pre- treatment questionnaire. Part II included 8 questions
which would gather information about students‟ perception about designed oral
communicative activities. The first and second questions aim to find out students'
assessment about effectiveness and students enjoyment about these activities. The
third question investigate pattern which brought the most effective to improve
students' speaking competence. The fourth question is used to define what students
thought about oral communicative activities that they participated in. The fifth
question is designed with the purpose of investigating the students' view about the way
that their teachers create good relationship with them. The three last questions are
provided to help writer define students' assessment about the duration, the content and
the effectiveness of oral communicative activities which were applied in English Club.
2.3.1.2. Teachers interviews
The interviewer can pursue in-depth information around the topic at
convenience. To be more detailed, in this study, semi-structured interviews were
conducted to allow new and open ideas to be brought up during the interview. Data
collected from the interview were also analyzed with the same means made in analysis
in questions for easy comparison between the students' thoughts, comments, and
teachers' ones.