VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

NGHIÊM THỊ HẰNG

CONSOLIDATING AND IMPROVING VOCABULARY THROUGH
COMMUNICATIVE SPEAKING TASKS FOR THE FIRST-YEAR
STUDENTS AT THE DEPARTMENT OF FINANCE AND
ACCOUNTING, PHUONG DONG UNIVERSITY

(CỦNG CỐ VÀ PHÁT TRIỂN TỪ VỰNG THÔNG QUA NHIỆM VỤ NÓI
MANG TÍNH GIAO TIẾP CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ NHẤT KHOA
TÀI CHÍNH – KẾ TOÁN, TRƢỜNG ĐẠI HỌC PHƢƠNG ĐÔNG)

M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60140111

Hanoi, 2014

DECLARATION

I hereby, certify the thesis entitled “Consolidating and Improving Vocabulary
through Communicative Speaking Tasks for the First-Year Students at the
Department of Finance and Accounting, Phuong Dong University” is the result of
my own research for the Minor Degree of Master of Arts at University of
Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. The
thesis has not been submitted for any degree at any other universities or institutions.
I agree that the origin of my paper deposited in the library can be accessible for the
purposes of study and research.
Hanoi, 2014 Nghiêm Thị Hằng

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T his thesis is to investigate consolidating and improving vocabulary through
communicative speaking tasks for the first-year students at the Department of
Finance and Accounting, Phuong Dong University. In more details, it makes clear
the current application of communicative speaking tasks in vocabulary lesson,
advantages and disadvantages, and suggestions for more effective use of this
technique. To achieve these objectives, the researcher uses survey questionnaires
and semi-structured group interviews for both the English teachers and the first-year
students at the Department of Finance and Accounting. The results show that many
types of communicative speaking tasks were used to review and develop students’
vocabulary. Despite some remaining difficulties, the majority of the participants
assumed a great number of strong points of these tasks and desired to apply them in
consolidating and improving vocabulary. Additionally, their pedagogical
suggestions for the effective application of communicative speaking tasks in
reviewing and developing vocabulary are presented.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, FIGURES AND TABLES
ABBREVIATIONS:
PDU

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii
ABSTRACT iii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, FIGURES AND TABLES iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS v
PART I: INTRODUCTION 1
1. Statement of the problem and rationale for the study 1
2. Aims of the study 2
3. Objectives of the study 2
4. Research questions 2
5. Scope of the study 3
6. Significance of the study 3
7. Methodology 3
8 An overview of the rest of the study 4
PART II: DEVELOPMENT 6
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 6
1.1 Vocabulary 6
1.1.1 Definition of vocabulary 6
1.1.2 The importance of vocabulary 6
1.1.3 Aspects of vocabulary knowledge 7
1.1.4 Stages in teaching vocabulary 8
1.2 Communicative speaking tasks in vocabulary learning 9
1.2.1 Communicative speaking tasks 9
1.2.2 Communicative speaking tasks in vocabulary learning 10
1.2.3 Types of communicative speaking tasks to increase vocabulary
knowledge 11
1.3 Previous studies 13

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1.3.1 Foreign researches 13

countries. English has recently been taught as a compulsory subject from the third
grade. However, after several years of learning English, most students still find it
hard to communicate with foreigners. Even at colleges and universities like
Phuong Dong University, teachers have to teach non-major students English from
the beginning. Many students may be good at English grammar, but they cannot
express their ideas in English effectively. When asked for the reason, most of them
said that it was due to their vocabulary limitation. They may know very well the
meaning of words when doing exercises, but they can hardly use them in real
situations.
According to many linguists, in communication, vocabulary is more
important than grammar. David Wilkin (1972) pointed out “Without grammar very
little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” (as cited in
Thornbury, 2002:47). Therefore, vocabulary, one of the major components of
language, ought to be taken into consideration in both English language teaching
and learning. However, only focusing on teaching new vocabulary is not the most
effective way of handling vocabulary. It is more effective if teachers spend time
consolidating words the students have learnt before helping them learn more new
ones. Moreover, students ought to be given more speaking opportunities so that
they can be familiar with real life communication. To improve students’
vocabulary as well as their speaking ability in real communication, one of the
suggested ways is to implement communicative speaking tasks in consolidating
and improving the active vocabulary for the students.

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All the aforementioned factors have inspired the researcher to conduct a
study named “Consolidating and Improving Vocabulary through Communicative
Speaking Tasks for the First-Year Students at the Department of Finance and
Accounting, Phuong Dong University.”
2. Aims of the study

4. What are their suggestions for more effective application of communicative
speaking tasks in consolidating and improving vocabulary?
5. Scope of the study
Due to the limit of a minor thesis, the study focuses on investigating the uses
of communicative speaking tasks in consolidating and improving vocabulary. The
samples of the study are also restricted to the English teachers and the first-year
students at the Department of Finance and Accounting, PDU.
6. Significance of the study
Theoretically, the study is hoped to provide the teachers with useful
information of teaching and learning vocabulary in general, and consolidating and
improving vocabulary through communicative speaking tasks for the freshmen in
particular. More importantly, they would have more ideas of the students’
perceptions and desires of this technique. In addition, the study could be a
reference for other researchers to conduct the study related to this topic.
Practically, since the study delves into consolidating and improving
vocabulary through communicative speaking tasks, its finding hopefully would
contribute to the first-year students’ better use of English as a tool of
communication. As for the teachers, they could apply these above theories into
consolidating and improving the students’ vocabulary. Moreover, the study also
provides the teachers with some helpful suggestions so that they could take their
own initiatives to use communicative speaking tasks effectively in their classroom
situations.
7. Methodology
7.1 Approach
Survey research was chosen as the primary research method as it meets the aim
and objectives of the study. Sincero, S. M. (2012) points out six main advantages

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of survey research namely high representativeness, low costs, convenient data


Chapter 3 (Results and Discussions) presents, analyses and discusses the collected
data from the questionnaires and interviews.
PART C: CONCLUSION summarizes the main issues discussed in the thesis,
the findings that the researcher has found basing on the data collected from the
four research questions, the limitations of the research, several pedagogical
recommendations concerning the research topic as well as some suggestions for
further studies.


language, then it is vocabulary that provides the vital organs and the flesh to make

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up its perfect body”. Therefore, to most of language learners, the acquisition of
vocabulary is an important component in the course of language learning. Students
mastering a variety of vocabulary perform better in the communicative language
activities.
Regarding to this matter, Wallace (1982) said “Failure to find the words one
needs to express himself is the most frustrating experience in speaking another
language”. It can be seen that vocabulary is the leading factor for learners to gain
their target language.
As its significance in the foreign language teaching, vocabulary teaching has
the goal to help students not only improve but also extend their vocabulary as well.
The more words one knows well, the more successful he/she is in daily
communication and the more information he can get from different sources such
as books, newspapers, etc. Therefore, vocabulary deserves an important position in
foreign language teaching and learning.
1.1.3 Aspects of vocabulary knowledge
The concept of a word can be defined in various ways, but three significant
aspects teachers need to be aware of and focus on are form, meaning, and use
(Nation, 2001:27). The form of a word involves its pronunciation (spoken form),
spelling (written form), and any word parts that make up this particular item (such
as a prefix, root, and suffix). The meaning encompasses the way that form and
meaning work together, in other words, the concept and what items it refers to, and
the associations that come to mind when people think about a specific word or
expression. The use involves the grammatical functions of the word or phrase,
collocations that normally go with it, and finally any constraints on its use, in
terms of frequency, level, and so forth.
Ur (1999:60-62) and Harmer (1991:156-157) agreed on listing the

teachers can use some decision making ones like identifying, selecting, matching,
sorting, ranking and sequencing. And also production tasks, for instance,
completion of sentences and texts and creation of sentences and texts.

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The last stage is related to the production stage with the aim of helping
students incorporate the new items into the lexicon. This can be done by using
communicative activities in which the learners have to retrieve the vocabulary
already learnt and practiced.
1.2 Communicative speaking tasks in vocabulary learning
1.2.1 Communicative speaking tasks
According to Willis (1996:36), a communicative task is a “goal oriented
communicative activity with a specific outcome, where the emphasis is on
exchanging meanings not producing specific language forms”.
Estaire & Zanon (1994:13-20) indicated that a communicative task was a
piece of classroom work which, as far as possible, resembled activities which our
students or other people carried out in everyday life, thus reproducing processes of
everyday communication. A piece of classroom work which involved learners in
comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language
while their attention was principally focused on meaning rather than form. The
task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a
communicative act in its own right. Furthermore, Lambert (2004:18-27) defined
communication tasks as pedagogic tasks which operated through a planned
diversion in the information held by learners, and which usually approximated to
some degree to a real world task which learners had to complete outside class.
Communicative speaking tasks are considered communicative activities,
real-world tasks or real-world connection given with the aim of providing students
chance to express their own ideas orally about the topic of the lesson. These ideas
are based on the analysis of meaning derived from a communicative activity.

face-to-face nature of communication in group activities can help speakers to set
their speech to a suitable level for the particular listeners and to adjust it when
listeners indicate a lack of understanding. Secondly, communicative speaking
tasks generally provide a meaningful context within which to encounter new
vocabulary. Thirdly, there is a good chance learners will also be exposed to
repeated use of the new items during the course of the task. Lastly, having
encountered the new items, learners are likely to be required to use them
productively in the communicative speaking tasks. If this requires learners to use

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vocabulary in ways that are not rote repetition of the way the vocabulary appeared
in the input task, learning will be much greater (Hall, 1992).
1.2.3 Types of communicative speaking tasks to increase vocabulary
knowledge
Several classifications of communicative speaking tasks have been proposed.
Nation (2001:129-138) mentioned some activities that helped learners gain control
of knowledge and also encouraged them to produce vocabulary, namely semantic
mapping, making decisions, information transfer activities, split information tasks,
ranking, retelling and role play.
Schmitt & McCarthy (1997:254-255) suggested some types of
communicative speaking tasks such as role-play, information gap, discussion and
interview. Although dialogues have the advantage of putting words directly into
productive vocabulary (Nation, 2001), role-play which is a similar but less
structured technique is an option for spontaneous oral practice of vocabulary. In
addition, having students discuss or retell a selection is another common technique
which quite naturally results in students’ repeating vocabulary and chunking
words (Allen and Allen, 1985). Finally, variations on the oral interview provide a
range of communicative practice with target vocabulary. Students can share one-
on-one how a word relates to personal experience, rotate to new partners, or

the background to the problem, the problem, the constraints on the solution and
their roles to act well. Examples include individual role cards for a travel agent
and a customer; for five students arranging to meet for a meal; for two
interviewers and four candidates for a job; a policeman and four witnesses of a
monster in Loch Ness; and art gallery officials and several members of the public
choosing a new picture for the gallery.
In conclusion, different scholars classified communicative speaking tasks
using different terms. All of these tasks may be used to expose students to new
vocabulary as well as to reactivate vocabulary in the iterative process words need
to go through in order for long-term retention to take place. Among these above
categories, Harmer classified the types of communicative speaking tasks clearly

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and also covered all of their aspects. Therefore, this study adopted Harmer’s
classification of oral communication tasks.
1.3 Previous studies
With the orientation of achieving both vocabulary accuracy and
communication fluency, teaching vocabulary through communicative speaking
tasks catches much attention from researchers. Hence, many studies have been
conducted on this issue. Some typical researches involving my research will be
reviewed and discussed in this section.
1.3.1 Foreign researches
Vygotsky (1978:123) stated that language developed mainly from social
interaction and a supportive interactive environment could promote learners to a
higher level of knowledge and performance. However, for most second language
learners, they did not have so many opportunities to communicate with others in
target language and their most time to learn second language is in classroom.
Therefore, focusing on the interaction in classroom was important and necessary.
For the purpose of English vocabulary learning, students learnt it to communicate,

he found that teachers tended to teach English vocabulary by organizing role play
and discussion (2009). In addition, Nation gave the scope of incidental activities in
classroom, such as retelling, ranking and so on (2001:135). He also did some
studies on learning vocabulary through speaking (2001:125). Boyd Zimmerman
(1997a:121-140) conducted a study on the impact of interactive vocabulary
teaching in vocabulary knowledge, and from the research, they confirmed that the
recasts and repetition were the better ones. Groot (2000:60-81) expressed that
many learners could not master a large amount of English vocabulary due to lack
of exposure to new words with sufficient time. Therefore, this would hinder the
creation of sufficient number of associations and linked with other words for solid
storage and efficient retrieval.
1.3.2 Vietnamese researches
Hoang (2012) conducted a study entitled “The effectiveness of presenting
and practicing new vocabulary in minimal context for second-year non English
major students at Vietnam University of Commerce” to investigate the efficiency
of teaching vocabulary in minimal context, in terms of the second-year non

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English major students’ vocabulary knowledge improvement and motivation in
acquiring vocabulary; as well as find out several advantages of minimal context
brought about the vocabulary learning and teaching, then propose some
pedagogical implications for the teachers at the research site. An action research
was implemented in the author’s class of 40 second-year non English major
students at VUC during two weeks (5 periods) and data were collected and
generated by pre-test and post-test, questionnaires and observations. The findings
highlighted students’ improvement in vocabulary knowledge and high motivation
in the vocabulary lesson using minimal context to present and involve students in
practicing new vocabulary. In addition, the study indicated a range of benefits to
students’ language study, pedagogy and strategy in vocabulary instruction and

contributed to success of implementing this instruction.
Additionally, many other researches were conducted for purposes such as
finding out problems faced by first-year students in developing vocabulary for
speaking in different subject areas (Nguyen, 2011), examining the comparative
effectiveness of some CLT approach classroom activities in teaching vocabulary
(Nguyen, 2008), searching the ways to improve the teaching of vocabulary (Tran,
2007), etc. However, in the thesis limit, only studies involving my study purpose
are focused, and they have been really good reference for my research.
In short, the results from the above studies indicate that the techniques play
an important role in learners’ vocabulary acquisition, and make it easier and more
effective for learners to increase their vocabulary knowledge. However, studying
new vocabulary can only be perfect when it is combined with the practice and is
connected to the students’ real world in some way.
SUMMARY
In this chapter, the researcher has elaborately discussed the theoretical basis
of the study by defining and clarifying the various aspects in the hope of providing
an important background for the discussion of the collected data later. The
following chapter will display the methodology and findings of the research under
the light of the above-mentioned theories. 17

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY
The previous chapter has provided a necessary theoretical background for the
present study. This chapter presents the methodology used for the data collection
and analysis in the study. It starts with the description of the participants. It then
describes data collection instruments and analysis procedures of the study.
2.1 Participants
The target population of the study consists of the first-year students and the