MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY

LÂM THỊ HƯƠNG
IMPROVING SPEAKING SKILL FOR 10
TH
GRADE
STUDENTS AT DO LUONG 1 HIGH SCHOOL THROUGH
COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES
MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION

Nghe An - 2014
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY
LÂM THỊ HƯƠNG
IMPROVING SPEAKING SKILL FOR 10
TH
GRADE
STUDENTS AT DO LUONG 1 HIGH SCHOOL THROUGH
COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES
Major: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
Code: 60.140.111
MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION
SUPERVISOR: TRẦN BÁ TIẾN, Ph.D.
Nghe An – 2014
STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP
I hereby acknowledge that this study is mine. The data and findings
discussed in the thesis are true, used with permission from associates, and have not
been published elsewhere.
Author
Lam Thi Huong

for those who are interested in this matter.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale
1.2. Objectives of the study
iii
1.3. Research questions
1.5. The design of the study
2.4.1. Aims of communicative activities
2.4.4 Roles of communicative activities in language teaching and learning
2.4.5 Requirements of communicative activities
3.2.1 Methods
Limitations of the study
Suggesons for further studies 59
LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES
INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale
1.2. Objectives of the study
1.3. Research questions
1.5. The design of the study
2.4.1. Aims of communicative activities
2.4.4 Roles of communicative activities in language teaching and learning
2.4.5 Requirements of communicative activities
3.2.1 Methods
Limitations of the study
iv
Suggesons for further studies 59
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
CAs: Communicative Activities
CLT: Communicative Language Teaching

speaking skill through communicative activities” to find out the answer, and further,
to help improve the teaching of speaking skill at her school.
1.2. Objectives of the study
According to the importance of the participation of the students in speaking
lessons, this study aims at studying on communicative activities in the 10th
graders’ English speaking classes at Do Luong 1 high school.
These are the objectives of the study :
- To investigate the real situation of applying communicative activities in
teaching speaking skill for 10
th
graders at Do Luong 1 high School, Do Luong
District, Nghe An Province.
- To give some recommendations to improve the students’ speaking skill
through communicative activities
1.3. Research questions
1.3.1. What is the real situation of teaching and learning speaking skill of the 10
th
graders at Do Luong 1 high School, Do Luong District, Nghe An Province ?
1.3.2. How are communicative activities applied in speaking lessons for the
10
th
graders at Do Luong 1 high school?
1.3.3. What are suggested class communicative activities to improve for the
10
th
graders’ speaking skill in Do Luong 1 high school?
1.4. Scope of the study
Although there are many different ways to motivate students to learn English,
all these issues can not be fully covered in this paper. Due to the limited time and
the length of a minor thesis, the researcher only focuses on exploiting

problems and summarize all the main points raised in the paper, the limitations of
the study and some suggestions for further studies.
Chapter 4 : Findings and discussions- shows major findings and discussions.
Chapter 5: Implications and recommendations - offers recommendations for
motivating students to speak English through communicative activities.
Conclusion - is a summary of the study in which limitations of the study and
suggestions for further research are presented.
3
Chapter 2
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1 The nature of language skills
Based on the purpose of analysis and instruction, language is divided into
different skill areas. On the teaching point of view, language skills consist mainly of
four macro-skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing. Those four skills have
supportive relationship. Among the four skills, listening and reading are perceptive
skills while speaking and writing are productive skills (Byrne, 1991, p.8). They are
also divided according to the manners by which they are formed. The skills that are
related to articulate organs are called oral skills that include listening and speaking.
The ones in connection with manual script is named literacy skills that consist of
reading and writing.
Speaking plays an essential role of the four skills. Byrne (1991, p.9) proves
that this oral skill in communication is complementary. If one man is good at
speaking skill, other skills will be much supported.
To sum up, all the above skills are important for learners. Whenever they
acquire those skills they can have confidence in speaking and using a foreign
language. However, it should be emphasized that speaking skill can never be
separated with other skills (listening, reading and writing). All of them are
integrated and supportive to each other.
2.2 Speaking skill
2.2.1 The definitions of speaking skill

Most of us speak more than we write in our daily lives. According to Wilkin
(1979), speaking when compared with writing is the essential form of language and
writing is ranked second after it and derived from it.
“It is the vehicle of social solidarity, of social ranking, of professional
advancement and of business” (Bygate, 1987, p.7) assumes about the role of
speaking.
5
According to Nunan’s opinions about language learners: “mastering the art of
speaking is the single most important aspect of learning a second language or a
foreign language, and success is measured in term of ability to carry out a
conversation in the language” (Nunan,1991, p.39). It is clear that speaking is a very
important skill among the four basic ones. Therefore, teachers need to motivate
students more often in learning speaking lessons.
2.2.3 Principles for teaching speaking skill
The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative ability. Therefore, teachers
ought to be concerned about the principles for teaching speaking skill to adapt
appropriate communicative activities.
According to Brown (1994), there are seven principles for teaching speaking skill.
• Principle 1: Focus on both fluency and accuracy depending on your objective.
This principle suggests that teachers should be sure about their tasks that have
linguistic objective and always create opportunities to help students perceive and
use the building blocks of language.
• Principle 2: Provide intrinsically motivating techniques.
According to Brown, teachers have to appeal to students’ ultimate goals and
interests to their need for knowledge, for status, for achieving competence and
autonomy and help them to see how the activity will benefit them.
• Principle 3: Encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful
contexts.
Authentic contexts and meaningful interaction may require teachers a lot
energy and creativity. However, with the help of a storehouse of teacher resource

activities basing on the tasks in the textbook or adapt some more activities to
increase the communicative factor at this stage. Students are supposed to do the
tasks in pair or group work. This stage aims to develop students’ speaking skill by
doing the controlled tasks and activities themselves. The tasks and activities also
supply opportunity for students to practice the accuracy and fluency. Teacher needs
7
to monitor the activities and provide help for the weak students who have difficulty
completing the task at this stage.
b.The Post-speaking Stage:
This is the freer speaking stage. Students are required to use the target
language that they have learnt and practiced, and their language knowledge to
produce their speaking communicatively. What they produce reflects the result of
their practice stage, their interests or views. At this stage, the teacher plays the role
as observer, assessor who provides appropriate feedback to students.
Basically, a speaking lesson should follow these stages orderly. Nevertheless,
the procedure of a speaking lesson may flexible due to each lesson, time constraint,
objectives of the lesson, types of students and materials in use. However, teacher
needs to have an overview of the lesson to assess how far their students achieve
after the lesson.
2.2.5 Problems with speaking activities
Speaking skill is one of the difficult skills and causes some obstacles and
problems for both the teachers in teaching and the students in learning. Ur (1996)
points out the problems that the students often meet in learning speaking skill as
follows:
•
Inhibition: Speaking skill, is different from other skill reading, writing and
listening, focuses on some degree of real time to exposure to an audience. The
learners often have inhibition in trying to say things in a foreign language without
the mother tongue. Moreover, the worries about making mistakes, losing face, or
being simply shy, reserved and timid prevent them from attracting in the speaking

According to Bock (2000), CLT is tailored to get at meaning and learners
negotiate meaning in class. Meaning is considered as what is communicated. The
negotiation of meaning can be implicated through pair work, group work in
problem-solving tasks. He also states, “Authentic materials, functional tasks, and
group and pair work are significant aspects of CLT”.
In conclusion, above definitions of CLT claim that the goal of teaching
language is to develop learners’ communicative competence that involves the
ability to use the language appropriately to a social context. These components can
9
be seen as linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse
competence, and strategic competence.
2.3.2 Characteristics of CLT
According to Brown (2000, p.266), there are four interconnected
characteristics of CLT as follows:
- Classroom goals focus on all of the components of communicative
competence and not restricted to grammatical or linguistic competence.
- Language techniques are designed to engage learners in the pragmatic,
authentic, functional use of language for meaningful purposes. Organizational
language forms are not the central focus but rather aspects of language that enable
the learner to accomplish those purposes.
- Fluency and accuracy are seen as complementary principles underlying
communicative techniques. At times, fluency may have to take on more importance
than accuracy in order to keep learners meaningfully engaged in language use.
- In the communicative classroom, students ultimately have to use the
language productively and receptively, in unrehearsed contexts.
Nunan (1991, p.279) also pointed out five common characteristics of CLT
classrooms:
- An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target
language.
- The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.

Learning language through CAs helps learners establish positive personal
relationship to develop among them and between learners and teacher. In addition,
CAs create an environment which supports individual to show his or her efforts to
learn language.
2.4.2 Characteristics of communicative activities
Communicative activities are designed to encourage the purposeful and
meaningful interaction among students in a language lesson. It is, therefore,
11
important for teachers to be fully aware of their characteristics so that they can use
them effectively.
According to Mulling, Sylvia(1997), activities which are truly communicative
meet almost all of the five following criteria:
The information transfer principle, whereby some information must be
transferred from a sender to a receiver.
The information gap principle, which requires that the receiver does not
already possess the information he or she receives.
The jigsaw principle, whereby students begin with different pieces of
information and finish with the same information.
The task dependency principle, which requires to create whenever students
practise at the levels of controlled and semi-controlled communication before they
are ready to perform the activity at the level of free communication.
The correction for content principle, which argues that during
communication the students’ language production should be judged on its
communicative efficacy in relation to a specific task.
In summary, in order to take the advantage of communicative activities
effectively in the process of teaching and learning, it is necessary for the teachers to
distinguish the characteristics of these two kinds.
2.4.3 Types of oral communicative activities
Different linguists have had different ideas on the distinction of
communicative activities. Littlewood (1990) distinguishes them into two main

example, they can sing a song later by themselves. Music creates a relaxing
atmosphere because the whole class sings together. Songs allows maximum
participation by every student in both listening and speaking. Additionally, music
makes a nice change from standard textbook and it is good for developing students’
instincts about intonation and rhythm. Eken (1996, p.46) states that songs can be
used:
• to present a topic, a language point
13
• to practise a language point
• to encourage extensive and intensive listening
• to stimulate discussion of attitudes and feelings
• to encourage creativity and use of imagination
• to provide a relaxed classroom atmosphere
• to bring variety and fun to learning.
In order to choose a suitable song, the teacher should keep in mind that (1)
Songs must be a reasonable length, range, and rhythm. (2) Song should have
repetitive lyrics or chorus that is easy to learn. This allows slower students to
follow. (3) The emotional and conceptual content of a song should be appropriate to
the age and maturity of your students. (4) Songs must be pedagogically appropriate
to the lesson.
As demonstrated, songs are valuable in language teaching and learning. The
teacher is obliged to successfully integrating songs into a language lesson.
+ Discussion
In this type of activity students “have to pool the information in the
discussion” (Littlewood, 1990, p.27). The discussion may be about a proper
problem, for example, “People who throw away rubbish in the forest should get a
fine”. Students have to prepare arguments either in favor of this problem or against
it.
Harmer (1991) has said that many teachers can be heard complaining that their
students have nothing to say or that they have no opinions and are not prepared to

of a real-life situation in the classroom: students “simulate” the real world. Thus we
might ask them to pretend that they are at an airport, or we might organize them to
get together to plan an imaginary reunion. What we are trying to do artificially of
course is to give students practice in real-world English. Students are asked to adopt
a specific role in this situation. In some cases, they may simply have to act as
themselves. In others, they may have to adopt a· simulated identity.
15
There is some controversy about the usefulness of simulations, particularly
where students are asked to play roles, but many teachers feel that they have certain
advantages because students do not have to take responsibility for their own actions
and words. In other words, it is the character that speaks, not themselves. It has
certainly been noticed that some shy students are more talkative when playing roles.
We will use the term here to denote an activity which involves decision-
making, in which the participants may act as themselves or in social roles. It is not
performed for an audience, and the participants work together within the constraints
of the imaginary setting.
Simulations do not as a category provides any basis for predicting the kinds of
language skills that learners will use: it depends what kind of simulation is being
considered. For instance, a simulated committee meeting is likely to produce one
kind of interaction, a simulated another interview, and a simulated public meeting a
third. Indeed a single simulation often consists of several different kinds of
interaction, including the three just mentioned. It is, however, possible to make
some predictions, once the nature of the simulation is known.
Simulations general divide into three phases: firstly, a stage for giving the
participants necessary information; secondly, the problem-solving discussion; and
thirdly, follow-up work.
This kind of activity can be carried out during a speaking lesson for example.
After all, they make a report to share their views with the rest of the class.
To enhance the effectiveness of classroom activities, it is worth paying
attention to the matter of grouping students for group work and pair work activities.

Firstly, communicative activities provide “whole-task practice”: In considering
how people learn to carry out various kinds of skilled performance, it is often useful
to distinguish between (a) training in the part-skills of which the performance is
composed and (b) practice in the total skills, sometimes called “whole-task
practice”. When mentioning the roles of communicative activities, Littlewood
17
(1981) says that “In foreign language learning, our means of providing learners with
whole-task practice in classroom is through various kinds of communicative
activities”. With such advantage, language teachers should design various activities
in order to suit the learners’ level of ability.
Secondly, communicative activities provide motivation. The learner’s ultimate
objective is to participate in communication with others. They will be motivated to
learn if they can see how their classroom learning is related to this objective and
helps them to achieve it with increasing success. In addition, most students’ prior
conception of language is as a means of communication rather than as a structural
system. Their learning is more likely to make sense to them if it can build on this
conception rather than contradict it.
Thirdly, they can provide natural learning. Language learning takes place
inside the learner and it also consists of many aspects that sometimes they are
beyond the teachers’ pedagogical control. It is likely, in fact, that many aspects of
language learning can take place only through natural processes, which operate
when a learner is involved in using the language for communication. As a result,
communicative activities (inside or outside the classroom) are important parts of the
learning process.
Moreover, communicative activities can create a context that supports
learning. They provide opportunities to promote relationship among learners and
between learners and teachers. These relationships are able to “humanize” the
classroom and create a friendly environment that supports the students in their
efforts to learn.
At last, communicative activities such as working in groups, in pairs or