MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY

NGUYEN THI KIEU VAN
A STUDY ON THE USE OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES
TO ENHANCE 12
th
GRADE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING SKILL
IN HONG LAM UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL
MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION
NGHE AN - 2014
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MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY
NGUYEN THI KIEU VAN
A STUDY ON THE USE OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES
TO ENHANCE 12
th
GRADE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING SKILL
IN HONG LAM UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL
Major: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
Code: 60.14.01.11
MASTER’S THESIS IN EDUCATION
Supervisor: Nguyen Gia Viet, Ph.D
Nghe An, 2014
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ACCEPTANCE

I hereby state that I: Nguyen Thi Kieu Van, being a candidate for the degree
of Master accept requirements of the College related to the retention and use of
Master’s graduation Paper deposited in the library.

Many teachers are still using traditional techniques such as repetition drills and
memorization of dialogues. The use of communicative activities, in spite of having
been known to teachers in Vietnam, has been really limited due to many reasons,
such as teachers’ low proficiency, class size, limited teaching facilities, and tight
teaching schedules.
There have been a few research studies that investigated effectiveness of
communicative activities in the classroom in some part of the world. However, very
few studies have been conducted in Vietnam about how teachers and students
perceived about these activities in upper secondary schools. Especially, no research
has been carried out in Hong Lam Upper Secondary School.
This research study aims to investigate the use of communicative activities to
enhance speaking skill for 12
th
grade students in Hong Lam UPSS. It uses two sets
of questionnaires for teachers and students in Hong Lam Upper Secondary School.
A total of survey questionnaires for teachers and survey questionnaires for students
were collected. The data collected were coded in charts and percentage was yielded
and figures were built as to address the research questions.
The data showed that the majority of the student participants were inclined to
communicative activities. As for the teachers, based on the results of the study, a
number of implications and suggestions have been provided for teachers, students,
policy makers, and researchers. The findings of this study, being a case study,
cannot be generalized, but they contribute to the academic understanding of a
context where little research has been done.
Generally, the students are not interested in doing speaking tasks that are
given in the textbooks. Also, they are not aware of whether these tasks are effective
for them or not. Nevertheless, they express their desire for some types of
communicative activities that they have chances to work with.
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For the teachers, most of them admit that they often have difficulties in using

2.3.1. SPEAKING AS A SKILL 23
2.3.2. THE ROLE OF SPEAKING IN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING 24
2.3.3. APPROACHES TO THE TEACHING OF SPEAKING 26
2.3.4. TEACHING SPEAKING IN RURAL AREAS 29
2.3.5. TEACHING SPEAKING IN UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL 29
CHAPTER 3
METHODOLOGY 31
3.1. AN OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH SITE 31
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3.2. PARTICIPANTS 32
3.3. METHODS OF DATA COLLECTION 32
3.3.1. INSTRUMENTAL DEVELOPMENT 33
3.3.2. PROCEDURES OF DATA COLLECTION 34
3.3.3. METHODS AND PROCEDURES OF DATA ANALYSIS 35
3.4. SUMMARY 36
CHAPTER 4
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 37
4.1. EVALUATION OF THE ENGLISH 12 TEXTBOOK 37
4.1.1. OVERVIEW OF THE ENGLISH 12 TEXTBOOK 37
4.1.2. EVALUATION OF SPEAKING SKILL 38
4.2. RESULTS FROM THE SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRES 41
4.2.1. THE FREQUENCY AND INTEREST OF EACH KIND OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES IN CLASS 44
4.2.2. DIFFICULTIES THAT THE TEACHERS HAVE WHEN USING COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES 49
4.3. DISCUSSION 50
4.4. IMPLICATIONS 52
4.4.1. IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING EACH KIND OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES 52
4.4.2. GIVING STUDENTS INSPIRATION BY ACTIVITIES INVOLVING THE LESSON 58
4.4.3. USING THE SITUATION IN INTRODUCTION 59
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION 60

STUDENTS 48
FIGURE 4.11. THE FREQUENCY OF USING DISCUSSION IN CLASS,
GIVEN BY TEACHERS 48
FIGURE 4.12. INTEREST OF THE STUDENTS IN DISCUSSION 49
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FIGURE 4.13. SOME KINDS OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES THAT TEACHERS HAVE
DIFFICULTIES WHEN TEACHING SPEAKING SKILL 50
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ABBREVIATIONS
EFL : English as a Foreign Language
UPSS : Upper Secondary School
HFLSS : Hanoi Foreign Language Specializing School
C.A : Communicative Activities
CLT : Communicative Language Teaching
MOET : Ministry of Education and Training

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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale
In the flow of global integration trend, English has become indispensable
means in communication over the world. The importance of English has been
realized in Vietnam because English is considered to play a crucial role on the path
of industrialization and modernization of the country, English is now taught in
almost every school, college, university and language centre all over the country.
One of the main tasks assigned to foreign language teaching at school is that
of training students to be communicatively competent. At Hong Lam UPSS, like at
many other Upper Secondary Schools in Vietnam, English has been a compulsory
subject in secondary curriculum for many years. The fact is that, due to the demand
of the Upper Secondary School graduation and university entrance examinations,

lessons, this study aims at investigating the use of communicative activities to
enhance speaking skill for 12
th
grade students in Hong Lam UPSS.
With the reasons mentioned above, the specific aims of the study,
accordingly, are:
+ To investigate the current English speaking teaching and learning situation
at Hong Lam UPSS.
+ To explore the teachers’ viewpoints in the necessity of applying the
communicative activities in teaching speaking skill.
+ To learn about the students’ attitude toward practicing their speaking skill
through the communicative activities.
+ To find out the students’ problems in speaking skill and elements leading
to such difficulties.
+ To provide strategies to overcome such difficulties and give some
suggestions pedagogical suggestions to apply communicative activities in speaking
lessons.
In order to serve the above mentioned objectives, the researcher hopes to find
out the answers to the following questions:
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Research question 1: To what extent are speaking tasks from the textbook
used by the 12
th
grade students in Hong Lam UPSS?
Research question 2: What are the attitudes of students toward using the
communicative activities in speaking skill?
Research question 3: What are difficulties that teachers have in teaching
speaking skill via the communicative activities?
1.3. Scope of the study
Within the scope of graduation paper and due to the limitation of time, the

role of communicative activities in enhancing speaking skill for students;
Chapter 3: Methodology
The chapter covers the research design, information about the participants,
the instruments, the three-phase procedure of collecting data and the procedure of
processing data from the survey questionnaire and interviews.
Chapter 4: Results and implications
This chapter presents and discusses the findings, which give comprehensive
answers to the three research questions through the data taken from the survey
questionnaire for students and teachers analyzed and categorized. The findings are
used as the cornerstone for the recommendations in the next chapter.
Chapter 5: Conclusion
The chapter summarizes significant findings, highlight contributions of the
research, puts forward practical suggestions for future research as well as
addressees notable limitations.
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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter, as its name suggests, provides an overview of the literature
related to this study, laying the solid foundations for the subsequence development
for the paper. Not only are key terms like communicative activity, speaking skill
defined but critical background information about the key terms is also presented to
ensure a thorough understanding of the research matters. Besides, this review will
reveal the research gap, thus rationalizing the need to carry out the study.
2.1. Review of previous studies
In recent years, it is seen that a large body of research has investigated into
applying Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) or Communicative Approach
in teaching English language aspects as well as the four language skills. Among
them, the issues of applying communicative activities into teaching speaking skills
have drawn attention of many educators as well as researchers. There were some
studies that refer to some aspects of the topic. One of the most relevant is “Some

pedagogical recommendations to make a better use of elicitation techniques in
teaching vocabulary. Knowing that his effort in conducting this study was
praiseworthy and the findings had a significant contribution to the field, there were
still some limitations that should be addressed. Firstly, the study centered on the
teaching vocabulary. Although this was one of three core teaching components
where the employment of elicitation techniques could be considered a must in
modern EFL classrooms, the results of a thorough investigation into this field only
could not represent that of the others namely grammar, pronunciation and four
macro skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Secondly, the classroom
settings where the survey of this research was conducted were not yet introduced
the new textbook which still followed the old teaching methods.
One year later, another research on enhancing speaking skill was carried out
by Tran (2007) named “eliciting technique to teach speaking skill to grade-10
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students in HFLSS”. Firstly, she investigated the real situation of teachers’ using
eliciting techniques to teach 10
th
grade students in HFLSS in Hanoi. Outstanding
advantages of this practice could be drawn out. Hindrances to the employment
process of this technique were diagnosed for timely and necessary pedagogical
adjustments. Notably, the author gave a close look at the speaking skill as the focus.
It means that the whole study shed light on the issue of how to employ eliciting
technique to teach speaking skill, not others. This can be seen as the first limitation
of the study. The second problem is that the subjects of the study were students
from FLSS only, which could hardly be generalized into a wider population of other
institutions across the city and country.
These listed gaps intensify the significance of the current study which targets
at techniques teachers use to elicit students’ talk to develop numerous skills
simultaneously, rather than any single one, and among grade 12 students in
some selected classes in Hong Lam UPSS.

production of the foreign languages (spoken or written) or interaction in the foreign
languages. During a communicative activity, learners’ attention is principally
focused on meaning rather than form, that is, on what is being expressed rather than
on the linguistic forms used for expressing it. In addition, as far as possible, a
communicative activity resembles activity which students or other people carry out
in daily life, thus reproducing processes of daily communication. A communicative
activity is usually part of a sequence which often creates a context for the
activity. Beside, both teachers and learners can evaluate this task, in relation to
both process and outcome. A communicative activity has the ultimate purpose
of developing students’ ability to communicate in English, so it has a pedagogic
purpose.
2.2.2. Features of communicative activities
Communicative activities are categorized by two key features.
Firstly, it must contact with authentic target language. Students are required
to use real language. In classes where communicative language teaching is applied,
students’ attention is not on the code of the language but on the meaning. By using
authentic materials in the classroom, even when it is not in an authentic situation, it
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still provides the learners with many significant advantages (Martinez, 2000).
Martinez (2000) summarized several benefits of using authentic materials. By using
authentic material, students are exposed to real discourse, as in videos of interview
with famous people where intermediate students listen for general idea. Authentic
materials keep students informed about what is happening in the world, so they
have an intrinsic educational value. Language change is reflected in the materials so
that students and teachers can keep abreast of such changes. Reading texts are ideal
to teach/practice mini-skills such as scanning, e.g. students are given a news article
and asked to look for specific information. Also, teachers can have students practice
some of the micro-skills of listening, e.g. basically, students listen to news reports
and they are asked to identify the names of countries, famous people, etc. Different
authentic materials such as books, articles, newspapers, and so on contain a wide

Vietnamese learners.
Secondly, Doff (1988, p. 161) believed that “eliciting encourages students
to draw on what they already know or partly know. Therefore, it is a useful
technique for mixed ability classes or those of different learning backgrounds.”
To draw students’ attention to the new lesson, teachers are often reminded to review
the old one as well as to ask some questions relating to students' experience. While
responding to teacher’s questions, students have a chance to display their
background knowledge, And by sharing knowledge, students, regardless their weak
competence, would learn much from one another. Using eliciting questions is a
useful way of activating the knowledge students have, which is often not disclosed
if not asked.
It is taken for granted that elicitation directly and mainly benefit students.
However, in the meantime, teachers are at great advantage. First, elicitation can be
used for presenting new language as well as reviewing what was taught earlier
(Doff, 1988, p.161). Moreover, eliciting gives teachers a chance to see what
students know and what they do not and so adapt their presentation to the level of
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the class. Therefore, it is suggested that elicitation plays the role as testing tools
that teachers can use to measure the level of the class. In short, communicative
activities are beneficial to both students and teachers. Teachers should take every
chance, when possible, to apply this technique in language classrooms. The
following activities are most popular in speaking classes (Harmer, 2004)
2.2.3.1. Acting from a Script/Simulation and Role-play
The activity is like Simulation and Role -play because they both require the
students to take on roles in the play or in a conversation, etc. Acting from a script
seems to be in simulation and role -play because when the teachers do not have
the students act the script completely, the activity will become Simulation and
Role-play.
Simulation and Role -play has three advantages (Harmer, 2004)
* The students can be good fun and motivating

This technique is widely advocated by many ELT experts since it is very
effective in many ways. Traditionally, there used to be a common conception that
all learning should be serious and solemn in nature. This is a mere misconception as
it is possible to learn a language and enjoyed oneself at the same time (Lee, 1995, p.
35) Wright, Betteridge and Buckby (1984, p. 1) believed that “language learning is
hard work…Effort is required at every moment and must be maintained over a long
period of time. Games help and encourage many learners to sustain their interest
and work”. Therefore, it seems that good games can be used during a burdensome
lesson. Communication games help teachers to create contexts in which the
language is useful and meaningful. The learners want to take part and in order to do
so they must understand what others are saying or have written, and they must
speak or write in order to express their own point of view or give information
(Wright, 1984, p. 1). If communication games are well-chosen and appropriately
used, they can give students a break and simultaneously create chances for them to
practice new skills in a highly amusing and motivating way (Ersoz, 2000). In order
to fully obtain these benefits, one thing that teachers should take into consideration
is that “whenever a game is to be conducted, the number of students, proficiency
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