Challenges in teaching and learning speaking
skill with the new English textbook for grade 10
(Basic Stream) at Xuan Hoa High school, Vinh
Phuc province and some solutions Trần Thị Lan Anh

Trường Đại học Ngoại Ngữ
Luận văn ThS. Chuyên ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15
Người hướng dẫn: Đỗ Bá Quý , MEd
Năm bảo vệ: 2010 Abstract: This research investigates the challenges in teaching and learning speaking skill with
the new English textbook for grade 10 at Xuan Hoa high school – Vinh Phuc province- and
suggests some solutions to the problems.
The thesis is divided into 3 main parts: Part I presents the rationale, aims, methods, scope and
organization of the paper. Part II includes 4 chapters: Chapter 1 presents the theoretical
background of speaking, teaching and learning, and communicative language teaching approach;
Chapter 2 describes the methodology of the thesis. Specifically, the data for this research was
collected in the forms of survey questionnaires and interviews. The participants of the survey
questionnaires were 6 English teachers and 360 grade - 10 - students. After the results of the
survey questionnaires had been clarified, the interviews with 6 teachers and 20 students were
conducted to make the survey questionnaire results clearer; Chapter 3 analyses and discusses the
results from the survey questionnaires and interviews. A lot of challenges in teaching and
learning speaking skill with the new textbook were revealed through the data, such as the lack of
time and training in using the new textbook, the poor teaching and learning conditions, students’
low proficiency, etc; Chapter 4 mentions some pedagogical recommendations for both subjective
and objective problems. For example, the teachers should plan the speaking lessons more
carefully, conduct tests on speaking skill or organize English speaking clubs. As for the students,

CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND……………………………………….3

1.1. Theoretical background of speaking ………………………………………… 3
1.1.1. Definitions of speaking……………………………………………… 3
1.1.2. The nature of speaking………………………………………………… 3
1.1.3. Aspects of Speaking…………………………………………………… 5

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1.2. Theoretical background of learning and teaching speaking skill…………… 7
1.2.1. Definition of teaching and learning……………………………………. 7
1.2.2. Communicative Language Teaching Approach ………………………. 8
1.2.3. Communicative Competence – The desired goal of CLT…………… 10
1.2.4. The necessity of teaching and learning ………………………………. 11
speaking skill in a communicative class
1.2.5. Problems in teaching and learning speaking skill ……………………. 12

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY………………………………………………………… 13

2.1. The teaching and learning situation in Xuan Hoa High School…………… 13
2.2. The New English Textbook for Grade 10……………………………………. 13
2.2.1. The overall design of the textbook…………………………………… 13
2.2.2. The general features of the new textbook …………………………… 14
2.2.3. Description of the Speaking Section ………………………………… 15
2.3. Description of the study…………………………………………………………17
2.3.1. Kind of the research………………………………………………… 17
2.3.2. Participants…………………………………………………………… 17
2.3.3. The research questions……………………………………………… 18

CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS ………………………………… 19


Testing students’ communicative competence……………… 35

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Organizing English speaking clubs……………………… 35
3.2.3.2. Students’ solutions……………………………………………36
Self – study…………………………………………………….36
Taking extra courses………………………………………….36
Practising speaking to friends……………………………… 36
Participating in English speaking clubs………………………36

CHAPTER 4: PEDAGOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS:…………………………… 37

4.1. Pedagogical suggestions for subjective problems …………………………….37
4.1.1. A careful plan of the speaking lesson………………………………… 38
4.1.2. Various ways of testing speaking skill………………………………….38
4.1.3. The teacher’s self-improvement of speaking skill…………………… 39
4.1.4. The change in students’ speaking habits ……………………………….39
4.2. Pedagogical suggestions for objective problems………………………………40

PART III: CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………….41

1. Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………… 41
2. Limitations…………………………………………………………………………………41
3. Recommendations for further study………………………………………………….….41

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………… 43

APPENDICES
Appendix 1…………………………………………………………………………………….I
Appendix 2……………………………………………………………………………………IV

school in particular have encountered plenty of difficulties. The first-year high school students
are also confused when learning this language skill. Hence, the author wishes to understand
more about this situation by conducting the study entitled “Challenges in teaching and learning
speaking skill with the new textbook for grade 10 at Xuan Hoa high school, Vinh Phuc province
and some solutions”. With this study, the writer looks into the problems for both the teachers
and the students and suggests some solutions to those problems.

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2. Aims of the study
This research mainly aims at clarifying the challenges in teaching and learning speaking
skill with the new textbook for grade 10 at Xuan Hoa high school, Vinh Phuc province. The
author investigates the teachers‟ and learners‟ attitudes towards speaking skill and then put the
focus on the current difficulties in the application of the new textbook. The causes of their
difficulties are also examined so that the solutions to those problems can be given.
3. Method and procedure of the research
The data of this paper was collected through the survey questionnaires and interviews.
First, the author carried out the survey questionnaires to find out the attitudes towards the
teaching and learning of speaking skill with the new textbook and the difficulties of the teachers
and students in using the new textbook. Then the interviews with teachers and students were
conducted to clarify aspects which were inadequate and vague in the survey questionnaires.
4. Scope of the study
This research mainly covers the problems with the speaking skill that teachers and
learners have in the process of using the new textbook for grade 10. These problems were
discussed thoroughly in order to discover the causes and to offer the best solutions. The
subjects of the study are limited to the teachers and students at Xuan Hoa High School – Vinh
Phuc province.
5. Organization of the paper
The study includes 5 parts:
Part 1- Introduction presents the rationale, aims, method, scope and organization of the study.
Part II consists of 3 chapters:

involves producing, receiving and processing information; Its form and meaning are dependent
on the context in which it occurs, including the participants themselves, their collective
experience, the physical environment, and the purposes for speaking; It is often spontaneous,
open ended and evolving. However, speaking is not always unpredictable. Language functions
that tend to recur in certain discourse situations (declining an invitation, requesting time) can be
identified and charted. For example, when a salesman asks, “May I help you?”, the expected
discourse sequence include a statement of need , response to the need, offer of appreciation,
acknowledgements of appreciation, and a leave – taking exchange. Speaking requires that
learners not only know how to produce specific points of language, such as grammar,

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pronunciation or vocabulary (linguistic competence), but also that they understand when, why,
and in what ways to produce language (sociolinguistic competence).
According to Byrne (1976: 8), speaking is a two - way process between the speakers
and the hearers involving the productive skill of speaking and the receptive skill of
understanding. Both the listener and the speaker have a positive function to perform. The
speaker has to encode the message to be conveyed in appropriate language, while the listener
has to decode the message. The message itself in normal speech usually contains a great deal of
information that the listener needs.
It is perfectly true that speaking is active, or productive, and makes use of aural
medium. An act of speaking is commonly performed in face - to - face interaction. The act of
speaking involves not only the production of sounds but also the use of gestures, the
movements of the muscles and the face. Spoken language consists of short, often fragmentary
utterances, in a range of pronunciations. There is often a great deal of repetition and overlap
between one speaking and another. Speakers frequently use non - specific references.
Some of the micro-skills involved in speaking. The speaker has to:
*Pronounce the distinctive sounds of a language clearly enough so that people can
distinguish them. This includes making tonal distinctions.
*Use stress and rhythmic patterns and intonation patterns of the language clearly
enough so that people can understand what is said.

use devices which help them make the oral production possible or easier through „facilitation‟,
or enable them to change words they use in order to avoid or replace the difficult ones by
means of „compensation‟ (Bygate, 1987:14)
There are four elementary ways of facilitating that Bygate distinguishes:
simplifying structures, ellipsis, formulaic expressions, and using fillers and hesitation devices.
On the other hand, when a speaker needs to alter, correct or change what he or she
has said, they will need to make use of compensation devices. These include tools such
as substitution, rephrasing, reformulating, self-correction, false starts, and repetition and
hesitation.
Bygate concludes that incorporation of these features, facilitation and compensation, in
the teaching-learning process is of a considerate importance, in order to help students‟ oral
production and compensate for the problems they may face: “All these features may in fact help
learners to speak, and hence help them to learn to speak . . . In addition to helping learners to

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learn to speak, these features may also help learners to sound normal in their use of the foreign
language.” (Bygate 1987: 20-21)
Interaction skills
According to Bygate (1987:22), both speakers and listeners, besides being good at
processing spoken words should be „good communicators‟, which means „good at saying
what they want to say in a way which the listener finds understandable‟. This means being
able to possess interaction skills. Communication of meaning then depends on two kinds of
skill: routines, and negotiation skills.
Routines are the typical patterns in which speakers organize what they have to
communicate. There are two kinds of routines: information routines, and interaction routines.
The information routines include frequently recurring types of information structures involved
in, for example, stories, descriptions, comparisons, or instructions. Bygate further divides
information routines according to their function into evaluative routines (explanations,
predictions, justifications, preferences, decisions), and expository routines (narration,
descriptions, instructions). The interaction routines, on the other hand, present the

the knowledge requires two kinds of skills, according to Bygate – production skills, and
interaction skills. Production skills involve two aspects – facilitation and compensation,
brought about by processing conditions. Both devices help students, besides making the oral
production easier or possible, sound more naturally. Interaction skills, on the other hand,
involve routines and negotiation skills. Routines present the typical patterns of conversation
including interaction and information routines. Negotiation skills serve as a means for enabling
the speaker and listener to make themselves clearly understood. This is achieved by two
aspects: management of interaction and turn-taking.
1.2. Theoretical background of learning and teaching speaking skill
1.2.1. Definition of teaching and learning
In contemporary dictionaries, learning is defined as acquiring or getting of knowledge
of a subject or a skill by study, experience or instruction. A more specialized definition states
that learning is a relatively permanent change in the behavioral tendency and is the result of
reinforced practice (Kimble and Garmezy, 1963:133). Language learning is a long and complex
undertaking: “Your whole person is affected as you struggle to reach beyond the confines of
your first language and into a new language, a new culture, a new way of thinking, feeling and
acting. Total commitment, total involvement, a total physical, intellectual and emotional

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response are necessary to successfully send and receive messages in a second language. Many
variables are involved in the acquisition process.” (Brown, H D. 2010: 1)
Similarly, teaching, which is implied in the first definition of learning, may be defined
as “showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instructions, guiding in
the study of something, providing with knowledge, causing to know or understand.” Teaching
is also defined as one of the means by which education is achieved (if it is) and education is a
common purpose of teaching. Teaching is the process of carrying out those activities that
experience has shown to be effective in getting students to learn. A teacher is defined as a
person whose professional activities involve the transmission of knowledge, attitudes and skills
that are stimulated in a formal curriculum to students enrolled in an educational programme.
Teaching and learning have a close relationship. We cannot define teaching apart from

content – centered education and task – based learning. Besides, Littlewood (1981:1) states:
“one of the most characteristic features of communicative language teaching is that it pays a
systematic attention to functional as well as structural aspects of language”. For other theorists,
communicative language teaching means using procedures where learners work in pairs or
groups employing available language resources in problem solving tasks.
David Nunan (1991:279) offers five characteristic features of CLT:
-An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.
-The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.
-The provision of opportunities for learners to focus not only on language but also on the
learning process itself.
-An enhancement of the learners‟ own experience as important contributing elements to
classroom learning.
-An attempt to link classroom language with language activation outside the classroom.
These five features are claimed by practitioners of CLT to show that they are very
interested in the needs and desires of their learners as well as the connection between the
language as it is taught in their class and as it used outside the classroom. Under this broad
umbrella definition, any teaching practice that helps students develop their communicative
competence in an authentic context is deemed an acceptable and beneficial form of instruction.
Thus, in the classroom CLT often takes the form of pair and group work requiring negotiation
and cooperation between learners, fluency-based activities that encourage learners to develop

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their confidence, role-plays in which students practice and develop language functions, as well
as judicious use of grammar and pronunciation focused activities.
1.2.3. Communicative Competence – The desired goal of CLT
When teaching a language, the most important goal is to help the pupils to obtain the
ability to communicate. Therefore, as an effective approach in language teaching, CLT puts
communicative competence on the top of its objectives.
The concept of communicative competence was introduced in 1964 and since then it has
caught much attention from linguists all over the world. Communicative language teaching is

classroom. Speaking is a skill which deserves attention in both first and second languages. The
learners often need to be able to speak with confidence in order to carry out many of their most
basic transactions. It is the skill by which they are most frequently judged. It is the vehicle par
excellence of social solidarity, of social ranking, of professional advancement and of business.
It is also a medium through which much language is learnt, and which for many is particularly
conductive for learning. Therefore, the teaching of speaking merits more thought.
Many language learners regard speaking ability as the measure of knowing a language.
These learners define fluency as the ability to converse with others, much more than the ability
to read, write, or comprehend oral language. They regard speaking as the most important skill
they can acquire, and they assess their progress in terms of their accomplishments in spoken
communication. The necessity of learning and teaching speaking skill was emphasized by
Nunan (1991): "success is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a conversation in the
(target) language." Therefore, if students do not learn how to speak or do not get any
opportunity to speak in the language classroom they may soon get de-motivated and lose
interest in learning. On the other hand, if the right activities are taught in the right way,
speaking in class can be a lot of fun, raising general learner motivation and making the English
language classroom a fun and dynamic place to be.
In the communicative model of language teaching, instructors help their students
develop this body of knowledge by providing authentic practice that prepares students for real-
life communication situations. They help their students develop the ability to produce
grammatically correct, logically connected sentences that are appropriate to specific contexts,
and to do so using acceptable (that is, comprehensible) pronunciation. The goal of teaching
speaking skills is communicative efficiency. Learners should be able to make themselves
understood, using their current proficiency to the fullest. They should try to avoid confusion in

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the message due to faulty pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, and to observe the social and
cultural rules that apply in each communication situation.
1.2.5. Problems in teaching and learning speaking skill
If the aim of the English course is to enable the students to communicate in English,

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