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

NGUYỄN THỊ DUYÊN

USING PROJECT-BASED TEACHING TO ENHANCE 11TH GRADE
STUDENTS’ SPEAKING SKILLS AT A HIGH SCHOOL IN HUNG YEN
(Sử dụng phương pháp dạy học dự án để nâng cao kỹ năng nói cho học sinh
lớp 11 tại một trường THPT ở Hưng Yên)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 8140231.01

HANOI - 2019


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

NGUYỄN THỊ DUYÊN

USING PROJECT-BASED TEACHING TO ENHANCE 11TH GRADE
STUDENTS’ SPEAKING SKILLS AT A HIGH SCHOOL IN HUNG YEN
(Sử dụng phương pháp dạy học dự án để nâng cao kỹ năng nói cho học sinh
lớp 11 tại một trường THPT ở Hưng Yên)

always open whenever I ran into a trouble spot or had a question about my research
or writing. He consistently allowed this paper to be my own work, but steered me in
the right direction whenever he thought I needed it.
I would also like to thank thirty 11th grade students at a local school in Hung Yen
province. Without their passionate participation and input, the validation survey
could not have been successfully conducted.
My sincere thanks go to my family, my colleagues and my friends for their
encouragement and support that help me to complete my work.

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ABSTRACT
The present study entitled “Using Project-based teaching to enhance 11th grade
students’ speaking skills at a high school in Hung yen” was conducted to address
two issues: exploring the students’ attitudes toward the implementation of Projectbased teaching in their English lessons and the impacts of using Project-based
teaching on students’ English speaking. The instruments employed for data
collection and analysis of the study included two tests, a questionnaire and an
interview with six students. Research findings showed that the students had positive
attitudes towards the use of Project-based teaching in their English lesson. It also
revealed that Project-based teaching was beneficial to help students improve their
oral competence. Based on the findings, some implications would be suggested for
both the teacher and the students. With all this information, this study is expected to
be significant to both teachers and students in teaching and learning English
speaking skills.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS



3.1.1. The current situation of teaching and learning English at the school ............18
3.1.2. The teaching program and materials ..............................................................19
3.2. The participants ..................................................................................................20
3.3. Design of the study.............................................................................................21
3.3.1. Action research ...............................................................................................21
3.3.2. Procedures of the study ...................................................................................21
3.3.3. Data collection instruments ............................................................................27
3.4. Data analytic method..........................................................................................31
CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ...................................................33
4.1. Analysis of the speaking tests ............................................................................33
4.2. Analysis of the survey questionnaire .................................................................35
4.3. Analysis of the interview ...................................................................................40
4.4. Discussion of the findings ..................................................................................42
4.4.1 Achievement ....................................................................................................42
4.4.2 Attitudes ...........................................................................................................43
4.5. Summary ............................................................................................................44
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ...............................................................................46
5.1. Recapitulation of the research ............................................................................46
5.2. Recommendations of the study ..........................................................................46
5.2.1. The teachers ....................................................................................................47
5.2.2. The students .....................................................................................................47
5.2.3. The school administrators ...............................................................................47
5.3. Limitations of the study .....................................................................................48
5.4. Suggestions for further research.........................................................................48
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................49
APPENDICES ........................................................................................................... I
Appendix 1 – A Sample DESCRIPTION OF A PROJECT ................................. I
Appendix 2 – PRE-TESTS ................................................................................. XIX

PBL

: Project-based Learning

TESOL

: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

ZPD

: The Zone of Proximal Development

CEFR

: The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

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LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1. Procedures of the study ................................................................................. 22
Table 4.1: The results of pre-test and post-test .............................................................. 33
Table 4.2: Students’ responses to the questionnaire ...................................................... 36

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LIST OF CHARTS
Chart 4.1: Students’ mean score of average mark ......................................................... 34
Chart 4.2: A comparison of mean scores on pre-test and post-test by five criteria ....... 35

Providing learners with only good basic numeracy and literacy skills will no longer
suffice. The labor market increasingly demands a mix of high-quality cognitive,
behavioral, and technical skills. Therefore, the government should provide better
quality schooling that fosters higher-order cognitive and behavioral skills (such as
creative and critical thinking) for more young people. Accordingly, the Ministry of
Education and Training is working on an ambitious reform to optimize learning and

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promote the competencies needed to master content and apply knowledge. To adapt
to the development of society, to train human resources according to the needs of
the new era, in addition to intensive knowledge, the school needs to equip the 21st
century skills for students.
Over the last few years, project-based teaching has been discussed and implemented
widely in Vietnam education. The phrase “Project-based teaching” has been
mentioned in a lot of books on teaching methods and techniques. Research has
shown that project-based teaching - methods and techniques of teaching based on
project-based learning - has been proved positive and effective. It is a learnercentered teaching model, through open tasks, encouraging learners to explore,
realize the knowledge learned during the implementation process and create their
own products. Instead of following a rigid lesson plan that instructs learners down a
specific path of learning outcomes and objectives, project-based teaching allows
students carrying out in-depth investigation of a topic under discussion. Through
project-based teaching, learners have more autonomy over what they learn,
maintaining interest and are motivated to take greater responsibility for their
learning. Project-based teaching “focuses on the nitty-gritty of how teachers
facilitate high-quality learning experiences for students” (Suzie Boss and John
Larmer 2018). Together with the changes of the world, the need for project-based
teaching is increasing. We see schools and districts working toward more studentcentered approaches that include inquiry learning, personalized learning,
performance-based assessments and a huge surge of interest in and implementation

learners often evaluate their success in language learning as well as the
effectiveness of their English on the basis of how much they feel they have
improved in their spoken language proficiency. Oral skills have hardly been
neglected in today’s EFL/ ESL courses.
To meet the demand of the educational development trend - education in the 21st
century highlights globalization and internationalization - as well as to improve my
students’ performance, I have been trying to find out the most suitable and effective
methods of teaching English. The methods being worked out can be for the four
English skills, of which speaking should be paid most attention to. Having
perceived the benefits of PBL, I am interested in applying it into my teaching job to

3


improve the learners’ speaking skills. Therefore, I conducted the research entitled
“Using project-based teaching to enhance 11th grade students’ speaking skills at
a high school in Hung Yen”. My objective is to construct the most effective ways
of alleviating the students to overcome the barrier of low self-confidence when
studying speaking skills. I hope that this innovative approach can foster my
students’ motivation and autonomy, and enjoy learning English. Furthermore, being
good at speaking English will be a gateway leading to opportunities to work with
international projects for developing economics or cultures.
2. Aims of the study
Based on the rationale mentioned above, I would like to investigate the impacts of
PBL on students’ English speaking skills and their attitudes towards the new
approach in my own teaching environment to see whether it is applicable at my
school or not. The study is conducted with a view to finding out the answers to the
following questions:
1. To what extent does project-based learning enhance the students' speaking skills?
2. What are the students’ attitudes towards project-based learning?

5. Methods of the study
The method employed in the study is classroom action research. According to
Ferrance (2000), action research is regarded as one of the most common research
methods applied in current educational circumstances. With the choice of this
method, data collection instruments including pre-test and post-test, questionnaire
and interview are used in order to have a deep investigation into what is being
studied.
6. Structure of the thesis
The study consists of five chapters:
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION, states the reasons for choosing the topic or
rationale, the aims to which the study is conducted and the research questions.
Then, it is followed by a brief description of its significance, scope and method. The
fact about how current study is organized will also be provided in this section.
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW, provides the definitions of some key
terms, and the previous research related to the study. Both positive impacts and
disadvantages will be exposed in this section.

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CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY, focuses on eliciting research
questions, research methods, data collection and data analysis.
CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION, demonstrates the findings and
further discussion.
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION, ends the report with the summary of findings.
Besides, some limitations of the study and recommendations for further research are
also proposed.

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environment, and the purposes for speaking. It is often spontaneous, open-ended,
and evolving. Bartz (1979) described five kinds of speaking components that
enhance fluency, understanding, and quality of communication content, quantity of
communication content and the exertion in communication. Fluency is smooth,
constantly and naturally speaking. Understanding refers to supply of content or data
to make the audience understand. Quality of communication refers to the language
accuracy to speak. Quantity of communication content refers to capacity of content.
The exertion in communication refers to the speakers try to be understood by verbal
and non-verbal in communication.
Speaking is defined operationally in this study as the secondary stage students'
ability to express themselves orally, coherently, fluently and appropriately in a
given meaningful context to serve both transactional and interactional purposed
using correct pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary and adopting the pragmatic
and discourse rules of the spoken language. In other words, they are required to
show mastery of the two sub skills: Micro- and macro skills of oral production.
Here are some of the micro- and macroskills involved in speaking which are stated
by Brown (2004) as followed:
Microskills include making differences among English phonemes and allophonic
variants, producing chunks of language of different lengths, creating English stress
patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and
intonation contours, creating reduced forms of words and phrases, making fluent
speech at different rates of delivery, and producing speech in natural constituents: in
appropriate phrases, pause group, breathe groups, and sentence constituents.
Microskills also mean using an adequate number of lexical units (words) to
accomplish pragmatic purpose, exploiting grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs,
etc), systems (e.g., tense, agreement, and pluralization), word order, patterns, rules,
and elliptical forms, monitoring one’s own oral production and use various strategic
devices-pauses, fillers, self-corrections, back tracking - to enhance the clarity of the

how to exploit language as a means of expressing values and judgments, and
how to apply the language quickly and confidently with few unnatural pauses,
which is called fluency.

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All things considered, speaking lessons are a kind of bridge for learners between the
classroom and the world outside. So using the target language or the second
language to communicate in real life is one of facilitator for the students for
learning new language. Many teachers agree that students should learn to speak the
second language by interacting with others to master speaking components such as
comprehension, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and fluency. Besides,
teaching speaking is to create good atmosphere for students to express their
emotions, communicative needs, interact with other people in any situation, and
influence the others. In conclusion, teaching speaking skills is helping students
improve their micro- and macro skills of speaking.
2.2. Project-based learning
2.2.1. Definitions of project-based learning
There are many definitions of project-based approach in learning. Each definition is
the reflection of the underlying theories or perspectives that the authors assume.
Carter and Thomas (1986) characterize project work with three features referring to
the venue, the inter-disciplined characteristic and student's autonomy:
i) it takes place outside the classroom
ii) it is cross-curricular
iii) it allows learners to set their own targets as they proceed.
Moss, D. and Duzer, V.C. (1998) defines "PBL is an instructional approach that
contextualizes learning by presenting learners with problems to solve or products to
develop". Accordingly, the essential feature of project-based approach is a tangible
and visible result such as a product or a solution to a defined problem.

principles of a subject.
Thirdly, “Projects involve students in a constructive investigation.” This emphasizes
accumulative progress students make during the completion of the project.
Nextly, “Projects are student-driven to some significant degree.” This is
characterized in the importance of students' participation during different stages of a
project. Students should have certain autonomy in doing the task.
Last but not least, “Projects are realistic, not school-like.” Projects should offer
students real-life problems or situations to deal with rather than a repetition of
school drills.
2.2.3. The project as a process
The division of stages in a project varies from researcher to researcher. Wrigley (1998),
for example, proposes some basic phases found in most projects which include
selecting a topic, making plans, researching, developing products, and sharing results
with others. The process in a project can be divided into three steps: Orientation and
planning, research and implementation and sharing results in this study.

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2.2.3.1. Step 1: Orientation and planning
In this step, students identify the topic for the project as well as develop a work plan
for completing it. Once they have some ideas about what can be done, students
decide the topic and their own work plans. It is necessary that students are involved
in decision-making from the beginning. It is suggested by Gallacher (2004) that
teachers should help students work out the plan by posing some guidelines in terms
of what the project includes, its form, the task division of each group member, the
time for producing each part of the project, and the material or resources which
might be needed.
2.2.3.2. Step 2: Research and implementation
Students engage in research and other activities in implementing the project such as