THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

NGUYEN THI DUONG

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING VISUAL AIDS TO PROMOTE
SPEAKING SKILLS FOR THE 12TH GRADERS
AT CAM PHA HIGH SCHOOL
(Hiệu quả của việc sử dụng giáo cụ trực quan để phát triển kỹ năng nói cho
học sinh lớp 12 tại trường THPT Cẩm Phả)

M.A. THESIS

Field: English Linguistics
Code: 8220201

THAI NGUYEN – 2019


THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

NGUYEN THI DUONG

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING VISUAL AIDS TO PROMOTE
SPEAKING SKILLS FOR THE 12TH GRADERS
AT CAM PHA HIGH SCHOOL
(Hiệu quả của việc sử dụng giáo cụ trực quan để phát triển kỹ năng nói
cho học sinh lớp 12 tại trường THPT Cẩm Phả)

M.A. THESIS (APPLICATION

Thai Nguyen University for their valuable teaching and tremendous assistance that
have enlightened my study path.
Third, I am grateful to my colleagues at Cam Pha high school for their
constructive suggestions about this research. Without their help and cooperation, the
research would have been made impossible.
I also would like to give my special thanks to the students at Cam Pha high
school who have actively participated in my study.
Last but not least, my sincere thanks go to my family, my classmates at the
Master Course Class, my friends, especially my husband, who also encourages and
shares the hardship with me.
These people deserve all the credit. I highly appreciate all their support and
contribution.
Nguyen Thi Duong

ii


ABSTRACT
This study is an attempt to investigate the use of visual aids in teaching
speaking to 12 graders at Cam Pha high school. The main purposes of the study are
to find out: the current English speaking teaching and learning situation at Cam Pha
high school; activities and techniques of teaching with visual aids applied by
teachers and students’ preferences; the difficulties in learning and teaching English
speaking and then give some suggestions for teachers to stimulate students in
speaking and overcome the difficulties they have to face with in teaching speaking
English for students. The study adopts action research approach, with the use of
mixed research methods involving both qualitative and quantitative data. Two
hundred 12th grade students and four teachers took part in the study. The findings
show that the use of visual aids significantly enhanced students’ interest and
engagement in speaking skills. Students also reported their improvement in various

2.1.2
2.2

Fluency and accuracy ................................................................................. 7

Teaching speaking............................................................................................. 7

2.2.1

Teaching and learning speaking skills ....................................................... 7

2.2.2

Principles for designing speaking techniques ............................................ 8

2.2.3

Problems in learning speaking ................................................................... 9

2.3 Visual aids ........................................................................................................... 10
2.4 Roles and functions of visual aids in language teaching and learning ............... 14
2.5 Use of visual aids in language teaching and learning ......................................... 15
2.6. Previous studies.................................................................................................. 17

4


2.7. Summary ........................................................................................................... 18
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY......................................................................... 19
3.1

5


4.3.Interviews ............................................................................................................ 46
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION............................................................................... 49
5.1. Concluding remarks ........................................................................................... 49
5.2. Limitations ......................................................................................................... 50
5.3. Implications........................................................................................................ 50
5.4 . Suggestions to further studies ........................................................................... 51
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................ 53
APPENDICES .............................................................................................................I

6


CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1

Rationale of the study
Nowadays, English has an important role in the world. Most countries in the

world use English as medium of communication in many aspects of life. Meanwhile,
in Vietnam, English is considered as a foreign language. It also has been introduced
to educational institutions, which is learnt from Junior High School up to university
as a compulsory subject.
Oral communication competence or speaking skills is the goal of English
learning in many schools. Speaking skill is considered as an initial skill that leads
learners to develop the other communication competences (reading and writing).
However, it is assumed that developing speaking skill to 12th graders in our school
is not easy because of the status of English as a foreign language in which it is not

employment of group work on enhancing the students’ speaking skill, this research
employs the treatments of action research to conduct the research on: “The
effectiveness of using visual aids to promote speaking skill for the 12th graders at
Cam Pha high school”.
1.2 Aims and objectives of the
study
The overarching aim of this current research is to investigate the Vietnamese
high school students’ speaking behaviors and performance under the effects of
using visual aids in English speaking lessons in the context of public high school
from the perspectives of both the EFL teachers as instructors and students.
The following specific objectives will be supportive to the areas of research:
1 To find out the 12th grader’ attitudes towards using visual aids to teaching
speaking at Cam Pha high school.
2 To evaluate the effectiveness of using visual aids in teaching speaking at Cam
Pha high school.
1.3
questions

Research

Based on research objectives, there are three research questions
as
1)
How do visual aids promote speaking skills for the 12th graders at
Cam
Pha high school?
2)
What are Cam Pha high school students’ perceptions of and
attitudes
toward using visual aids in speaking lessons?

suggestions to help the students better their speaking skill. The report has carried out
in the first semester of academic year 2018-2019 with only 12th-grade students;
hence, the respondents does not represent for all students who study English major in
Vietnam.
1.5 .Significance
study

of

the

This current study is devoted to generate both theoretical and practical
contributions. Theoretically, although there are certain number of studies previously
conducting the investigation into the use of visual aids in the EFL context, the major
concerns of these studies lie on other aspects of English as vocabulary or listening,
not speaking skills. Particularly, in Vietnam there is a scarcity of research exploring
the implementation of visual aids in English speaking teaching and learning at
upper elementary level. There has been little evidence supporting the effectiveness
and implementation of visual aids in an English class. Therefore, the study findings
expect to fill the gap of literature in this aspect and provide valuable information for
the researchers who are interested in cooperating visual into their teaching.
Concerning the practical contributions, it is expected that the present study
may benefit teachers and students at high schools, particularly, which have problems
in instructing English speaking skills, contributing to the reform of English
curriculum design and teaching pedagogy at upper elementary level. Most of the
typical problems that the students of grade 12 face while speaking are that they
cannot speak beyond short segments because of lack of vocabulary, poor grammar
and pronunciation. Due to this problem, they cannot participate actively in
conversation and activities based on daily life situations. They have frequent
communication gaps and misunderstandings results in lack of communication


to

five

Chapter 1: Introduction - deals with the rationale, aims, scope, methods,
significance and design of the study
Chapter 2: Literature Review- is intended to give some theoretical
background related to speaking, speaking problems, Communicative Language
Teaching (CLT), visual aids, and previous studies relating to the topic of research.
Chapter 3: Methodology- deals with research governing orientation, research
methods and presents the situation analysis, participants, data collection instruments,
data collection procedures and data analysis. The detailed results of the survey and a
comprehensive analysis on the data collected are focused.
Chapter 4: Findings and Discussions- show major findings and discussions
and offer some recommendation for teachers to motivate students to speak
and overcome some difficulties they meet in teaching speaking through the
employment of group work activities.
Chapter 5: Conclusion- is a review of the study, suggestions for
further research and limitations of the study.

6


CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
It is stated in the previous chapter that the purpose of this study is to improve
the students’ speaking skills by using visual aids. Thus, in this chapter, to support
this study, some theoretical descriptions on speaking and visual aids will be
described thoroughly.
2.1 . Speaking skills

macroskills of speaking are listed as follow:
Microskills
1)
Produce differences among English phonemes and allophonic
variants.
2)
lengths.
3)

Produce chunks of language of different

Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and

unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonation contours.
4)
phrases.
5)

Produce reduced forms of words and

Use an adequate number of lexical units (words) to

accomplish pragmatic purposes.
6)
delivery.
7)

Produce fluent speech at different rates of

Monitor one’s own oral production and use various strategic devices


2)

Use appropriate styles, registers, implicature, redundancies, pragmatic

conventions, conversation rules, floor-keeping and yielding, interrupting, and
other sociolinguistic features in face-toface conversations.

9


3)

Convey links and connections between events and communicative

such relations as vocal and peripheral ideas, events and feelings,new
information and given information, generalization andexemplification.
4)

Convey facial features, kinesics, body language, and other

nonverbal cues along with verbal language.
5)

Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing

key words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of
words, appealing for help, and accurately assessing how well the speakers’
interlocutor is understanding conveyed messages.
Those micro and macro skills above can be a checklist of objective when

memory, and cognitive organization, learning involves active, conscious focus on
and acting upon events outside or inside the organism, learning is relatively
permanent but subject to forgetting, learning involves some form of practice,
perhaps reinforced practice and learning is a change in behavior. Brown also
cites that teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to
learn, setting the conditions for learning. Regarding the definitions about teaching
and learning above, it can be concluded that both of them cannot be separated.
Teaching and learning are two processes to achieve something. It is also a process of
take and give, in this case, knowledge.
2.2.2 Principles for designing speaking techniques
According to Brown (2000), there are seven principles for designing
speaking techniques. They are stated as follows:
1) Using techniques that cover the spectrum of learner needs, for languagebased focus on accuracy to message-based focus on interaction, meaning, and
fluency;
2) Providing intrinsically motivating techniques;
3) Encouraging the use of authentic language in meaningful contexts;
4) Providing appropriate feedback and correction;
5) Capitalizing on the natural link between speaking and listening;
6) Giving students opportunities to initiate oral communication;
7) Encouraging the development of speaking strategies.
In teaching speaking, it is very important for teachers to consider the
speaking techniques. The tasks should include techniques designed to help students
to perceive and use the building blocks of language. It is also needed to make any
drilling as meaningful as possible. Teachers’ role is very crucial in teaching
11


speaking becauseteachers should help the students to see how the activity will
benefit them. It


1) Clustering: Learners can organize their output both cognitively and physically
(in breath groups) through clustering. It will be difficult for the junior high
school students since they still confuse about the vocabulary used.
2) Redundancy: The speaker has to make meaning clearer through the
redundancyof language.
3) Reduced forms: Contractions, elisions, reduced vowels, etc., all form special
problems in teaching speaking.
13


4) Performance variables: One of the most salient differences between native
and nonnative speakers of a language is in their hesitation phenomena.

14


5)

Colloquial language: Students are not well acquainted with the words,
idioms, and phrases of colloquial language.

6) Rate of delivery: Learners are difficult to achieve an acceptable speed along
with other attributes of fluency.
7) Stress, rhythm, and intonation: The stress-timed rhythm of spoken English
and its intonation patterns convey important messages.
8)

Interaction: It is still difficult to find the creativity of conversational
negotiation for students.


process stimulate students to participate and be familiarized with their own
experiences. Not exempt of defining visual aids, M, Jessa (2008) claims that they
“refer to graphs, maps, pictures etc. used as aids in learning” and these can be
separable into four categories:
-

NON-Projected 2D: wall board, roll-up board, picture, poster, chart, cartoon,
cue sheet, flannel board, flash card;

-

NON-Projected 3D: cut-out, model, mock-up, puppet, marionette,
diorama, vocabulary wheel, keyboard, teaching machine;

-

Projected 3D: slide, transparency sheet, film strip, microfilm, video cassette, CD;

-

Verbal: text book, supplementary reader, workbook, magazine,
document, duplicated materials, reference book, newspapers, and clippings. (p.
93)
Regarding this categorization Callista (1938) suggests how visual aids

contribute to the teaching-learning process pointing out that visual aids firstly
“provide for the learner a concrete picture of the situation in question” (p. 4). Visual
resources accompany what is verbally said and help to understand ambiguous
situations. Moreover, the school and the teacher must provide interesting sources to
offer attractive educative experiences to the students. Callista (1938) also