An investigation into the role of information technology in teaching English speaking skill to 10th form students at hermann gmeiner school of Hanoi



             

   
 




  
 

 
 
 



 


  



 


        !"# $%&'()(''&*
+,  !  Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 601410



 

             

   
 




  
 

 
 
 



 


  



 


        !"# $%&'()(''&*
+,  !  Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 601410 Supervisor: "  







  

 
I hereby certify that the thesis entitled
                                 is the result of my own research for the Degree of Master of Arts at College of Foreign Languages, Hanoi National University, and that this thesis has not been submitted for any degree at any other university or tertiary institution. Signature: Date:     



 
I would like to acknowledge my debt to my supervisor, Mr. Do Tuan Minh, lecturer of College of Foreign Languages,, Vietnam National University, Hanoi for his invaluable support, guidance and suggestions when I was doing this research. I wish to express my deep gratitude to other teachers and lecturers of College of Foreign Languages whose lectures and suggestions have been most useful. I am grateful to the teachers of English and all the 10th form students at Hermann Gmeiner of Hanoi who helped me collect data for completing this study and who gave me a great deal of helpful and valuable support. I would also like to send my sincere thanks to my family and my friends whose constant inspiration and encouragement did keep me going on with this research. Last but not least, I wish to thank my readers for their interest and commend on this research.








 
The application of Information Technology to foreign language education is obviously a must in the Information age. In the last few years, there have been dramatic changes in the ways that languages are taught with the replacement of grammar translation by communicative approaches and the introduction of technological tools. The reason for such changes is that the goal of Vietnamese learners is no longer to pass examinations but to use language for daily communication and interactions. Hermann Gmeiner school of Hanoi is seeking further improvements and achievement in teaching English language skill. Apart from selecting qualified teaching staff, applying appropriate teaching methods, the school is experimenting with the use of multimedia in teaching English. This study aims to investigate the current use of multimedia in teaching English speaking skill at Hermann Gmeiner school of Hanoi. The subjects of the study were seventy-two 10 th form students and the teacher who was responsible to teach English to these students. The teacher and the students were invited to take part in the survey, answer the questionnaire, participate in the interview, and play the role of source for the author’s observation. The research reveals that using multimedia to teach speaking skill to 10 th form students is rather effective. However, several difficulties are realized during the first steps of applying this method of teaching; and thus, suggestions to overcome these obstacles as well as to increase the efficient of using multimedia in teaching this skill are in great demand. On this basis, the study provides a number of recommendations for the administrators, the teachers to utilize IT in improving the teaching quality of speaking skill among EFL students.

















Page
   !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!""""""""""""""""""""" ii #  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! iii #  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!""""""""""""""" iv !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" v $  #  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!""" vii  
!
" 
1 1.1. Rationale……………………………………………………………………. 1 1.2. Purpose of the study……………………………………………………….. 2 1.3. Scope of the study………………………………………………………….. 2 1.4. Methods of the study………………………………………………………. 2 1.5. Significance of the study…………………………………………………... 3  
#!
  
  
4 2.1. The use of multimedia in a language classroom…………………………. 4 2.1.1. Definition of multimedia………………………………………….. 4 2.1.2. The use of multimedia in a language classroom………………….. 5 2.2. Speaking skill………………………………………………………………. 8 2.2.1. The importance of speaking………………………………………. 8 2.2.2. What is involved in speaking a foreign language? ……………….. 9 2.2.3. Goals for teaching speaking………………………………………. 10 2.2.4. Teaching speaking in secondary schools………………………….. 11 2.3. The new textbook “Tieng Anh 10”………………………………………... 11 2.3.1. General introduction……………………………………………… 11 2.3.2. The description of the “Tieng Anh 10”…………………………… 11 2.3.3. Speaking lessons in the new textbook “Tieng Anh 10”…………... 12 2.4. Evaluation of a language lesson…………………………………………… 13 2.5. Summary…………………………………………………………………… 15  
$!
% 
 . 16 3.1. Methodology……………………………………………………………….. 16

3.1.1. Research questions………………………………………………... 16 3.1.2. The participants…………………………………………………… 16 3.1.3. The conditions of teaching and learning English with IT at Hermann Gmeiner school of Hanoi……………………………………… 17 3.1.4. The instruments…………………………………………………… 18 3.1.5. The rational for combining quantitative and qualitative approach... 20 3.2. Data collection and analysis procedure………………………………… 21  
&!
' 
 


22 4.1. Results and discussions from the questionnaire and interview for the students…………………………………………………………………………. 22 4.2. Results and discussions from the teacher interview…………………….. 34 4.3. Results and discussions from the classroom observations 37  
(!
) 


 
 


)*
 

 . 39 5.1. Findings:…………………………………………………………………… 39 5.1.1. Findings…………………………………………………………… 39 5.1.2. Implications of the findings………………………………………. 41 5.2. Recommendations…………………………………………………………. 42 5.2.1. For the administrators…………………………………………….. 42 5.2.2. For the teachers:…………………………………………………... 43 5.3. Limitation of the study…………………………………………………….. 44 5.4. Suggestions for further research………………………………………….. 45 5.5. Conclusion………………………………………………………………….. 45 %!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 47







 &'Student questionnaire &('Student interview &'Teacher interview &'Classroom observation



*

 

 

Table 1 & chart 1: The degree of students’ interest in speaking lessons with multimedia and without multimedia. Table 2 & chart 2: The degree of students’ attention paid in speaking lessons with multimedia and without multimedia. Table 3 & chart 3: The degree of frequency students wanted speaking lessons to last longer. Table 4 & chart 4: The degree of students’ activeness in participation in classroom activities during speaking lessons. Table 5 & chart 5: The students’ opinions about time for speaking skill practice. Table 6 & chart 6: The students’ opinions about the extent of easiness that materials are understood when presented with multimedia and without multimedia. Table 7 & chart 7: The students’ opinions about the length of time for which materials presented in speaking lessons are retained by them. Table 8 & chart 8: The students’ opinions about the organization of peaking lessons.  Table 9 & chart 9: The students’ opinions about the teacher’s class management. Table 10: The students’ opinions about the type of teaching method that help them to use the language learnt better and with more confidence in the outside classroom situations.












" 

%  !
The information age urges educational success to depend on different factors in which technology plays an important role. Information technology has created changes to the general picture of education all over the world, changing the ways people acquire knowledge. For developing countries like Vietnam, if it is to integrate itself into the outside world, applying Information Technology (IT for short) to education is, certainly a must. Children, in today's technologically advanced society, are growing up in an educational environment that is struggling to overcome the teacher-centered classroom in which student achievement is based on a system of memorization and recitation of material contained in a single content area textbook. In order for students to succeed in a today's competitive society, they must be given the opportunity and the guidance to develop not only knowledge level skills, but they should graduate from high school with the ability to use that knowledge in "real world" situations. Teachers are gradually realizing that traditional methods of teaching are no longer capable of providing students with an educational foundation that is strong enough to withstand the pressures of such a technologically dependent society. Students of today have been raised in a society that is dependent on television, video games, computer software, and most recently, the Internet. Everywhere you go it is almost impossible to find anything that has not either been manufactured by computers and software, or that is not dependent on computer technology for its functionality. If classroom teaching methodology continues to follow the traditional pathway, we are likely to see a continued decline in the academic progress of our children, because the inherent technology - based learning styles of the instructors. Since its first appearance in Vietnam in the early 1990s, IT has been proved to be effective on the process of teaching and learning. It has been used differently in education and contributed greatly to the pedagogical methodology renovation. Regarding foreign language teaching, IT has been considered as a potential tool. But the application of IT to promoting the teaching and learning of foreign languages in Vietnam (in general) and in upper secondary schools in Hanoi including Hermann Gmeiner
 school of Hanoi (in particular) is still limited. Moreover, as Vietnam is in the first steps of applying IT to FL education, there has been a great shortage of studies on this particular field. The above fact encouraged the author, who is a teacher of English at Hermann Gmeiner school of Hanoi to explore this "potential but still left open field" into a particular aspect: IT and teaching English speaking skill to upper secondary school students. #
+ 



Due to the limitation of time, the thesis was conducted primarily to examine the extent to which IT can enhance and promote English speaking teaching at Hermann Gmeiner school of Hanoi. More specifically, it aimed at: - Establishing the influence of IT on FL education in general and on English speaking teaching in particular and the extent to which IT can assist English speaking teaching by introducing an overview of multimedia and the use of multimedia in EFL teaching. - Investigating the situation of teaching English speaking skill using multimedia at Hermann Gmeiner school of Hanoi through the analysis of synthesis of student questionnaire, student interview, teacher interview and classroom observation. - Proposing a number of indispensable recommendations for administrators and teachers to exploit IT for promoting the effectiveness of English speaking teaching and attaining targeted pedagogical aims. $
,



It would be too ambitious for this small-scaled thesis to specify all aspects of IT utilization in education. Therefore, the researcher would like to focus only on using multimedia to teach speaking skill to 10 th form students at Hermann Gmeiner school of Hanoi. &
-



This was intended to be a descriptive case study. Data were collected through the analysis of the student questionnaire, student interview, teacher interview and classroom observation. They were then compared, contrasted, analyzed and synthesized both qualitatively and quantitatively

The subjects for this study were seventy-two 10 th form students which were placed in two groups at Hermann Gmeiner school of Hanoi, and the teacher who was teaching these groups of students. (
,  



The study, if successful, will be of theoretical as well as practical benefits. First and foremost, as it is among the pioneer studies in Vietnam which investigates the impact and utilization of IT in this particular field of FL education with this particular group of learners, the thesis hopes to provide a valuable background on the matter, which can be used as reference for future studies on similar topics in such an area of growing interest. In addition, the findings will be a useful starting point for teachers or administrators when planning to applied IT for the learners of analogous contexts. Besides, the researcher can personally gain more knowledge about this field during a process of critically researching materials and analyzing collected data from the survey. Last but not least, the study itself wises to raise awareness among teachers and administrators of utilizing the existing modern technologies to meets students' needs and implementing the instruction 29/2001/CT - BGD&DT about applying IT in education and training into specific perspectives (i.e. FL education).





  
  
#
 

   
 

 
Information technology is a broad subject which deals with technology and other aspects of managing and processing information, especially in large organizations. Particularly, IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and retrieve information. Over the past 20 years, its prevalence has dramatically increased so that it is now a part of nearly every aspect of daily life. IT has also been used differently in education and contributed greatly to the pedagogical methodology renovation. When dealing with the role of IT in education, we can not ignore the role of multimedia, which has been considered to have enormous potential in education in general and in foreign language teaching and learning in particular. With the influx of multimedia technologies, foreign language pedagogy began to shift toward more discourse oriented, interdisciplinary, and contextual modes of instruction. Because language studies are by nature encyclopedic, the field has offered prime opportunities for augmenting established educational techniques with interactive technologies and methodologies. On many campuses, new multimedia learning centers and electronic laboratories have already become the focus of the changing paradigms of foreign language instruction. 2.1.1. The use of multimedia in language classrooms 2.1.1.1. Definition of multimedia Multimedia is not a new concept and there are many definitions of it. According to Vicki Sharp (2006), multimedia refers to communication of more than one media type, such as that involving text, audio, graphic, animated graphics, and full of motion video. Paul Brett, University of Wolverhampton (as retrieved from pointed out that as language teachers we regularly use in our teaching all the media types that go to make up multimedia. These are written texts, pictures, sound and video. Each of these delivers messages in a particular manner and can exemplify or elicit communicative language in its own particular way. "What multimedia delivers, is the ability to juxtapose these essential language media, they can now exist within

the same space as each other. The power and effectiveness of the "multi" media should be greater than the sum of its individual parts". Multimedia has been made possible by the recent increase in the size and speed of personal computers. Up to the 1990s, the majority of computers lacked the power to be able to reasonably deliver much more than text, to crunch large amounts of numerical data or to deliver simple graphics. The expansion in power of computers gave the capacity to store pictures and to deliver and record sound. To these has now been added the deliver of moving video. Language teaching and learning is concerned with the development of communication skills and has traditionally and creatively exploited all these communication elements. Each element has its own particular advantages in conveying particular kinds of messages and evoking particular kinds of learners’ responses. Essentially however, the ability of the single source, the computer, to combine, link and orchestrate all these communication elements means we have a multimedia message which is most probably greater than the sum of its individual parts. Pfaffenberger (as cited in Vicki Sharp 2006) supposed that using this very broad definition of multimedia, "multimedia in the classroom could include PowerPoint presentations that are created by the teachers, commercial software (such as multimedia encyclopedias) that is used for reference or instruction, or activities that directly engage the students in using multimedia to construct and convey knowledge". In this thesis, multimedia can be understood as the computer-delivered combination of a large range of communication elements: text, sound, graphics, pictures, photograph, animation and moving video, which is in the form of multimedia presentations that are created by teachers in Microsoft PowerPoint. 2.1.1.2. The use of multimedia in language classrooms With its advantages, multimedia is suitable for ESL/ EFL teaching using communicative approaches. In fact, teachers around the world are experimenting with multimedia and using it to motivate learners and to enhance their language lessons (Stempleski & Arcario, n.d.). Brinton (2001) further emphasizes "Whatever the approach, language teachers seem to agree that media can and do enhance language teaching" (p. 459)

Since the early 1960s, language teachers have witnessed dramatic changes in the ways that languages are taught. The focus of instruction has broadened from the teaching of discrete grammatical structures to the fostering of communicative ability (Warschauer & Kern, 2000). Together with the appearance of communicative approaches, the emergence of multimedia in language teaching has attracted the attention of teachers, academicians, educationalists and experts. From the opinions of those who have studied the role and function of multimedia, it seems to be rather controversial and unlikely to produce a definite answer to the apparently simple question, "Do multimedia actually enhance and promote foreign l