Enhancing 'Student Talk' both Quantitatively and Qualitatively with Action Research
201M047 N. K.
The theme of this thesis is to consider effective ways to enhance student talk in English classes. In my lessons most of time has been spent for my talk. It's not a good way for students, who want to acquire communicative abilities. If students are not given enough opportunities to use English, it's difficult to acquire such abilities. I did action research in order to find problems in my lessons, improve them and consider how I can enhance student talk both quantitatively and qualitatively. I referred to an approach called communicative language teaching. I also referred to an approach called task based language teaching. I presented some lesson plans, referring to the approaches. I also considered my future plans.
This thesis is organized as follows:
Chapter one, Why don't students talk?, discusses some reasons why teachers talk more and students talk less from the aspects of teachers' behaviour, motivation for English learning, the size of one class, affective factors and methodologies of teaching. I found motivation is very important and stated ways to increase students' motivation. I referred to Maslow's hierarchy of needs (1968) in considering motivation.
Chapter two, The necessity of student talk, describes the reasons why I think that more student talk is important and the aims of a language teaching. I stated several important ways to teach language. In communicative language teaching, attention is paid to functional aspects of language as well as structural aspects of language. It is necessary for language teachers to teach both aspects of language. I presented some examples of activities, taking the methodological framework shown by Littlewood(1981) into consideration.
Chapter three, Action research: The first half, shows action research in the first cycle. I hypothesized that if I show the students necessary English vocabulary and the patterns of sentences explicitly when they do communicative activities, students will speak English more voluntarily. I made handouts for each lesson and distributed them to the students. I observed that the students could talk more referring to the handouts. However, the students just followed the model conversations and their activities were very limited.
Chapter four, Action research: The second half, shows action research in the second cycle. In this cycle, I hypothesized the following three ideas. If I give student tasks that they have to do through interaction in pairs or in small groups, student talk will be enhanced. If the topics of the tasks are related to their personal lives or authentic world, students' motivation will be increased. If the attention is focused on meaning rather than forms, student will talk voluntarily without worrying about making mistakes. I observed that the students participated in the activities more freely and spoke more than in the activities in the first cycle. They felt that it was more important to talk more in English and get information from other students than to be afraid of making mistakes and remain silent. In designing lessons, I referred to a framework for Task-Based learning offered by Willis(1996). I found it very difficult to think of tasks that were appropriate for the students.
Chapter five, Future plans, describes my future plans in teaching English. I found that it was very important for teachers to arrange conditions for language learning and encourage students in order that they can become good language learners. I also thought it necessary to find ways to give lessons in which teacher-control becomes less and learner-creativity becomes more. For I observed that the student participated in the lessons positively when they were given a lot of opportunities to create their activities by themselves. In order to realize that, teacher's roles are very important.
Through action research, I intended to examine how student talk was enhanced more precisely and to present better lesson plans. However, it is regrettable that I didn't have enough time and I couldn't give lessons fully according to my plans. To find better methods to enhance student talk and to measure student talk will be my future issue. I will continue doing action research to find them.