An Investigation of Thai Students’ English-speaking Problems and Needs and the Implementation Collaborative and Communicative Approaches to Enhance Students’ English-speaking skills
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Abstract
This study aimed at investigating students’ English-speaking problems and needs, and how collaborative and communicative approaches can be implemented to enhance students’ English-speaking skills. The research informants consisted of 100 lower secondary students drawn from five schools five schools in Phitsanulok, 20 teachers of English from different institutions and 8 experts. Structured interviews were used as tools for data collection. The participants involved were interviewed to gather information related to students’ English-speaking problems, needs and how collaborative and communicative approaches can be used to enhance students’ English-speaking skills. Content analyses were used to analyze the data gotten from the structured interviews. The results of the study revealed as follows. Firstly, students face linguistic problems, such as the inability to use correct grammatical structures in sentence construction, lack of vocabulary and inability to understand and use vocabulary in different situations, poor pronunciation, and inability to understand different English accents. Students also face problems related to their instructors such as teachers-centered method, tensed classroom environment as teachers gave negative and offensive feedback to students and teacher’s continuous use of the Thai language during the learning process.
It also revealed that students face general problems such as fear of being mocked by friends and lack of confidence. The results of studying students’ needs revealed that they need to learn correct pronunciation rules. It also revealed that students need activities that will enable them to interact such as working in groups or pairs, role-play, paired conversations, communicative game and questions and answer sessions that will enable them to overcome fear, develop confidence and improve their speaking skills. Students also expressed the need for videos and audios to be used during the teaching learning process in order to enable the learning not boring as well as facilitate understanding. Secondly, the results of studying how collaborative and communicative approaches can be implemented to enhance students’ English-speaking skills revealed that interactive, pair, group dialogues/ conversation tasks, role-play and communicative games are collaborative and communicative activities that can be implemented to enhance students’ speaking skills with students working together to prepare, practice and present oral tasks while the instructor facilitates, encourages, gives feedback and corrects students as they work.
Article Details
บทความที่ได้รับการตีพิมพ์เป็นลิขสิทธิ์ของวารสาร สักทอง : วารสารมนุษยศาสตร์และสังคมศาสตร์ สถาบันวิจัยและพัฒนา มหาวิทยาลับราชภัฏกำแพงเพชร
ข้อคิดเห็นใดๆ ที่ปรากฎในวารสารเป็นวรรณกรรมของผู้เขียนโดยเฉพาะ ซึ่งมหาวิทยาลัยราชภัฏกำแพงเพชรและบรรณาธิการไม่จำเป็นต้องเห็นด้วย
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