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Skkn applyingjigsaw technique to teach speaking skill for 12th graders

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NGHEAN DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
NAM DAN 1 HIGH SCHOOL

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
APPLYING JIGSAW TECHNIQUE
TO TEACH SPEAKING SKILL
FOR 12TH GRADERS
(ÁP DỤNG KỸ THUẬT JIGSAW
ĐỂ DẠY KỸ NĂNG NÓI CHO HỌC SINH LỚP 12)

Subject: English
Writer: Phan Thị Vinh
Group: English
School: Nam Dan 1 high school
Year of experiment: 2020 -2021

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CONTENT

PART 1 INTRODUCTION

1

I. RATIONALE

1

II. AIMS OF THE STUDY


2

III. THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY

2

IV. METHODOLOGY

2

PART 2 CONTENT……….

2

I. THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL BACKGROUND

2

1. Speaking skill

2

2. Overview of Jigsaw activities.

3

3. Benefits of using Jigsaw activities in foreign language teaching and
learning.

4


4. Procedure of implementing Jigsaw technique in classroom.

4

II. FACTUAL SITUATION

5

1. Setting of the study

5

2. Students’ level of speaking proficiency

6

3. Factual information from the teachers’ questionnaires

7

II. SOLUTION

8

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
1.

24


The comparisons between pre survey questionnaire and post survey

questionnaire from students.

24

2.

26

The pre-test and post-test results.

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PART 3 CONCLUSIONS

28

I. SUMMARY

28

II. IMPLICATIONS

28

1. For teachers

28


2. For the students

28

REFERENCES

30

APPENDIX

32

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PART 1 INTRODUCTION
I. RATIONALE
Among the four skills, speaking is one of the most important to be
developed for language learners. Despite its importance,this skill has been
overlooked in schools due to different reasons such as theemphasis on the
development of reading techniques, vocabulary and structural patterns to meet the
requirements

of

all

compulsory


exams,

especially

university

entrance

examinations. It is also a demanding skill for the majority of students at Nam Dan
1 high school in particular and those at other high schools in general. Students,
especially 12th graders, not only pay no attention to learning this skill but have no
motivation in speaking lessons as well. A large number of students revealed that
they are bored with the repetition of speaking activities in the classroom such as:
questions and answers, reading out loud the dialogue. They also think there is no
need to improve speaking as this skill is not required in the exams. Consequently, a
large number of high school students are found to be at a very low level of
spoken English. Many of them can hardly complete a simple sentence about
familiar topics such as hobbies or families. Moreover, when working in groups, a
frequently used activity in most speaking lessons, more advanced learners tend
to participate more actively than weaker learners. In other words, the stronger
students even dominate whereas the weaker ones don’t even try, which may result
in their frustration, boredom, loss of concentration or disruptive behaviors.
Having been working as a teacher of English for more than 10 years, I have
always been making every effort to find out the most efficient teaching methods to
improve this situation. It is important for the teacher to create an active learning
environment in the classroom, where learners are aware of their responsibilities
and actively involved in their group works. From the best of my knowledge about
Jigsaw technique, I strongly hold the belief that it will make a great contribution to
improving this situation at my school. Jigsaw has been designed to promote
cooperation by making individuals dependent on each other. In this technique,

each student is responsible for learning a part of a broad topic and teaching it to
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other learners. That is, each learner is dependent on other group members to learn
the main topic. It encourages students’ participation in a classroom where learners
have a critical role for success and this depends on active cooperation and
participation.
From the reasons above, I have seen the need to adapt activities encouraging
students to speak by applying jigsaw technique, and therefore would like to do a
research entitled: “ApplyingJigsaw technique to teach speaking skill for 12 th
graders”

II. AIMS OF THE STUDY
The study will focus on exploring the effects of jigsaw activities on students’
attitudes towards the speaking activities, their participation in these activities and
students’ speaking proficiency.
III. THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY
This study was carried out among 12th graders from two classes at Nam Dan
1 high school and Thanh Chuong 3 high school, who were taught by the speaking
activities adapted using jigsaw technique.
IV. METHODOLOGY
This research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The
data will be collected via survey questionnaires, the pre-test and post-test.

PART 2 CONTENT
I. THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL BACKGROUND
1. Speaking skill

Researchers have different definitions of speaking. Lado (1961:239-240)
defines speaking ability as: “The ability to use in essentially normal
communication, stress, intonation, grammatical structure and vocabulary of the
foreign language at normal rate delivery for native speakers of the language”.
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According to Nunan (1989),speaking is “ an interactive process two persons or
more are involved in a real-life situation they exchange talk or use the language so
as to fulfill a certain communicative purpose or accomplish a certain social
function.” Additionally, Burns & Joyce (1997) stated that speaking is also defined
as an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing,
receiving and processing information. Its form and meaning are dependent on the
context in which it occurs, the participants, and the purposes of speaking.Leaners
need to acquire some speaking aspects to have a good speaking skill. As proposed
by Brown (2001: 168), those aspects are pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, and
accuracy.
Teaching speaking means teaching how touse language for communication,
for transferring ideas, thought or even feelings to other people. The goal of
teaching speaking skill is to communicate efficiently. Therefore, language
activities is speaking class should focus on language use individually. This requires
the teacher not only to create warm and humanistic classroom atmosphere, but also
to provide each student oppotunities to speak, therefore, it is clear that language is
very important. The teacher teaches speaking by carrying out the students in
certain situation when the ideas have an oral command of the language need to
describe the topic.
2. Overview of Jigsaw activities.
The Jigsaw method was originally developed by Elliot Aronson in 1970 in

Austin, Texas. As Cooperative Learning technique, it has been studied by numbers
of researchers at different levels and subjects. There have been several
modifications introduced in Jigsaw strategy. In the original Jigsaw, the class is
divided into groups and each group has part of the implementation to complete an
activity.Each student of the group was given different material. Then, all students
who have the same part of material gathered to form an “expert group”. In this
expert group, the students discuss until they master the material. After that, they
return to their original group to explain the others about the material. The class
must fit the pieces together so complete the whole. In so doing, they must use their
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language resources to communicate meaningfully and so take part in
meaningful communication practice.
Below is the illustration of jigsaw techniquesutilized in this research:

This technique is a method of organizing classroom activity that makes
students dependent on each other to succeed. Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each pieceeach student's part is essential for the completion and full understanding of the
final product. If each student's part is essential, then each student is essential, and
that is precisely what makes this strategy so effective. It is designed to increase
learners’sense of respectability toward their own learning and the learning of
others. Learners not only learn the material provided, but they also provide and
teach the other members in their groups.
3. Benefits of using Jigsaw activities in foreign language teaching and
learning.
Lots of researchhas been conducted to confirm the benefit of Jigsaw in
primary, secondary and even university levels in developing student’s critical
thinking process, communication skill and the ability to express them. This

technique can be useful, well-structured template for carrying out effective in
class group work. Like jigsaw, each piece, or each student part, is important for the
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completion for a full understanding of the final product. Each student is
indispensablebecause they each have an essential piece of information to to add to
the group. Cooperation and communication are necessary because no one can
succeed completely unless each member contributors. The advantages of Jigsaw
according to Aronson (2008):
- It gives students the opportunity to teach themselves about the material.
- Student are able to practice peer teaching, which requires in-depth
understanding about the material.
- Students become more fluent in English as they have to explain the material
to their peers.
- Each student has to be involved in meaningful discussion in small team.
This is hard to achieve in large group discussion.
- Each group is fostered in real discussion followed by question and answer
session.
- Students are less dependent on teachers compared to traditional classroom
because they are not the main resource of knowledge. In Jigsaw, teacher has
a role of cognitive guide or facilitator.
From Aronson’s suggestions above, it can be said that teaching speaking
through jigsaw gives opportunities to the students to work cooperatively to analyze
a topic and then to encourage others and share their opinion with the whole class
4. Procedure of implementing Jigsaw technique in classroom.
The jigsaw classroom is very simple to use. Here are ten steps in
implementing Jigsaw in classroom according to Aronson (2008):

- Step 1: Divide studentsinto 5or 6 person jigsaw groups. The groups
should be diverse in terms of gender and ability
- Step 2: Appoint one student from each group as the leader. Initially this
person should be the most mature student in the group.
- Step 3: Divide the day’s lesson into 5-6 segments.

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- Step 4: Assign each student to learn one segment, making sure students
have direct access only to their own segment.
- Step 5. Give students time to read over their segment at least twice and
become familiar with it. There is no need for them to memorize it.
- Step 6. Next is forming the Jigsaw group in which the student of should
gather to with the student with same material. This is called the “expert
group”. In this group the students have to discuss the main point of the
material, solve the problem and rehearse the presentation they are going to
make.
- Step 7: Bring the students back to their jigsaw groups.
- Step 8: Ask each student to present her or his segment to the group.
Encourage others in the group to ask questions for clarification.
- Step 9: Observation the process. If any group is having trouble, make an
appropriate intervention.
- Step 10: At the end of the session, as with the individual’s approach, each
group would then create a presentation and share it with the entire class.
This method can be especially useful when introducing a new topic that
contains different perspectives or subtopics or sub-areas. Students should also
prepare digital devices to search for more information related to their tasks and the

instruments for presentation.
II. FACTUAL SITUATION
1. Setting of the study
This study was conducted at Nam Dan 1 high school in Nam Dan district,
and Thanh Chuong 3 high school in Thanh Chuong district, whose students are
famous for traditional fondness for learning and great academic achievements. The
reason I chose Thanh Chuong 3 high school for the 2ndresearch site is that it bears
some similarities to Nam Dan 1 high school, where I am working. The most
common thing is the level of English proficiency of the participants.
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Moreover, in each school, the teaching and learning facilities has frequently
upgraded to create a favorable learning environment for students and help student
to be fully developed, especially for teaching and learning English. The library
provides students with an enormous source of learning materials and references.
Classrooms for grade 11 and 12 at Nam Dan 1 high school is equipped with a
projector, which is frequently used in English lessons.
Although efforts have been made, there are also some obstacles which result
in the unexpected outcomes of teaching and learning English in both schools.
Firstly, the majority of the students pay little or no attention to learning English as
it is not the subject for their university entrance examination. Moreover, although
all of the students have learned English since the first year of secondary schools,
many of them lack foundation background knowledge, which discourages them to
learn the subject. As a result, their performance in learning English is quite poor.
To deal with these problems, most of the teachers here always try to improve
their professional knowledge; however, many of them find teaching this subject
effectively is a demanding task.

2. Students’ level of speaking proficiency
This part is the presentation of scores of the pre-test, which was conducted
before the application in order to investigate students’ level of spoken English
proficiency and to ensure that the students in two groups were of the same level.
Content of the test relates to familiar topics they have already learnt. Due to time
limitation, this was done within 3 optional periods. Students picked up the topics
randomly, had 1 minute to prepare and then had 3-5 minutes to make a short
presentation in front of the class. Students performances were assessed according
to 4 scales assessment rubric, adapted from TFU Foreign Language Assessment
Rubrics, including poor (between 0.0 and 4.5 points), average (between 5.0 and 6.5
points), good (between 7.0 and 8.5 points) and exceptional (between 9.0 and 10
points):

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Assessment Rubric for speaking performances
The chart below presents pre-test scores of the participants at the two
research sites. It is clearly from the chart that in both schools, a large percentage of
the students were at Poor and Average level, only a small number of them got good
grades and no one was obtained exceptional scores. The mean scores of the
students at Nam Dan 1 high school and Thanh Chuong 3 high school was 4.86 and
4.79 respectively. As can be seen, there were minor differences between the scores
of the participants at the two research sites. These results show that the learners’
levels of speaking English competence were approximately the same and were
very low before the application.

Average ; 48.500%

Poor; 44.200%
Average ; 41.100%
Poor; 33.300%

Good; 18.200%
Good; 14.700%

THPT Nam Đàn 1
Poor

Average

Figure 1: Results of the
pre-test

Exceptional;
Exceptional;
.000%
.000%
THPT Thanh Chuong 3
Good

Exceptional

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3. Factual information from the teachers’ questionnaires

There are 9 teachers of English at Thanh Chuong 3 high school and 7 other
teachers at Nam Dan 1 high school, most of whom are well trained and graduated
from universities in our country. All of the teachers always make efforts to
improve their professional knowledge; however, most of them find teaching this
subject, especially speaking skill, is a demanding task due to students’ low level of
English proficiency.Through the data collected from survey questionnaire for
teachers, I have noted some challenges in teaching and learning speaking skill in
classroom.
Firstly, 12 out of 16 teachers, accounting for 75% noted that among 4
language skills, speaking is the most challenging for their students. According to
teachers at the two research sites, these problems happened because they have low
level of the language proficiency (vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar), they
lack motivation for the subject, the learning environment discourages them, they
have little student-talking time, the lessons do not interest them and activities are
not suitable for their right level. Two remarkable causes that all of the teachers
agreed were students’ low motivation and unsuitable teaching methods.
Moreover, all of them frequently usedgroup work in their speaking lessons
but with some challenges. They always grouped their students according to their
seats. Students sitting to each other were put into small groups, regardless of their
levels. Therefore, the biggest problem was that good students were always
dominant in all group work. The weak students, on the other hand, tent to be overdependent on them and never tried to speak up.
Furthermore, when being asked about the effectiveness of speaking activities
in text book “Tieng Anh 12”, the majority of the teachers thought that that most of
these tasks were uninteresting and unsuitable for their students’ level.Many of
them are too challenging and cannot be done within a short time and do not
encourage students to develop their language competence.Many of post-reading
and post-listening tasks,whose aim is to integrate the target material into the real-

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life and personalized practice, does notgive learners opportunities to use of the
knowledge gained in the lesson to produce their own language at all.
In addition, at the end of the questionnaires, all the teachers were asked to
give ideas of how to improve this situation. Their ideas were as follows:
- “The teachers should adapt activities in textbooks to make them more
exciting order to encourage the students to speak English”.
- “Communicative activities should be used in speaking lesson”
- “Teachers should create a comfortable and relaxed learning environment
for students to join in the speaking activities
- “Teachers should creative more hand-on activities to motivate students in
speaking lesson”
- “Teachers and administrators should organize some extracurricular
activitiesto give students more chances to practise speaking English”.
From the results taken from questionnaire for teachers, it is obvious that the
need to adapt these activities was worth considering.
II. SOLUTION
The following are jigsaw activities utilizedto improve students’ speaking
competence. They were applied in the post-stage of the reading, listening skill and
while speaking stage. The activities applied are described as follow:

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SAMPLE TEACHING ACTIVITIES
Sample 1: UNIT 2 CULTURAL DIVERSITY


● Activity:Talking about the cultural differences between Viet Nam and
America
● Objectives: By the end of this activity, students will be able to:
-Recognize some cultural differences.
-Make a presentation about these cultural differences.
● Stages applied: While-speaking
● Procedure:
I. WARM UP: funny video
- T ask ss to watch the video and explain what makes it funny
Video source: />- T lead in: culture differences in America and Vietnam
II. PRE-SPEAKING: Brain storming
- T elicitsthe most common things to talk about culture of a country

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- Tasks eliciting questions to activate students’ background knowledge of
the topic.
III. WHILE-SPEAKING
1. Expert group work
- Ss sit in their expert groups assigned in advance
- T delivers handouts to the expert groups.
- T encourages ss to use their digital devices to look up new words or search
for more information. T offer helps if necessary.
- Ss discuss the suggested answers.
2. Home group work
- Ss return to their home groups, present the suggested answers they’ve

discussed, the others listen and complete their notes
- T controls, makes sure everyone in each group complete the task.
- T offers help if necessary.
- The whole groups write their answers on posters.
IV. POST-SPEAKING: Ss’ presentation
- T asks each group to hang their posters on the board and calls on students
from each group randomly to present.
- T gives feedback.
● The illustration of students’ tasks:

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Sample 2: UNIT 5 HIGHER EDUCATION
● Activity:Making comparisonsbetween studying abroad and in a home
country.
● Objectives: By the end of this activity, students will be able to:
- Recognize some drawbacks and benefits of each choice.

- Say which one they would choose and offer the reasons for their choice.
● Time allotted: 12 minutes
● Stage applied: Post-reading
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● Procedure:
1. Expert group work
- Ss sit in their expert groups assigned in advance
- T delivers handouts to the expert groups.
- T encourages ss to use their digital devices to look up new words or search
for more information. T offer helps if necessary.
- Ss discuss the suggested answers.
2. Homegroup work
- Ss return to their home groups, present the suggested answers they’ve
disscussed, the others listen and complete their notes
- T controls, makes sure everyone in each group complete the task.
- T offers help if necessary.
- The whole groups writetheir answers on posters.
- T asks each group to hang on their posters on the board and calls on
students from each group randomly to present.
- T gives feedback.
● The illustration of students’ tasks:

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STUDYING ABROAD OR IN HOME COUNTRY
WHICH ONE WOULD YOU CHOOSE?

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Sample 3: UNIT 6 FUTURE JOBS
● Activity:Describing jobs and talking about your favorite jobs.
● Objectives: By the end of this activity, students will be able to:
- Recognize some responsibilities, requirements and the importance of some
certain jobs.
-Making a presentation describing these jobs and can make a similar
description of their favorite jobs.
● Stage applied: While-speaking
● Procedure:
I. WARM UP:
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Guessing game: Who am I?
- Ss sit in 5 groups (home groups)
- T introduces the game. T hides pictures of different jobs, each groups take
turns to use Yes/No questions to find out the hidden jobs.
- T control the game and lead in
II. PRE-SPEAKING: Brain storming

- T elicit things to describe a job:

- T elicits to give an example.
III. WHILE-SPEAKING
1. Expert group work
- T asks ss to move to their expert groups.
- T delivers handouts to the expert groups.
- T encourages ss to use their digital devices to look up new words or search
for more information.
- T offer helps if necessary.
- Ss discuss the suggested answers.
2. Homegroup work
- Ss return to their home groups, present the suggested answers they’ve
discussed, the others listen and complete their notes.
- T controls, makes sure everyone in each group complete the task.
- T offers help if necessary.
IV. POST-SPEAKING: Ss’ presentation
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- T calls on students from each group randomly to present.
- T gives feedback.
● The illustration of students’ tasks:

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Sample 4: UNIT 8 LIFE IN THE FUTURE
● Activity:Making predictions about life in 50 years from now.
● Objectives: By the end of this activity, students will be able to:
-Making some predictions about changes in some certain fields in the future
● Time allotted: 12 minutes
● Stage applied: Post-reading
● Procedure:
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1. Expert group work
- Ss sit in their expert groups assigned in advance
- T delivers handouts to the expert groups.
- T encourages ss to use their digital devices to look up new words or search
for more information. T offer helps if necessary.
- Ss discuss the suggested answers.
2. Home group work
- Ss return to their home group, present the suggested answers they’ve
discussed, the others listen and complete their notes.
- T controls, makes sure everyone in each group complete the task.
- T offers help if necessary.
- The whole groups write on posters.
- T asks each group to hang their posters on the board and calls on students
from each group randomly to present.
- T gives feedback.
● The illustration of students’ tasks:


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