Developing students' English speaking skills through personalization tasks Action research on grade 10th students at Hoang Quoc Viet High School kỹ năng nói t

C VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
*********************


TRIỆU ANH THƯ


DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS THROUGH
PERSONALIZATION TASKS: ACTION RESEARCH ON GRADE 10
th
STUDENTS AT HOANG QUOC VIET HIGH SCHOOL

Phát triển kĩ năng nói Tiếng Anh cho học sinh qua các hoạt động cá nhân hóa.
Nghiên cứu hành động của học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Hoàng Quốc Việt



M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS


FIELD : ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE : 60140111





Hanoi, 2014
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
*********************


TRIỆU ANH THƯ


DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS THROUGH
PERSONALIZATION TASKS: ACTION RESEARCH ON GRADE 10
th
STUDENTS AT HOANG QUOC VIET HIGH SCHOOL

Phát triển kĩ năng nói Tiếng Anh cho học sinh qua các hoạt động cá nhân hóa.
Nghiên cứu hành động của học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Hoàng Quốc Việt


M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS


FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE: 60140111
SUPERVISOR: LÊ VĂN CANH, PhD.




Hanoi, 2014
i

DECLARRATION
I certify that the work presented in this study is the result of my own research and the
material has not been submitted either in whole or in part for any degree to any other
university or institution.
Signature


Trieu Anh Thu
ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to show my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Le Van Canh, for his
encouragement and guidance through the research, without which this study can be
impossible.
My deep sincere thanks go to the administrators of Faculty of Post- Graduate Studies,
University of Languages and International Studies- Vietnam National University for giving
me the best environment to fulfill the thesis.
I would like to acknowledge to the support and assistance of my co-teachers as well as the
students at HQV high school.
iii


ABSTRACT
One of the common problems faced by almost every teacher of English in my
school is the students‟ limited participation in speaking lessons. This thesis reports the
results of an action research project, which was designed in an attempt to resolve this
problem. The research was carried on 40 students in a class at grade10
th
of HQV High
School in six weeks following Nunan‟s (1992) five-step procedure. The aim of the study is

to find out whether using personalized lessons can help to develop students‟ speaking skills
or not. The results of the study have shown that using personalization tasks can help
develop English skills for grade 10
th
students at HQV high school. However, not all the
techniques give benefits for all students. Therefore, teachers need to choose a suitable
method in order to make speaking lesson more effective.
iv


LIST OF ABBREVIATION
CLT: communicative language teaching
HQV: Hoang Quoc Viet high school

v

LIST OF TABLES
Table 2.1. Student participants’ experience in learning English
Table 2.2. Students self-reported classroom participation
Table 2.3. Reasons for willingness in classroom speaking English
Table 2.4. Students’ suggested speaking topics
Table 2.5 Observed number of students participating in speaking activities per lesson .
Table 2.6. Time of each student in speaking lesson
Table 2.7 Students’ confidence in speaking English
Table 2.8. Table for students’ changes in their attitudes toward personalization
techniques















vi

TABLE OF CONTENT
DECLARATION i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii
ABSTRACT iii
LIST OF ABBREVIATION iv
LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS. v
TABLE OF CONTENT vi
Part 1: Introduction
1. Rationale 1
2. Aim and objectives of the research. 2
3. Scope of the research 2
4. Research question 3
5. Research method 3
6. Significance of the study 3
7. Structure of the thesis. 4
Part 2: Development
Chapter 1: Literature Review
1.1. The role of speaking in second language learning 5
1.2. Nature, characteristics of speaking competence 6
1.3. Challenges with teaching speaking skills 9
1.4. Approaches and strategies in teaching speaking skills 9
1.4.1. Approaches in teaching speaking skills 9
1.4.2. Strategies for developing speaking skills 11
1.4.2.1. Using minimal responses 11
1.4.2.2. Recognizing script. 11
1.4.2.3. Using language to talk about language 11
1.5. Personalization in foreign language teaching 12
1.6. Personalization and students‟ participation in oral activities 13
1.7. Chapter summary 15
Chapter 2: The Study

2.1. Definition of Action Research 16
vii

2.2. Rationale of using an action research 16
2.3. Steps in doing Action Research 17
2.4. The school 17
2.5. Participant students 18
2.6. Research procedure 18
2.7. Findings 21
2.7.1. Changes in student‟s participation. 23
2.7.2. Observed time of each students‟ speaking per 45 – minutes lesson. 24
2.7. 3. Students‟ self- reported changes in their confidence in speaking English 25
2.7.4. Students‟ evaluation 26
2.8. Discussion 29
2.9. Reflection 30
2.10. Chapter summary 31
Part 3: Conclusion
3.1. Recapitulation 32
3.2. Concluding Remarks 33
3.3. Limitation of the study and plans for the next cycle 33
REFERENCES 35
APPENDICES I



1

PART A: INTRODUCTION
In this Part, the rationale, the aims and objectives as well as the research questions
and research design are presented. The structure of the thesis is also presented briefly in

this Part.
1. Rationale
In the history of language teaching, many methods have been created in order to
help learners study a second language and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is
considered one of the ways to teach English effectively. In CLT, teaching speaking is one
of the difficult skills and it has an important role in each person‟s daily life. Speaking is the
key to help human communicate. Just think of all different conversation in comparison
with how much communication we write, which one we do more? In fact, we often speak
more than we write in our daily lives, so if the goal of language course enables the students
to communicate in English, then speaking skill should be taught and practiced in the
language classroom. Many language learners regard speaking as a measure of knowing a
language. To them, speaking is the most important skill that they can acquire. The learners
often need to be able to speak with confidence to carry out their attitudes or message they
want to mention. Speaking is an excellent vehicle of social solidarity, of social ranking, of
professional advancement and of business. Therefore; teaching and learning speaking skills
are necessary than we thought.
The necessity of teaching and learning speaking skill was emphasized by Nunan
(1991) said: “Success is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a conversation in the
(target) language”. Therefore; in language classrooms, if students do not learn how to
speak and do not have a chance to practice speaking, they will lose interest in learning. On
the other hand, if the right activities are taught in the right way, speaking in class can
motivate student participate oral interaction successfully. Both teachers and learners are
aware of the importance of speaking skill, but it is true that speaking ability of Vietnamese
students is still weak. In fact, many Vietnamese students have a weak instrumental
motivation for studying English. This is because they do not have much opportunity to talk
and they do not have adequate exposure to the target language environment. Therefore;
many students do not participate in speaking activities in classroom. There are many
2

reasons to explain for this cause and there were a lot of resolution which were given to

solve this problem. However, I think, although we used what measure, which method, they
have the same goal that is to motivate students to learn.
As language teachers, we are aware that the learners need to be motivated in order to learn
successful.
This small piece of action research was designed to test the effectiveness of
applying some personalization techniques in teaching speaking skills in order to increase
the students‟ interest and their participation in classroom. The study was based on the
assumption that learners will participate better if students have chance to associate with the
learning materials in their daily lives.
2. Aims and Objectives of the study
The aim of this study is to find better ways of teaching speaking skills to the
students in a secondary school located in a rural area, where students do not seem to have
motivation to speak English due to the lack of opportunities to use English orally outside
the classroom. Basically, the aim of the action research reported here is to increase the
students‟ participation in English- speaking lessons and helping them to speak English in
the classroom more confidently.
This overall aim is specified into the following objectives:
1. To gain understanding of the extent to which the use of personalized activities
can help my grade 10
th
students to be more active in participating in speaking English in
the classroom; and
2. Find out the students‟ opinions of whether personalized speaking activities
helped them to speak English better or not.
3. Scope of the study
This is in fact a mini-scale action research project in which I designed some
classroom techniques to personalize the course book so that students‟ feelings, prior
knowledge, experience are used to motivate them to speak English in the classroom. The
3

study was not intended to identify the correlation between the use of new teaching
strategies and students‟ speaking competence or speaking performance. Rather, its aim, as
stated in 1.2. above, is just to gain understanding of students‟ attitudes to the new teaching
strategy. Therefore, the study is the initial step for the next cycle of action research, which
could be quasi-experimental in nature.
4. Research question
In an attempt to achieve the aims and objectives stated in 1.2., the questions that
guided the study mainly focused on the following issues:
Question 1: How do personalized activities affect students’ participation in speaking
lessons according to the students’ self-reports?
Question 2: How do students self-report on the changes in their confidence in speaking
English as the result of the teacher’ use of personalization techniques.
Question 3: How do the students value personalized activities with regard to their learning
to speak English?
5. Research method
As the aim and objective of this study is to improve my own teaching practice so
that the students can benefit more my teaching by applying a new teaching technique, the
study is an action research project. Its design is guided by the principles of action research.
The information about the effectiveness of the intervention – personalization techniques –
was gained by means of student questionnaires and self-observation.
6. Significance of the Study
The findings of the study will help me to decide whether personalization techniques
help my grade 10
th
students to enjoy speaking English better or not. The results will inform
me to make better decisions about my teaching and help me understand better how to
change my teaching practices for the benefit of the student learning. In other words, the
significance of this action research is its information on how I can improve my teaching
English-speaking skills so that my students can speak English better.
4

7. Structure of the Thesis
The thesis is organized into three parts. Part One - “Introduction” - introduces the
rationale, the aims and objectives and the research questions. Information about the
research design and the scope of the study is also provided in this chapter. Part Two -
“Development”- is composed of two chapters. Chapter I reviews the relevant literature
with a focus on the use of personalization techniques in teaching English in general and
teaching speaking skills in particular. Chapter II provides information about the study
including the research design, the research procedures, and the research findings. Part
Three, “Conclusion”, summarizes the key issues in the study and the conclusions resulted
from the study. In this part, the limitations are acknowledged and information about how
the next cycle of the action research will be conducted is provided.













5

PART B: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE
This chapter reviews the literature review related to teaching speaking skills and the

benefits of personalization in English language teaching in general and teaching speaking
skills in particular. The chapter begins with the review of the literature on the role of
speaking in second/foreign language acquisition. Following this is the review of the nature
of speaking a foreign language as well as the challenges of teaching speaking skills. The
chapter concludes with the presentation of what other scholars have said about
personalization in foreign language teaching.
1.1 The role of speaking in second language learning
In the foreign language teaching and learning, speaking and writing are productive
skills while listening and reading are receptive skills. From the second language
acquisition perspective, the success of second language learning depends on the
availability of comprehensible input and opportunities to produce output, among many
other factors. Nowadays, language learners tend to use oral language to communicate with
others. According to Swain, (1985), Language learners can develop their language by
producing comprehensible output. Swain‟s output states that the production of oral
language can, under certain circumstances, enable learners to acquire new forms of the
language. Language learners can be pushed to use language further when what they say is
unclear or ungrammatical, and they have to repeat, rephrase or correct what they have said
in order to produce speech that is comprehensible to others. Swain (1985) also argues that
learners, while speaking the target language, must notice language forms in their speech
that are causing problems for the listeners, such as pronunciation or grammar, and try to
modify their spoken language for greater accuracy. Thus, input, feedback and modified
output are the tripartite framework for teaching and learning speaking skills.
Although speaking plays an important role in second and/ or foreign language
learning, Bailey (2003, p. 54) points out,
6

Learning speaking skills is very challenging for students in foreign
language contexts, because they have very few opportunities to use
the target language outside the classroom.
This reason partly explain why students learning English as a foreign language like those

in Vietnamese high schools tend to be weak at speaking. This raises the need for teachers
to find ways to help their students to develop their speaking skills.
1.2. Nature, characteristics of speaking competence
It is obviously that speaking is one of the most important key to communication
and it seems to be involved in all other kills like reading, listening and writing. People
speak to each other to exchange their ideas, attitudes, thought, cultural values. Let imagine
that what would happen to our world if we did not speak? We only use gestures or signal to
communicate with others?
The communication will be difficult and our world will become as silent as grave.
Therefore, speaking skills become an essential part in language course and the classroom‟s
activities which have aim to develop learner‟s ability to express themselves through speech
are considered an important factor in language teaching.
There are some scholars who studying and discussing about the nature of speaking.
According to Burn & Joyce, (1997) and Brown (1994), speaking is an interactive process
of constructing mean that involves producing and receiving and processing information;
its form and meaning are dependent on the context in which it occurs, including the
participants themselves, their collective experiences, the physical environment, and the
purposes for speaking; It often spontaneous, open- ended, and evolving. To Hedge (2000),
speaking a foreign language competently involves the ability to make oneself understood
and to manage interaction. However, speaking is also unpredictable. Speaking requires the
language learners not only know how to produce specific points of language, such as
grammar, pronunciation, but also understand when, how and what ways to produce
language.
Brown (2001:27) said that in teaching oral communication, micro skills are very
important. He also mentions that the pieces of language should be given attention for more
7

that make up to the whole. He gives some features of micro skills of oral communication
that the speakers should to know:
- Produce chunks of language of different lengths.

- Orally produces differences among the English phonemes and allophonic variants.
- Produce English patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions rhythmic
structure, and into national contours.
- Produce reduced forms if words and phrases.
- Use an adequate number of lexical units (words) in order to accomplish pragmatic
purpose.
- Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery.
- Monitor your own oral production and use various strategic devices pauses, fillers,
self- correction, backtracking to enhance the clarity of the message.
- Use grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, ect), system (e.g. tense, agreement,
and pluralization), word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
- Produce speech in natural constituent in appropriate phrases, pause groups, breath
groups and sentences.
- Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
- Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
- Accomplish appropriately communicative functions according to the situation,
participants and goals.
- Use appropriate registers, implicative, pragmatic conventions and other
sociolinguistics features in face to face conversations.
- Convey links and connections between events and communicative such relations as
main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and
exemplification.
8

In most cases, speaking is the interaction between at least two people, the speakers
and listeners. By speaking, the speakers can express their ideas, attitudes or their opinions
about something or someone. Of course, the listeners will receive information and they
can give immediate reaction to what is spoken to the speaker. This reaction can be positive
or negative meaning depends on the attitudes of the speakers. Because of the complexiblity
of speaking interaction, some researchers give some characteristics of speaking skills.

According to Bygate, he showed that speaking is a reciprocal activity. This means
that in speech, in order to “make sure that communication is taking place, the speakers
have to adapt their message according to their listeners‟ reaction” ( Bygate, 1987:12)
The same opinion with Bygate, Nunan gave another characteristic of speaking skill.
It is “speaking is spontaneous”. He said that: “we all have routines, set of phrases and other
expressions that we use to assist us when speaking spontaneous” (Nunan, D. 1999: 227).
The third characteristic is Speaking consists of colloquial language. Colloquial
language appears in both monologues and dialogues. It will be difficult for the learners,
who only study standard language in textbook, to produce or try to understand about
words, idioms or phrases of colloquial language.
The following characteristic of speaking is Speaking depends much on language‟s
stress, rhythm and intonation. It is obviously that with a same sentence, if the speakers use
different stress, rhythm and intonation, the speech can be understand with different
meanings, in some cases, the listeners can misunderstand the original meaning of the
speakers. This is a very important characteristic of speaking because in speech, different
stress or intonation use can convey different messages.
The last characteristic of speaking is “Speaking is interaction process”. According
to Brown, H.D. (1994:93), he states that “ the greatest difficulties that learners have in
learning to speak is not in multiplicity of sounds, words, phrases and discourse forms that
characterize any language, but rather in the interactive nature of most communication”. It
means that speakers have to engage in process of negotiation of meaning with many
discourse constraints, so they have to be care of choosing what and how to say in what
situation.
9

1. 3. Challenges with teaching speaking skills
Ur (1996, p. 120) states,
Classroom activities that develop learners‟ ability to express themselves
through speech would therefore seem an important component of a
language course. Yet it is difficult to design and administer such activities;

more so, in many ways, than to do so for listening, reading or writing.
Similarly, Goh and Burns (2012) say that in many classroom situations, although both the
teacher and the students do a lot of speaking, little teaching of speaking actually takes
place. This is because the teacher is just concerned with providing opportunities for the
students to talk in the target language. The authors point out that there are many things that
teachers can do to help their students develop specific speaking skills and strategies, and
acquire the language they need for a range of speaking demands.
According to Ur (1996), there are four major challenges with speaking activities.
First, learners are inhibited about trying to say things in the target language in the
classroom for fear of mistakes, criticisms, and shyness. Secondly, they cannot think of
anything to say. Thirdly, some learners may dominate the speaking lesson while others
speak very little or not at all. Finally, they tend to use their mother tongue instead of the
target language.
1.4. Approaches and strategies in teaching speaking skills
1.4.1. Approaches in teaching speaking skills
There are a lot of changes in approaches and methods in language teaching. Many
methodologists have studied to find out the most effectively way to teach English. Many
language teaching methods and approaches have been mentioned such as:
- Grammar- translation method
- The Direct method
- The Audio – lingual method
10

- The Audio- visual method
- Communicative Language Teaching.
Among these methods, Communicative Language Teaching is considered to be the most
effectively way to teach learners to communicate and help them to develop the learners‟
communicative language ability. According to Nunan,
CLT views language as a system for the expression of meaning.
Activities involve oral communication, carrying out meaning tasks

and using language, which is meaningful to the learners. Objectives
reflect the needs of the learners; they include functional skills as well
as linguistic objectives. The learner‟s role is as a negotiation and
integrator. The teacher‟s role is as a facilitator of the communication
process. Materials promote communicative language use; they are
task – based and authentic. (Nunan,1989:194).
CLT is the learned- centered method and it emphasizes communication and real- life
situations. The role of the teacher in CLT is quite different from traditional teaching
methods. In the traditional method, the teacher is in charge and they often control their
students. In CLT, the learner is in charge of their own learning and the teacher often serves
as more of a facilitator. CLT is defined as a list of general features. One of the most
recognized of these lists is David Nunan‟s (1991a:279, cited in Bang, N & Ngoc, N.B).
Five features of CLT are given:
 An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target
language.
 The introduction of authentic texts into learning situation.
 The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on language but also
on the learning process itself.
 An enhancement of the learner‟s own experiences as important contributing
elements to classroom learning.
11

 An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside
the classroom.
The goal of language teaching is to develop communicative competence. In CLT, learners
are encouraged to contribute as much as they gain and learn in independent way.
1.4.2 Strategies for developing speaking skills
1.4.2.1. Using minimal responses
Learners who lack confidence in their speaking ability rarely take part in oral
interaction in classroom. They often keep silent and listen while others do the talking. One

way to help them participate in talking is that build up a stock of minimal responses that
they can use in different types of exchanges. These minimal responses can be predictable
and often idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use to express understanding,
agreement, disagreement, doubt, angry and others responses to what another speaker is
saying. By using this method, language learners can participate successfully in oral
interaction. These minimal responses help a learner to focus what the other participant is
saying.
1.4.2.2. Recognizing speaking scripts
Some scripts are predictable set of spoken exchanges such as greeting, apologies,
compliment, invitations and other functions that are influenced by social and cultural
norms often follow patterns. Teacher can use script to help students develop their speaking
ability by making them aware of the scripts for different situations. When they recognize
types of script, they can guess what they will hear and what they will need to say in
response. The teacher can ask student to practice more and more by giving them different
scripts.
1.4.2.3. Using language to talk about language
Language learners who do not understand what another speaker is saying often feel
shy or embarrassed, so they often do not say anything, just only keep silent and try to listen
others speak. In this case, teacher can help learners by asking them to assure
misunderstanding and explain that the need for clarification can occur in any type of
12

interaction. Teacher can also give students strategies and phrases to use for clarification
and comprehension check.
1.5. Personalization in foreign language teaching
Personalization is rooted in the humanistic approach to language teaching (Griffiths
& Ethane, 2000). Personalization happens when activities allow students to use language to
express their own ideas, feelings, preferences and opinions. Personalization is an important
part of the communicative approach, since it involves true communication, as learners
communicate real information about themselves.

Personalization is not a form of language practice, but it is the context and stimulus
for language learning. Moscowitz, (1978: 197) states,
In foreign language teaching, we customarily begin with the lives of
others, with whom students may not easily identify, and then expect
students to transfer the material to their own lives. However, transfer
to the textbook is easier when the content starts with the student
himself and then leads into the materials to be learned… Let the
students first discover what they can generate on the subject from their
own personal thoughts and feelings. By drawing on their own
experiences and reactions, the transfer to the textbook will be more
relevant and more apparent.
Similarly, According to Griffths and Keohane (2000: 1) ,
As language teachers, we are well aware that learners need to be
motivated in order to be successful. Personal involvement is one very
effective way of enhancing motivation. By this, we mean making
language learning content personally meaningful. If learners feel that
what they are asked to do is relevant to their own lives, and that their
feelings, thoughts, opinions and knowledge are valued, and crucial to
the success of the activities, then they will be fully engaged in the
tasks and more likely to be motivated to learn the target language.
13

These authors also list the following benefits of personalization tasks to language
learning. For them personalization tasks help in:
 Creating trust between class and teacher;
 Facilitating positive group dynamics with the class;
 Securing honest, helpful , and interesting feedback;
 Bringing humour into the classroom;
 Making language learning something the teacher and the students
will recall with affection;

 Making language learning memorable
In other words, personalization tasks are aimed at helping the students to
express their own experiences, opinions, tastes or feeling in English so that they
can develop the skills in using the language in a relaxing manner. According to
the scholarly description of what „personalization‟ is in language teaching, it
seems that this instructional strategy can be most applicable to the teaching of
speaking skills.
1.6. Personalization and students’ participation in oral activities
In a speaking lesson, teachers have an important role when they construct
the students their own lessons. of course, the students have been affected their
ideas. If the teachers use personalization techniques, student can reveal their
opinions, and talk spontaneously about their own experiences within the lesson.
The aim of applying personalization techniques is to encourage meaningful
interaction between students, make them more active, creative and interested in
the lesson in class. The teacher is more interested in what students say than how
they say it. Therefore, personalized lessons can be motivating.
According to Connolly (1998, p.24) “taking an active part in shaping lessons to suit
the demands of the class is the essence of personalized teaching”. Personalization means a
14

strong element of personal involvement on the part of the teacher and students. As the
lessons are related to the daily lives of the students, students have opportunity to talk
spontaneously about their own experiences within the lesson. Students activities enable
other class members to get know each other and students can talk about the things related
what they learned in the classroom to their real situation outside the class.
Nunan (1991) states that “success is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a
conversation in the (target) language”. Therefore, if students do not learn how to speak or
do not have any chances to speak in language classroom, they will be lost interesting in
learning and soon get de-motivated. In addition, if the teacher chooses right method, right
activities to teach, the speaking lesson can be lot of fun, raising general learner motivation

and making the English language classroom a fun and dynamic place to be. Students are
willing to learn to speak and participate in speaking lesson.
The teacher works at drawing out the experiences and interests of the students. For
instance, teacher can ask students to talk about themselves, their hobbies or something
related to their lives. In personalization in a speaking lesson, the learners are center and the
teacher plays an active role in constructing their own lessons. The teacher is more
interested in what information students say rather than how they say it. Thanks to this,
students can feel more confident. In other words, personalized lessons are motivating
because it exploits the need and desire of learners to have interesting and meaningful
exchanges in the class.
The purpose of real communication is to accomplish a task, such as conveying a
telephone message, expressing a opinion. In real communication, participants must manage
uncertainty about what the other person will say. Moreover, to achieve their purpose,
participants have to clarify their meaning or ask for confirmation of their own
understanding. Therefore, develop communicative competence by creating appropriate
speaking activities in the classroom is essential for students.
The aim of applying personalization techniques is to encourage purposeful and
meaningful interaction between students, or make student more active in the classroom.
Besides, this method helps students become more confidently and creative in their real
situations. By using this method, students have more chances to speak English follow their
15

thoughts and their participation in speaking lessons will increase more and more.
Therefore, the success depends on what is done by teachers before the class begins and
what is done in the class. Using this technique, teachers can design many activities to make
students take part in speaking lesson.
Although personalization has been suggested as one of the possible solutions to the
enhancement of students‟ participation in speaking English in the classroom context (Ur,
1996), there has been little empirical evidence on the effectiveness of this teaching
strategy. This limited literature on personalization in developing students‟ English-

speaking skills motivated me to conduct this action research.
1.7. Chapter Summary
This chapter reviews the literature on teaching speaking skills and the benefits of
using personalization activities in teaching English as a foreign language as general and
teaching speaking skills in particular. The benefit of personalization can be summarized as
lowering students‟ anxiety thereby helping them to be more confident in speaking English
in the classroom. Another benefit is that as personalization gives students chance to use
their own personal feelings, knowledge and experience in learning English, it may
encourage them to participate more actively in classroom speaking activities. However, as
stated above, the literature does not show many studies on teachers‟ use of this teaching
strategy.
The next chapter provides information on the research design, research procedures and the
results.
16


CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY
This chapter presents the study. It starts with a definition of action research, which
is employed in this study, and the rationale for using action research. Then, the research
procedure is described. Next, the findings are presented before these findings are discussed.
2.1. Definition of Action research
According to Carr and Kemmis (1986),
Action research is simply a form of self-reflective inquiry undertaken
by participants in order to improve the rationality and justice of their
own practices, their understanding of those practices and the situations
in which the practices are carried out (p. 162).
Kemmis and McTaggart (1982) elaborate the nature and the purpose of action
research as follows:
The linking of terms „action‟ and „research‟ highlights the essential
feature of the method: trying out ideas in practices as a means of

improvement and as a means of increasing knowledge about the
curriculum, teaching and learning. The result is improvement in what
happens in the classroom and school, and better articulation and
justification of the educational rationale of what goes on. Action
research provides a way of working which links theory and practice
into the one whole: ideas- in- action (p.5).
In sum, action research is stimulated by the problem the teacher is faced
with in the classroom and her motivation to address that problem. The results of
action research may help the teacher to improve her teaching practice and
possibly the students‟ learning.
2.2. Rationale of using action research