SKKN encouraging grade 10 students to take advantage of multimedia resources in improving their speaking skills at nong cong II high school

PART ONE:

INTRODUCTION

1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY
English is considered the world language; the one that dominates the world
as no other language does. Several authors have affirmed that its dominance is
superior to any other language as never before, and currently an important portion
of the world’s population is able to use English to communicate in some degree at
least. On the other hand, speaking is the skill that students of English or any other
language are meant to master first, as it is essential for communication. This
generates concern, due to the fact that it will not be able to achieve without the
appropriate practice and dedication, and as a consequence, its acquisition can be
hard. Teaching the speaking skill is then a very important part of teaching English
as a foreign language, due mainly to the fact that nowadays there are more learners
that want to use this language spontaneously to communicate.
The technological revolution has changed the world and education, and
makes easier to teach and learn any foreign language. Traditional classes can be
improved with the application of multimedia-based programs that turned a
classroom based session into a face to face online session, proving to be a powerful
teaching medium (Hartsell, 2016). It is possible to believe then that the use of
multimedia-based programs in traditional ESL and EFL classes is a successful
technological medium to increase students’ motivation to learn. It cannot be denied
that multimedia has changed teachers’ practices and the way students learn. (Rossi,
P. & Fedeli, L., 2017).
Students nowadays are likely to be addicted to social network and other
technological applications. Hence, it sounds a great idea to stimulate students to
take advantges of technology in developing their study.
Therefore, in this study I present some guides involving taking advantages
of multimedia resources to help students of grade 10 improve their language
speaking skills.

2. AIMS OF THE STUDY
I do this research to investigate how students at Nong Cong II high school use the
language knowledge they have learnt to speak, as well as to find out whether using
technology can help them improve their speaking skills. So I decide to name my
research as “Encouraging grade 10 students to take advantages of multimedia
resources in improving their speaking skills at Nong Cong II High School.”
3. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
This paper investigates the following questions:
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First, the extent to which technological applications, especially multimedia
such as the Internet and its products (Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok…) affect students'
speaking skill.
Second, how can these multimedia resources be helpful for students to
improve their speaking?
These questions are addressed to two classes (10 A1 and 10A7) I am teaching to
find out the effect of using technology to improve students’ oral skills.
4. METHODS OF THE STUDY
- Teaching experience method.
- Collecting and studying relating documents.
- Questionnaires.
- Assessing students’ speaking products

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PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
1. OVERVIEW OF SPEAKING SKILLS

Speaking is defined as the action of furnishing information or expressing
one’s feelings in speech. According to Nunan (2003, p.48), speaking is a
productive verbal skill or, in other words, a skill of producing language which
consists of constructing systematic verbal utterances to convey meaning. While
Brown (2004, p.140) points out that “speaking is an interactive process of
constructing meaning that involves producing, receiving and processing
information”. Speaking is also considered as a complex process that combines
phonetics, lexical knowledge, grammar and strategies of communication. In
Methodology in Language Teaching, Richards and Willy claims that speaking a
language is especially difficult for foreign language learners because of the fact
that effective oral communication requires the ability to use the total language
appropriately in social situations. Jones (1996) also comments “In speaking and
listening we tend to be getting something done, exploring ideas, working out some
aspect of the world”.
Speaking a foreign language is not an easy skill to be mastered by learners
because it needs great courage as well as preparation to speak. Regarding this,
Brown (2004, p.172) says speaking has five components namely: grammar,
vocabulary, comprehension, fluency and pronunciation. Students have to be aware
of these components. Before they speak, they should know what they will say,
therefore, they need to have ideas in their mind. In addition, students must be able
to use correct pronunciation; otherwise, it will be difficult for listeners to
understand them. Moreover, in order to be able to speak fluently and correctly, they
must have sufficient vocabulary and arrange their sentences so that they can be
understood. If all these things are done well, students surely will be able to speak
well and their listeners will get the massage easily.
In reality, the competency of high school students in speaking English is still
a matter of concern. The recent curriculum objective is to enable students to
understand and use the language appropriately in accordance with the appropriate
situations. However, many high school students lack the capability to express
ideas, thoughts and feelings clearly. They surely face difficulties that hinder them

to be competent at speaking; such as lack of vocabulary, poor or unusual
pronunciation and poor grammar (according to Heriansyah, 2012, p.31). In fact,
the class atmosphere which consists of only a few interesting activities or games is
not favorable one for oral activities and students are not motivated to speak.
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Besides, the time spent by the students to learn these skills is thought not to be long
enough and students do not have proper learning strategies to develop their
speaking skills.
2. TYPICAL STUDENTS’ PROBLEMS IN SPEAKING.
Most of students consider speaking skills challenging tasks. In fact, there is a
combination of different problems in students’ speaking English. To begin with,
students feel nervous and are afraid of making a mistake while speaking, in other
words, there is a problem in students’ confidence. Students are not self- confident
with their poor pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar that prevents them from
producing natural sentences and speaking. As a result, students often talks too long
to compose utterances and speak slowly. Hence, they can’t participate actively in
conversations and their language does not sound natural. The second problem is
that students have a limited amount of vocabulary. Sometimes when students are
speaking, they have a sentence in mind, but they are missing two or three
important words or they can’t pronounce a word correctly, then it becomes difficult
to say what they are thinking. In addition, students have difficulties in pronouncing
a word, a phrase or a sentence correctly, which makes listeners unable to
understand what they are speaking. When speaking English, students have to
consider not only the pronunciation of the individual words, but also the
connection between the words in the sentences. There are also the rhythm and
intonation of the sentences to consider, which makes them confused. In brief, to
improve students’ speaking skills, the teachers have to use specific tips to deal with
each of the above problems.

3. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS AND SPEAKING SKILLS
Among the previous studies that have covered the use of multimedia in
language teaching, Bahadolfar and Omidvar’s (2014), highlights the importance of
the use of technology in practising speaking skill. For them, technology is the
vehicle to modernity and a resource that cannot be avoid in educational sectors (p.
9). In addition, Navas (2006) states that “any language programs with a
communicative goal should focus on appropriate audio-visual equipment and the
quality of the input and output skill tasks, based on authentic materials” (p. 1).
Contreras, Charry & Castro (2016) examined the way multimedia resources
foster the speaking skill development in student. In this work the authors stress the
difficulties teachers face in the development of students’ speaking skills due to the
context, which leads to the need of improving their classroom practices. This paper
proposes the use of podcasts, videos and Power Point Presentations in order to
develop learners’ pronunciation, vocabulary and fluency in English language.
Butler-Pascoe & Wiburg (cited by Contreras et al., 2016), affirm that interaction
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increases with the application of technology, and presents students’ language in a
graphically and linguistically enhanced manner” (p. 3). In this way, Contreras et al.
also affirm that applying multimedia is a great source of motivation that can
improve students’ performance, and at the same time develop their speaking (2016,
pp. 3-4).
Multimedia resources include a great variety of elements that can be used in
the educational field. Besides the resources mentioned in the studies above, a
research study carried out by Felix Castellanos, titled “The use of gamification and
videogames in second 4 language learning”, suggests a new trend in the use of
multimedia to teach a language: gamification (2016). The main objective of his
work is to explore the way in which multimedia, in the form of videogames,
influences the development of language skills, among them, the speaking skill.

Undoubtedly, with more extensive access to native speakers of English, social
media were seen by others as stages where non-native English speakers are offered
chances to increase more extensive access for association and correspondence. It
was seen that these advances interface them to native English speakers or language
specialists in all pieces of the world. Social media additionally cleared to route for
the lead of online training or classes. Furthermore, language students
are probably going to mirror or get how the individuals they "follow" talk and
compose through video online journals, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram
inscriptions, digital recordings, music sounds and recordings, and significantly
more. For them, Social media give chances to language students to cooperate with
specialists over all fields or intrigue and get the ideal information that they look
for.
CHAPTER 2: PRACTICAL SITUATIONS
1. METHODS OF THE STUDY
This research study was conducted at Nongcong 2 high school. The subjects
of this study were students at two classes 10A1 and 10A7. In order to collect data
needed for this study, documents and questionnaires were the main instruments
used.
2. THE REALITY OF TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH SPEAKING
SKILLS AT NONGCONG 2 HIGH SCHOOL

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Survey no.1
Practical Situation of learning English speaking Skills at Nongcong 2 High
School.
Questions for students
A
1. Which of these four Reading

following English language
skills do you think the most
26%
important to learn?
2. What is your idea about
Very
improving your English essential
speaking skills?
58%
3. How often do you use
smart phones or computers?
4. How often do you access
to social media and other
technological
apps.
(Facebook, Zalo, Tiktok,
Youtube…)
4. How do you think of roles
of the apps in improving
your English, especially
speaking skills?
5. Do you make use of these
sources in developing your
English speaking and other
skills

B
Speaking

C

Listening

36%

18%

Essential

Not very
essential
6%

D
Writing
20%

Very
often
72%
Very
often
72%

Often
18%

Not
essential at
all
2%

Sometimes
Never
9%
1%

Often
18%

Sometimes
9%

Never
1%

Very
useful
28%

Useful

Not very
useful
6%

Always

Sometime
s
26%

Rarely

Not very
useful at
all
0%
Never

40%

24%

10%

34%

66%

It can be seen from the survey that speaking is considered one of the most
important skills at Nongcong 2 High School. Over 70 percent of students usually
use smart phones, computers as well as social media and other technological
applications in their daily life. Although most of them realize the importance of
improving their ability to speak English, only few students constantly or
sometimes take adavantages of technological advances to better their speaking.
There are a lot of students who never have any ideas for their learning
improvement despite the fact that they access to various sources of useful English
everyday.
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CHAPTER 3: RECOMMENDATIONS
TO IMPROVE THE STUDENTS’ ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILLS
1. RECOMMENDATIONS
From the result of the questionnaires above, we can see the fact that a
combination of modern technological advances applied by students themselves to
study at home are essential in order to improve students’ oral ability. The
expectable result can’t come only from the teacher or students’ effort. If the
teacher knows how to stimulate students in using multimedia effectively, speaking
ability of students will be surely improved day by day.
Therefore, I suggest making use of technological applications to improve
students’ speaking skills.
Students feel positive about self-study outside the classroom when their
teacher provides motivational tools. Furthermore, students do not feel pressure
from other students in a negative way to participate in self-study activities outside
the classroom.
2. PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS
The solutions to all problems of students’ poor speaking come from both
teachers and students. Hence, teachers play the role of the guiders, who provides
students with useful sources and encourage them to take advantage.
2.1. Sources of useful websites
Facebook, Youtube and Google have a huge variety of pages. Here are just a few of
the great pages and groups on Facebook that you can use to learn English.
- IELTS Face-Off

The first educational IELTS Show in Vietnam broadcast in VTV7. Students can see
the talk show and learn the way to answer questions in IELTS tests as well as
experience outstanding people’s natural speaking. Students can see videos on
Youtube channel or Facebook page.
- Learn English

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This Australian Facebook account shares some excellent articles and
videos about English and language learning. It posts explanations about everyday
phrases, commonly confused word pairs and pronunciation issues. Best of all, there
are lots of comments on each post so students can get some reading practice or
even join the conversation!
BBC Learning English

It’s a public service broadcaster, which means it runs British
programs and TV shows thanks to donations. The BBC also has a huge collection
of online English learning tools. Their Facebook page challenges English learners
to answer questions and write their opinions about current events.
Practice English with real world examples through audio clips, podcasts and news
articles. Remember: This is British English so some words will be spelled
differently than they are in American English, like colour (British) versus color
(American).
VOA Learning English

This page, run by Voice Of America, is similar to the BBC’s English
learning page, but it uses American English. The language is a bit harder to
understand but the idea is the same: Students can learn English by reading about
and discussing things that are happening in the world right now. VOA also has
some fun grammar videos, tips, new words and much more.
Learn English—British Council

Here’s another excellent place to learn through just talking about
things. Instead of using current events as the topic of discussion, the British
Council page uses more casual things like short stories and popular TV shows. The

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operators of the page are always happy to help in the comments, too. Watch out for
British spelling again!
Learn English Online Community

The Learn English Online page shares many blog posts and YouTube
videos of different kinds of teachers giving English classes, like Fluency MC, the
teacher who raps about English grammar. When watching or reading, students can
always come back to the page and leave their thoughts or questions.
Practice English Everyday

Practice English Everyday is a great place to meet a practice buddy.
It’s a very friendly group where people ask each other questions about English and
share great English lessons they found. They also practice together and test each
other on their English knowledge.
Students can post their own questions or get involved by responding to posts from
other members of the group. Join the group and introduce themselves—students
will get some warm welcomes and immediately (right away) feel more confident
about posting.
ESL Team

Some pages post questions and just let followers have their own
conversations in the comments. The ESL Team joins the conversation instead,
asking questions and responding to others in the comments, turning a conversation
into a deeper discussion. It’s a small page for now, which makes it a great place to
have a discussion with a small group of people (including the “teacher”).
English Vocabulary

A lot of the pages mentioned here use text to explain English. This
page posts pictures and worksheets so you students can see what new English
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words and phrases mean. Everything is organized and visual (you can see it), and
the level ranges from very basic vocabulary to more complicated concepts like
prepositions.
2.2. Channels or Vlogs of famous people specialized in English
The Dang Vlog
Đặng Trần Tùng – one of the 5 Vietnameses getting IELTS band 9.0. Visiting his
Facebook or Youtube, you will be shared numerous videos about the way to
pronounce correctly, speak naturally and answer tough questions in IELTS
speaking tests.
Khanh Vy Official
Khánh Vy – a hotgirl with a video of speaking 7 languages. She gratuated from
Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam. Her videos on Youtube or Facebook mainly
share her own personal English learning, how to accumulate vocabulary and
develop speaking in various topics of daily life.
3. SOME PRACTICAL EXAMPLES OF STUDENTS’ APPLYING
TECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS IN DEVELOPING THEIR SPEKING
SKILLS.
(I enclose some students’ videos with this study)
Some images are taken from videos made by students when they talk about the
topics in English 10 textbook.
1. Recording
a video

\
Phuong Anh –a student of class 10A7 recorded a video introducing

about herself at the beginning of school year.

Linh Phuong - –a student of class 10A7 recorded a video
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introducing about herself at the beginning of school year.

A group of students (class 10A1) are talking about their daily
routine.

Da Thao – class 10A7 is introducing herself

Ha My and Ha Ngan- class 10A1- are
discussing about their film they like.
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2. Applying
apps in the
videos

Phuong Thao – class 10A1 is presenting about her favourite film.

Khanh Ly – class 10A1 is talking about music.

Phuong Anh – class 10A7 – is presenting about her favourite song.

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Some images from other videos about various topics.

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CHAPTER 4: RESULT
In conclusion, students have clear improvement in their speaking ability in
comparison with their performances before. They become more confidence in
speaking, be willing to speak without any fear of making mistakes, especially
applying techcnological apps to improve their speaking.
Students have a considerable amount of vocabulary which relates to certain
topics and they can use them to speak in real situations. Their pronunciation,
grammar are also improved.
In class, students are more enthusiastic and eager to participate in speaking
activities, they have more words/ phrases and ideas to speak.
Students’ improvement can be seen clearly in their speaking tests. The
following chart is the result of class 10A1 and 10A7:

Class

Before applying technological
applications

After applying technological
applications

(Speaking test at the beginning
of the school year)

(Speaking tests at the end of the
school year)

Excellent
(%)

Goo
d

Fair

Poor

Excellent

good

Fair

Poor

(%)

(%)

(%)

(%)

(%)

(%)

(%)

10A1

3.6

6.9

71.1

18.4

11.5

16.1

60.9

11.5

10A7

8.4

21.0

60.1

10.5

12.6

29.4

46.2

4.2

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PART THREE: CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
1. CONCLUSION
The time allowed for me to implement my strategies was limited due to the
fact that data collected over a longer time period produces results that can be
considered to be more reliable and valid. Nonetheless, conducting this action
research made me aware of the importance of the teaching of speaking for students.
I recommend that teachers of language to young learners should use a variety of
strategies that encourage the students to speak in the classroom as well as work
collaboratively on speaking tasks. Materials from the prescribed course book can
be adapted to include more speaking activities. Additionally, I strongly recommend
that teachers consider implementing other strategies to promote students’ speaking
skills, such as presentations, interviews, role plays and show-and-tell sessions.
Through this research, I learnt about many technological advances that help to
promote speaking in classes, and it gave me an opportunity to implement the use of
different motivational techniques to enhance students’ speaking skills. The data
collected seem to support my assumptions that using multimedia resources would

have a positive impact on students’ spoken production, and would increase
students’ confidence in their speaking.
The results also indicate that while teacher interaction and motivation play
positive roles in students’ attitudes toward self-access learning, they make
difference in the type of self-study activities students pursue. It is also clear that
students’ positive attitude becomes even stronger when the teacher motivates them
to study outside the classroom on their own.
2. SUGGESTION
Based on the research results, it is suggested that teachers should
encourage students to make full use of technological advances for speaking
better and well as guide students to be more aware of their own speaking
learning. They should make full use of websites, social network to be more
successful in developing their speaking skills.
In order to achieve the goal of improving students’ speaking skills, teachers
involved in second language acquisition should actively use the following positive
motivational techniques on their students to encourage greater engagement with
self-study:
1) On the first day of class, introduce new students to self-access study facilities
and encourage them make use of them.
2) Demonstrate to the students how to complete an online self-study activity and
what steps to take to receive proper teacher credit for it.
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3) Encourage the students in class to do more self-access study and praise those
who finish activities early or do extra activities.
4) Continuously remind students of the deadline to complete an activity sheet.
5) Make it clear in a positive way to the students the benefits of self-access study,
such as learning more English or achieving a better class grade.

The Headmaster’s identification

Thanh Hoa, May 2nd, 2021
I ensure that this study has been written
by me
The writer

Dinh Thị Thuy

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REFERENCES
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Learning. Boston
3. Acta Didactica Napocensia, 2009. Teaching English Through Mass Media
4. Doărnyei, Z. (2005). The psychology of the language learner: Individual
differences in second language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum
5. Jack C.Richards, Willy A.Renandya. 2002. Methodology in Language
Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
6. Jones. 1996. Speaking In Tongues. Danu Press.
7. Marta Uminska, Caroline Krantz. Solutions. Elementary Teacher’s Book.
Oxford University Press.
8. Nunan, D. (Ed.) 2003. Practical English Language Teaching. New York:
McGraw Hill.

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