NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies.

October 1, 2009 Introduction Nunan (1991) exerted that success in learning targeted language is measured in terms of the ability to carry out conversation in the language. Therefore many English second language (ESL) learners all around the world equate being able to converse in the target language as knowing the language and hence viewing language learning as learning how to speak the language. Why do we have to teach speaking skills in language classroom? It is fundamental for language educators to teach speaking skills in the classroom as students ability to use the language will serve as the strong base for the students to learn better English. Students will be motivated to learn the language as they feel they have achieved something meaningful and valuable in the course of learning the target language (Lukmani, 1972). Motivation plays a significance role in influencing the success of the second language learning and acquisition. Success in using the target language will increase the desire to learn and obtain something concrete from the study of a second language (Hudson, 2000). Students will feel increased desires to meet the requirements for school examination as well as achieving higher social status among their own classmates. Thus, it is clear that teaching speaking skills in the classroom will benefit the students as it will increase students motivation in learning the target language. Furthermore, speaking is essential to human communication as most of the times in our lives are used to speak than write. Thus, it is imperative for language educators to develop as much speaking skills as possible so that human communication can be fostered and not deterred. However, language educators faced abundant obstructions in teaching speaking skills to students due to several reasons caused by the students and educators themselves. This situation is parallel with what I had been through for the past 12-week of school practicum in particular during my speaking lessons.

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NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies. October 1, 2009 The later part of this paper will elaborate my experiences and reflections about the problems in conducting speaking lessons, strategies taken in exterminating the problem which derived from the theoretical knowledge learned in college as well as tips and techniques from more experienced cooperating teacher and lecturer. School and students backgrounds For my school practicum, I was sent to Sekolah Kebangsaan Seri Indah which is located in Taman Overseas Union Garden, Jalan Klang Lama. The school is a small school which consists of 250 students and 35 teachers and non-teaching staffs. The school has 6 classes and each standard only has one class. I had been assigned by my cooperating teacher to teach the Year 3 class. There are 30 students in Year 3. It is a multiracial classroom in which Malay students are the majority followed by Chinese and Indian students. Students come from various socio-economic backgrounds ranging from upper class family to lower class family. There is a vast gap in students English proficiency levels as there are very good students with average English proficiency and weaker students with poor English proficiency. Thus, it was visible that sometimes, particularly in the speaking lessons, advanced students seemed to dominate the lessons by participating in most of the lessons activities while the weaker students seemed to drift far from the language lessons. What had happened in my classroom? The most common problem that occurred in my classroom during the speaking lesson was majority of my students refused to talk in English. They understood well the questions that I asked in English but they just did not want to respond back to my questions using the target language. Most students in my class were comparatively shy and quiet and this just added to their disadvantage in speaking. They were not confident to use the language as they were afraid of making mistakes which would then make them looked unwise in front of their friends. Thus, they resorted to play it safe and talked using Malay language whenever they wanted to respond to my questions. Their refusal to use the target language may root from the lack of vocabulary needed in forming basic utterances. This is mainly because the speaking of English is limited to

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NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies. October 1, 2009 the English lessons in the classroom and there is no way that the students will learn new vocabulary and utterances other than during the English lessons in the classroom. Furthermore, students did not give full cooperation during the lessons because they viewed English as insignificant to their daily lives. They were not seriously involved in the lessons activities because they did not find any relevancies of learning English in their lives. Their negative attitude towards the target language has added to their disadvantage in speaking the target language (Gardner & Lambert, 1972). This situation had contributed to the lack of competency in learning and acquiring the target language. Possibly, the negative attitudes toward English learning may be influenced by their socio and economic backgrounds as well as their guardians opinions on learning English as a second language. Through my interviews with my students and cooperating teacher, I gathered that many weaker students come from the lower socio and economic background and their guardians are lack of the capacity to teach or to use the target language either. Thus, this had played a role in augmenting the negative attitudes towards learning the target language and even more in speaking the language. These situations had hindered my aims of teaching and helping the students to learn better English especially in developing their speaking skills to the maximum. Students failed to follow the lesson I was left in despair. What were the typical speaking problems among the Year 3 students? The two most common speaking problems among my students were the inaccuracy in pronouncing English words as well as ill-constructed sentences with many basic grammatical errors. These common speaking problems had disrupted their

communication as there were confusions in the messages conveyed due to faulty pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary or word order. Difficulties in pronouncing some of the English words were often faced by the weaker students who have lower level of English proficiency in the Year 3 class. They were not able to follow the correct model of pronouncing words even after I modeled the correct pronunciation. The common mispronunciation often involved words that have the consonant r and vowels, a,e, i, o, u. Students often pronounced the vowel sounds as
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NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies. October 1, 2009 they are spelt in their written forms. They did not understand the idea that the pronunciation of the English words does not necessarily sound as they are spelt. On the other hand, advanced students in the class always made mistakes when they produced utterances in English. They always constructed ill-structured utterances with many grammatical errors. Most of the times they did not adhere to the standard word order in English. Instead, they preferred to use the Manglish (Malaysian-English). As a language teacher, I could not restrain myself from correcting the errors made by the students. Habitually I would stop them in the middle of their presentation to correct the errors. This situation had led the students to feel de-motivated to actively participate in the speaking activities. Thus, I felt a jolt of responsibility to reflect upon these problems and contemplate upon myself as their new English teacher. This must be done so as to devise strategies that would be applicable to overcome these problems and helped them to better learn and acquire the target language. Intervention strategies used to overcome the problems The lack of interest to use English and students negative attitudes towards using and learning the target language may stem from my lack of planning and devising interesting ideas and activities in my English lessons as well as my own attitudes towards teaching English to those students. Throughout the 12-week school practicum I had received a great deal of help form both my supervising lecturer and cooperating teacher. The two of them were very creative and helpful in ensuring that I would be able to produce and deliver sound and interesting lessons that would tap on students strengths and lessen their weaknesses in speaking skills. The two of them had been my mentors and had helped me in becoming better English teacher. My cooperating teacher had been a great help for me because of the time that we spent together in school discussing problems that occurred in Year 3. She is a very experienced teacher with 30 years of teaching English to primary students. I have learned a lot from her and the discussions that I have had with her had provided me with the opportunity to develop my own professional identity,
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NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies. October 1, 2009 chances to teach and participate in the multiple and dynamic experiences essential for meaningful teaching and learning. My view on this matter is supported by Huling-Austin (1992) who stated that teacher mentoring is seen as an effective tool of reducing novice teachers attrition thus enhancing individual personal and professional growth and development. Among the strategies and techniques which had been developed with the help from my supervising lecturer and cooperating teacher were mostly focusing on finding the right and meaningful activities which would help the students to use the target language meaningfully and authentically. In addition, I also tried few strategies that involved making necessary changes in my self as well as the outer environment of my students lives. Generally, the most common factor that affects students voluntary use of English in the classroom is the environment in which they learn the target language (Newcombe, 2007). Positive and non-threatening environment helps the students to speak actively and correctly. This is supported by Newcombe (2007) who mentioned that successful language learning requires regular interaction in the target language as well as conducive learning environment in which the learners are comfortable with. There were several strategies that I used with my students and for instance, I let the students sat on their chairs when they spoke English so that they would feel easy and comfortable as the attention was not focused directly on them. I learned a lot from this strategy that taught me to never single out students or put them on spot because this would only make them felt vulnerable and uninterested to speak the target language. In order to make the classroom more conducive, I also restrained myself from focusing on accuracy but rather fluency at the first stage of the language production. In other words, I tried to lessen the frequency I corrected my students errors when they were in the middle of presenting their opinions and work. This is because, I chose to do

selective corrections which would correct only certain errors determined by the objectives of the lesson, or the specific exercise that was being done at that moment. For instance, in one of my grammar lesson, I chose to focus the lesson on Simple Past

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NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies. October 1, 2009 Tense. Then, only pronunciation errors in those forms were corrected (e.g. thanked, helped, needed, etc.). Other students errors involving mispronouncing the words other than the Simple Past Tense verbs were ignored (e.g.: I changed my blue bed sheet into red. Students sometimes mispronounced the word red and bed). They pronounced the words as [reid] and [beid] when the correct pronunciations are [red] and [bed]. This is suggested by Chun, Day, Chenoweth, and Luppescu (1982) who concluded that intolerance towards students errors will discourage students to choose not to speak in English. I also treated my students with respect and sensitivity. I always praised them for being brave and valued their opinions in the class discussion. As a result, students felt positive towards the speaking lessons and participated actively in the class activities. This was because, they felt safe and were no longer threatened by my negative comments about their mistakes. Regarding the improvement of my lesson planning, I chose to do more information gap activities and opinion-based activities. This was because these kinds of activities would allow more freedom and creativity for the students to express themselves. Moreover, these activities would give the students previews on what the communication outside the classroom would be and provided them with the platform for exercising the authentic use of the target language. Among the activities that had been conducted during my speaking lessons were: 1. Retelling: I asked my students to retell a short story that they had read entitled Why Do We Slap Mosquitoes? Students were able to use their own words to describe the story back to the classroom despite having made several pronunciation and grammatical errors during the presentation. Regardless, they felt good about themselves after the retelling session and their motivation level sprinted up. 2. Acting and speaking: I used this activity when I taught the students about Occupations. I asked several students to come out to the front of the class and acted out a certain profession, for instance a singer singing a song. The other

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NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies. October 1, 2009 students that were in the same group as the student in front would guess the profession and then talked about the acts. They liked this activity as they felt that it was more like a game rather than a speaking activity. 3. Free talk: I always tried to choose topics that had something to do with my students interest and experienced. I avoided using topic that the students could only describe by using yes or no. In order to ensure this would not happen, I always used open-ended questions so as to elicit more responses from the students. Students were always excited to talk about the experiences that they had at their home with their families. Generally, students always wanted to share their experiences about their school holidays and birthday celebrations. It was always surprising with what the students could talk when I did not limit their creativity. In addition, this activity was also an eye-opening for me when I learned that students will be able to use the language effectively if the content matters are relevant to their lives. No skill ever develops without adequate practice; and mistakes form an integral part of skill-development. Thus, I believe in myself that I had done the right thing with my students. I had done my part and I also knew that they also did their part on overcoming the problems. I could see that towards the end of my practicum, students attitudes slowly change. They are more positive towards learning the language. Further, I could see that their speaking skills are more or less improved as they are no longer afraid and shy to use the language. What have I learned about myself as a teacher? From the discussion above, I understand that teachers are powerful elements in students lives in which they can do damage to students by just being less supportive. Further, teachers too can be exceptionally influential in which they influence students more than just in students learning and academic achievement but as well as in students personal growth as individuals too. I have also learned that teachers cannot give up on hope and must keep on continue to upgrade themselves not just in terms of lesson planning but also their enthusiasm as the language teachers. This is because, students generally like to take their own teachers as their role models. Thus it is
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NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies. October 1, 2009 important for teachers to always be the inspiration for the students so that the students can succeed in their course of learning and acquiring the target language. Conclusion In short, I can say that the learning experiences that I have encountered during my 3month school practicum has enhanced my own perspectives regarding teaching and has succeeded in convincing myself that teaching is a mature profession, one on par with medicine, law, engineering and social work, and ultimately a modern and noble profession in this 21st century. Experiences will never be enough or too old for a person because, through experiences one generates possible future based on what he/she has learned before. I am also hoping that I will develop love and passion in myself for the path that I have chosen to take. I never dreamt of becoming a teacher before I first stepped my feet in IPBA. Now, I cannot wait for the opportunity to come and start teaching the future generation in Malaysia and share with them all the knowledge and experiences that I have acquired and gained throughout the school practicum. There is a saying I read that states To learn and never be filled, is wisdom; to teach and never be weary, is love.

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NursufyanaUlfaCheMustaffa.ReflectiveTask. (School Practicum). Teaching Speaking Skills in Malaysian Classroom: Challenges and Intervention Strategies. October 1, 2009 References: Chun, A. E., Day, R. R., Chenoweth, A. & Luppescu, S. (1982). Errors, Interaction, and Correction: A Study of Native-Nonnative Conversations. TESOL Quarterly, 16 (4), 537-549. Gardner, R.C., & Lambert, W.E. (1972). Attitudes and motivation in second language learning. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Hudson, G. (2000). Essential introductory linguistics. Wales: Blackwell Publishers. Huling-Austin, L. (1992). Research on learning to teacher: Implications for teacher induction and mentoring programs. Journal of Teacher Education. 43(3) 173-180. Lukmani, Y.M. (1972). Motivation to learn and language proficiency. Language Learning, 22, 261-273. Newcombe, L. P. (2007). Social Context and fluency in L2 learners: The case of Wales. United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters. Nunan. D. (1991). Language Teaching Methodology. United Kingdom: Prentice Hall International.

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