Cultural

Diversity
Cultural
Diversity
Educational Issues
Urban vs Rural:
Based on the UPSR
result, the gap
between rural and
urban pupils almost
4% with an
advantage to the
urban schools. For
SPM, the gap had
increased to 8%
points.

Male vs Female
Students:













Academic
achievement gap in
male and female
students gave an
impact on the
enrollment of students
in public higher
education institutions
(IPTA) showed female
students in
universities across the
country are generally
more than 70 percent
Socioeconomic
Status:













Students with higher
socioeconomic status
tend to get better
result than students
with lower
socioeconomic status.
Indigenous
(Orang Asli)
Dropout problem:













While their enrollment
has improved, the
numbers who
complete schooling
keep declining. Efforts
and assistance from
the government and
other organizations
seem not to produce
desired outcomes.
Teaching speaking skills
2- overcoming
classroom problems
Introduction : Why
should we teach
speaking skills in the
classroom?
Speaking skills should be
taught and practised in
the language classroom
to enable students to
communicate in English.
Speaking is fundamental
to human communication-
most of us speak more
than write.
Nunan (1991) wrote:
success is measured in
terms of the ability to carry
out conversation in the
(target) language.
If right activities are taught in the right way,
speaking in class can be a lot of fun, raising
general learner motivation and making English
language classroom a fun and dynamic place to
be.
Dealing with common arguments
against teaching speaking skills in the
classroom
1. Students wont talk or say
anything.

Problem: culture
unusual for students to talk
out loud in class-shy.
Boring class activities

Ways to overcome:
Decorating walls in English
language and culture
posters.
Encourage to ask things in
English
Capture the student interest
and create a real need
communication
We simply speak in English
as much as possible.

Swain wrote Dont worry if
you are not completely
fluent or dont have that
elusive perfect native
accent, we learn to speak by
speaking
2. They end up chatting in
their own language when
work in pairs or groups.

Problem:
Is the activity or task pitched
at the right level for the
students?
Was the timing of the
activity good?

Ways to overcome:
Give a complete tools and
language they need to be
able to finish their task.
Be aware of the fact that
some students often use L1
as an emotional support at
first.
Give the students an activity
that calm them down and
make them focus before
groups/pair speaking
activities.
Walk around the classroom
monitoring their participation
and help them as they need.

3. When all students speak
together it gets too noisy and
out of hand and I lose control
of the classroom.

Problem: Noisy classroom and
out-of-control classroom?

Ways to overcome:
It is fine if the students talking
and interacting in English.
Walking around and
monitoring the students.
Simply change the pace of the
class to a more controlled task
if students get too rowdy.

Learner- centred classrooms
where learners do the talking in
groups and learners have to
take the responsibility for
using communicative
resources to complete a task
are shown to be more
condusive to language learning
than teacher-centred classes.
( Long & Richards 1987)