The effects of naprative task repetition on the english oral language performance of Thai

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to investigate the effects of narrative task repetition on the English oral language performance of Thai undergraduate students. Since there was planning-time allotted for the participants to prepare and work together in their small groups, the co-construction process during their planning-time and the knowledge they gained from this co-construction process were also investigated. This research was conducted in the course 2701358 Effective English Speaking. There were three phases in this research. In Phase one, a course preparation was performed after the preliminary study had been conducted to verify whether there was any effect resulting from the narrative task repetition. Then a documentary study was carried out in order to develop the research instruments which include teaching and learning materials, the Oral Proficiency Test and Descriptive Band Scales including Teacher’s Observation Form and Field Notes, Student’s Report Form, and Interview Questions for Co-construction Process for validation. In Phase two, the pilot studies were conducted for further implementations of the instruments. The main study was conducted in Phase three with twenty third-year English major students studying in the Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University. For the data analysis on the English oral language performance, the researcher has both quantified and qualified those sets of data. On the other hand, the investigation of the co-construction process including its products was performed by means of the qualitative data analysis. The research findings were as follows: 1) The English oral language performance of the participants in the study has improved. There was a significant difference between the scores of the scores of the Posttest and Pretest using the Wilcoxon-signed rank test 2) The narrative task repetition helped improve the fluency and accuracy of the participants in all levels of Oral Proficiency Test. From the results of the Chi-square, there were significant differences between the frequencies of pauses and grammatical errors of new narrative task and narrative task repetition in all levels of participants. For the lexical complexity, there were significant differences between the frequencies of the number of words of new narrative task and narrative task repetition in only Low and High levels of participants by using the Chi-square. 3) Qualitatively, it was found that the narrative task repetition helped improve the English oral language performance of the participants in different aspects of language learning according to the Descriptive Band Scales. 4) There were assistance and support in the focus group’s co-construction process during the three Phases: Start, Midpoint, and Get Ready Phases. Phase one and two were similar because the process started with an appeal for ideas/assistance, a helping out, other-initiated suggestions, continuers, other-initiated correction/paraphrase, and content confirmation and clarifications. Phase three was different from those two phases in which the process was started by other-initiated suggestions without an appeal for assistance from their peers. 5) They learned about the framework of the narrative, the technique of delivering a speech, some vocabulary, and grammar from the co-construction process.