Effects of using tiered instruction and gamification teaching method on English oral communication ability of ninth grade students

Abstract

This quasi-experimental research was conducted with two purposes: 1) to investigate the effects of tiered instruction and gamification teaching method on students’ English oral communication ability in overall and analytical views and 2) investigate the effects between tiered instruction and gamification teaching method and conventional instruction on students’ English oral communication ability. The participants were ninth grade students of a small-sized secondary school in Chumphon, selected by purposive sampling into two mixed-ability classrooms.They were cluster-randomly assigned into experimental group with 22 students learned by tiered instruction and gamification teaching method, and control group of 18 students learned by conventional instruction. The research instruments consisted of (1) parallel pre- and post-test of English oral communication (2) lesson plans of tiered instruction and gamification teaching method, and (3) lesson plans of conventional instruction. The data collection procedure was 100 minutes per week for 8 weeks. The collected data were analyzed by arithmetic mean, standard deviation, paired-sample t-test, and independent-sample t-test.

The result of this study showed that

1) The experimental group had higher mean scores of English oral communication ability in overall view than before the experiment at .05 significant level. Besides, their mean scores in four out of five elements of English oral communication ability namely content, vocabulary use, fluency, grammatical structure, improved at .05 significant level.

2) The experimental group had higher mean score of English oral communication ability than the control group at .05 significant level. Moreover, mean scores in three elements of English oral communication ability including fluency, grammatical structure, and pronunciation of the experimental group were higher than the mean scores of control group at .05 significant level.