A study of usefulness and enjoy ableness of communicative English activities as perceived by lower secondary demonstration school students

Abstract

The objectives of this study were (1) to study the extent to which lower secondary demonstration school students had experienced communicative and non-communicative activities, (2) to study lower secondary demonstration school students’ opinions towards the usefulness and the enjoyableness of communicative and non-communicative activities, (3) to find relationships between perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyableness of communicative and non-communicative activities, and (4) to compare opinions towards the usefulness and the enjoyableness of communicative and non-communicative activities of low, medium, and high English proficiency students. The participants consisted of 400 lower secondary school students from five demonstration schools in Bangkok. The study was divided into two phases: the survey phase and the experiment phase. In the survey phase, the research instruments were a questionnaire and an interview form. In the experiment phase, four lesson plans were conducted to study the students’ opinions about six communicative activities. Another questionnaire was administered in this phase. To analyze the questionnaire data, the researcher employed percentages, mean, standard deviation, Pearson correlation coefficients and One-Way ANOVA using SPSS Version 11.0 for Windows. The interview data were analyzed using content analysis. The findings in this study revealed the followings: (1) the participants had experienced both communicative and non-communicative activities in their English classes; (2) the participants perceived that both communicative and non-communicative activities were useful but they thought communicative activities were more enjoyable; (3) there were positive relationships between perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyableness of communicative activities and non-communicative activities at the 0.05 level of significance; (4) there were not any significant differences in opinions towards the enjoyableness of communicative activities of low, medium, and high English proficiency students but there were significant differences in their opinions towards the enjoyableness of non-communicative activities and towards the usefulness of communicative and non-communicative activities at the 0.05 level of significance.