Minggu, 11 Maret 2018
ATTITUDES TO IMPROVING SPEAKING
SKILLS BY GUIDED INDIVIDUAL ACTIVITIES
We have employed an innovative approach for improving
speaking skills, which includes the following four stages:
Stage 1. Individual short talks on professional
topics followed by class discussions.
Stage 2. Individual Power Point Presentations on a
professional topic followed by class discussions.
Stage 3. Class discussions on a covered topic from
the course book with emphasis on pros and cons of the issue.
Stage 4. Spontaneous speaking on a current professional
issue, either by individual students or by the representative of a small group.
Results
and discussion
This section reports the students’ responses and discusses the
main points that emerged. The respondents were asked to indicate the degree of
difficulty they had with the spoken language on the Likert’s scale ranging from
“very difficult” (1) to “very easy” (5).
Students’
reflections
This section reproduces passages from students’ weblogs about
speaking activities they performed in their ESP classes. The key attention of
written reflections is towards making PPPs, speaking spontaneously and giving
short talks. For the sake of authenticity, neither style nor register were
corrected.
Conclusions
The present study is rather limited in some respects. First,
it describes the perceptions of starting students, undergraduates, about
improving spoken English for their specific future profession. Second, the
number of respondents is comparatively small: 45 students in PS sample and 42
students in SW sample.
