Powerful English Speaking Tugas 1

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.