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I am going to find strategies to overcome second language learners’ lack of participation in speaking activities and improve their speaking performance.

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The classroom I am going to study belongs to Instituto Nuevo Siglo in the city of General Roca. The class is composed of 16 students studying in the second, third, fourth and fifth year of secondary school. Students attend lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 13:50 to 16:00. Their proficiency level is A2. Among the group of students, I could identify many introverted and shy students, who weren’t willing to participate in speaking activities.

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I could observe that many students have poor speaking skills, which might be the reason why they don’t want to participate in many tasks. When they were asked to share their answers or ideas in speaking tasks, they got nervous and remained silent. Their responses were short. Nevertheless, something that caught my attention was that they didn’t have many problems in writing or reading comprehension activities.

While I was in the observation phase before starting my teaching practice, I noticed that there wasn’t a great focus on developing their speaking skills. That’s why, I can say that a possible cause of their lack of participation is their little exposure to speaking activities. The type of activities that I designed at that time, which might have been too challenging or boring, could also have caused poor participation levels. There may be other factors as well that lead students to struggle with classroom participation, such as their personal traits, anxiety, lack of motivation, among others.

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The main aim of this project is to research ways and strategies that help improve my students’ speaking skills and participation in the classroom.

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In order to increase students’ participation in speaking activities, I will make use of data collection instruments at different moments of the study. In the initial stage, I will administer a questionnaire (Kraemer, 1973)  which includes 12 statements regarding students' general interest in language study, their perceptions about their speaking performance, and reasons why they wouldn’t participate in some speaking tasks, among others. I will add two statements in which they choose the type of speaking activities they would include in a lesson and the topics they should evolve, making them justify their choices very briefly. Learners will have the possibility to complete the questionnaire anonymously at home so as to have enough time to reflect upon their speaking performance. They will answer this questionnaire according to their own experience.

Data will also be collected by means of a number of different observations of lessons in which several types of speaking activities will be carried out. Some will be in pairs, others in bigger groups and others all together. These observations will be conducted by me together with a colleague, who will be part of the research. The main purpose of these is to see how they behave when they encounter different speaking activities. My colleague will be useful to observe details that I missed.

Students will also complete a survey at the end of each lesson so as to qualify the activities done, express what they like/didn't like and what they need to improve.

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Once the collection of information is complete, I will proceed to analyze the data gathered from the questionnaire, the observations and the survey. First of all, I will focus my attention on students’ answers in the questionnaire, which will give me detailed information about the types of speaking activities they like/don’t like doing, the topics they hate/love talking about, the modality of those tasks, their opinion about their own speaking performance and difficulties, speaking strategies that they use, what prevents them from sharing their ideas/thoughts, among others. Moreover, the results will allow me to have an insight into how certain external or internal factors affect students’ participation, identifying cases of inhibition, anxiety or lack of motivation. After all that, the results from the questionnaire will be summarised using descriptive statistical analysis.

The observations will reveal if what they said in the questionnaires correlates with actual practice. It will tell what speaking strategies I will need to foster/enhance in them. Finally, the results from the survey will provide students’ perspectives on their performance and what they need to improve. As I said before, all this data analysis will be done with another colleague.

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I am going to quote authors that back up my claim that says that students who participate show improvement in their communication skills and performance. For example, “the more students participate, the more they engage in higher levels of thinking, including interpretation, analysis, and synthesis, which leads to improving their speaking skills” (Smith, 1977).Mustafa et al. (2010) claim that "students who actively participate in the classroom are expected to get better results. Thus, poor participation may affect students’ academic achievement".

Moreover, other authors postulate that if students develop speaking strategies, they will overcome the obstacles which impede them from participating in class. These “help learners to avoid failure in oral communication and psychological aspects that obstacle their speaking performance.” (Imane, 2015, p. 11).

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Taking into account what some authors proposed and all the data collected, I will come up with possible solutions. For example, designing lessons in which they learn explicitly several speaking strategies and their benefits, so they later apply them. Another possible solution that I can think of is designing activities which take into account their level of proficiency, interests, difficulties, and the factors that affect their participation. That is to say, what they wrote in the questionnaire. Finally, experiment and expose them to different activities which are different from the textbook so as to see how they react to them.

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I am going to carry out a 3-week speaking strategies instruction, in which students will learn certain communication strategies such as making clarifications, requesting for assistance, indicating lack of understanding, among others. Moreover, I am going to design lessons taking into account both the descriptive statistical analysis derived from the questionnaire and the surveys, including their suggestions and how they feel about their performance. I am also going to design a particular lesson in which students see videos of different English lessons and they analyze effective participation behaviours and speaking strategies used by those students. To see if the solutions I propose are effective, I am going to compare the new results derived from the observations with the ones recorded at the beginning of the research project. I am going to check whether their performance and levels of participation in the English classroom have increased. The surveys done at the end of each lesson will always facilitate what needs to be worked on in the following lessons.

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Even though this action research project hasn’t been carried out yet, it will be extremely beneficial not only to my students but also to future teachers who are dealing with the same issue. In other words, the findings from the research can inform future teaching practices and be shared with other educators. It is important to remark that this project is relevant to both classroom and students’ needs. It places students at the centre of the research process. Moreover, by involving them in the process, I will empower them to take ownership of their learning, providing valuable insights into what strategies might be the most effective for them.

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Hamzah, Mohd Hilmi & Asokan, Thivya. (2016). The Effect of Participation Instruction on ESL Students' Speaking Skills and Language Anxiety.

Imane, K, K. (2015). Enhancing EFL learners’ speaking skills through effective communicative activities and strategies in the case of first-year EFL students. People’s democratic republic of Algeria ministry of higher education and scientific research.

http://dspace.univtlemcen.dz/bitstream/112/8910/1/kaddour-khaoula.pdf

Kraemer, A. (1973). Development of a cultural self-awareness approach to instruction in intercultural communication (Report 73-1 7). Arlington, VA: H.R.R.O

Listyani, L., & Kristie, L. S. (2018). Teachers’ Strategies to Improve Students’ Self-Confidence in Speaking: A study at two vocational schools in Central Borneo. Register Journal. https://doi.org/10.18326/rgt.v11i2.139-153

Smith, D. G. (1977). College classroom interactions and critical thinking. Journal of Educational Psychology, 69(2), 180-190. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.69.2.180

Susak, Marija, "Factors that Affect Classroom Participation" (2016). Thesis. Rochester Institute of Technology. https://scholarworks.rit.edu/theses