Using pictures to enhance fluency and engagement among first year non-major students at Hanoi law university, Vietnam



With the aim at enhancing fluency and engagement among non-major learners in general and non-major learners at Hanoi Law University, Vietnam in particular, this paper discusses current situations of studying English and makes some effective suggestions on improving the qualifications of teaching and learning their English four skills at Vietnam universities.

Keywords : innovation, fluency, engagement, language teaching and learning.

1. Introduction

Innovation is considered a crucial issue for the development of global education, especially for language teaching. Educational innovation in language teaching consists of teaching materials, methodological skills and pedagogical values that belong to curricular innovation. In this process, “teachers and the students always play a key role in all language teaching innovation” [6, p. 43]. In addition, various participants in society will affect the process of that curricular innovation, such as leaders of Ministry of Education, the University officials, the Dean of the department and Institutional scientific board, etc. There is also an ethnic tendency to depend on such a strategy to adjust in definite contexts of innovation implementation [6, p. 43]. However, curricular innovation involves “a variety of professional, academic and administrative change” [6, p. 51], that means innovation will be enhanced by both an organization’ power and its administrator. Through this, innovation management is an interest of various participants in language teaching that is necessary for developing education.

Based on these theoretical points of views, a trial was conducted as an innovation to consider the outcomes of using pictures in teaching English speaking at Hanoi Law University (HLU). This work is conducted to identify the efficiency of using pictures to enhance fluency and engagement among first year non-major students of English at HLU , and then clarify the behavior and attitudes of students to these activities and the approach used. This work broadens comprehension of techniques for teaching English speaking to students whose first language is not English. The rationale for the work derives from the current English teaching and learning at HLU and the need to increase greater perspective of the English speaking teaching and learning. Therefore, the English speaking teaching and learning methods should be innovated at HLU. The researcher will apply qualitative methods and triangulation to achieve validity, reliability and crucial data and get further understanding of the research. The teaching and learning of English for non-major students in Vietnam are far from satisfying high prospects because learning English four skills have not been respected. Moreover, the teachers have kept on teaching English with traditional methods, as the action of saying again or learning by heart dialogues for many years. However, with the aiming at meeting the demands of a modern society, the English teaching and learning are to enhance the communicative skills of the students, since, only in that method, the students can express themselves and realize how to follow the community and intellectual rules in suitable ways for their own every communicative situation. For improving fluency of Vietnam non-major students, teaching English-speaking needs to be taken into consideration.

Through examining the current English teaching and learning at HLU, I found that most of first year non-major expressed evidently that they disliked speaking English in front of the full class. They had to learn English in large-size classes (from 35 to over 40 students) that teacher could not give them enough practice, thus, they were only interested in vocabulary, grammar, written English but they were not interested in English speaking. Students also expressed to hate learning English in general and speaking in particular with traditional teaching methods and colorless textbooks that led to students disregarded intentionally their responsibilities for completing the conversational tasks when they had to work in groups. Throughout observation of groups in communication activities, a few good students were appointed to lead his/ her group and then that good students were responsible for making presentations. However, when pictures are designed in English speaking classes, most of students are very vocal in classroom. Many students are willing to make presentations. Some of them take hold of all chances of speaking from the others. Whereas, there are only one or two students who look confused as they do not know what they need do in these tasks. In addition, throughout interviews and questionnaire, the majority of the students expressed evidently that they are fond of learning with pictorial topics and speaking before the full class. Additionally, students are engaged in communicative activities through pictorial topics that assist them to learn how to speak more efficiently and fluently. High scores are easier to be achieved when the students have to work in groups to learn speaking through pictures. Finally, the teachers have to plan speaking lessons with pictures regularly than before.

Accordingly, an action research should be designed to focus on the issues that whether the students could realize the advantages of using pictures in theory and consider what the students in reality understand the important role of using pictures in learning speaking in practice. For these reasons, an action research is carried out with the topic: Using pictures to enhance fluency and engagement among first year non-major students of English at Hanoi Law University.

For finding the above evidence of this paper, some key methods in qualitative research, such as questionnaires, observation field notes, focus group interview and triangulation would be used. This action research is done with the hope of helping EFL the students to nurture a habit of speaking, enhance their fluency and engagement in speaking English. In addition, this research aims to help the researcher to improve her own practice. The researcher also hopes to change the current techniques of teaching English speaking that lead to pedagogical innovation and curriculum innovation at HLU. Based on the mentioned facts, the research questions raised are: (1) What is the role of pictures in enhancing fluency? and/or (2) In what ways can pictures enhance the engagement of first year non-major students?

2. Theoretical Background

This part will clarify some the relevant theoretical background for the work including notions of speaking skill, pictures as well as the advantages of using pictures in English learning and teaching that provided by previous research.

2.1. English speaking skill

Many researchers have focused on the role of speaking skill in English as second language (ESL) and English as foreign language (EFL) classroom settings. According to Brumfit, speaking is “the productive skill” [1, p. 76] that contains listening, reading and writing, and therefore speaking is the most important skill in ESL and EFL classroom [10, p. 120]. However, there are many problems with speaking activities in class settings. The habit of using mother tongue hinders the students from speaking in the class. They are nervous about “making mistakes, losing face, having nothing to say” or “low or uneven member” [10, p. 121]. For solving these problems, some clasroom activities should be presented that help to expand the abilities of the students to convey themselves through communication, such as topic and task-based, group work, role-play, pictures, etc. Among them, pictures are considered a significant supplementary tool to enhance the students’ fluency in the English classes because Shatri stated, “Where words fail to describe, pictures will be successful due to their visual impact” [7, p. 59]. In addition, Shastri advised that, “pictures should be incorporated with pair or group work in order to engage the students in speaking before the full class” [7, p. 57].

2.2. English speaking skill and pictures

For the term “picture”, Oxford dictionary of English 2010 describes, “ Picture” is “a painting or drawing”. Pictures have been categorized into seven main groups, as photographs, personal photographs, drawings, picture books, cartoons, classroom visual aids and commercial artworks. Among them, drawings, picture books, and classroom visual aids are considered all sorts of illustration encouragement produced for applying in the class settings only. These definitions of pictures reveal some functions of pictures. In classroom, pictures are used as supplementary/practical aids that help to awake and engage the interest of students, enhance the class and then make learning speaking uncomplicated. In addition, Shastri presented some advantages of using pictures in language teaching. Pictures can create the setting to identify the characters, offer a dissimilar opinion to supply the topic coherence and strengthen the topic. Through using pictures, the teachers increase their ‘ productive skill ’ and the students are more engaged in increasing crucial interactive skills and speaking fluency” [7, p. 60, 80, 81].

With regard to the role of the teachers in these activities, Shastri stated that, “the aim of teaching English speaking is to enlarge the competence to convey oneself reasonably, persuasively and fluently” [7, p. 78]. The teachers play a key role in teaching speaking with these activities. The teachers have to produce various situations in the class settings. Hence, the teachers are required to be tolerant, empathetic and supportive to the students in order to inspire the students with the use of verbal and pictures. Pictures will be a functional aid for generating attentiveness among them.

In the scope of using picture, Shastri affirms that, “illustrations of people/place or object are more helpful at elementary level, whereas understanding and supposition of meanings is more helpful at higher level” [7, p. 59].

In brief, the major notions of teaching speaking approaches with pictorial topics are presented in the way links with speaking process to complete the conversational tasks. The collaboration of groups in various speaking steps is implemented to enlarge the communication between the students and help them in speaking fluency because all members would learn from each other. Therefore, for showing the uses of pictures in teaching speaking skill to engage among first year non-major students, to what extent if this technique is appropriate and vice versa.

3. Methodology and data

3.1. A description of subjects of the work at HLU

The subjects of the research are two teachers of English at HLU. They are 36 years old. They get MA degree in English teaching methodology. These teachers are invited to take part in this work in order to assist to teach some innovation speaking lessons. They are chosen because they are qualified, young and innovative people. Moreover, they are very interested in this work. In addition, the following subjects of the work involved 50 first year non-major students at HLU. They are students of Laws. They are from 18 to 22 years of age. They are from different Northern areas of Vietnam. Although, they had 3 years of learning English at high schools, their English proficiency is at elementary level. They are volunteer and randomly chosen to divide into 05 experimental groups that coded by B1, B2, B3, B4 and B5 respectively, with 10 students in each group in order to participate in the speaking tasks in class for the researcher observes and then they will respond the questionnaires, focus group interviews.

3.2. Methods of data collection

Qualitative research is used to “understand some features of social life, and qualitative techniques will help to produce words rather than statistics, as data for analysis” [8, p. 3]. In addition, some major methods like interviews, focus groups and observations are prevailing in the naturalist model and complementary in the affirmative model, where the employ of survey provide in contrary organize. This shows that qualitative methods normally intend to recognize the experiences and thoughts of participants. It is clear that, qualitative methods are quite flexible; a qualitative research design is chosen to predict a real world that identifies how the qualitative researcher chooses participants, collects data, investigates and approaches issues of validity, reliability and ethics.

Regarding this, the strengths of questionnaires are to be utilized in a huge trial to gather uncomplicated and standardized data from indistinguishable questions, particularly the researchers are more attracted in “what occurs” rather “why” and “how”. Data of questionnaires is not causal; therefore, the relationships between the cause and effect could not reach. After all, “data of questionnaires is also self-report which does not inevitably reveal the real behaviours” [8, p. 195].

There are two types of questionnaires. They are open-ended and closed-ended questions. The usage of closed-ended questions is to attain permanent answers (Agree/Undecided; Like me/unlike me, etc...). The strengths of closed-ended questions are easy to count, analyse and understand. However, they may not have provided for all possible answers. The usage of open-ended questions is to “provide participants a free will to give feedback all questions according to their perception (What/ Why /How?)” [5, p. 110]. The strengths of open-ended questions are flexible and helpful to trial study and create various suggestions.

Pan and Pan had implemented the work on “ The effects of pictures on the reading comprehension of low-proficiency Taiwanese English foreign language college students: An action research study ” [8, p.190 -192]. They suggested that, the researchers should attach an extra technique that is “interview with the participants” to classify how the researcher selects participants, collect data, analyses and approach of validity, reliability and ethnics. Through the outcome of the study, They concluded, «Interview with the members regarding if and how they utilize pictures would supplement the effects of the reading comprehension studies”. Hinchey recommended that, “the researchers should ask participants to attain their responses» [3, p. 81]. However, participants are not usually willing to answer honestly, because participants feel too strongly or lose their faces if they tell the truth to strangers. Therefore, focus groups will be appropriate method in this case. The feature of focus groups is group interview. Through this, the researchers will interview a representative group to discover their variety insight into a separate theme. Focus groups are valuable for approaching different views on a sole theme within a sole forum. The strength of a focus group is its effectiveness in obtaining various views in a limited amount of time.

Lastly, observations field notes method is considered a written record of trials that happen in classroom, playground, etc. and observed by a researcher [3, p. 79]. Furthermore, the researchers will observe and then take note in a form of data collection that differs from interviews. Observations are needed an ethnical rule. The weaknesses of observations are hard to carry out if the researcher is a participant observer. Sometimes observations could not avoid bias because the researchers select what to oversee. The strength of observations is not to make pressure on participants and to offer a valuable technique of triangulating extra forms of data collection (e.g. focus group).

After reviewing theoretical background that related to methodology, methods of data collection in qualitative research containing questionnaires, field notes and focus groups are selected for this work (Table 1).

Table 1

Methods of data collection

Who	What	Where	When	How
50 first year non-major students at HLU (5 groups)	Triangulation: Field notes, recording and digital photo	classroom	during the course	This would be assessed and treated according to their common outcomes. It is valuable to determine the attitude of participants when group works are engaged in communicative activities through pictures. Field notes are implemented during the course This will discover the behavior and attitudes of students towards these activities and the approach used.
50 first year non-major students at HLU (5 groups)	Triangulation: Observation, focus groups (five open-ended questions) and interview individually	a spared room (time of interview: 20 minutes)	at the mid-term	This would follow-up questionnaires method to discover the general attitudes of students towards English pictorial topics. Furthermore, this data is collected to realize how the application of pictures in speaking is effective. This would discover how students would benefit from the effectiveness of using pictures. Students' reply could expand their engagement in speaking throughout the remainders of the course and then the students could provide different ideas that suggest broadened evaluations.
50 first year non-major students at HLU (5 groups)	Triangulation: Interview, questionnaires (five closed-ended questions) and artifacts (paintings, written English)	Classroom (time of interview: 20 minutes)	week 2, 3, 4 (collecting artifacts) and week 5 (delivering and collecting questionnaires)	They contain the evidence that related to the research questions. The following five closed-ended questions with five-point levels are exploited to evaluate the effectiveness in teaching speaking through pictures. The statistics on the five-point levels would show the influence of pictures on the students’ performance and practice. This data would be treated to complement the outcomes provided the two mentioned methods.
6 colleagues	Triangulation: Focus group (five open-ended questions) and interview individually	a spared room (time of interview: 20 minutes)	week 5	They contain the evidence that related to the research questions. The action research was done that could “help the teachers increase their productive skill ”. Furthermore, this will help teachers to know best the way students learn English speaking that lead to teachers change their thoughts and their teaching method to teach English speaking.

3.3. Data collection process and instruments for data analysis

Observation field notes is the most suitable method that is used to this work because this method helps the researcher to reduce the ethical issue in classroom. 50 students are chosen for field notes. Field notes are implemented during the course. The researcher spends all day at the classroom within 5 weeks.

Regard this, the researcher uses classroom observation form, digital photos and recording for triangulation. Furthermore, when observing, the researcher also discover how the students speak, the period and the way the students have a conversation; how the students are engaged in speaking with pictorial topics; whether students like the pictorial topics. These descriptive data would be assessed and treated according to their common outcomes (Table 2).

Table 2

Classroom Observation form for innovation lessons at HLU

Name of observer/ Objective of observation::	Date:	Length of observation:
Teacher’s name:	Class:	Text book:

Time

Teachers’ activities

Students’ activities

Comments

The researcher applies focus group interview to understand the behavior of students on using pictures in learning English speaking. Furthermore, this data is collected to realize how the application of pictures in speaking is effective and find out the general thoughts of students towards pictorial topics (Appendix3). All the responses could be recorded by hand/tape, transcribed and classified into every group in the same increasing argument to be investigated. These interviews are conducted at the mid-term as the students have had experiences of learning speaking through pictures by that time. According to students’ responses, the extra investigation could be carried out.

Finally, due to the advantages of questionnaires , they are planned and filled-in by 50 students. The content of questionnaires is written in both English and Vietnamese. The 50 handouts will be coded by numbers before delivering to the students. The questionnaires will be asked at the end of the course. They comprise the evidence that relates to the research questions. The closed-ended questions are distributed to the treatment groups, which learn pictorial topics.

The interview questions for students

+ What do you think if your teacher applies a new method to teach English speaking?

+ What do you think about the use of pictures in teaching and learning spoken English?

+ What do you think if your teacher uses your own paintings in teaching English speaking?

+ In what ways can pictures engage you in the task?

This method will help to confirm the data of field notes. Questionnaires will be useful for collecting data to examine and assess the findings and thus, help to adjust the research questions. This data would be treated and presented as a frequency and percentage distribution that complements the outcomes provided the two mentioned methods [8, p. 192]. All the data would be treated according to thematic analysis. Thematic analysis is “the most universal method for descriptive qualitative projects” [9, p. 24]. The advantages of this method are fairly simple and quick to study and practice. This could classify the common issues and the most important themes, and thus offer a thick description of the data set. Accordingly, it should be concluded that thematic analysis is suitable to be applied as an instrument in analyzing the data. The data collection process and data analysis will take place within 5 weeks.

3.4. Steps of the innovation implementation

The research will be carried out within 5 weeks of spring semester, from March 10 ^th to April 11 ^th , 2023.

Before the lesson: the teacher plan the lessons and ask the students to work in groups to prepare the own thematic paintings for all speaking lessons before entering the class. The teacher has to plan the lessons that incorporate various activities before entering the classes because lesson planning would help the teacher to make the optimal use of classroom time. These speaking lessons will be designed basing on the topics of speaking from unit 10 to unit 14 of current textbook at HLU.

During the lesson: At the first lesson, the objectives and procedure of the innovation speaking lessons would be introduced to the students. The teacher have to work as conductors who help students obtain and process the implied possibilities in the scenes and the teacher direct the students to resolve carefully constructed tasks by themselves and in collaboration with their peers, under the teacher’s control. In addition, the teacher would comment on the student’s presentation and give mark after their presentations. However, with the aiming at achieving the effects on implementing the innovation speaking lessons, the researcher will amend and adjust these lessons frequently.

After the lessons: The teacher gives the students followed up activities after their presentations.

4. Conclusions and recommendations

In short, this work is conduct to clarify the value of using pictures to enhance fluency and engagement among first year non-major students at HLU, and determine the perceptions and thoughts of the students towards these activities and the approaches exploited. For answering the research questions, the researcher will apply field notes, questionnaires, focus groups and triangulation to achieve validity, reliability and crucial data as well as gain insights of the analysis. The action research is done to help the teachers to get deep understanding of the methods that the students learn English speaking and then the teachers may change their teaching techniques to teach English speaking. Consequently, the students would benefit from the various values of using pictures in teaching speaking skill that enhance their fluency and engagement in communicative activities as well as improve their speaking ability. The researcher also hopes to change the current techniques of teaching English speaking that lead to pedagogical innovation and curriculum innovation at HLU.

Table 3

Contents of five closed-ended questions with five-point levels

Statements	1	2	3	4	5
	strongly agree	agree	neutral	disagree	Strongly disagree
The pictures supported my comprehension of the topic.
The pictures assisted me to suggest the meaning of new words that I could not understand in this topic.
When facing trouble with generating sentences to illustrate word meanings of the topic, the pictures inspire me to understand, thus motivate me to learn.
I understand what teacher says but I dislike speaking with pictorial topics.
The pictures engage me in speaking English in front of the class.

List of the interview questions for teachers

+ What do you think about the use of pictures in teaching and learning spoken English?

+ Have you ever used pictures in your English classes? Did your role change when you applied it in teaching spoken English? Could you please give your reasons if you have never applied it?

+ Do you think that the current teaching conditions at HLU are suitable for the implementation of using pictures in teaching and learning spoken English?

+ What do you think if the pictures will be applied in teaching and learning spoken English at HLU in the future?

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