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Luận văn trình bày nghiên cứu khảo sát về ảnh hưởng của văn hóa học tập Việt Nam đến thái độ của học sinh trung học phổ thông đối với các hoạt động học tiếng Anh theo đường hướng giao tiếp. Nghiên cứu đã sử dụng phiếu điều tra để thu thập dữ liệu từ 166 học sinh được lựa chọn ngẫu nhiên ở một trường Trung học phổ thông. Kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy ảnh hưởng của văn hóa học tập Việt Nam đến thái độ của học sinh đối với các hoạt động này. Những thái độ đó vừa thuận lợi vừa bất lợi cho việc áp dụng CLT đối với đối tượng của nghiên cứu. Phát hiện này cho thấy để áp dụng CLT thành công tại Việt Nam cần phải có sự thích ứng của CLT trong bối cảnh văn hóa Việt Nam, hoặc có sự điều chỉnh của văn hóa học Việt Nam, hoặc cả hai.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to people who have, in various ways, contributed to the completion of this thesis. First and foremost, I would like to give my most sincere thanks to Dr. Le Van Canh, my supervisor, for not only his responses to any of my questions but also for his encouragement at any time of my hardship. I would like to thank Nguyen Viet Hung, my friend, a PhD student at the University, for helping me much with advice and encouragement. I am grateful to the students and teachers at my researched Upper-Secondary School for their cooperation during my data collection period. I owe a great debt to my wife, daughter and my families for the patience and encouragement I have had from them. I believe that with all contribution of the people mentioned, I have an improved final thesis; however, there are unavoidably remaining weaknesses in this thesis, all of which belong to my responsibility, and all of which I should learn from. i ABSTRACT The present study explored the influence of Vietnamese learning culture on upper- secondary school students’ attitudes towards communicative activities in English learning. The survey study method was adopted, and the questionnaires were delivered to a systematically selected sample of 166 students from one upper-secondary school in a mountainous region in Vietnam. This aimed at collecting necessary data for answering three research questions about the students’ belief about language learning, the influence of this belief on the students’ opinion about the role of teacher and learner and on their preferences for English learning activities both inside and outside the classroom. The findings demonstrated influence of the Vietnamese culture of learning on the students’ attitudes towards communicative English learning activities, some of which were favourable for utilisation of communicative activities. These concern their openness in communication, and a greater responsibility they took for their own learning. They also indicated the students’ positive attitudes towards group work activities, which are typical of CLT techniques. Besides, the study showed evidence of the students’ negative attitudes towards communicative activities, which resulted from the incompatibleness of these activities to the Vietnamese culture of learning. Basically, this incompatibility is related with the students’ perceived drudgery nature of learning, the cultural strategies for effective learning through memorisation and error avoidance, the necessity for maintaining harmonious relationships, the students’ passive learning, and their respect for and unequal relationship with the teacher. Based on these findings, some suggestions were proposed concerning either adaptation of the CLT approach and its spawn activities to the cultural context of the study, or adjustment of the students’ Vietnamese learning culture, or both. All of this aims at successful implementation of CLT at the researched school. ii TABLE OF CONTENT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I ABSTRACT II TABLE OF CONTENT III LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES IV PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 PART B: DEVELOPMENT 4 PART C: CONCLUSION 39 REFERENCES 44 APPENDICES I iii LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Figures FIGURE 1. CULTURE – ATTITUDE – BEHAVIOUR 10 FIGURE 2. RESPONDENTS’ GENDER 24 FIGURE 3. RESPONDENTS’ ENGLISH PROFICIENCY 24 Tables TABLE 1. QUESTIONNAIRES DELIVERED AND COLLECTED 24 TABLE 2. STUDENTS’ CONCEPTIONS OF LEARNING 25 TABLE 3. STUDENTS’ BELIEF ABOUT THE ROLE OF TEACHER AND LEARNER 31 TABLE 4. STUDENTS’ PREFERENCE FOR ENGLISH LEARNING ACTIVITIES 34 TABLE 5. STUDENTS’ MOST FAVOURED, MOST DISFAVOURED AND HOME ACTIVITIES 36 iv PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of Study Since the time of Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman philosopher, and later in the Renaissance theories, until now all languages have been considered to be of equal status (Pym, 2007). This is because “there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demanding, or handicapping about any of them” (Crystal, 1987, p.6, cited by Kasaian and Subbakrishna, 2011, p.165). The English language is not an exception. Although English was said to be a source of gratification to mankind because it was spoken in two of the greatest powers of the world (Jesperson, 1905), that is, America and Britain, it has no intrinsic linguistic supremacy over other languages in the world (Kasaian and Subbakrishna, 2011). Nonetheless, “for good or ill, the dominance of English as the world’s preferred second or foreign language has been increasing in recent years” (Canh, 2004). For this reason, “those who are able to exploit it, whether to sell goods and services or to sell ideas, wield a very considerable power”; furthermore, “if you want to resist the exploitive power of English, you have to use English to do it” (Halliday, 2006, p.362, cited by Van, 2010, p.17). Although the statement is ideological, it has some truth in it. Since the utility of English has been perceived as a passport for many desired things in life, English teaching has consequently been regarded to be able to serve individual, national, and international needs (Canh, 2004), and “if people are deprived of the chance of learning it, they are the ones who suffer” (Halliday, 2006, p.362, cited by Van, 2010, p.17). During the course of teaching and learning English, numerous methods have come and gone because there is no one-size-fits-all method that can meet the goals and needs of all learners and programs. As a matter of rule, in the 1970s Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) emerged, in the West, and started being discussed as a fashionable way of teaching languages, and by the turn of the new millennium, CLT had become a real buzzword in language teaching methodology around the world (Dornyei, 2009). In this context, education administrators, English language educators and teachers have navigated their attention toward CLT, as a response to its irresistible appeal. Accordingly, CLT has widely been accepted as an effective way of teaching English as a second and foreign language (ESL/EFL). This is because there is an unspoken assumption that CLT is not only “modern”, but is in fact the only way to learn a language properly; hence, a country without CLT is somehow backward; teachers who do not use CLT 1 approach in their teaching are backward; methodologies which are considered to be traditional and the one based on route learning are said to be behind in comparison with communicative approaches (Bax, 2003, p.281). Vietnam is not an exception from the spread of CLT. Although CLT was introduced into the country rather later than into other countries in the neighbourhood (Canh and Barnard, 2009), it has been rhetorical in the whole school system of the country, especially at the general education level. However, scholars and researchers have reported the unsatisfactory implementation of this approach in Vietnam (Canh, 2004; Canh, 2011; Canh and Barnard, 2009; Barnard and Viet, 2010; Nguyen and Franken, 2010; Thinh, 2006; Phu, 2008; Van, 2010; Son, 2011; Hung, 2011; Vietnamnet, 2012; Toan, 2013; Khang, 2014). One of the reasons for the failure of CLT implementation in Vietnam is that the approach is imposed without taking into consideration the students’ learning culture, which influences students’ attitudes towards learning activities, learning behaviours, and learning habits. However, this issue has often been ignored. I believe that for the success of innovation, the first step to be taken should be the understanding of learners’ learning culture so that teachers can decide what aspects of the intended innovation fit the students’ learning culture, and what aspects of the students’ learning culture should be changed to accommodate the intended pedagogical innovation. This is the rationale for my study. 2. Research Aims and Questions Being inspired by all the above mentioned rationales and my preliminary interest, this survey study aims to explore the influence of Vietnamese learning culture on attitudes of the upper-secondary school students in a mountainous area toward CLT. Information gained from this study is aimed to help teachers to make their teaching more learner- centred by modifying the principles of CLT to the students’ learning culture for better educational results. With this aim in mind, the study was designed to seek answers to the following research questions: 1. What is the students’ belief about language learning? 2. How do their beliefs about language learning affect their opinions of the teacher’s role and student’s role in the English language classroom? 3. How do their beliefs about language learning affect their preferences for language learning activities both inside and outside the classroom? 2 It is hoped that answers to the above questions can inform classroom teachers of how to adapt CLT in their classrooms. 3. Methods of Study In order to achieve the above-stated aims, this research adopts the survey study framework with the use of a questionnaire as the key instrument for data collection. As the purpose of this study is to gain insights into students’ attitudes to, and opinions of, learning activities, the survey method is appropriate. However, the survey was conducted with a small group of upper-secondary school students who were chosen purposefully in one school in a mountainous region of Vietnam. Therefore, no generalization of the findings was intended. Rather, the findings can be used to inform teachers of English in this and other similar schools of how to adapt CLT more effectively. 4. Scope of Study The study limits itself to the exploration and description how the students’ learning culture influences their learning of English within the context of an upper-secondary school in one northern mountainous province. 5. Significance of Study This study hopes to be significant in pointing out some culturally inappropriate aspects of the CLT approach to a group of school students in a mountainous area. This understanding can lead to some suggestions for how to adapt CLT to the local learning culture so as to raise the educational effectiveness. 6. Organisation of the Thesis The thesis is composed of three parts: Introduction, Development and Conclusion. Part A introduces the rationale, research aims and questions, method, scope and significance of the study. Part B – the Development – includes a review of the related literature (Chapter 1) and issues concerning the methodology, participants, instruments, the procedure of data collection and analysis, findings and discussions of the findings (Chapter 2). Part C – the Conclusion – presents the concluding remarks drawn from this survey as well as the recommendations for adapting CLT in the researched school and other similar schools. 3 PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1. Introduction First introduced in the 1970s by British applied linguists as a reaction away from grammar-based language teaching approaches, CLT is a multi-perspectival approach that builds on several disciplines that include, at least, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and educational research (Savignon, 1991, 2002; Hu, 2002; Dornyei, 2009; Asassfeh et al., 2012). Beside this widely accepted view, there have been many attempts in accounting for the formation of CLT; nevertheless, for personally logical reason, this paper presents a combined view of these scholars and some others on the background of CLT. 1.2. Communicative Language Teaching: Principles and Characteristics CLT is resulted from a shift in the way language is viewed. Accordingly, while language is still considered as consisting of vocabulary, structures and rules with which, through learning, learners can make grammatically correct sentences, it is not a static system of interconnected units but social behaviour, which is used purposefully, and always in context (Savignon, 1991, 2002). Its primary function is for interaction and communication: people communicating with others to accomplish some course of action. Therefore, language is said to be instrumental to communicative functions such as making, expressing, exchanging and negotiating meaning (Ma, 2009; Hu, 2002). The assumption is that there is always interdependence between form and meaning, or between structural and functional aspects of language within a language (Hu, 2002). Thus, knowing a language means not solely knowing how to construct sentences in isolation, but also knowing how to combine sentences into texts and to put texts in discourse of the speech community in order to fulfil some task and meet some need. CLT has made this one of its most characteristic features when “it pays systematic attention to functional as well as structural aspects of language, combining these into a more fully communicative view” (Littlewood, 1981, p.1, cited by Dornyei, 2009). Moreover, it also puts more emphases on meaningful use than on the form with the guiding principle that “accuracy and acquisition of the formal features of the L2 [second language] are less a measure of successful language learning than are fluency and an ability to get something across comprehensibly to a native speaker” (Sanders, 1987, p.222, cited by Beale, 2002, p.19). 4 In order to communicate effectively in a language, people need to have the following four aspects of abilities (Stern, 1983, cited by Ma, 2009): • The intuitive mastery of the forms of language • The intuitive mastery of the linguistic, cognitive, affective and social-cultural meanings expressed by the language forms • The capacity to use the language with maximum attention to communication and minimum attention to form • The creativity of language use Hymes (1971 cited in Ma, 2009), while reacting to Chomsky’s conception of competence and performance, is concerned more with language in the speech communities and in its integration with communication and culture. To him, linguistic knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful communication. People also need to understand about culture, through which they know how to interact in culturally acceptable ways with others in different situations and relationships. He proposes an influential theory of communicative competence. Communicative competence is defined as “the ability to communicate in a personally effective and socially appropriate manner” (Trenholm and Jensen, 1988, cited by Ma, 2009, p.41). Canale and Swain (1980) conceive it more broadly by relating it with the concept of social behaviour: communicative competence is the ability to interpret and enact appropriate social behaviours which requires the active involvement of the learner in the production of the target language. For this reason, communicative competence plays a not only necessary but very important role in language proficiency. It is even identified as “the most important linguistic ability”, which helps to “produce or understand utterances which are not so much grammatical but, more important, appropriate to context in which they are made” (Campbell and Wales, 1970, p.247, cited by Canale and Swain, 1980, p.4, italics in original). Communicative competence consists of four components, including grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence (Ma, 2009; Canale and Swain, 1980; Latha and Rajan, 2012; Beale, 2002; Richards, 2006). The grammatical (or linguistic) component refers to the knowledge of lexis, syntax, morphology, phonology and the like. It concerns the language users’ understanding about 5 how phonemes are combined into words, how words come together to form phrases, clauses or sentences, and how sentences are sounded with stresses and with different intonations. Briefly speaking, grammatical competence is the cognition of linguistic rules, which enables people to create and understand grammatically correct sentences. Sociolinguistic competence implies knowing what is expected socially and culturally by members of the speech community. This element transcends its linguistic counterpart because with knowledge of language alone, people cannot use language appropriately, and therefore, effectively. They need to know about sociolinguistic rules, which stipulate, for example, what to say to people of different statuses and different relationships in different circumstances. This knowledge is also about how to response nonverbally in particular ways basing on the purpose of the interaction. It enables people to vary their use of language according to the setting and the participants. Discourse competence is related to the logical meaning relationship between sentences, that is to say, in a text or a discourse. It concerns the ways, for instance, how sentences are grouped, with different discourse markers, and rules of cohesion and coherence, in different discourse structures, in meaningful ways to serve language users’ purposes. These discourse principles are also important clues for processing different types of texts, and perceiving and comprehending the meaning that the conversational partners want to convey. Strategic competence is the knowledge of communication strategies that people employ in interaction. It is, for example, “the ability to know how to keep a conversation going, how to terminate the conversation, and how to clear up communication breakdown as well as comprehension problems” (Ma, 2009, p.41). Basically, when people use communication strategies, they manipulate their language to meet their communicative purpose. For this reason, it can be said that this kind of understanding is the compensation for the limitation in or reinforcement of people’s understanding of linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse rules. From the communicative competence perspective, learning a language is to facilitate the integration of the four types of knowledge for learners (Canale and Swain, 1980; Asassfeh et al., 2012; Richards, 2006; Savignon, 2002; Hu, 2002; Ma, 2009; Latha and Rajan, 2012), as dissected above. 6 [...]... philosophy of CLT and that in Vietnamese culture are under different poles (Hsiao, 2010) This entails that the meeting of these, manifested in the implementation of CLT in Vietnamese context, to Vietnamese learners, may cause either convergence or divergence Another point to note is the dynamic nature of culture Culture is always changing, and with recent rapid development of Vietnam through modernization... have to raise their hand and wait for the teacher’s allowing them to speak 1.8 Beliefs of Learning in Vietnamese Culture It can be said that learning in Vietnam is influenced, firstly, by face-saving and harmony-maintaining culture This features the collectivist nature of Vietnamese culture In Vietnam, each member of the community sees themselves as belonging to an in-group; they do not want to stand... greatly valued in Vietnamese society (Mahmoodzadeh, 2011) For this reason, it is concerned that how Vietnamese teachers cope with conflicts between Western values embedded in CLT and traditional Vietnamese values (Khoi and Iwashita, 2012) Since teachers’ traditional roles as mentors and imparters of knowledge in the classroom lie at the heart of the pedagogical practices in Vietnam (Kramsch & Sullivan,... Duong, Diller and Sutherland’s (1975, p.126) comment that: According to Vietnamese custom, one should remain modest and humble, showing the extent of knowledge or skills only when asked In Vietnam, there is the motto of saying less than what one actually knows, often and admirable characteristic Modesty and humility for Vietnamese are very important social graces, and deeply ingrained into their identity... Culture is always changing, and with recent rapid development of Vietnam through modernization and industrialization, Vietnamese cultural values are subject to change, and changing This may result in changes in Vietnamese philosophy of learning, and subsequently in the way Vietnamese people learn, as well as learners’ attitude towards CLT 1.9 Learning Culture and CLT Since its birth, CLT has spread... teachers’ authority, and learners’ autonomy in learning Getting closer to the context of the current study, although it is reported that “Vietnamese teachers of English, by and large, have positive attitudes towards the CA [CLT]” (Canh, 1999), implementation of CLT in Vietnam has not satisfied teachers, learners and parents, and educational managers The underlying reason of this, besides ones concerning to... interesting feature of Vietnamese learners is that though they are thought of learning by rote or memorisation, they are only silent and inactive in the surface The survey conducted by Duong Thi Hoang Oanh and Nguyen Thi Hien (2006) 13 showed that both teachers and students at the tertiary level emphasised memorization as an important strategy for learning grammar and vocabulary Vietnamese learners prefer... students of the school was established, which included students’ full name and their class In order to do this, the student name lists of all the classes were collected in the form of computer files (Microsoft Excel) These separated lists were then combined into one list, which was again sorted alphabetically according to the students’ names After that, 150 students were randomly chosen out of the total... influential to Vietnamese learners’ view on student-student and student-teacher relationships which in turn affect their ways of learning Vietnamese culture is considered to rest on the principle of respect, which is very much concerned with face-saving Respect is not only for higher-status people but also for other people, for the family and the community as well This is because each Vietnamese is a member... Continuing on the theme of respect and face-saving, since in Vietnam, honour and face is more important than any material possession in the world, people always yearn for a good name They are taught to avoid words or actions damaging dignity and honour of others in the group they belong to This affects their way of communication Vietnam is considered to be a high-context and indirect-communication . approach in Vietnam (Canh, 2004; Canh, 2011; Canh and Barnard, 2009; Barnard and Viet, 2010; Nguyen and Franken, 2010; Thinh, 2006; Phu, 2008; Van, 2010; Son, 2011; Hung, 2011; Vietnamnet, 2012;. Learning in Vietnamese Culture It can be said that learning in Vietnam is influenced, firstly, by face-saving and harmony-maintaining culture. This features the collectivist nature of Vietnamese culture. In. that in Vietnamese culture are under different poles (Hsiao, 2010). This entails that the meeting of these, manifested in the implementation of CLT in Vietnamese context, to Vietnamese learners,