The Effects of Oral Assessment on Teaching and

ASSIGNMENT 3 Name: Dinh Quang Doan

THE EFFECTS OF ORAL ASSESSMENT ON TEACHING AND
LEARNING ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS IN HO CHI MINH CITY

1. Many Vietnamese students who have learnt English in schools for seven years and three years in colleges or universities could not apply English to communicate in simple situations. It is as the result of what we assess the students’ achievement through written tests, and multiple-choice tests. Moreover, the MOET has a tendency to apply multiple-choice tests to assess the achievement of students for majority of subjects in schools as well as colleges and universities. Therefore, my research will address to the research question: “To what extent does oral assessment influence on teaching and learning English?” 2. The three main concepts in this research are oral assessment, attitudes and communicative competence. 1. Oral Assessment a. Nominal definition: Oral assessment is the way of evaluating speaking and communicating skills of language learners. b. Operational definition: Oral assessment can be conducted throughout activities that the language learner participates and performs orally or by oral tests at the end of each semester. 2. Communicative competence a. Nominal definition: Communicative competence is a linguistic term which refers to a learner's L2 ability. It not only refers to a learner's ability to apply and use grammatical rules, but also to form correct utterances, and know how to use these utterances appropriately. b. Operational definition: Communicative competence is measured by teachers or peers about learner's ability to apply and use grammatical rules, but also to form correct utterances, and know how to use these utterances appropriately during activities in class or oral tests. 3. . Attitude a. Nominal definition: Attitude is a person's perspective toward a specified target. b. Operational definition: attitude toward teaching and learning can be measured by questionnaires, observation, recording, filming and interviewing the participants. 3. Hypotheses: a. Oral assessment causes positive attitudes toward teaching and learning English in high schools. b. Oral assessment motivates communicative competence of teenaged students. 4. I choose to do this study by survey research because the variables in this research can be conducted by questionnaires, interviews, observation. Moreover, survey research does not take long time to do research and it can be more objective because I can do research with a large choice of samples in different places. 5. Role of each variable in the above hypotheses: - Oral assessment: independent variable - Attitude: dependent variable - Communicative competence: dependent variable - Teenaged students (age from 13 to 18): control variable 6. Research design: 7. Sampling procedures: I use the systematic random sampling to get sample for my research. The population for my research is about 100,000 students from 100 high schools and 1000 English teachers in 100 high schools in Ho Chi Minh city. First, I looked at the list of high schools and chose 10 schools among 100 schools With the formula K = N/n, {“N” is the number of schools, “n” the sample size that I need}, I have sampling fraction 10/100 = 10%. In this case, the interval K = N/n = 100/10 = 10. For example, I started with number 2, then I chose school with number 12, 22, 32 and so on. For the sample of students, I also use systematic random sampling to chose 100 students from 1000 students of ten schools with sampling fraction 100/1000 = 10%, so K = N/n = 1000/100 = 10, and then I started to choose by selecting every 10 students. For the sample of teacher, I also use systematic random sampling to choose 100 teachers from 1000 teachers of 10 schools. 8. Data collection plan: in order to collect data, I will use methods: questionnaires, interviews and observation. Before conducting this research, I send emails to the headmasters of 10 schools which I intend to do research to explain about my purposes of research and then I also send this email to those English teachers whom I intend to send questionnaires. I design a questionnaire which can identify the attitudes of teachers about teaching ( what and how they will teach if oral assessment is conducted in their classes and examinations). Then I email the questionnaires to 100 English teachers in my sample and tell them to email me back after a week. For the students, I design the questionnaire which can identify the attitudes of students about learning English if oral assessment is conducted in classes and examinations. The questionnaire also identify what kind of skills and knowledge that students will focus on learning. Then I administer the questionnaire to 100 students of 10 classes from grade 6 to grade 12 during their break-time, in order to help them to understand my questionnaire, I also translate it into Vietnamese. I will collect this questionnaire after the break-time. 9. This research will be conducted during a school-year in 10 classes of 10 different schools including private schools and public schools in Ho Chi Minh city. The staff for conducting this research requires only two people. 10. The statistical techniques I will use: a. The descriptive tools: the distribution and central tendency b. Inferential tools: T-test c. Measures of association: correlation 11. Make up some data: a. This table show the attitudes of teacher and students toward oral assessment in teaching and learning English.

|Table 1: the attitudes of teacher and students toward oral assessment in teaching and learning English. |
|Do you like oral assessment ? |Teacher |Student |Total |
|Yes |55 |70 |125 |
|No |45 |30 |75 |
|Total | | | |

b. Table 2:
|Table 2: Does oral tests make you more concerned about communicative competence? ( each group of age has 50 participants) |
|Age |Strongly agree |Agree |Disagree |Strongly disagree |
| Junior high school ( 13 – |20 |15 |10 |5 |
|15) | | | | |
| Senior high school ( 16-18) |18 |16 |14 |2 |

12. Budget for this research :
|List of work |Cost |Notes |
|Design questionnaire |50 USD | |
|Traveling and contacting |100 USD | |
|Printing and photo |100 USD | |
|Collecting and analyse data |60 USD | |
|Salary for staff |200 USD | |
|Total |510 USD | |

In conclusion, this research cost about 510 USD.

Reference: Trochim, M. K. W. (2005). Research method – the concise knowledge base. Ohio: Atomic Dog Publishing. Issac, S & Michael B. W. (1997). Handbook in research and evaluation.