The Role of Receptive Skills in Enhancing Second Language Acquisition - Leisure Time Activities - Education - http://maxpages.com/thena/Leisure_Time

After the classes: Leisure time Activities

The members of the experimental group were motivated to read after the classes. The teacher told the students at the beginning of the year that those who could read at least 3000 pages until the end of the year would get extra credit. This was inten ded to motivate the students at the very beginning of the year. The teacher was hoping that the students would get the pleasure of reading and try to read as much as possible without any extra motivation. First, the teacher organized a group to buy cheap reading books for the class. Then, they could exchange the books among themselves and they could change the books with new ones with some extra fund. A student was responsible for the recording of the books. Another one kept a record of the names and the number of the books each student read. A month after the application began students were much eager to read. They added new graded readers and short stories to the class library. The teacher also gave a class hour for SSR activity in class.

1) The questionnaire indicated that the average student in the experimental group read more than 3000 pages from various graded readers. The approximate number of pages read by the subjects in the control group was 50.

2) The learners in the experimental group studied grammar nearly 3 hours a week whereas the ones in the control group studied grammar from 8 to 13 hours each week.

3) In terms of listening practice outside the class, the average experimental group member reported that they spent 4 hours on listening. The control group, on the other hand, gave diverse reports. Eight of the subjects spent no time on listening; one reported one hour; four of them wrote 2 hours; four of them spent 4 hours; two of them spent 5 hours; and one reported that he spent 10 hours on listening every week.

4) The experimental group allotted no time for writing outside the class. The control group, however, were engaged in writing activities from 4 to 8 hours every week.

2) Materials

As the main course book, American Streamline Departures and Connections were used (see Appendix 4). These books present texts which are organized around a typical structural syllabus. The structures are graded from simple to more complex and each uni t tries to offer practice in these structures. The books are colorful and simple. The recommended activities with the text in the teacher's book usually involve listening to the text, repetition of the text and reading aloud. After some practice of t his kind of lesson activities, asking and answering of some text- based questions follows the flow of the lesson. Most of the time oral substitution drilling of the target forms and a writing homework ends the lesson. Each book is accompanied with work-books which provide extensive drilling on target structures (see Appendix 5).

The teachers of the control group usually write grammar exercises on the blackboard and emphasized the importance of accuracy. They went over each sentence in the book, either translated or paraphrased the sentences and explained unknown vocabulary a nd the target structures.

The teacher of the experimental group used the same source books; but he did not use them as exercises of target structures.

He changed the type of the exercises and used the texts as the source of input. Often, texts were supplemented with worksheet of comprehension questions for listening and reading activity.(see Appendix 3) Beside the Streamline series the experimental group teacher also made use of other listening materials available. USIS listening materials Day By Day and Conversations F or Everyday Use by Curry (1987, 1988) were used (see Appendix 6). These books were also supplemented with listening exercises.

In the Reading part of the course, Oxford Departures in Reading and Connections in Reading were used (see Appendix 7). The reading teachers in both groups followed almost the same classroom procedures described in the book. Classroom activities in this part of the course consisted of listening to the texts, reading of the passages, games, oral discussion of the subject matter in the texts, and a written homework. The skills teacher in the experimental group did not follow the writing part of the procedure.

The video room was insufficient for the whole prep class. Students could only attend the video classes one hour a week. A Weekend Away and A Week by the Sea were the video series used in video classes (see Appendix 8). These programs were basically designed as the video component materials of English Streamline series and all try to reinforce the target structures in the books. The teacher of the experimental group noticed that the video tapes of materials are badly worn and usually incomprehensible. Therefore, first 40 episodes of the Follow Me series were used in video classes (see appendix 9). Again Follow Me series were also designed to teach grammar. However, the teacher did not focus on the forms and tried to draw the attention on the meaning content of the conversations.

3) The experimental group's awareness of the method to be followed

The researcher told the experimental group from the very beginning of the study that they would receive a different kind of instruction from the other classes; The number of hours they would spend on grammar would be minimum; and they would receive n o writing instruction nor would they do any writing activity in and outside the class. Upon students' interest he explained the principles of language acquisition in simple terms. He pointed out the importance of focus on meaning and comprehensible i nput. From time to time, he would ask the students why they sometimes studied grammar and the students responded that they studied it in order to understand the input and that they studied it only when it was necessary. At the first introduction of the approach to be followed in class students hesitated that they would fail in the tests and they would not be able to learn English as well as the students in the other classes. Explanations by the teacher at various times played an important role in convincing the students of the new methodology. However, students' commitment to the new approach increased as they realized that their performance on the weekly tests was not worse than their friends'. Also important is the fact that students' arousal of interest went higher five weeks after they were engaged in free reading activities. They reported that they loved reading stories and that they had not known that reading was such a pleasure. This psychological readiness and high motivation drew the students to participate in more meaning-based activities and in finding ways of getting more input.

The control group did not take any preparatory information about a special approach. Probably, their teachers' focus on form and grammar assignments indirectly influenced their understanding of language learning.

Testing

A speaking, two writing, and a C-test were given to both groups at the end of the study. A listening test was not administered due to the aims of the study.

Speaking Test

It was difficult to administer the speaking test. First of all, student anxiety due to the feeling of being tested was a great burden to the tester. Although the students were told many times that the exam they would take had no relation with their p assing grade, they were still too anxious before the exam. Therefore, the researcher had to explain his research to every student and he tried to persuade them to be calm, to be themselves. He was successful, though to some extend. The speaking test was conducted in the video room. One student each time was taken to the test. The tester was the researcher himself. He first asked some warm-up questions such as a question for the student to introduce himself, a question to tell a bout the best person he knows, some questions about the reasons why he was there, what he thought about the education at the school, ideas about friends, and school facilities etc. After he felt that the student got calm, a picture was given to the s tudent and he was asked to comment on the picture. The student was let to talk about the picture as much as he could. In cases when he did not like the picture, he was let free to choose another one. Each student talk lasted from 7 to 10 minutes. The test was videotaped and later viewed and scored by the agreement of two scorers. The scorers evaluated the students' performance in terms of accuracy, vocabulary, pronunciation, content (sentence length and message complexity), and fluency.

Writing Tests

Two forms of writing test were given to the students (see Appendix 10). The first writing test included three questions. One question was taken from the writing part of the Cambridge Preliminary English Test(PET). In the first question, students were required to fill in a hotel reservation form and write a note to a fr iend about the arrangements they made. The second question presented a problem at the station and the students were to write a message to a friend. The third one was again a narrative. The students were asked to write a letter to friends in their cou ntry before their arrival. The researcher made use of the pictures and question types in Testing for Language Teachers. (Hughes, 1989)

The second writing test was given to the students a week after the first one was given. That was not because of the experimental procedures but because of the difficulty in getting all of the students together at a certain hour. The test was a pictur e story test.The students were told to write a story about a series of four pictures which describe an act of robbery.

C-Test

The C-Test is a kind of cloze test. In the C-Test the second half of every second word is deleted. The basic advantage of C-Test is that it offers more exact scoring and takes less time to administer. It is considered as a means of overall general language ability (Oller, 1973; Hughes 1989). The C-Test written for the research had 100 words to be completed (see Appendix 11). Neither the experimental nor the control groups had taken an exam of this kind before. Therefore, the C-test was a surprise for them, they liked taking such an exam.

School Achievement of the students

Students took final tests at the end of the year at the school. The final test of the school included 70 questions which comprised grammar and reading comprehension questions in multiple choice and write-the- answer form (see Appendix 12). The test results were compared in order to see whether the two groups would show comparative values similar to those obtained from the research tests.

For an extra assessment of overall school achievement of the students, the researcher compared the passing grades of the subjects. The passing grades were a combination of grades obtained from the weekly and monthly tests during two semesters, the grades of the final test, and the speaking test. As a school regulation, students are taken to an oral exam at the end of each school year. The oral exam accounted for nearly 25% of the passing grade.

Data Analysis

The Statistical Package for Social Sciences(SPSS) was used for the analysis of the data obtained during the research. T statistics (T- TEST) were computed in accordance with the objectives of the study. T- tests are used to test if two variables are different or not according to a statistical comparison of the mean scores of the groups. The results are interpreted according to the level of significance chosen. The level of significance is expressed with the letter p. In this study two-tailed level of significance (.05), which is the most commonly preferred value, was used. Therefore, when the significance level computed for two variables is smaller than or equal to .05 the two groups are considered to be different. When it is greater than .05 then it means that there is not a significant difference between the groups; i.e. two groups are considered equal according to the mean scores.

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