An Evaluation of Students’ Oral Fluency to Identify Ways to Help Them Improve Their English Speaking Skills

Abstract

Most English medium institutions in Hong Kong, from kindergarten to tertiary level, are using the Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) approach to teach. Students have to use English in all the subjects except the Chinese course. The definition of CLIL is that L2 is used in all classes as the teaching and learning medium. In Hong Kong, Chinese medium schools do not have to use CLIL (perhaps only in the so-called outstanding classes chosen by the schools). Currently only the English medium schools are using CLIL extensively. Nevertheless, most tertiary colleges and government-funded universities have adopted English as the medium of instruction though both English and Chinese are given the official language status. In this paper, we shall use speech data to identify the effectiveness of using English in the learning process. A total of 50 recordings of Year 1 students' discussions and presentations have been collected for analysis. Focus of the study is to identify the types of language problems students have encountered in expressing themselves in English. Major Findings: Students have problems with the appropriate use of vocabulary, parts of speech and sentence structures. Most of them could not differentiate the definite article 'the' from non-definite articles (a, an). It is clear that L1 has interfered their use of L2. Quite a few also tried to memorize texts from various sources. Only the above average students could respond to the teacher's comments using appropriate expressions. To conclude, it is recommended that some coping strategies should be taught to them through practice.



Author Information
Kit Lin Lee, Gratia Christian College, Hong Kong
Eliza L.Y. Lau, Gratia Christian College, Hong Kong

Paper Information
Conference: ACLL2016
Stream: Conversation analysis

This paper is part of the ACLL2016 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon