IMPACT OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING ON SPEAKING COMPETENCE OF 10TH GRADE STUDENTS IN PHO YEN HIGH SCHOOL

Abstract

Over the past decade, cooperative learning has appeared as one of the leading approaches in speaking environments. In the teaching context at Pho Yen high school, there existed some problems for speaking skills that the researcher came across in helping the students to speak in the classroom such as shyness when expressing personal opinions, passivity in speaking activities, and so on. Therefore, the aims of the research is to evaluate cooperative learning’s effects on the students’ speaking competence and explore their attitudes towards this approach. There are forty 10th grade students, including 19 males and 21 females at 15 year old, taking part in the research. The authors used a combination of two data collection instruments: a speaking test and a questionnaire. The study has shown the significant improvements of students’ English speaking performance after utilizing cooperative learning. Moreover, most of the students expressed a positive attitude towards applying cooperative learning and an interest in group work, which demonstrate that they believe in its positive effects. Besides, some suggestions were also proposed to reduce the shortcomings of using cooperative learning in English speaking classes to enhance the potentiality of this method and make it more interesting, meaningful and learning-centered.