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CHAPTER FIVE DISCUSSION
The present study aimed to exam the effects of TBOI on elementary students‟
oral communicative competence and to investigate learners‟ attitudes and motivation towards learning English after the treatment. The goals were achieved through the two research questions asked. This chapter presents the discussion on these two research questions.
Research Question 1: What Are the Effects of Theme-Based Instruction on Oral Communicative Competence for EFL Elementary School Students?
In the present study, EOPT was employed to examine the effects of students‟
oral communicative competence after the treatments of TBOI and the traditional oral instruction. The results have produced several findings. First, by comparing the results of pre-and post- EOPT of EG and CG, both groups made significant progress.
This result might be related to the learning and practicing effectiveness. Since all the learning contents and materials were totally new for the students in the two groups at the beginning, most of the learners could not answer the questions well; many of them could not even understand the questions. After twelve-week training and practicing, they became capable of understanding questions and making progress in answering the EOPT.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that, as shown in Table 4.1 and Table 4.2, TBOI helped learners yield higher scores than those of traditional oral instruction in the post EOPT results. The mean scores of EG has improved greatly from 25.57 to 44.40, while the mean scores of CG only changed from 25.26 to 36.32. The results also indicated that the EG students made a significant progress in producing oral communicative competence after the treatment of TBOI. Such wide a difference
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between EG and CG might reflect that while getting highly involved in the process of implementing TBOI, learners can gain advantages of developing their oral
communicative competence in several ways. At first, TBOI comprises activities such as brainstorming, webbing, freely discussing, idea listing or clustering, negotiating, and decision-making, which provides learners with numerous opportunities to explore, analyze, construct and evaluate any ideas in their minds by practicing and thinking in English. As Bruner (1985) pointed out that theme-based program allowed learners to get actively involved in the thematic content learning
environment, to work cooperatively with their peers, and to gain many opportunities for creative thinking and problem solving. Meanwhile, Fisher (1991) also supported that theme-based instruction created an environment that can foster and encourage all students to get involved in process learning.
Secondly, by building on learners‟ interests and prior knowledge, TBI focused on topics relevant to children‟s real-life experiences. In order to successfully complete these challenging tasks or activities relevant to their real life experiences, students need to acquire sufficient and adequate details to enrich the contents of their performance. While searching for detailed language knowledge and content information, learners actually search into their schemata of knowledge or search into their life experiences for support. This provides students with excellent opportunities to link prior knowledge with new content, creates authentic learning environment closed to their real life, and offers them with proper contexts to examine what they need to strengthen to support those areas where their language knowledge and personal experiences are deficient. According to Lave and Wenger (1991), learning can be defined as a process in which learners interacted with the world outside through reconstructing the new information and reinterpreting its
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meaning related to the real world. Similarly, Gardner (1991) also pointed out that a number of today‟s learners fail to understand what they actually learn due to the lack of connection between what they learn at school, what they need in the real life, and what they expect to learn in their mind. To respond to this predicament, Cooper (1993) provided a good suggestion that thematic-unit teaching and learning framework was one of the effective instructions to help children construct meaning since “the various content areas of the school curriculum are the basis for the authentic experiences students need to become effective constructors of meaning”
(p.430). As Heibert (1994) defined, authentic tasks lay emphasis on “student choice and ownership…, promote discussion and collaboration, and build upon students‟
interests, abilities, background, and language development” (p.391-413). Thus, TBI has created meaningful contexts (Krogh, 1990) which can promote students to engage in authentic tasks and activities learning.
Thirdly, the meaningful conceptual framework of TBI provided learners with various sources of supports, such as the teacher‟s guidance and feedback,
diversified learning materials, and peers sharing, which acted as essential factors for fostering students to yield communicative competence appropriately and automatically. Based on Krashen (1985)‟s comprehensible input theory, students need to be exposed to sufficient amounts of comprehensible input for language acquisition to occur. Some related research also suggested that teacher talk can be perceived as one of the main sources of comprehensible input and live target language model in the EFL contexts (Liruso & Debat, 2003). In the process of implementing TBI, students may encounter difficulties in the lack of background knowledge or the limitation of vocabulary span. The teacher can provide them with proper materials displayed in diverse ways in advance or can support them with
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timely responses or feedback (Ernst & Richard, 1995). In addition, Kim (2008) indicated that “reading and writing can serve as an effective scaffolding tool to develop oral language skills for young ESL/EFL students with minimal English oral language skills” (p.432). In order to successfully accomplish TBI tasks or activities, students also need some supplementing learning requirements such as practicing reading and writing activities. Since the present study adopted
cooperative learning group strategy, peers sharing and collaboration might also offer learners supports for improving their oral communicative competence.
Lastly, cooperative learning and oral interaction in a small group may also enhance learners‟ communicative competence. While students participated in the TBI oral discussion tasks or activities, oral interaction played an important role in developing their communicative competence. As Naughton (2006) claimed that
“learners are seen to be mutual scaffolders who give and receive support as they interact with their peers” (p. 170), TBI provided learners peer responses training, peer learning, interaction within group, and cooperative learning, which may allow learners to reinforce the use of communicative strategies, meaningful negotiation, decision-making, error-trying, and logical thinking in the authentic environment (Long, 1996; Pica et al.,1989; Varonis & Gass, 1985).
Research Question 2: Are There Any Changes in Learners’ Attitudes and Motivation towards English Learning after the Implementation of
Theme-Based Instruction? If Yes, in What Ways?
The results of pre- and post- questionnaires of EG and CG have shown several important findings of the changes of learners‟ attitudes and motivation towards English learning after the implementation of the present study. Firstly, the
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learning attitudes and motivation towards English learning in CG has only changed slightly after the implementation of the traditional oral instruction, and it remains negative as shown in Table 4.3. It might reflect that the traditional oral instruction can not meet learners‟ needs and interests, so it failed to arouse learning‟s learning attitudes and motivation. On the contrary, the findings supported the view that learners‟ attitudes and motivation towards English learning changed positively after the treatment of TBOI (shown in Table 4.3), and made significant difference while compared with the results of traditional oral instruction (shown in Table 4.4).
Based on the three factors, as shown in Table 3.2, which constructed the questionnaire in the present study, several main discussions about the changes of learners‟ attitudes and motivation towards English learning has been described as follows.
Learning Attitudes Factor
As shown in the previous chapter, EG learners‟ attitudes towards English learning have become significantly positive in affective, cognitive, and behavioral components after the implementation of TBI, indicating that TBI can trigger learners to develop positive learning-oriented attitudes and behaviors as they get actively involved in the thematic activities that meet learner‟s interests and needs.
In terms of affective components, the findings indicated that EG students perceived much more positive attitudes after the treatment of TBI than CG did.
As for cognitive components, the finding also showed that students in TBOI class revealed better awareness of learning than CG learners. For example, they believed that the contents of English lessons are highly connected to their daily life, and they conceived that practicing English more can result in better learning results.
They also believed that learning English is not difficult, and they consider learning
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English as an important thing.
With positive affective and cognitive conceptions, pupils in EG consequently performed much more positive behaviors than CG learners did. Believing that the contents of English lessons are very interesting, EG learners liked to speak English in class. Since they felt attending English class quite relaxed, they were not afraid to answer teacher‟s questions, and they liked to have a conversation with classmates.
They loved the activities of English class, so they enjoyed discussing with other classmates, and they were also willing to perform in English class.
The finding mentioned above may fully support Mumford‟s (2000) claim that theme study approach built on learner‟s interests and life experiences can help children develop their attitudes in a meaningful way. “The more students become involved in how and what they study, the more interested they become in learning”
(Mumford, 2000, p. 4). Since theme-based lessons were developed by learners and the teacher together, driven by students‟ own interests, innovative ideas, creative activities, learning strategies and meaningful negotiation had contributed to the learning process. Hutcchison and Waters (1987) also claimed that authentic materials may help to increase learners‟ motivation. In theme-based instruction, a variety of authentic materials did arouse learners‟ motivation towards learning English.
For decades, a great deal of research findings (e.g. Gardner, 1985; Gardner and Macintyre, 1992) supported the claim that learning attitudes have been viewed as crucial variables generating significant influence on learners‟ language achievement (Finch, 2001). The finding mentioned above also indicated that there was a positive correlation between EG learners‟ attitudes and the results of EG learners‟ oral communicative competence.
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Anxiety Factor
The findings in the study revealed that EG learners had much lower anxiety than CG learners did while attending TBI lessons. This might explain that TBI provided learners with a more authentic environment for language learning. While learners were involved in the tasks or activities in which they were interested, their affective filter would be low. According to Krashen‟s (1982) Affective Filter Hypothesis, the optimal learning may occur in environments where the affective filter was weak; in other words, while anxiety was low and defensiveness
diminished, learner may acquire language and knowledge naturally and efficiently.
In the implementation of TBOI, the teacher‟s authority diminished as the teacher became a coordinator or facilitator rather than a lecturer, which offered students a low-anxiety learning environment (Mumford, 2000).
Instrumental Motivation Factor
The instrumental motivation factor results showed that most pupils both in EG and CG were highly driven by the instrumental motivation to their English learning.
They perceived that learning English can make them understand more about foreign cultures, that acquiring English fluency would be very helpful for their future career, that the English language knowledge can be applied to their future life, and that learning English well can help them attending a high school or college as well as finding a good job. Nikolov (1999; as cited in Carreira, 2006) pointed out that instrumental motivation appeared in the 11 or 12 year-old children, while pupils‟
intrinsic motivation started to decrease with age. As getting older, students become more mature and gradually perceive the competitive world in the near future.
However, EG learners performed significantly higher motivation than they did at the
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beginning of the study after the treatment of TBOI. These findings indicated that TBI treatment can help learners perceive much more content knowledge in the aspect of foreign culture and can make students become better aware that English oral fluency will be useful for their future career.
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CHAPTER SIX