1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction / ELT Unit
College of Education
Sultan Qaboos University
Action Research:
What Is the Effect of Feedback in:
Improving Speaking Skill Of Grade Five Students
Done by: Fatma AlGhafri / 112028
Course code and name: CUTM4500 - Teaching practice
Practicum school: Aseela bint Qais for Basic Education (5-9)
Supervisor: Dr. Nada Al Washah
2. 1. Abstract
This study aims to investigate the difficulties that face grade five in speaking skill. 72
female students from two classes in Aseela bint Qais School for Basic Education (5-9)
participated in this experimental study. The pre-task was talking about their holiday.
Then, the students were given feedback. The post- task was talking about their daily
activities. The results show that there is a significant effect of feedback in improving
student's speaking skill, specifically they gained more confident when they were
speaking. It is recommended that teachers have to give students feedback after the
presentations to learn from their mistakes in order to improve their speaking skill.
2. Introduction
Nowadays, English speaking ability is very important for people to communicate
between each other since it becomes the global language around the world. English
language has been part of curriculum for almost all the countries around the world.
The main purpose of teaching and learning English in to communicate. This purpose
can be achieved through focusing on the different skills which are speaking, listening,
writing and grammar. Teachers have to use different methods and techniques in order
to help students acquiring the language.
One of the important language skills is speaking skill. Speaking is way that people use
to share their ideas and feelings. The students have to master different sub-skills and
good amount of vocabulary in order to be able to communicate.
The Omani English curriculum includes different goals and plans to teach speaking
skill as an important skill that students have to study. Students start this skill from the
beginning by learning the alphabet letters. Gradually, they produce letters together
and then one word then phrases then a full sentence. Grade five students are expected
using simple and clear language, which enable them to communicate with each other
and with the teacher.
The process of teaching speaking skill include different steps and procedures. In
addition, there are many different methods and technique that could be used to teach
and learn speaking skill. One common ways of improving and developing speaking
skill is giving feedback in different ways.
3. 3. Defining the Problem
Speaking is an important skill, which give students the opportunity to express their
selves, thoughts, ideas, feelings and opinion. According to the Ministry of Education
in Oman, grade 5 students are expected to be able to talk in English using correct
form and simple vocabs. However, I found that most of grade five students have
difficulties in speaking. They have difficulties in pronouncing some words also; they
have problems in saying full well formed sentences and some students have stuttering
when they gave the presentation. However, the students were given clear instructions
and guidelines before doing the presentation such as choose any topic they want,
which match their abilities, and the presentation takes only 3 or 4 mins, they continue
making mistakes. Thus, it is very important to solve this problem through finding an
effective treatment, which will help grade five to make progress in their speaking
level. One of the best way to improve students speaking skill is giving feedback.
4. Literature Review
In this section, previous studies and research on ways of improving students speaking
and the types of feedback and its effectiveness are discussed from different aspects.
4.1. Strategies to improve students speaking
According to Hadfiels (1999), "Speaking is a kind of bridge for learners between
classroom and the world outside". Therefore, to build this bridge, the teachers have to
use different activities in speaking that will help the students to master this skill and
boost their level in English. A very helpful way is that the teacher make students
engage in conversation with their pairs in order the share their ideas, thoughts and
change their information with other that will help students to master speaking skill
(Fajariyah, 2009). Another way is always encourage students to participate in the
class to gain more confident and to be able to speak in front of class. In addition,
using "Communicative Language Teaching", during this approach, teacher motivate
students to speak without much focus on form of grammatical patterns which will
students to speak more and engage more also teachers should make their lessons more
interesting in order to motivate their students (Efrizal,2012). Self-correction is also a
4. useful way in which students correct their pronunciation of words. All these way may
work depending on how they are used by the teachers and on the different conditions
surrounded.
4.2. Feedback
Feedback plays an essential role in improving students' academic level in all the
language skills. However, it is different from one skill to another. For example,
speaking skill require continues feedback to boost students confidence and motivation
to express their selves. Following parts will discuss the different types of feedback
and its effectiveness.
44.2.2. Types of feedback
There are different types of feedback. According to Ferris and Roberts (2001), there is
one distinction of feedback whether it is direct and indirect feedback. Direct feedback
is when teachers give students a clear form of their mistakes, so they only have to
change the mistaken form to the correct one. On the other hand, the indirect feedback
is the teachers indicate the mistakes without writing the correction, so students have to
find the solution (Bitchener, Young & Cameron, 2005). There are also another two
types of feedback, which are coded and encoded. The fist type, coded, means that
teachers mark the mistakes of the students and writ the corrections of these mistakes,
while the second type, encoded, means that that mistakes are underlined without the
corrections (Ferris and Roberts, 2001). In addition, the study of Hyland (2009)
mentioned different types of feedback such as the oral, the written feedback, peer
feedback, and computer-mediated feedback.
4.2.3. Effectiveness of feedback
The effectiveness of any type of feedback is depend on how it is used. For example,
Gue nette (2007) stated in his study that the different types of feedback including the
direct and indirect methods, correction and group correction, and explicit and implicit,
excellent students respond well and the low achieving students need to motivate and
5. encourage in order to achieve more. He concluded that no matter what teachers do,
some students will achieve more and some students will not. However, different
researchers, Bitchener, Young & Cameron, 2005) found that feedback is an important
role in students' academic life since studies got that there are always differences
between control group and the experimental group. On the other hand, some scholars
found different results when it comes to the most effective way of proving feedback to
students speaking skill. There are five types of feedback, that Semke (1984) discussed
in his study, which are "writing comments and questions rather than corrections,
making all errors and supply the correct forms, combining positive comments and
correction, and indicating errors by means of a code and requiring students to find
corrections". However, Chandler (2003) stated, "direct correction is best for
producing accurate revisions". In contrast, there are different studies showed that
there is no significant difference between the different types of feedback (see e.g.
Kepner, 1991; Polio, Fleck, & Leder, 1998; Robb, Ross, & Shortreed, 1986; Semke
and Sheppard, 1992, as cited in Bitchener, Young & Cameron, 2005).
5. Research questions and aims
This research aims to examine the impact of feedback in improving students' speaking
skill. Throughout the research, it is expected that feedback has great effect in student
speaking skill. The findings of this research will be useful for future teachers’
practices in improving students’ speaking skills.
6. Methodology
In this part, participants, data collection methods and procedures are discussed.
6.1 Participants
The participants of this study were 72 female students of grade five at Aseela bint
Qais School (5-9). They were from two different classes; class one includes 36
students and the other class includes 36 students. Most of the participants were
Omanis, yet there were some other nationalities such as Sudanese, Iraqi, Egyptian and
6. Syrian. However, all participants speak Arabic fluently and learn English as a foreign
language.
6.2 Data Collection Instrument
The tool of data collection was two speaking test. Students were given different
topics such as talking about their selves, holiday, country, daily activities, and famous
people and they have to choose one topic. First, they were required to give the first
test of speaking with the topic that they had chosen it, then; the teacher gave them
another topic, which was almost similar to the first one and asked students to give a
presentation about it in 3 mints. There is a paper to assess them.
Presentation Form
Student name:
The topic is about:
TotalThe
amount
of info
Voice,
pronunciation
Language
used
Contact
with
audience
Clear,
easy to
follow
6.3. Procedures
The two speaking test, which is giving two presentation, is that the students were
required to give a clear and easy to follow topic with correct and simple language
with a clear voice and they have to contact with the audience and present a good
amount of information. In the first test, the students choose the topics they want but in
the second test, the teacher chose the topic for each student. The teacher assessed the
students according to that paper and each students were given feedback on her
presentation either from the teacher or from the other students. In addition, the teacher
spent the whole lesson in order to give students feedback to improve their speaking
skill. During the feedback lesson, students were given their papers back and were
7. asked to read the comments. Then, the teacher highlighted the common mistakes and
errors among students in the board. The second speaking test was as a gift for those
who did not get good marks. The idea behind the second test is to see if the students
will benefit from the feedback that they are given. It is noticed that most of the
students had got benefit from the feedback and their mark had increased.
The researcher did not face any challenges to design the two tests and choose topics
of the presentations. However, there was a lack of discipline in one of the classes. It is
important to highlight that the curriculum of grade 5 needs time to be finished, so the
teachers found difficulty to allocate lessons for the presentations.
7. Results
The two speaking tests had done in two classes of grade five. In the first test, most of
the student got less than 5, they got 4, 3, 2, out of 5 and there are some students got 5
out of 5. In the two classes, after giving the feedback, in test two most of the student
got full mark 5 out of 5, however, some students got less 3 or 4 out of 5.
Table 1: Test one
ImprovedNumber of students who
got less than 5,4
The error
912Clear, easy to follow
66Contact with audience
1014Language used
68Voice, pronunciation
55The amount of info
8. Discussion
As stated before, 72 students from two classes were given two speaking tests and
feedback after test one. The types of feedback is written and oral in which the teacher
wrote comments for the students and told them their weaknesses in order to avoid
them in test two.
8. The results of the first test shows that most students got less than 5 out of 5. However,
in the second test, almost all the grades have improved. It is clear that, then, feedback
has a significant impact on students because most of the students got 5 out 5. The
findings of this study are in line with Gue´nette (2007) who mentioned that feedback
could work with good students more which agrees with the results of this research.
All the good students avoid the mistakes that they did in the first test. This might be
that not all the students read the feedback given by the teacher, whereas good students
always care about teachers' comments. Moreover, the type of feedback, direct
feedback, concerns with Chandler (2003) who mentioned that direct feedback is one
of the best way for accurate revision. The results of this research is also in line with
Bitchener, Young and Cameron (2005) and others as they claim that feedback affects
students speaking skill significantly. In brief, feedback has an important role in
students' academic life.
9. Conclusion
In this study, the impact of feedback after the test one was investigated among 72
students in grade 5. The students were given written and oral feedback after test one.
Then, after test two, their results were discussed. The findings show that there is an
obvious influence of feedback on students speaking skill.
9.1 Limitations and Further Research
There is one limitation of this study, which is the few number of students and they
were from one school only.
9.2 Recommendations
The findings of this study show that feedback has a great influence on students'
grades, therefore, teachers could use this technique and try always to provide their
students with feedback. In addition, it will be such a good implementation if the
Ministry of Education puts providing feedback as one of teachers’ missions or at least
to encourage teachers to practice it.
9. Reference
Bitchener, J., Young, S., & Cameron, D. (2005). The effect of different types of
corrective feedback on ESL student writing. Journal of second language writing, 14(3),
191-205.
Chandler, J. (2003). The efficacy of various kinds of error feedback for improvement
in the accuracy and fluency of L2 student writing. Journal of second language writing,
12(3), 267-296.
Efrizal, D. (2012). Improving students’ speaking through communicative language
teaching method at Mts Ja-alhaq, Sentot Ali Basa Islamic Boarding School of
Bengkulu, Indonesia. International journal of humanities and social science, 20(2),
122- 126.
Ferris, D., & Roberts, B. (2001). Error feedback in L2 writing classes: How explicit
does it need to be?. Journal of second language writing, 10(3), 161-184
Guénette, D. (2007). Is feedback pedagogically correct?: Research design issues in
studies of feedback on writing. Journal of second language writing, 16(1), 40-53.
