Developing Student’s Communication Skills through the Use of Communication Strategies and Writing: Part 1

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The 20th century has seen a number of language teaching methods. Some of them at first seemed to be promising new approaches to second language acquisition, but failed to help students in their quest to use the target language communicatively. Within the last 30 years communicative language teaching (CLT) has become popular among language instructors as a new and improved way to teach English as a second or foreign language. Since 1989, the Japanese Ministry of Educations, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) has striven to improve the communicative ability of Japanese students through the implementation of CLT into the curriculum of language education. However, many institutions have been unable to make the necessary changes for successful implementation of CLT, which calls for adjustments in lesson plans, materials and teaching approaches. Because of this, it is likely that many university students in Japan have never encountered CLT and communication strategies (CSs), which are important to foster smooth and natural conversations. Moreover, it can be assumed that there have not been many attempts to implement the writing of paragraphs to support the development of conversations. This paper presents the results of action research (AR) conducted over a period of two years. The first year of AR was conducted at a university in Nagoya, and deals mostly with how CLT was implemented using reading material as the main source and how to support students’ speaking and writing abilities through post-reading activities. The second year of the study, conducted at a different institution of higher education, investigated how the use of CSs relates to the frequency and length of pauses students make in conversations, and how writing of paragraphs on the conversation topics affect students’ oral output. Furthermore, the relation between structured support for students speaking development and student’s motivation was explored. It is worthwhile to note that the research focus changed over time in order to develop a more communicative classroom by using different approaches and constantly adjusting to the requirements of the context in order to successfully implement CLT. Data was primarily collected through questionnaires, student interviews, recording of audio- and video-data. Results indicated that there might be a connection between the use of CSs and pauses student make in their conversations. However, there are various factors that could have an influence on it. Students found that writing of paragraphs on the conversation topics affected their oral output positively, and the data collected suggest this as well. It was difficult to determine whether structured support for students speaking development had an influence on their motivation, but the result suggested that it was beneficial to students learning.

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