Use of Cooperative Learning to Develop Speaking Skills for First-Year English Major Students

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how English language teachers at the researcher’s university have implemented cooperative learning (CL) as a learning strategy in their speaking classes and explored whether implementing this strategy is effective to Vietnamese learners of English in the development of their oral proficiency. With descriptive research design, the study was carried out with the first-year English - majored students at the university, with a view to finding out how CL can help them to improve their English in general and their speaking skills in particular. Questionnaires and classroom observation were used as the main data collection instruments in doing the research to get an insight of how CL had been applied in speaking classes and the effectiveness of using it in developing students’ speaking skills. Two questionnaires were administered, one for the first-year English - majored students in their first semester of the academic year 2022-2023. The other was for English language teachers at the university. Simultaneously, classroom observation was conducted during six speaking lessons in class to collect information. The findings of the study reveal that CL was implemented in different activities in the speaking lessons and helped to enhance the students’ speaking skills effectively, which implies that CL can be considered an effective method of teaching speaking skills for teachers of English and should be applied extensively to promote its benefits.