LANGUAGE IN INDIA

A RESEARCH REPORT ON ENGINEERING STUDENTS' PERFORMANCE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE SPEAKING TEST

R. Narayanan M.A. (Eng), M.A. (Ling) and M.Phil. (Eng)
N. Rajasekaran Nair, Ph.D.
S. Iyyappan, Ph.D.

Abstract

This paper focuses on a research study made with 408 students of various engineering colleges in and around Chennai of India. It identified that female students have performed better than male students in speaking ability test in English language.

Introduction

'Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.' - Gustave Flaubert

Speech enables students to make connections between what they know and what they are learning, and listening helps them to acquire knowledge and explore idea. A successful speaker has some characteristics like highly motivated, a great degree of aptitude, flexible and adapt his/her style and beliefs to meet the demands of the task or the learning situation and also aware of importance of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Moreover, he/she has complementary receptive skills (reading and listening) as models for what he/she wants to say, and she/he uses writing as a means of preparing for speaking encounters. Hence, a number of things are to be needed for fostering speaking skill.

A Vital Problem Underlying Speaking Tests

On the other hand, one of the vital problems underlying speaking test is that "speaking" is difficult to define. For example, speech can be broken down into three areas:

1. Pronunciation and intonation, accuracy and fluency.
2. It can be categorized in terms of strategies.
3. It can be regarded as a form of interaction and analyzed using the methods of pragmatics or discourse analysis.

The problem is that in the course of a normal conversation, all these aspects are important. If testers try to separate out the strands, they may well find that the ecology of speaking is different in different successful speakers. This means that the accurate speaker may communicate effectively, but slowly, whereas the fluent speaker may sacrifice accuracy for the sake of rapid communication (Skehan, 1998).

Our Data Collection

Following the guidelines offered by Foster et al. (2000) and Skehan (1996 &1998) for the selection of a unit for measuring speaking ability test, we recorded 408 students' voices in cassettes. Sony cassette-corder TCM-150 recorder was used for recording purpose.

• Accuracy
• Fluency
• Physical performance (body language, eye contact, etc.)
• Pronunciation and intonation
• Grammatical accuracy

These students were provided with the following topics:

1. You and your family
2. Your best friend
3. Your weekend activities
4. Your hobbies
5. Your last summer holidays
6. Your plans for the future
7. A T V programme you love/hate
8. Your favourite subject
9. Your dream holiday
10. A film you'd like to see again
11. Your hometown
12. A game you like playing
13. A person you admire
14. Your favourite season
15. Your childhood
16. A person you respect
17. An embarrassing experience
18. A book that influenced you for life
19. A place that you'd like to visit again
20. A lovely dream

This is only the beginning part of the paper. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

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