Understanding L2 Speaking Problems: Implications for ESL Curriculum Development in a Teacher Training Institution in Hong Kong

This paper reports the result of a study that aimed to identify the problems with oral English skills of ESL (English as a second language) students at a tertiary teacher training institution in Hong Kong. The study, by way of semi-structured interview, addresses the gap in our understanding of the difficulties ESL students encountered in their oral English development in the context of a Bachelor of Education (English Language) programme. Insufficient opportunities to speak English in lectures and tutorials, lack of a focus on language improvement in the curriculum, and the input-poor environment for spoken communication in English outside class apparently contributed to a range of problems that closely related to the sociocultural, institutional and interpersonal contexts in which individual ESL students found themselves. The results of the study lead us to question the effectiveness of the knowledgeand pedagogy-based ESL teacher training curriculum. They also point to a need to incorporate a sufficiently intensive language improvement component in the current teacher preparation program. Background to the Investigation The institution at which the study was conducted is a provider of tertiary-level teacher training formally established in 1994. In 2004, the government granted the institute self-accrediting status in respect of its own teacher education programs at degree-level and above. In 2010, the institution launched its research postgraduate programmes and undergraduate programmes in three disciplines: "Humanities" (mainly Language), "Social Sciences", and "Creative Arts & Culture", which was seen as a step closer for the institute to gaining its university title by becoming a Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 37, 1, January 2012 44 fully-fledged university of education with a range of disciplines and strong research capacity. Currently, the entry point of the students studying at the institute is not as high as at some other tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. This suggests that in the case of language-major students, if the entry point is lower, it would not be surprising that the exit point may be lower as well, as “the proficiency one starts with at university is the most constant indicator of how far one is likely to ‘travel’” (Elder & O’Loughlin, 2003, p.226) One of the academic programmes, i.e., the Bachelor of Education (English Language) programme provided by the institution, is recognized by the government as one of a few degree programmes whose graduates are exempted from sitting the Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers of English (LPATE) as they are deemed to have achieved the equivalent of Level 3 of LPATE. LPATE which is designed and organised by the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority aims to provide an objective reference against which the language proficiency of primary/secondary English teachers in Hong Kong can be gauged. The minimum requirement set by the government for primary/secondary English language teachers in Hong Kong is Level 3 in each component of LPATE. Currently, most local secondary schools tend to be unwilling to hire English language teachers unless they have obtained LPATE Level 3, regardless of which degree programme they graduated from (Report of the External Review Panel,. 2010). Given the local secondary schools’ preferences in employment, and to ensure the employability of graduates from the Bachelor of Education (English Language) programme when they seek employment as English language teachers, the institute has therefore set LPATE Level 3 as an exit requirement, i.e., students on the programme are not allowed to graduate unless they have fulfilled the LPATE requirement (Report of the External Review Panel, 2010). To alert students’ attention to the importance of LPAT, the English Department within the institute that runs the BEd (English Language) programme requires that BEd students have to reach LPATE Level 3 by the end of Year 3 in all five areas of reading, writing, listening, speaking, and classroom language assessment) in order to progress to Year 4. Those who fail to reach the required level are put on ‘conditional progression’ or ‘non-progression’. ‘Conditional progression’ means that students who fail only either speaking or writing but gain an average score of 2.5 or above in the area will be allowed to conditionally progress to Year 4, i.e., these students can take all Year 4 courses but will only be allowed to graduate if they reach LPATE 3 by the end of Year 4. ‘Non-progression’ means that students who fail to reach the conditional progression requirements will be on non-progression status. These students have to re-sit LPATE the next year, and if they reach the LPATE requirements or the conditional progression requirements, they Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 37, 1, January 2012 45 can progress to Year 4. This means that non-progression students have to study their Year 4 in two years. This study builds on an earlier survey study of the English language skills of the BEd students in the English Department at the institution which was motivated by the fact that for two consecutive academic years (2008-2009 and 2009-2010), an alarmingly large number of BEd students in the program were unable to reach Level 3 of LPATE, the minimum requirement set by the government for English language teachers in Hong Kong. For example, of the 113 students in the 2009-2010 Year 3 cohort progressing to Year 4 in 2010-2011, nearly one third were on either conditional progression or non-progression. Given the fact that majority of these students failed the LPATE speaking component, this study aimed to identify their problems with oral English skills during the Bachelor of Education (English Language) programme so that some form of intervention could be included in pre-service teacher preparation. In the following sections, I first present an overview of some important theoretical perspectives on second-language speaking and a number of empirical studies of language problems that ESL students face at tertiary level. I then describe the methodology: the participants, data collection instrument and data analysis procedures. Next I present and discuss the results of the interviews. I conclude with suggestions for some form of intervention to be included in the ESL teacher training curriculum. Overview of the Literature In this section, I first briefly describe some important theoretical perspectives on second language (L2) oral production in the fields of L2 acquisition and pedagogy. Levelt’s (1989) speech production model is probably the most influential theory in relation to research into second language (L2) processing. The Levelt’s model identifies three processing components (conceptualizer, formulator, and articulator), each of which functions differently in the process of speech production. The conceptualizer is responsible for conceptualizing the message, i.e., generating and monitoring messages; the formulator for formulating the language presentation, i.e., giving grammatical and phonological shape to messages; and the articulator for articulating the language, i.e., retrieving chunks of internal speech and executing the message. In Bachman’s influential discussion of communicative language ability (CLA) (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996), elements considered important to a learner’s performance on a given language use situation are said to be cognitive Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 37, 1, January 2012 46 knowledge of the second language, knowledge of how to overcome communication difficulties, knowledge of how to organize and plan a task, topical knowledge and learners’ affective reactions. Consequently, communicative language ability can be described as consisting of both knowledge, or competence, and the capacity for implementing, or executing that competence in appropriate, contextualized communicative language use (Bachman, 1990). Bachman and Palmer (1996) make a further distinction between language competence and strategic competence. Language competence consists of organizational competence (e.g., grammatical and textual competence) and pragmatic competence (e.g., illocutionary competence and sociolinguistic competence) (see Littlemore & Low, 2006). Strategic competence is a general ability that enables an individual to use available resources by regulating online cognitive processes in accomplishing a communicative goal (Phakiti, 2008). It can thus be seen that there is a clear distinction between knowledge and processing action in Bachman’s model of communicative language ability. Recent developments in the fields of discourse analysis, conversational analysis, and corpus analysis suggest that discourse can be compartmentalized into a number of speaking situations and genres, and that successful L2 speakers should be able to operate in these situations and genres (Roger, 2006). Drawing on Jones (1996) and Burns (1998), Richards (2006) categorizes speech activities as talk as interaction, talk as transaction, and talk as performance. Talk as interaction is defined by Richards as referring to what is normally meant by ‘conversation’, which describes interaction that serves a primarily social function. Talk as transaction is defined by Richards as referring to situations in which the focus is on what is said or done. Talk as performance is defined by Richards as referring to public talk, i.e., talk that transmits information before an audience, which follows a recognizable format and is close to written language rather than conversational language A number of empirical studies have examined university ESL students’ concerns and difficulties they face while participating in oral classroom activities. These studies focused on international ESL students studying in English speaking countries (For example, Ferris & Tagg, 1996; Ferris, 1998; Morita, 2002; Cheng, Myles, & Curtis 2004; Kim, 2006). For example, Ferris (1998) investigated the views of tertiary ESL students at three different American tertiary institutions about their difficulties in English listening and speaking skills, and found that the students were most concerned with oral presentations and whole class discussions, but they perceived little difficulty with small-group discussions. Cheng, Myles, & Curtis (2004) examined the consistency between the language skills required for engagement with the demands of course work at the graduate level, and the skills that non-native English speaker students found difficult Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 37, 1, January 2012 47 to master. Their findings suggested that many non-native English speaker students still needed continual targeted language support even after they were admitted into the graduate programs. Kim (2006) examined views of East Asian international graduate students concerning required academic listening and speaking skill levels in their university courses and their own difficulties in meeting these expectations. Confirming Ferris’ findings, Kim’s survey revealed that students were most concerned about leading class discussions and participating in whole-class debates. Unlike the above studies which adopted a quantitative approach, Morita (2002) carried out a qualitative study that investigated how students were expected to speak in two graduate courses in a TESL program at a Canadian university and how they acquired the oral academic discourses required to perform successful oral academic presentations. Morita’s findings suggested that both nonnative and native speakers gradually became apprenticed into oral academic discourses through ongoing negotiations with instructors and peers. Several researchers in Hong Kong have investigated language problems faced by university students in Hong Kong. Hyland (1997) surveyed first-year students from eight disciplines at five Hong Kong tertiary institutions. Hyland’s findings showed that students demonstrated an awareness of the value of English language classes as they realized that proficiency in English was an important determinant of academic success in an English-medium environment. Offering a general picture of undergraduates’ language problems, Hyland concluded that the students’ language problems centred on the productive skills of writing and speaking and the acquisition of specialist vocabulary. Evans and Green (2007) investigated the language problems experienced by first-year Cantonese-speaking students at Hong Kong’s largest English-medium university. Their findings revealed that a significant percentage of the subjects experienced difficulties when studying content subjects through the medium of English. Somewhat echoing Hyland’s (1997) findings, Evans and Green suggested that their subjects’ problems centred on academic speaking (particularly grammar, fluency and pronunciation), and academic writing (particularly style, grammar and cohesion). To further illustrate the language-related challenges that first-year undergraduates faced when adjusting to the demands of English-medium higher education in Hong Kong, Evans and Morrison (2011) further focused on three students from different societal, educational and disciplinary backgrounds so as to illustrate and personalize their first-year language experience at a science and engineering university. Relying on the use of qualitative research method, i.e., semi-structured interview, their investigation revealed that the students experienced Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 37, 1, January 2012 48 four particular problems during the crucial first year at university: understanding technical vocabulary, comprehending lectures, achieving an appropriate academic style and meeting institutional and disciplinary requirements. Most of the studies reviewed above examined ESL students who were studying in North American English speaking countries. Although Hyland (1997), Evans and Green (2007), and Evans and Morrison (2011) examined Hong Kong university ESL students, their studies focused on first-year non-English major students. Given the lack of research into English language problems tertiary English-major students may face in an ESL context, it was considered that the field would benefit from a study that examined the problems experienced by tertiary English-major students during an English language education program at the tertiary level in Hong Kong. The central research question that frames this study is thus: What English speaking problems did one group of ESL learners experience during an English language education program at a tertiary teacher training institution in Hong Kong?