It is undeniable that English has become a language for global communication. It is considered as the medium of communication in many different fields such as: science, technology, aviation, international sport, diplomacy, and so on. English is used as the working language of the Asian Trade group ASEAN and the official language of the European Bank (Wallraff). In fact, with the spread of globalization and the rapid expansion of informational and technologies, there has been an explosion in the demand for English worldwide.
In Vietnam, in recent years, particularly after the Education Reform in 1975 the study of English has been gaining momentum firstly because it is an international language and secondly because it is also seen as a mean to promote mutual understanding and cooperation between Vietnam and other countries. As a result, more and more people desire to know and master English with the hope of keeping up to date with the latest development in technology in the world. English is most widely taught not only at schools, universities but also at many foreign language centres in part-time classes. There are also English teaching programs available on radio and television.
In Foreign Language Center, Haiphong University (FLC-HPU), the number of learners keeps increasing recently. Certainly, they come to the Center with the hope to have a good command of English to use it effectively and all the four language skills are all very important to them. Regarding speaking skill, most of the learners who took part in the survey conducted in the present study agree that speaking is always at the top of their demand for they need it to pass the oral examinations at university and to have an effective communication to get a job at a joint-venture company or a foreign company. Therefore, it is important for them to be able to speak English fluently.
However, for a long time teaching speaking English at FLC-HPU was performed with a traditional teaching method – the grammar translation method, in which the form of the language, mainly grammatical and vocabulary items, is the focus of a lesson. Consequently, learners who were passive recipients became structure competent, but communicative incompetent, and they found it challenging while communicating with English speaking people.
The remarkable changes in the teaching and learning English can be seen recently since communicative teaching method CLT was applied to satisfy the learners’ needs, i.e. to master simultaneously four language skills especially speaking skill and their communicative ability.
Being a teacher of English at FLC-HPU, the researcher is well aware of the importance of using such method to help their learners become the communicator of English.
However, like many other teachers in FLC-HPU, the researcher has encountered a number of difficulties in helping her learners enhance their speaking skill especially in motivating reluctant learners who only speak when they are made. Reasons for this are various, including large classes, psychological or cultural differences, lack of ideas or language devices, such as grammatical structures or vocabulary etc. Whatever reasons they may be, it is the first target of the teachers to help their learners get out of the always silent moment in class, and thereby, improve their speaking skills.