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east 7 years, but their English is still at very low levers. They have different background knowledge, different learning styles and different purposes, thus their ability of participation in English class is very low, especially in English speaking activities. In addition, most of the teachers at VIC seem to be unwilling to organize group work activities in their lessons despite the enormous benefits of using these activities. They still use traditional teaching method, grammar translation, in teaching, which means that teachers come to class with only textbook, then they ask students to open the books, and explain new words or structures by translating them into mother tongue. After that they require students to do exercises in the textbooks and answer their questions mechanically. They often ask students work individually before the students speak. As the result, the students at VIC are not good at speaking and they do not want to take part in speaking activities.

It is obviously that group work activities have been proved to be effective in ELT, but have attracted comparatively little attention at VIC. That is reason why I would like to do this research on group work activities as a teaching procedure. A quasi- experiment will be carried out to discover the effects of group work activities compared with traditional teaching method- individual work on students' participation in speaking activities at VIC.

1.2. The aim of the study.

This study is aimed at exploring the effects of using group work activities on students' participation in English speaking activities at VIC.

Research question:

The study was carried out with a view to answering the following research questions:

1. How do students participate in English speaking individual activities?

2. What are changes of levels of students' participation brought about by the introduction of group work activities?

1.3. The significance of the study.

Most of research on group activities has showed that group work activities used as a teaching procedure is very useful and effective for students in an EFL context. For this reason, I expect that group work activities procedure can be often applied at VIC.

By investigating the effects of group work activities over individual work at VIC, this study gives teachers of English at VIC an opportunity to get access to a different teaching procedure in teaching speaking activities- the use of group work procedure, especially for students in tourism. It can bring students a good way to practice speaking English which enables them to self- study to hold pace with the changing world not only during the time they are at college but also for their future life.

1.4. The scope of the study.

Student's poor participation in speaking activities is a common phenomenon in classes, which may be caused by many factors and can be dealt with using a variety of approaches. This study, however, limits itself to one major cause of poor participation, which is traditional teaching method - individual work. This means that the researcher only focuses on exploring the effects of using group work activities on students' participation in comparison with the individual work activities. This study only involves a group of 6 first year students in a tourism class at VIC.

1.5. The outl