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creasing practice opportunities that brought when starting group work activities “allow both weak and strong participants to extend themselves to their full ability”.

Kemaloglu, Aydin, & Tepiroglu (2005) emphasizes that group work activities promote students' responsibility and autonomy. Having the responsibility in the group to fulfil the assigned action gives each student the chance of managing his/her own learning process (cited in Brown, 2001).

In short, group work activities provide great opportunities for students to practice the language they are learning in a relaxed environment, which will lead to better quality of language production.

Summary

From the theoretical background to speaking skills, group work activities as well as previous study, it is clear that group work activities can bring about many benefits to students in their speaking lesson, especially to motivate students to participate in speaking activities.

However the use of group work activities has not been popular at VIC. In this study, I would like to do this research on the use of group work activities in speaking lesson with a quasi- experimental design with a view to finding out the effectiveness of using group work activities to the level of participation of the first year students at VIC. The method of the research is discussed in detailed in chapter three.

第三章：方法论-CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

This chapter provides readers the description of research method, the subject, data collection instruments and procedures.

3.1. Research questions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the following 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?

The present study deals with the first year students at VIC.

3.2. The participants of the study.

3.2.1. The researcher

The researcher has been a teacher of English at VIC for seven years. She is currently working on Master's degree in TESOL from Victoria University, Australia. She understands students quite well.

3.2.2. The observers.

The two observers have been teachers of English at VIC for 5 or 6 years. They are interested in teaching English, especially speaking skill. Both of the observers were given further training in observing and recording data using the observation sheet in speaking sessions.

3.2.3. The student subjects

The subjects of this study are the first year students at VIC. There are six students in this study (four girls and two boys). They are in a tourism class with forty two other students. Most of them are at the age of eighteen. They come from different areas in different province in the North of Vietnam. The six students who I selected for this study have learned English for 4 or 6 years, but they have different levels and ability of speaking English. However, they were all very helpful and were fully encouraged to participate in this study.

3.3. Data collection instrument procedures.

In order to answer the research question of this study, two kinds of data collection

instruments including observation and