PROBLEM STATEMENT

1.     

1.1. Location where the research will be held

The research will be done in seven class “B” of English Major in the Faculty of Education in Chimborazo National University, Campus “La Dolorosa” of Riobamba city.

1.2. Problem Situation

The effective oral communication skills help students to improve their academic performance, increase their employment options, consequently expand their subsequent professional competence, and improve their personal effectiveness.  Unfortunately, while communicating orally in English, students usually face some linguistic problems that make communication difficult.

Oral communication is a communicative process of two ways between the speaker and the receiver that includes the productive skill speaking and the receptive skill listening, to find the factors that affect the oral communication of those who learn English, it must be taken into account the listening and speaking skills in the students.

Oral communication means spoken communication, that includes not only the face to face communication but also the communication by means of electric and electronic devices such as the telephone.  To listen to a speech in the cinema or in the television is also considered oral communication, but this is less personal because the interlocutor is not physically to interact with the person that listens directly.

The phonetic system  that is taught during the career to form teachers of English as a second language prepares students to understand messages issued in English.

From the teaching practice in the high school and in the university it can be noticed that students have difficulties to understand oral messages.  It can be inferred that this difficulty would be greater if they try to understand oral messages pronounced by native speakers than by Latin speakers.

Reviewing test results of listening skill it is noticeable that students face difficulty.  Generally to test this skill, teachers make students to listen to recordings of native speakers of conversations of different topics.  When students listen to the recordings twice and when they are tested in spoken comprehension in a written test, the result is 20 %.  When the skills teacher reads the tape scripts twice, students understand better and to apply the written test in spoken comprehension, the result is 60%.

On the survey applied to students of seven class “B” the following results were obtained (annex):

71% of students are learning English between 10 and 20 years.  According to the level of oral communication to speak and to understand English fluency, 58% thinks that understands between 30 and 60 % of oral messages.  70 % of students say that can speak with 80 % fluency.

Among the limitations to speak in English fluently there are the psychological, linguistic, social, cognitive and no cognitive barriers,

When students listen to a conversation in English, they say that they know very little vocabulary, the speed of the speaker is very fast and the use of contractions limits understanding.

67 % of students have had linguistic experience with native speakers, 75 % of students have difficulty to understand oral messages from a native speaker.  95 % of students say that they do understand oral messages from a Latin speaker.  54 % say that the difficulty they face is the speed of the speaker and 46 % say that the main difficulty is the speaker pronunciation.  Students (33 %) have difficulty to communicate especially when the interlocutor uses idiomatic expressions.

In an interview to the skills teacher, he says that students face this difficulty when they are exposed to a recording conversation spoken by native speakers, specifically English from United States.  Students request to be repeated the recording to four times to have an idea of the recording content.  When the teacher (Latin speaker) reads the same dialogue trying to give emphasis to his pronunciation, students request repetition for a second time to understand the content.  When the teacher invites to do a dialogue about the topic of the conversation that is heard by the students, he says that students use basic structures and do grammatical mistakes.  Students have difficulties in distinguish phonemes such as /d/, /v/ and vowel sounds that there are not in Spanish, sometimes producing a bad linguistic transference.

In addition, based on the poll done to students and in the informal conversations maintained with the skills teacher, it can be noticed difficulties in the development of oral communication in the listening and speaking skills.

1.3. Problem Formulation

How do the linguistic barriers block when the students of 7 class “B” of the English Major communicate in English orally?

2.4 Specific Issues

How the lack of knowledge affects the effective oral communication of the students of class 7 “B” of the English Major?

How the speaking speed affects the effective oral communication of the students of class 7 “B”of the English Major?

Why the pronunciation of consonant sounds that are not available in Spanish affects the oral communication of the students of class 7 “B”of the English Major?

What extent the grammatical constructions as information questions affect the effective oral communication of the students of class 7 “B”of the English Major?