Japanese University Students Oral Performance in English - Assignment Example

Participants included seven students who were attending university education in Japan (Sakai, 2008). This is shown in appendix 1. Six of them were second years in communicative English and one was recruited from third and fourth-year Methodology in Teaching English Language as a Foreign Language course. The choice of the seven was motivated by the fact that all had studied English. Among the participants, six were women. Before the study was conducted, participants were informed that the research was intended to investigate the speaking skills of Japanese students.

After obtaining their consent, they were given five tasks and subsequently asked to answer a questionnaire giving their background information.Interrogatives, word order, and negation were the focus of the study. This structure is attached, as appendix 2 with the vertical arrangement in the form of a developmental stage whilst horizontal is the language groups. These structures are taught in Junior high school (Ministry of Education, 1989).Interview, spot-the-difference task, description of the picture, picture identification task, and storytelling were the tasks assigned to participants.

The tasks were selected since they could elicit a variety of structures. The timespan for the interview task was 15 minutes where participants and researcher discussed issues around family, sports, dreams, and friends. The spot-the-difference task was meant to locate differences and participants asked English questions with respect to the picture they held as compared with that held by the researcher. This task took 15 minutes. The third task of picture description consumed five minutes and involved participants giving a vivid description of sixteen cards, one at a time.

These pictures were structured such that they could elicit indirect questions and negations. After this task, picture identification was performed where a participant spent five identifying pictures by asking questions in English. The last task entailed telling a story based on displayed pictures.