The findings of this study indicated the greater challenges that the students had encountered while learning and using spoken English skills, and their motivation to develop their proficiency in English speaking. Reflecting on the findings from both quantitative and qualitative studies against the literature review, the implication of this study can be given as follows:
The findings obtained from the study provide the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MoEYS) in Cambodia with the current information about students’ learning difficulties and their motivation towards spoken English skills. The study pointed out that the students had confronted ample learning challenges in term of spoken English skills. MoEYS should encourage the Universities, in particular, in the school of English in Education to enhance the quality of students’ communicative competence based on the five components given within learning challenges in this study. In addition, MoEYS should provide possibly the strategy to develop the spoken teaching methodology and subsidise on the English spoken platform as many as possible. It would definitely help students to have opportunities to speak and listen to English.
The activities also encourage students to put more effort in spoken English skills as they are substantial necessary for the social recognition and their future prospects. The MoEYS’s recognition and concentration on spoken English skills directly stimulate the Universities throughout Cambodia to invest more on the field of spoken English skills. Hence, the study enables MoEYS to refresh their policy decisions and the implementation of educational strategies with a greater certainty regarding advancing learners’ proficiency in speaking.
The study shares with the Universities’ administrators, policy makes, supervisor, and educators to be well-prepared for the learning challenges which the students experienced during their study, particularly, spoken English skills. The results acquired from the quantitative study indicated that the students have a great difficulties in term of linguistic obstacles, speech processing difficulties, academic and conversational English skills, negative effect, and access to speaking opportunities. Each of the difficulties is absolutely the gateway to reach out the reduction and cessation of the students’ learning challenges towards spoken English skills, and probably the process of provoking their initial commitment in developing their spoken proficiency. Spoken English skills are without question indispensable for the TESOL undergraduate students, for one of their primary goals is to get a good job, specifically, be an English teacher. Therefore, they must be able to explain and speak in English very well. In this regards, the Universities should administer more on spoken English subjects and communicative tests in the classroom; and set up new programs to broaden the boundary of English spoken environment for the students. Those programs should be conductive to engage students actively in the seminar discussions, encourage them to write a paper and give a presentation at a seminar, have them to discuss the course with other students formally and informally outside the classroom, enable them to socialize with other students by participating in spoken English clubs and societies, or even just attend a job interview in English. In short, the Universities must ensure that those programs assist students to communicate effectively in spoken English at university level whether in a seminar situation or outside the classroom, they should probably be able to give opinions, agree and disagree with the arguments given in problems, defend their ideas, interrupt politely, deal with breakdowns in communication, make suggestions for the betterment etc.
In addition, the information obtained from this research may be of value for the lecturers and educators to enhance the positive factors and avoid adverse activities or approaches that affect students’ motivation. Regarding the linguistic obstacles, it is doubtless that a shortage of vocabulary and grammar understanding would definitely pressure students to speak the second language, and they are probably averse to learning the English words and grammar points. Furthermore, the lecturers should take the pronunciation of the word, phrase or sentences into account when teaching the new words and sentence structures. It is clear that as the second language learners, knowledge of the words and the way to construct and pronounce them are extremely important to be confident at speaking the language. Those vocabulary, grammar points should be learned appropriately – students should be capable to use them comprehensively and communicatively. To accomplish such goals, students should be given more time to practice the spoken English skills within friendly and motivational environment. For instance, according to the results obtained from qualitative study indicated the passiveness of the students in class due to the domination of teacher- talking-time. It can be inferred that the teachers apply learning hypothesis more than acquisition hypothesis. The imbalance of this hypothesis leads the students to be poor at pragmatism. By all means, the most effective approach to learn a language is in a natural communicative situation, which is founded on the concept that successful language acquisition requires communicating true meaning. When students engage in real-world conversation, their natural language acquisition methods are activated, allowing them to learn how to utilize the language. Indeed, creating a learning situation wherein language is actively used is essentially important to boost language proficiency and motivation towards the language learning. Therefore, it will definitely help students to “acquire” the language instead of just “learning” it.
Moreover, acquiring the language within the natural setting would bring relaxation or peace to both a teacher and learner, for the teacher does not need to be worried or afraid of failing to teach and meanwhile learners enjoy learning through their own pace without any pressure. Thus, motivational atmosphere stimulates the learners’ developmental psychology aligned with the language acquisition and the capacity to understand and use the language appropriately. Acquisition of the language enables students to be at ease at producing the language effectively, for they had plenty of time to talk and had conversation with their friends and teachers. They tend to use the English automatically without thinking in their mother tongue. The time given to students may enable them to speak English more accurate as they have time to monitor each other as well as their own. As a consequence, the speech processing difficulties and other obstacles gradually vanished from the students. Moreover, the learning environment which allows students to emerge in the English speaking context must be no doubt a result of teaching methodology that facilitates such productive process efficiently. Qualitative results demonstrated that the students prefer the student-centred where they have sufficient time to practice English speaking communicatively with their classmates and teachers. Such approach, which is extremely helpful since students do not merely learn the language but also acquire them comprehensively, should focus on the input and assessment of teaching process in order to make sure students attain the learning objectives.
The input is fundamentally essential to help students practice and acquire the language. The input of course requires the suitable and productive tasks for learners to practice and challenge in order to gain more understanding and lead them to the next level of language proficiency, in particular speaking competency. It implies that certain types of tasks can be sufficient to motivate or demotivate them. Indeed, there is a responsibility on teachers to develop achievable tasks. It can be the initial considerable barrier that has to be done in order to maintain learners’ engagement and motivation. For example, some learners, if they have experienced repeated failure, they would become completely demotivated, and then they will not like to engage in any learning new material in any way. For this reason, that great care must be taken into account when developing tasks to ensure that these are motivating and significant that learners entrust those tasks are achievable. It is essential that a task should be a combination of chronological steps that each step guarantees an achievable and rewarding outcome for them. Hence, the effective and productive input is a sort of tasks which facilitate the learners to actively engage in the learning process and ultimately attain good outcome. Then the assessment of the learning outcome should be strictly observed. Thus, the lectures can take immediate action if there are problems to improve the quality of teaching and learning. During the practice, lecturers should ensure that the students are competent to recognize, understand and produce the distinctive grammatical structures of a language and to use them effectively in communication and sociocultural rules of use where the use of appropriate grammatical forms for different communicative functions in diverse sociolinguistic contexts. Furthermore, the outcome should allow students to comprehend and produce language in the modes of not just speaking, but also listening, reading and writing cohesively and coherently. Eventually, outcome should emerge students’ strategic competence of using the language where they are capable to adapt the use of language to compensate for communicative problems and difficulties such as the use reference sources, grammatical paraphrase, requests for repetitions, clarification, giving recommendation, or problems in addressing strangers. In short, lecturers should mainly increase student talking time which allows them actively collaborate with classmates to achieve the activity’s goal while the lecturers merely facilitate the activity (preparation, set up and scaffolding, and during-activity support, as needed). In the meantime, the lecturers should also try to persuade students to communicate for a purpose as they exchange and collect information needed to perform the activity and complete the task. Every activity should be incorporated authentic communication situations and materials which complied with the spoken English skills.
The study further informs and updates the actual learning challenges that the students themselves experienced while learning and using spoken English skills. The findings indicates that students encountered the using of words choices, grammar points, difficulty of pronouncing the words, sentences stress and intonation, lack of spoken English opportunities which gradually cause them less confident at speaking the language etc. Responding to the problems they faced, here are some implication to be used to develop their speaking skills. First of all, since they are ESL students, they should make use of every opportunity they have to speak English inside and outside the classroom. Then keep a note of and learn some useful phrase used by native speakers and try to incorporate them into daily conversation. After that, they should try to participate the English club or society organized by Universities or Students’ Union which meets together every day or each week. This offers an excellent opportunity to practice English. International conference or events are highly recommended to participate and try out the language use they have learned. Next, they should attend actively the seminars and if possible write paper and present at those seminars. Importantly, the students should be constantly determined to practice speaking English with their friends and others. Hence, if they actively involved in spoken English environment, then their spoken proficiency are definitely mastered, and eventually, they can speak English very well.
In conclusion, it is crucially important to enrich the students’ learning performance and motivation towards the assigned tasks. If they are well-performed and highly motivated, then they persistently work on the tasks until they reach their ultimate goals of learning spoken English skills. Universities and lecturers are of paramount importance to students in term of learning. Therefore, if everyone concerned vigorously try the best to better the learning and teaching, then the best outcome is definitely achievable.
