Creative Teaching Methods to Improve Student’s Confidence and Motivation in Conversation

Abstract

The conventional teaching materials and methods used for the conversation classes improved the students pronunciation and intonation significantly. Nevertheless, these methods of teaching speaking do not seem to give students tconfidence to be involved in spontaneous conversations and create their dialogues. As a result, when asked to create the dialogues, they often look for ready-made dialogues on the internet that they present as their dialogues in classroom activities or even exams. These activities are not good to help them building their self-confidence in using the language; neither does improving their fluency in speaking. This research attempts to prove the creative teaching methods can improve the students confidence and motivation in the conversation class and these methods, which have been proven to improve student self-confidence and motivation use a student-centred approach which provides opportunities for students to build their confidence and be more creative when practicing their speaking skills. This quasi-experimental research in which one conversation class was taught creative whereas another class, the comparison class, was taught using the conventional teacher-centered methods. The qualitative data collected from questionnaires, an observations and teacher’s notes and quantitative data obtained from questionnaires an pre- and post-tests showed that the self-confidence and motivation of the experimental group increased significantly. This in turn improved their speaking skills as reflected their grades