Abstract
This paper investigates the development of students’ speaking skills, using the Immersion Teaching Model (ITM) as a form of process differentiation. It aims to explore whether the ITM intervention in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context will have an impact on the students’ speech development and motivation, and will furthermore investigate its feasibility as a teaching approach. A 5th Grade class of a Greek state Primary school was used and action research was implemented. The research findings revealed enhancement of the speaking skills for the students that have at least an initial level of language speaking competence, but no difference was detected for the students of no speaking competence, indicating the need for further differentiation. However, the ITM intervention was proven feasible to use in the EFL classroom and highly affective to student motivation. The implications of the present research for the EFL context have shown that the ITM is flexible enough to accommodate the diverse educational needs, and benefit meaningful speech production if appropriately applied.
Highlights
Language immersion is a general term that describes the exposure of the learner exclusively to the target language, in order to develop bilingualism and is flexible enough to adapt to various sociocultural and sociolinguistic contexts (Cummins, 2012) which is the reason why it is so widely used
The collection of quantitative data in action research is not a prevalent technique (Burns, 2010); it is used in the present research as it aims to document the development of the speaking skills in a primary school classroom, following the implementation of the Immersion Teaching Model, similar to the action research conducted by Uztosun et al (2017)
One of the skills that a teacher must possess is a good knowledge of his/ her class in order to be able to identify the students’ weaknesses and their strong points, and create suitable teaching conditions that will cater for the educational development of their students (Tomlinson, 2001) and the facilitation of a lifelong L2 learning (Papaefthymiou-Lytra, 2014)
Summary
Language immersion is a general term that describes the exposure of the learner exclusively to the target language, in order to develop bilingualism and is flexible enough to adapt to various sociocultural and sociolinguistic contexts (Cummins, 2012) which is the reason why it is so widely used. The present study assembled an Action Research (AR) applying the ITM (Luan & Guo, 2011) and Mangubhai’s (2006) suggestions, as a form of process differentiated instruction, with the purpose to investigate the development, of the speaking skills, of a specific class of 5th grade students, aiming at catering for their low speech production. This small scale research probes into the feasibility of the ITM, as well as students’ motivation. The results show a significant rise on students’ motivation and an enhancement on their speech production, students of low speaking competence were not affected
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