Factors affecting student's oral classroom performance

Abstract

The present study entitled "Factors Affecting Students' Oral Classroom Performance" aimed at identifying the factors that affect students' oral classroom performance. The study mainly focused on the production aspect of language. The study was carried out with the hypothesis that the effect of personal factors associated with the learners play a significant role in language learning, especially second language learning. In this connection, the researcher used both primary and secondary sources of data. For primary sources of data, the researcher used all three research tools viz: Questionnaire for students, Classroom observation forms and structured interview sheets for teachers. The students of class nine from four purposively selected schools were the population of the study. Only 80 students from four public schools in Kathmandu district were the sample of the study. Twenty students from each school were selected through simple random sampling procedure using fishbowl draw method. In addition to this, English teachers from the respective schools were also the population of the study. The finding shows that motivation, risk taking, learning strategies, teaching methods, use of teaching materials, classroom size and personality were the major factors affecting students' oral classroom performance. This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter of the study deals with the general background, review of the related literature, objectives of the study and significance of the study. The second chapter deals with the methodology which includes the sources of data, population of the study, sampling population and sampling procedure, tools for data collection, process of data collection and limitations of the study. The third chapter is the main part of the study which presents the analysis and interpretation of the data collected from the various informants and the fourth chapter presents the findings of the study and recommendations made on the basis of the findings.