Evaluating the effectiveness of using think - Pair - share strategy in improving the participation and confidence of non-english majors in speaking lessons at hai phong university (hpu)

114 TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC HẢI PHÒNG
EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING THINK-PAIR-SHARE 
STRATEGY IN IMPROVING THE PARTICIPATION 
AND CONFIDENCE OF NON-ENGLISH MAJORS IN SPEAKING LESSONS 
AT HAI PHONG UNIVERSITY (HPU).
Phan Thị Hường 
Khoa Ngoại ngữ 
Email: huongpt91@dhhp.edu.vn
Ngày nhận bài: 07/5/2020
Ngày PB đánh giá: 09/6/2020
Ngày duyệt đăng: 19/6/2020
ABSTRACT: Think-Pair-Share strategy (TPS) is considered an effective strategy to help students 
improve their language skills. Therefore, the study was conducted to evaluate at evaluating its 
effectiveness in enhancing students’ participation and confidence for non-English majors at the faculty 
of Tourism in speaking lessons. The research design used a mixed method to collect data from 24 
students in the faculty of Tourism at HPU. The results of the research showed that TPS strategy brought 
to considerably effective improvements to students’ participation and confidence in speaking lessons.
Keywords: Think-Pair-Share strategy; Speaking skill; Non-English majors
ĐÁNH GIÁ TÍNH HIỆU QUẢ CỦA VIỆC SỬ DỤNG CHIẾN LƯỢC CHIA SẺ - NHÓM - ĐÔI 
TRONG VIỆC CẢI THIỆN SỰ THAM GIA VÀ SỰ TỰ TIN CỦA SINH VIÊN 
 KHÔNG CHUYÊN ANH TRONG CÁC GIỜ HỌC NÓI 
TẠI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC HẢI PHÒNG (HPU).
TÓM TẮT: Chiến lược Chia sẻ - Nhóm - Đôi (TPS) được coi là một chiến lược hiệu quả giúp cải thiện 
các kĩ năng ngôn ngữ của sinh viên. Vì vậy, nghiên cứu này được thực hiện nhằm mục đích kiểm tra 
tính hiệu quả của nó trong việc cải thiện sự tự tin và sự tham gia của sinh viên không chuyên khoa Du 
lịch trong các giờ học nói. Nghiên cứu sử dụng phương pháp nghiên cứu hỗn hợp để thu thập dữ liệu 
từ 24 sinh viên khoa Du lịch, trường Đại học Hải Phòng. Kết quả của nghiên cứu chỉ ra rằng phương 
pháp Chia sẻ - Nhóm - Đôi mang tới nhiều thay đổi tích cực với sự tham gia và sự tự tin của sinh viên 
trong các giờ học nói. 
Từ khóa: Phương pháp Suy nghĩ - Nhóm đôi - Chia sẻ; Kĩ năng nói; Sinh viên không chuyên Anh
1. INTRODUCTION 
Relating to the comprehensive 
development of language skills, speaking 
skill is one of the most challenging factors 
for students. Because this skill requires the 
combination of a lot of knowledge such as 
vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and 
sentence structure to confidently present the 
opinion in front of others. The researcher 
also realizes that the development of oral 
communication in and out of the language 
classrooms plays a significant role in 
learning process, however, students 
normally have few chances to practice 
115TẠP CHÍ KHOA HỌC, Số 41, tháng 7 năm 2020
speaking or communicating with others 
by the target language. In most cases, 
they feel timid, embarrassed or frightened 
when being required to express their idea 
or communicate with others in English. 
Consequently, most of students show the 
reluctance to their study, refuse to take 
part in activities with others or even feel 
stressed in each lessons. Non-English 
majors in the faculty of Tourism are also 
not an exception, they are compulsory 
to complete two ESP subjects with the 
professional knowledge which focus on 
developing the speaking skill to cater for 
their future jobs. However, most of the 
student are not confident in communication 
as well as do not have chances to practice 
English speaking in reality and in learning 
process. The reasons may be the limitation 
of basic English knowledge, the lack of 
self-confidence, the embarrassment or 
shyness if accidentally making mistakes 
when speaking in front of others. 
Therefore, teachers always try their best 
to find out the suitable methods to help 
students improve their learning.
Think-Pair-Share strategy proposed by 
Lyman (1981) is considered an effective 
and efficient one for most of the students 
to bring positive changes in learning 
process as well as increase students’ 
learning motivation. In particular, there 
are some studies about the effectiveness 
of using Think-Pair-Share strategy 
investigated by researchers. For example, 
the research of Abdurrahman Hi Usman 
(2015) studied about using TPS strategy to 
improve students’ speaking ability at Stain 
Ternate. The researcher said that students 
achieved the positive result in speaking 
lessons and the good improvement in 
their ability. Another study of Ida Ubaidah 
Hidayati (2012) about the effect of TPS 
in improving vocabulary mastery of the 
second class students of Muhammadiyah 
vocational high school. The author 
showed that TPS strategy could help 
students improve their vocabulary 
mastery, make make the students more 
interested and actively involved in the 
learning process. In addition, the research 
of Andrew P. Kwok1, Alexandria Lau 
(2015) about the using TPS in promoting 
cooperative learning strategy, the study 
also pointed out that “TPS enhance the 
cognitive learning process. The students 
had more academic learning time spent 
in discussion, enhanced their thinking 
process from peer’s corrective feedback 
and self-reflection for deeper and more 
thorough understanding”.
Therefore, to help my students 
increase the confidence and participation 
in speaking lessons, the teacher decided 
to apply TPS strategy in learning process 
to evaluate its real effectiveness to non-
English students in the faculty of Tourism 
at HPU. Two following questions are used 
to clarify the main target of the research:
1. What is the effect of TPS strat-
egy to non-English majors’ confidence in 
speaking lessons at HPU? 
2. What is the effect of TPS strategy 
to non-English majors’ participation in 
speaking lessons at HPU?
2. DEVELOPMENT
2.1 Literature review 
2.1.1 Speaking skill
Speaking skill is believed to be one 
of the most challenging and important 
part in learning foreign language 
process, especially for foreign language 
students because this skill requires them 
116 TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC HẢI PHÒNG
to develop oral communication ability 
comprehensively. According to Brown 
(2004) “speaking is a productive skill that 
can be directly and empirically observed, 
those observations are invariably colored 
by the accuracy and effectiveness of 
the test-takers listening skill, which 
necessarily compromises the reliability 
and validity of an oral production test”. 
Thornbury (2005) also said that speaking 
was an interactive process and required 
the ability to cooperate in the management 
of speaking turn. In general, speaking is 
an interactive cooperation developed 
and enhanced as means of effective 
communication through producing, 
receiving and processing information.
Speaking skill is also a complicated 
process with the simultaneous participation 
of both speakers and listeners. Therefore, 
students are forced to accumulate their 
knowledge then apply to express their ideas 
as well as numerous language functions 
not only inside but outside classroom. 
However, “communication can only be 
effective when the student is sensitive to 
the social and cultural aspects of language 
use and how these differ between his first 
and second language” (Applegate,1975). 
Therefore, to improve the effectiveness 
in speaking lessons, teachers need pay 
attention to using suitable teaching 
approaches, provide students with 
interesting activities as well as create more 
learning motivations for them.
For most non-English majors in HPU, 
speaking is really a challenging task because 
they need to deal with language obstacles 
which prevent them from expressing their 
opinion fluently and confidently. Besides, 
their psychology of shyness, unfamiliarity 
to present in front of others as well as lack 
of chance to practice speaking English 
causes them not to gain a good speaking 
skill. Therefore, there are a lot of different 
techniques used to help students develop 
their communicative skills through 
interactive strategies, TPS strategy is one 
of the most popular strategy to be used to 
improve students’ speaking skill. 
2.1.2 Think-Pair-Share strategy
Think-Pair-Share strategy is a 
cooperative learning technique which is 
proposed by Lyman (1981) and proved 
by a lot of researchers to bring a lot of 
benefits such as (Lujan & DiCarlo, 2006); 
(Goodwin, 2005); (Arends, 2008). Using 
cooperative learning strategy means that 
students in different levels of ability 
use a wide variety of learning activities 
such as work in pair, in a small group 
or in a combination of both to improve 
their academic achievement, skills and 
students’ self-esteem (Goodwin, 1999). 
Each student participates in activities not 
only for learning but also for helping other 
teammates by giving immediate feedbacks 
and reinforcements. The common goals 
of applying TPS strategy are to increase 
students’ participation in speaking, enhance 
students’ confidence in speaking lessons. 
As a result, they can partly improve their 
academic achievement, develop language 
skills and the ability to work with others. 
A lot of teachers select TPS to apply in 
their classroom because this cooperative 
learning strategy is considered as an 
effective way to diversify class discussion 
atmosphere (Trianto, 2007). Lyman 
(1981) gives three steps in the TPS 
procedure including students are given a 
task or assignment to think individually 
in a short period of time, they think about 
the answers of the question, formulate 
117TẠP CHÍ KHOA HỌC, Số 41, tháng 7 năm 2020
and organize them in a suitable sequence. 
Then students work in pair or in a group 
to discuss their thinking with teammates 
and report their findings for relating 
tasks. This was considered an advantage 
of this strategy because Pressley (1992) 
said that the activity allowed students to 
have opportunity to think and provided 
them with a good chance to find out 
what knowledge they knew and what 
knowledge they needed to study more. In 
the final step, students share their opinion 
with other individuals in the group which 
creates the chances to interact with the 
whole group, present their own idea in an 
active manner as well as stimulate the oral 
communication skills. 
Besides, TPS strategy is a favorite 
activity of a lot of researchers because 
the evidences for the positive effect 
on studying process are given. Firstly, 
according to Lie (2002), “Think-Pair-
Share is learning strategy that gives 
students the opportunity to work 
independently and in collaboration 
with others”, which helps build the 
peer interaction and the positive 
interdependence because the success 
of the whole group depends on the 
individuals’ participation, so every group 
member’s participation and engagement 
is essential (Johnson & Johnson, 1999). 
Moreover, TPS learning strategy also 
helps develop students’ self-studying 
thanks to putting students in the center 
of learning activities, turning teachers’ 
role into guidance and organization. 
Therefore, active engagement of 
students is stimulated, more students 
participate in the classroom’s activities 
to debate, communicate with other 
students which creates an ebullient and 
effective learning atmosphere. 
Secondly, according to (Johnson & 
Johnson, 1999) face-to-face interaction 
is also an advantage of TPS strategy. 
Because it engages the whole class, allows 
all students including low-level students 
or timid students to take part in and reflect 
their idea. TPS strategy also reduces 
putting too much pressure on individuals 
when responding to the questions in front 
of the class which motivates students’ 
confidence and participation. Besides, 
allowing students to have enough time 
to think about the questions or tasks then 
discuss with others is also an advantage 
making students feel more confident in 
answering rather than responding directly 
by themselves. As Westwood, Peter and 
Oliver (1979) mentioned that teachers 
needed ensure active participation because 
what student practiced saying would help 
improve communicating ability not what 
they heard.
Besides, the competition among 
groups or pairs also helps students have 
more confidence in learning, thinking and 
expressing their own ability. This learning 
strategy also requires students to learn 
the way to work with other in the team, 
learn how to express their opinions, share 
and respect other’s opinion basing on the 
common goals or objectives. As the result, 
students can gradually improve critical 
thinking, problem solving, decision-
making skills and feel more interested in 
the enjoyable learning environment. 
In general, using TPS learning 
strategy has been proved to bring students 
more benefits. Therefore, the researcher 
decided to doing a study to evaluate the 
effectiveness of using TPS strategy in 
improving students’ participation and 
confidence in speaking lessons. 
118 TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC HẢI PHÒNG
2.2 Methodology 
The study uses a mixed method 
including questionnaire surveys and 
observation method to collect data for the 
study. Because questionnaire surveys are 
very effective and useful for the research 
as Richards and Lockhart (1994) said 
that questionnaires were a useful way of 
“gathering information about effective 
dimensions of teaching and learning, 
such as beliefs, attitudes, motivation, and 
preferences, and enable a teacher to collect 
a large amount of information relatively 
quickly.” Therefore, in this study, they 
can help me investigate students’ actual 
learning situations in speaking lessons. 
Secondly, to observe non-verbal gestures, 
facial expressions as well as the change 
in student’ attitude and participation in 
learning process, the author decides to 
use the observation method which is 
considered as a useful technique of carrying 
out research in psychology. Its goal is to 
obtain a snapshot of specific characteristics 
of students which are normally difficult 
to collect through questionnaire surveys. 
Therefore, using observation method helps 
the author discover the level of confidence 
and participation of students in learning 
process. 
2.2.1 Research setting and participants
This study was conducted in eight 
weeks from November to December, 
2019 in the faculty of Tourism at Hai 
Phong University. The subject is English 
for Hotel industry which is an English for 
specific purpose subject (ESP) has the aim 
to provide students basic knowledge of 
hotel industry and develop the ability to 
communicate with foreign customers in 
some common situations. Students apply 
the ESP knowledge to communicate in 
different situations, thus speaking is a 
compulsory content in learning process. 
There were eleven units used for this 
program, the participants are twenty-four 
juniors of Tourism administration class 
including both 16 female students and 8 
male ones with the pre-intermediate level. 
2.2.2 Data collection instrument and 
research design 
This study had the main aim to evaluate 
the effectiveness of using TPS strategy 
in improving student’s confidence and 
participation in speaking skill, therefore 
a mixed method research design was 
given. Using the data in different manners 
can help the researcher to get a thorough 
picture of students’ view of their abilities, 
their attitude to speaking skill, their actual 
participation in class discussion and the 
ways they took part in speaking lessons. 
Students were announced about the 
purpose of the study at the first lesson and 
all agreed to participate. In the first week 
and the final week, the author carried out 
collecting data through pre-survey and 
post-survey test about students’ attitude to 
speaking skill. In the following five weeks, 
the author implemented observation 
method to get data for the research. 
The procedure of the study included the 
following steps, firstly teachers prepared 
materials for teaching strategy including 
observation checklists, field notes, criteria 
for assessments. During the study, in 
each lesson, students were given a small 
task to discuss some given questions in 
a group of four while teacher observed 
the way students applied TPS strategy. 
After a limited period of time, teacher 
accidentally asked one students in a certain 
group to present their idea of the group 
and marked. One another activity using 
119TẠP CHÍ KHOA HỌC, Số 41, tháng 7 năm 2020
TPS strategy was that students worked 
in pair to make a short conversation with 
the given topic, after that, teacher invited 
some of them to present. To collect data, 
the researcher used an observation list 
to assess the process of applying TPS 
strategy included the information of 
such as participants, frequency and their 
attitude. Students were marked in different 
columns with a tick to show the evidence 
that they were active in conversation by 
posing questions, gave a long explanation, 
responded quickly to the answer, gave 
feedbacks to partners or showed what 
their attitude in speaking lessons. Finally, 
the researcher summarized all collected 
data to analyze and gave the findings for 
the study. 
2.3. Findings of the research 
With the purpose to answer the 
questions for the study about the changes 
of students’ participation and confidence 
in speaking lessons, the collected data 
showed a significant improvement in 
students with Think-Pair-Share strategy. 
To clarify the result of changing students’ 
participation and confidence in learning 
speaking, the researcher carried out 
analyzing the result of the pre-survey 
and post- survey. There were six given 
questions, the following table illustrated 
the answers for the study. 
Besides, two open questions were 
also given to find out the result of using 
TPS strategy in the post survey. For the 
first question “Do you feel interested in 
taking part in speaking skill? Why”, most 
of students agreed with the advantages of 
using TPS as some suggested answers. 
Firstly, teachers allowed them enough time 
to discuss, thanks to the period of time they 
could communicate with their friends to 
understand more about the assigned tasks, 
had a chance to discover new knowledge 
and found out the best solution. Secondly, 
accidentally appointing students to present 
idea by teacher forced all students in the 
group to take part in and master knowledge 
which avoided the concentration of task in 
one individual. Moreover, the atmosphere 
in speaking lessons seemed to be more 
comfortable and competitive with various 
chances to practice speaking directly with 
their partners. 
For the second question “Do you 
think that your speaking skill is partly 
improved thanks to TPS strategy?” Nearly 
all agreed with the idea and there were 
some suggestions chosen by students 
including I felt more confident to speak, 
I could speak longer sentences, I knew 
how to structure the content of speaking 
and I could apply more specific purpose 
knowledge in communicating better. 
At the same time, the data which was 
collected through observation method 
helped the researcher understand more 
about students’ participation. For the first 
week, some students did not show active 
attitude in speaking skill (Tien Anh, Ngoc 
Hai, Duc Hai, Hai Giang, Hong Chung, 
Hoa, Hieu, Lien, Mai, Thu, Trang). They 
showed the shyness, embarrassment in 
communication. They also used more 
Vietnamese in discussion, answered in 
short sentences and made a lot of mistakes 
in grammar and pronunciation. Even Ngoc 
Hai, Chung and Tien Anh only spoke one 
or two sentences in Vietnamese and sat 
silently. In the class, only Huong, Thuy, 
Ngoc Linh and Hong were active in their 
activity, gave long answers, explained the 
answers with the p