Using Immersion Teaching Process to Develop EFL Learners’ Speaking skill

Speaking skill is one of the most significant skills because it is one of the means of conversation and communication with others. Thus, this paper aims at investigating the development of the students‟ speaking skills by using the immersion teaching process, in addition to observing the authentic level of the students‟ implementation in their speaking performance. To achieve these objectives, a questionnaire is designed to be administered to the research sample. The research sample consists of students selected from the second stage in the Dept. of English, College of Education, Salahaddin University. The research findings revealed that improving students' speaking skills requires at least an initial level of language speaking competence. Based on the results discussion, a number of suggestions and recommendations are presented to investigate the impact of project-based learning (PBL) on speaking skills . © 2020 JTUH, College of Education for Human Sciences, Tikrit University DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25130/jtuh.27.5.2020.21 ةيسامغنلاا سيردتلا ةيلمع مادختسا يملعتم ىدل ثدحتلا ةيلباق ريوطتل ةيزيلكنلاا ةغللا ةيبنجا ةغلك هفيطسا ا زخم فيرا / ةيبختلا ةيمك / ةعماج نيجلا حلاص / ليبرأ يلو يمع نيدح .د / ةيبختلا ةيمك / ةعماج حلاص نيجلا / ليبرأ ةصلاخلا ،يلاتلابو .نيخخلآا عم لصاهتلاو ةثداحملا لئاسو نم اينلأ تا رايملا مىأ نم ثجحتلا ةرايم جعت ،ةيسامغنلاا ذيرجتلا ةيممع ماجختساب بلاطلا ىجل ثجحتلا تا رايم خيهطت ةسا رد ىلإ ثحبلا احى فجيي هحى قيقحتل .ثجحتلا ءادأ يف بلاطلا حيفنتل يقيقحلا ىهتدملا ةظحلام ىلإ ةفاضلإاب ميمرت مت ،فاجىلأا يف ةيناثلا ةمحخملا نم مىرايتخا مت بلاط نم ثحبلا ةنيع نهكتت .ثحبلا ةنيع ىمع وعيزهت متيل نايبتسا ثجحتلا تا رايم نيدحت نأ ثحبلا جئاتن تفذك .نيجلا حلاص ةعماج ،ةيبختلا ةيمك ،ةيديمجنلإا ةغملا مدق


Statement of the Problem
A major part of current learning environments is PBL. It is considered an alternative to paper-based, rote memorizing, or instructor-led lessons. PBL supporters cite various benefits in integrating their strategies in the classroom. These benefits include an extra level of connotation expertise, a comprehensive interpretation framework, better performance and interpersonal/ social skills, enhanced leadership skills, improved creativity and advanced writing skills. This also consists of a certain kind of training where the learners work together in their schools and communities to solve real-world problems. Problem solving also allows students to attract and follow guidance from various disciplines and observe them in very evidence-based design. This principle of training and being acquainted with a technique known as a "project-based experiment" of the tidal way is superior.
Two analyses (see Jones, Rasmussen & Moffitt, 1997; Thomas, Mergendoller & Michaelson, 1999: 47) are being used by Thomas (2000: 1) to describe PBL as complex assignments focused on difficult questions or issues involving students in design. This requires students to work relatively autonomously over considerable periods of time, resulted in practical products or presentations.
According to Bell (2010: 83), PBL is a key method for creating unbiased thinkers and learners. It solves real-world problems by designing their investigations, planning their learning, organizing their research, and implementing a multitude of mastering strategies. PBL is the pedagogical strategy of all learners motivating them to pursue subject awareness on their own and to demonstrate their new understandings throughout a wide range of presentation methods. The use of project-based classroom teaching is possible after providing the knowledge required for the project. Classroom performance should be student-centered, cooperative and interactive. The members of the group are responsible for their learning. Instructors play the role of co-operators, mediators and students (Moursund, 1999: 81).

Research Questions:
The researcher tries to find answers to the following questions: 2. Investigating about the best teaching learning strategies that foster speaking skills in English Teaching and Learning.

Limits of the Study
This study is confined to assess the integration of the major English language skills among second-level students in the Department of English Language, College of Education, Salahaaddin University, Erbil, for the academic year 2018-2019.

2.1
Project-Based Learning One of the effective techniques that turn the attention in the learning process to the learner rather than the teacher is Project Based Learning (PBL).
PBL has received a great attention since the late 1950s due to its high significant effect and major role in creating independent thinkers and learners and increasing the effectiveness of learning language and other educated subjects (Ying, 2002: 22).
Hence, this section reviews the literature on PBL in terms of its origin, characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of its implementation in language learning in general and its contribution to English learning in particular. Also, it focuses on the learner"s autonomy, its nature and the way to promote it through the PBL process. This is to reveal the effect of applying PBL process to teaching English language, known as Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL), on the development of learners" autonomy.
Dewey is considered the intellectual father of PBL and the first figure of dynamic instruction. Dewey assumed that the child is a perplexing person and that the students feel an internal desire to learn alongside their understanding of the reasons behind the research. As stated by Guven (2014: 183), Dewey has upheld the term "learning by doing" and has set out the conceptual frameworks for PBL. The founder of the PBL approach, however, is his fellow-worker, American educator William Heard Kilpatrick, who stressed the importance of student's attention and recommended concentrating on the instructive content of the project work. His fundamental goal was to construct the students' identity and to emphasize their responsibility for their learning (Kalabzová, 2015: 5).
Moreover, Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of development highlights that "zone of proximal development" has a critical role in the establishment of PBL.
According to this theory, learning is performed when students resolve their issues beyond their real advancement level under the guidance of teacher or in collaboration with more proficient peers (Guven, 2014: 184).

The Role of the Teacher in PBL
Being a teacher is a standout amongst the most requesting and responsible profession. Despite social and time framework, instructors come just after parents to assist children and students to integrate in the community, gain essential and useful skills, knowledge, attitudes, and capabilities, motivate However, PBL is one of the most substantial methods that play an essential part in the academic institution to real worlds. It affects the students" interpersonal skills and progress, leading them to utilize their talents and professions. It also promotes communication skills and allows students to work cooperatively to grow their personalities, allowing them to diversify into self-employed learners. Finally, PBL helps students to solve real-world problems and train them for real-world achievements.

The Implementation of Immersion PBL
The project, as Fried-Booth (2000: 10) states, undergoes three stages: beginning in the classroom, moving out into the world, and moving back to the classroom. These three steps lead to: 1. Classroom planning: in cooperation with their instructor, students explore the design and scope of the project.
2. Project implementation: learners leave the classroom to complete their proposed tasks, such as conducting interviews and gathering data.
3. Job analysis and monitoring: this involves discussion and input sessions to assess the proposal.
4. In addition to these steps, Fried-Booth (1997: 10) points out that a follow-up program to monitor the language requires students to observe activities during the implementation step that are beneficial to the students' linguistic competence.
PBL enables the students to apply their skills to issues that may occur in real-life circumstances.

Benefits of Immersion PBLL in Teaching English language
From a motivational perspective, the authentic tasks of the project are more important for students who increase their willingness to participate, boost their engagement and can advance learning. PBL is said to empower students because they are completely engaged in learning. Inspiration is likewise extracted from the fact that the vocabulary of the classroom is not impediments and how these shortcomings could be overcome. This implies that PBL is an innovative method that utilizes an alternative means of evaluation. Using the PBL method in language learning, students could assess themselves regularly. Evaluation is viewed as a continuous, frequent, and varied process including self-evaluation, peer review, teacher evaluation, selfassessment and reflection (Kalabzová, 2015: 9). To sum up, PBL is extremely useful and beneficial to students generally and EFL students particularly.

Research Method 3.1 Experimental Design
Good (1973: 174) defines the experimental design as "the strategy by which experimental groups are chosen, experimental treatments are administered and their effect is evaluated." Based on this idea, Bachman (2007: 266) states that two distinguishing characteristics of an actual experimental design must be taken into consideration when implementing an empirical study. The first characteristic is randomization and the second one is the experimental intervention or treatment. This means that the different individuals of a sample are exposed to distinct sets of circumstances as part of the experiment. In the current research, the post-test is applied to two groups (i.e., experimental and control) to discover the impact of integrating English PBL on developing learners" autonomous language acquisition.

Research Sample
The targeted sample of this study is limited to the second stage students at the Department of English, College of Education, Salahaddin University for the academic year 2018-2019. The total number of sample is (66) male and female students, representing two classes A and B (see Table 1). This college is selected for having an English communication course, as well as offering the resources to carry out a successful research.

Students' Age as Measured in Months
Age variable represents learner"s experience in learning, and it may influence the objectivity of the experimental study. As far as this variable is concerned, learners" age is measured in months so that members of the two groups are equalized in age. So, Mann-Whitney U is used through SPSS, which is computed for the two groups of the experiment (see Table 2).  The questionnaire consists of three parts intended to collect data on students' perspectives on learning through a PBL approach. It is postexperimental, exploring the views of students after being exposed to the PBL curriculum. It includes (14) open-ended questions (see appendix 1), focusing on understanding how and what the learners learned through a PBL approach. It is administered to (68) students who attended PBL classes and agreed to participate in the study. It is structured to allow students to express their learning experiences through a PBL approach. Based on the obtained results from the pilot study, no ambiguity is found concerning the items content. The questionnaire content has matched the students" level of comprehension, and the average time allocated to fill the questionnaire form is (90) minutes.

Validity and Reliability of the Questionnaire
Test validity is characterized as "the degree to which the test measures what it claims or purports to measure" (Brown, 1988: 101 Second, whether those who fail to return their questionnaire would have given the same distribution of answers as did the returnees" (Belson, 1968 as cited in Cohen et al., 2000: 128). The test is presented to the jury of experts in the area of English language teaching methodology to examine whether the items are expressed accurately and clearly and representing the projects expected to be used by the students. The referees suggest some opinions and modification, but they all agree that items are clearly and correctly represented PBL.

Results Analysis
The following tables show the statistical analysis of teachers' responses to the questionnaire form. The domain is calculated according to percentages, frequency, mean and significance. Operating on a project enhances the integrated skills of the students such as listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Results Related to the First Aim:
The first aim is on investigating the impact of immersion PBL method of teaching on developing students' speaking skills and finding out to what extent this approach boosts students" careful selection and exploitation of techniques of learning new concepts and encounter new perspectives. Hence, T-Test is applied to examine teachers' attitudes towards the form of language curricula in higher education. Results indicate that statistically there are no significant differences among teachers' attitudes towards using PBL to develop ELT speaking skills at α.0.05. The measured T-value is (1,932), which is lower than the T-tabulated value (3,606) at (0.05) level of significance and (5) degree of freedom, as shown in table (4). The second aim is on investigating the best teaching/ learning strategies that foster speaking skills in English Teaching and Learning. Here, T-Test is applied to analyze teachers' attitudes towards using different main strategies of learning projects evaluation. Results indicate that there are statistically no significant differences at α≤0.05 between them toward using this standardized model of evaluation. The calculated T-value is (2.467), which is less than the Ttabulated (4.242) at (0.05) level of significance and (5) degree of freedom, as shown in table (5).

Discussion
With regard to the first objective of the research, the research participants showed no significant statistical differences between English teachers in both colleges, since both agreed that the project-based immersion methods of teaching require more updated teaching curricula. The use of PBL will provide more opportunities for students to talk and communicate with their teachers, on the one hand, and with peers, on the other. They can endure their interaction without any interruption and that the accuracy, fluency and subject relationship of the learners are improved. Strategic skill of the learners has increased and they can quickly overcome difficulties in communication.
Concerning the second aim, an increase is recorded in most oral output categories, which is consistent with the assumption that EFL students need to be exposed to environments with opportunities to express them and authentically communicate with others to improve their speaking skills (Oradee, 2012).
Students are expected to take part in small groups to complete some assigned learning tasks as discovered in the responses of the teachers. In addition, the results show increase in learner's motivation resulting from the adapted lessons and the fact they can communicate using only English in classroom. The majority view is that these activities are pleasant and can be used in other units.
Some of the feedback indicates that the learners understand the value of learning interaction. Cooperation between groups is useful for debating the material of the course. It helps students understand the topic and gives them confidence that their opinions are relevant and valid. The students believe that the exercises are fascinating and thus they enjoy participating in them although it is often difficult for them to decipher context, an obstacle that is overcome by the presence of teachers/ researchers and by cooperation with classmates (see Luan & Guo, 2011).

Conclusions and Recommendations
To sum up, teachers use different curricula based on their teaching experience combined with their real preference. Students in this study may be lacking awareness of the aspects of PBL. They may not be aware of available strategies they can use to facilitate their leaning or the strategies that they are already employing. All these operators show that students should be trained in PBL so they will consciously start employing the right strategies to enhance their learning and to become more autonomous and competent language learners. Thus, it is important to emphasize that teachers can explain the way of learning appropriately to motivate language learners. It is important for the students to be more efficient and develop strategies that help them improve their learning and how to approach a new language. Therefore, the researcher suggests the following recommendations based on the above conclusions: 1. Since teachers play a significant role in the classroom, they should not devote the whole lesson depending on themselves in the interpretation and discussion. They need to motivate the students to participate actively and to reflect their background information by identifying their own strategies that are useful in learning process.
2. Empirical studies on the effect of teaching PBL on students" achievement are also needed and can be fruitful topics for future research.
3. Empirical studies on factors of language learning strategies at different stages of acquisition for language learners might help to answer different research questions. 4. It is also proposed that teachers should participate in supervised and ongoing global workshops to further teach production of this more globalized approach to language learning in modern classrooms. 12. I think speaking English helps my personality grow. 13. Speaking English using Immersion PBL is an essential and sublime aim in my life 14. Operating on a project enhances the integrated skills of the students such as listening, speaking, reading and writing.