Integrating Classroom English Skills into Real World Communication

Abstract

This paper aimed to encourage the students studying English as a foreign language (EFL) to use their classroom English skills in real world contexts, particularly in the AEC communication scenario. A series of action research was conducted to activate communication skills and maximize the learners’ performance of English, covering the four skills of listening, speaking, writing, and reading. In each study, these four macro skills were naturally integrated into real world communication. To illustrate this, one research article in a series was detailed. In this article, the classroom English skills were applied to the popular social networking website, Facebook, to design a research framework focusing on reading for communication.  From the researcher’s teaching experience, EFL classroom reading materials are limited to commercial textbooks or selected reading articles based on instructors’ interests. In order to promote extensive reading and strengthen the reading skills as a basis for communication in real world contexts, EFL learners should expose themselves to authentic reading outside the classroom and be provided with alternative sources of English learning materials. Based on the popularity of Facebook, this study therefore aimed to encourage extensive reading by employing the website as a cyber forum for EFL undergraduate students, who then shared their reading topics and their reflections on applying classroom reading strategies to reading English in real world contexts with other Facebook members. This eventually led to the main research question: To what extent did EFL undergraduate students develop their extensive reading on Facebook? The study methodology was designed for qualitative, action research conducted with a group of 31 undergraduate Thai students taking the course, “Reading and Discussion”. The data for the findings was derived from two sources: 1) from the articles, new words, reading strategies, reflections, and comments posted on Facebook during the 14 weeks of the university semester, and 2) from the responses to a structured interview questionnaire. The data were then qualitatively analyzed and categorized relative to the main research question and other related aspects. The findings revealed that female participants were likely to read and post topics related to health care, beauty, and fashion, while males were more interested in current news and different content-based topics. Results on effective strategies included using context clues to guess the meaning of new words, and analyzing the first sentence of each paragraph of an article to scope the subject area, the topic or the direction of the article. In addition, new words, idioms, and expressions learned from each article were detailed. The main conclusions drawn from this study covered the advantages of using Facebook for bridging the gap between classroom English to authentic English reading in real world contexts. Discussions on the drawbacks and implications of Facebook were also included in the paper.