Factors Affecting Learner Speaking Participation
📌 Key barriers to speaking include personality traits (shyness/introversion), anxiety and fear of making mistakes, lack of confidence, and language barriers such as lack of vocabulary.
🗣️ Student interest in the topic and the interlocutors (preference for small, familiar groups) significantly impact willingness to speak.
⏱️ Insufficient thinking time before speaking and an immediate error correction approach can cause hesitation and reluctance to participate.
🛠️ Teacher support mechanisms like word banks, sentence frames, and models are crucial for providing tools and scaffolding for participation.

Action Plan Strategies for Engagement
🔄 The action plan focuses on three successful strategies: scaffolding, the Round Robin technique, and regrouping.
🔄 The Round Robin technique ensures equal opportunity to participate by structuring turn-taking (e.g., 30 to 60 seconds per speaker), preventing domination.
✍️ Think Write Round Robin adds a pre-sharing writing step (30–60 seconds) to organize thoughts, boosting confidence, especially for quieter students.
📚 Scaffolding involves using word banks (vocabulary categorized by theme) and sentence frames (starters to build coherent responses), which students can use to construct answers naturally.

Regrouping for Enhanced Interaction
😟 Students often feel more comfortable speaking only with familiar neighbors; keeping the same groups allows dominant students to monopolize conversation.
📈 Frequent regrouping breaks these patterns, balancing participation, increasing confidence in unfamiliar settings, and exposing students to diverse viewpoints.
⚖️ Effective regrouping strategies include grouping by proficiency (mixed or similar levels depending on the task), grouping by shared interests, and using flexible team structures (e.g., mixing pairs within foursomes).

Assessment and Reflection in Speaking Activities
📝 Assessment relies on getting students to speak via varied activities (role-plays, debates) while using rubrics to clarify expectations.
🤝 Peer feedback is highly beneficial as both the giver and receiver learn to identify and avoid common errors.
🧠 Self-reflection, guided by rubrics, is essential for students to observe their own development and increase autonomy and motivation.

Key Points & Insights
➡️ The primary takeaway from action research is the necessity to explore the root causes of classroom problems before attempting to solve them.
➡️ Adopt delayed error correction; observe and note mistakes during speaking tasks, then address them anonymously at the end to avoid discouraging participation.
➡️ For highly inactive students who persist in not participating after implementing strategies, conduct further research (e.g., anonymous questionnaires) to uncover the specific underlying reasons for their silence.
➡️ Structure activities like Round Robin with clear timing boundaries (e.g., 30–60 seconds per speaker) to manage the task and ensure equitable speaking time for every student.

📸 Video summarized with SummaryTube.com on Oct 30, 2025, 12:57 UTC