<p>The research was conducted by the teacher as a writer of the study at Dong Nai Technology University. The study was carried out by using group discussion with two aims. They are: (1) to investigate the EFL students’ attitudes towards group discussion in their speaking classes and (2) to evaluate the effectiveness of applying group discussion activity in English speaking classes. The results of the study show that group discussion activity helped increase most of the students’ motivation in speaking lessons. Moreover, the findings of the study also indicated that after using group discussion activity in speaking lessons, the number of students getting GPA from B to A⁺ increased significantly with the rate from 35% to 63,33%. The researchers’ expectation was resulted by using group discussion activity in improving the students' speaking proficiency.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0938/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

<p>The study was conducted with the aim of finding out some main determinants related to the students’ speaking performance, not to eliminate them fast because that is impossible, at the present time, how to learn and encourage them gradually to solve the problems. The researcher believes that, when the students are clearly aware of the problems that they are encountering, they will be more positive in coping with them and improve them unconsciously. The descriptive method of research was utilized in this study to gather the necessary data and information. The independent variables are students’ motivation including their: achievement, competence motivation, power motivation, attitude motivation and incentive motivation. And the dependent variables of the students’ speaking proficiency include their: grammatical competence, strategic competence, discourse competence and sociolinguistic competence. The dependent variable focuses on English proficiency: accuracy and fluency. The respondents of the study were 30 English major students from Faculty of Foreign Languages and 6 teachers who were teaching English there, Dong Nai Technology University (DNTU).</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0939/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>