EVALUATING A SOMATICALLY- ENHANCED APPROACH (SEA) IN AN INTENSIVE THAI COURSE FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES
Felicia Zhang · 2014
This study evaluates the effectiveness of an intensive Thai course for academic purposes program (TAP) in improving L2 students’ listening and speaking skills in Thai. TAP employed communicative activities used in the Somatically-Enhanced Approach (here after SEA) such as relaxing the body, humming, clapping, movement and gestures in the teaching of Thai as a second language. Drama techniques were also used to train L2 students to detect the discourse features of Thai in academic lectures. In this paper, we report on improvements in L2 students’ listening and speaking performances in Thai in 30 students in TAP (experimental group) and 27 students (control group). Ttests analysis of the paper based listening test scores revealed that after the SEA treatment, students in the experimental group improved in their listening skill significantly. Furthermore, comparison of the mean scores of the two paper based tests between the experimental and control groups showed that students who were taught with SEA outperformed the control group of students in listening performance at the end of their courses. In speaking, the average score of the students’ performances in the experimental group in the post speaking tests was higher compared with that before the intervention; their Thai prosody improved; and their speech were considered by 9 native speaker judges to be more fluent. Such findings suggest that active learning strategies using in TAP can achieve long term positive impact on L2 students’ listening and speaking performances in Thai.