Tertiary students problems in English speaking skills: a study among first semester private university in Dhaka city

Abstract

The modern educated generation understands the value of speaking in English. However, speaking is mostly an undervalued skill at the secondary level in Bangladesh. Though nowadays university-level students are eager to improve their English speaking, this skill is not well-practiced at SSC (Secondary School Certificate) level and HSC (Higher Secondary Certificate) level. Actually, in the secondary and higher secondary level, the institutions and teachers both ignore the speaking skills. They mostly focus on improving their writing skills. Parents also do so. The main factors behind it, are the assessment system of the SSC and HSC. Most of the time, students memorize the topic and write this on the exam paper. For this reason, they face huge problems in the university. They feel fear and do not do better in the examinations. They also feel fear to speak in English. So, they lose their confidence. However, they also struggle to solve this issue. There are hardly some research on this topic. Hence, this paper is an exploratory study that investigated the problems that students face in the first year of university and what they do to recover from the situation. To justify the title several secondary level students from urban and rural areas were observed. For the research, a mixed- method was adopted involving both quantitative and qualitative data to get a variety of in-depth understanding data. After collecting the data, the results of the survey were analyzed using SPSS to interpret the information gathered.