AN INVESTIGATION INTO PERCEPTIONS AND USE OF VISUAL AIDS BY ENGLISH TEACHERS AT SENIOR HIGH SCHOOLS IN CAN THO CITY, VIETNAM

Abstract

In the teaching process, as a teacher, we need to pay attention to many factors to create an effective lesson plan such as: target, objective, and environment and nowadays Visual Aids (VS) is one of the most popular tools and dealing with a direct effect on students learning process. Visual Aids can improve students’ long-term memory process. Besides, we do not have a deep understanding of how to use VS in the right way and at which level VS can engage students learning process. In this paper, the researchers focused on summarizing teachers’ perceptions of how to use VS effectively and the hypothesis of these teachers’ experiences to gain a result on how teachers could use VS to engage students in their learning process. The researchers collected the data by using a questionnaire on 44 senior high school teachers, including 20 male teachers and 24 female teachers and 150 students (70 males and 80 females) from Grade 12 and semi-structured interviews (6 teachers and 6 students) were also conducted then. These teachers chose the most suitable answers for seven questions on how they understood VS definitions and what style of VS they used to; which VS device they thought did the most effective on engaging students in the learning process. A total of 44 senior high school teachers came from high schools in Can Tho City, in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. After data analysis and finding results, the study exposed that a large part of high school teachers only focused on using PowerPoint (PP) to support the teaching process and using pictures, and images which were the most popular styles in using VS in teaching English. And the results showed that the effects of this style were increasing after each time it was used.  Article visualizations: