PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH University Frères Mentouri Constantine Faculty of Letters and Languages Department of Letters and the English Language Upgrading Students’ Oral Performance via the Utilisation of Positive Self-talk and Personal Goal-setting. The Case of First Year Students at the Department of English, ENSC PhD Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Didactics and English Language Teaching Presented by: Mrs. Meriem BOULKRAA Supervised by: Prof. Hacène SAADI Board of Assessors President: Prof. Riad BELOUAHEM………. University of Constantine. Supervisor: Prof. Hacène SAADI …………. University of Constantine. Member: Prof. Said KESKES …………. University of Setif. Member: Prof. Hacène HAMADA..……. E.N.S. Constantine. Member: Prof. Amor GHOUAR………. University of Batna. Member: Prof. Samir LARABA …….. University of Constantine. 2015 - 2016 Dedication I gratefully and respectfully dedicate this thesis; First and for most, glory to our martyrs. To my very precious parents who offered their tireless unconditional love, companionship and unwavering support throughout this long process. To my husband and to our much loved children, the heart of my happiness, Rahma and Yahya who have taken the journey with me; “you should be very proud of yourselves”. To “the true warriors”, those who attempt each time to beat the enemy within: “negative inner-speech”. To ant strong; the best teacher I ever seen! And to the dearest reader “A public toast to all of you”. I ACKNOWLEGEMENTS No man is an island of self-contained perfect knowledge, on everything he/she needs to write about. Eventually, many people have contributed directly or indirectly to the writing of this thesis. First and foremost, I would like to thank God for the blessings that he continues to pour on me, though the challenges have been enormous, the rewards have been worth it all. I would also like to praise my parents who have helped me go beyond all the constraints and difficulties I encountered during my research work. Though they have not had the opportunity for higher education but value and construe the meaning of it. I wish to convey my indebtedness and sincere gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Hacène SAADI who provided all manner of points of inspiration and insights for my own research experience. He has shaped my understanding of Psychopedagogy; it is to him I owe my passion for Psychopedagogy and for simply being a delight to work with. He, really, deserves special thanks and appreciation for his diligent, brilliant ideas and constant push: “persons as generous as these are a rare breed”. I am infinitely indebted as well to his wife for her supportive assistance, human attitude and her interest and admiration for the theme of this thesis. I wish also to acknowledge with great debt and a deep gratitude those professors who accepted to be members of the jury and who exerted considerable time and energy to review the whole thesis to offer valuable comments: Pr. Hacène HAMADA, Pr. Riad BELOUAHEM, Pr. Samir LARABA, Pr. Said KESKES, and Pr. Amor GHOUAR. I wish to voice out a big “THANK YOU” to all of you. You really deserve special thanks. II I must address very special thanks to my wonderful sisters and to all the extended family. And a deepest appreciation extends to my friends as well: Norah BOUDEHEN, Fatima SEMAKDJI, Soumia BOUGUERRA and Saoussene MADOUI, for being a constant source of help and support in a number of ways in the production of this thesis. Their unforgettable support, encouragements, and assistance are greatly appreciated. My work could not have been launched without the generous aid of Samia ABBAZ who helped me type the manuscript in a shorter time limit, and who left no means to encourage and help me to carry on working on my research project. I am deeply grateful to DELLOUCHE Abderraouf for his assistance and guidance. For he left no means to help me carry on this research work. I would like to voice out a big thank you for him. I am especially grateful to Souheila BEKEY and Amina GEMOUH for their great help and all round support in this research work. Particular thanks are due to ENSC students who so willingly took part in what was a most stimulating experimentation; indeed it was an enjoyable journey. I also owe much to colleagues who subsequently agreed to participate in completing the questionnaires for this research work. Last but by no means least, no words would describe my indebtedness to my parents whose long patience, endurance, and eagerness to see the fruit of this research experience provided me with an endless motivation and willingness to go forward. I express a debt of gratitude to them; and my apologies for any inadequacies. You are simply the most kind, soft, and generous persons I ever seen and I am who I am because you believe in me! III ‘What we hear from others about us is considered important, but the most important thing is what we say to ourselves about ourselves that has the most powerful impact on our mood, feelings, behaviours, health, performance, success and happiness...!’ Meriem BOULKRAA IV ABSTRACT Positive self-talk (P.S.T) and personal goal-setting (P.G.S) are currently considered among the most potent self-management learning strategies, and as major factors within educational psychology that can fully be exploited by university students in order to bolster up their performance (achievements), in general, and their oral performance (speaking skill), in particular. The present study is an attempt towards sensitizing learners about the importance and usefulness of these learning strategies in aiding them produce more natural proficient English conversations, and demonstrating that such types of cognitive-motivational strategies (P.S.T and P.G.S) have generally been found to be effective in enhancing students’ performance in a variety of skills (such as the conversational skill). Specifically, the main aim in writing this thesis is to explore the potential effects of P.S.T and P.G.S. on students’ oral performance. Another equally significant aspect of this research is to investigate whether and to what extent these cognitive-motivational strategies are used by students as well as the utility of instructing a selected range of self-management learning strategies in order to improve students’ conversational skills, and thereby facilitating the teaching/learning operation. We hypothesize that if learners are sensitized about the significance and the usefulness of utilizing P.S.T and P.G.S as effective ‘self-management’ learning strategies, they would guide themselves to enhance positively their oral performance. For this purpose, a pre-test; a four- month follow-up study of one group (an intervention on building students awareness for utilizing P.S.T and P.G.S) and a post-test have been established, in addition to a series of questionnaires administered to first year students and to instructors at the English Department of the Teaching Training School, Constantine. Findings suggest that P.S.T and P.G.S truly have a potent cognitive-motivational role (positive significant effect) on students’ conversational skill, a fact which all the instructors in the questionnaire agree upon. Furthermore, as students’ questionnaires have revealed, more than half the students have been found unaware of the potential effects of self-management learning strategies (P.S.T and P.G.S). On the basis of our results, we confirm the importance, the usefulness and the effectiveness of self-talking positively and self-setting goals from the part of students for more fluent natural conversational English. Moreover, research findings revealed interesting implications and suggested recommendations for language learners to use these cognitive- motivational strategies, and for Oral Expression teachers it is worthwhile to assign considerable significance to the instruction of these potential self-management learning strategies. key words: positive self-talk;personalgoal ;setting-oral performance V LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS S.T. Self-talk P.S.T. Positive self-talk N.S.T. Negative self-talk G.S. Goal-setting P.G.S. Personal goal-setting E.F.L. English as a foreign language E.N.S.C. Ecole Normale Supérieure de Constantine L.M.D. Licence Master Doctorat O.E. Oral Expression Q. Question VS. Versus L2 Second Language VI LIST OF TABLES Table 01 Williams and Burdens‟ (1997) framework of L2 motivation 28 Table 02 Sources of Intrinsic Motivation 66 Table 03 Steps in Constructing and Implementing a Learning Strategy 76 Table 04 Negative Self-talk 107 Table 05 Positive Self-talk 114 Table 06 Procedures for Improving Self-talk 119 Table 07 Example of Self-talk 120 Table 08 Procedure for Writing SMART Goals. 151 Table 09 Goal Properties and their Effects on Behavior 157 Table 10 Table for Evaluating Concerns 196 Table 11 Procedures for Goal-setting 215 Self-motivation is considered as a critical component of effective Table 12 302 learning. Eventhough students are, from time to time, extrinsically motivated, it Table 13 303 is not quite sufficient and they need to be intrinsically motivated. If yes, hence, effective learning, in general, and speaking fluency, in Table 14 particular, is unlikely to take place in the absence of intrinsic 304 motivation. Have you ever noticed that there are some interfering thoughts that Table 15 305 come to your mind, before and during an oral performance? Table 16 Do they affect your oral performance? 306 Do you think that these interfering