1. Original hypothesis.

We conducted a survey of more than 200 people who are seniors in the Department
of Foreign Languages at Saigon University, and the results are very surprising
when almost all of them are having difficulty learning English skills for the IELTS
test to get a score of 6.5. In fact, what we would have expected was that more than
half of the survey participants were experiencing this problem, but it turned out
that 95.7% of them were facing this problem, which makes us even more interested
in this study as well as wanting to understand clearly the reason why they are
having such difficulties and offer some solutions for them to improve their English
speaking skills. Moreover, our research shows its importance increasing more and
more because it is sad that the seniors who should have been fluent in English
cannot overcome the difficulties in improving the speaking skills that they need in
order to be qualified for graduation. In addition, in line with the hypothesis, what
makes the survey participants find it difficult to learn speaking skills is the lack of
vocabulary, the lack of practice, as well as their difficulty in expressing ideas.

2. Findings

In line with the hypothesis, survey participants have almost no problems with
pronunciation; they have good pronunciation, accent, and intonation when
speaking. The biggest struggles they are facing are their lack of fluency in
expressing ideas, their inflexibility in the use of grammatical structures, and their
poor source of vocabulary. Those problems can be solved completely by practicing
every day and building up step by step. Unlike other theoretical skills in the IELTS
test, the speaking skill mainly focuses on how people practice it in order to acquire
the habit of expressing ideas, reflecting, and speaking out using the appropriate
grammatical structures, phrases, and words. The results, which were similar to
what we had previously expected, showed that more than half of the survey
participants actually felt the lack of practice greatly affected their IELTS speaking
test results and kept their speaking skills from improving.

Be aware of the reasons for the difficulties that prevent the survey participants
from improving their English speaking skills. 44.3% of them are still confident that
it is not too difficult to achieve a score of 6.5 on the IELTS speaking test if they
spend more time practicing. The most common excuse for this lack of practice is
that the speaking time in classroom lessons is too short. Besides, many of them
have other activities to do after school. For example, in Vietnam, seniors tend to
have part-time jobs, internships, charitable activities, and so on. When we
suggested several options to improve speaking skills, many people chose to self-
study through online resources, TV shows, and social media platforms such as
Facebook, Tiktok, etc. In addition, they can study together with friends as well as
participate in professional and methodical courses at English centers. This result is
also in line with our initial prediction.

3. Explanation for findings:

4. Limitations:

The research was limited to the Department of Foreign Languages at Saigon

University. Therefore, the results of the survey as well as the conclusion of our
research cannot be completely applied to English majors at other universities.
because each university has a different training program. Besides, depending on
the geographical issues as well as the economic conditions of each specific region,
the ability to access options to improve the English learning ability of students will
not be the same. Furthermore, it was impossible to avoid error cases during the
online survey, for which researchers could not take initiative (random choices,
duplicates, etc.).

5. Further research.

The study can be considered to be used and extended to other seniors at other
universities in Vietnam to get more accurate results and further research on the
difficulties of seniors in major English from universities for the 6.5 IELTS
speaking test.