Effectiveness of Oral Proficiency in English for Secondary Schools (OPS-English) Programme in Improving English Language Vocabulary among Secondary School Students

Speaking is an important skill that needs to be mastered as it is the best way to communicate with other people in order to deliver opinions and express ideas, but the fact is that secondary school students’ ability in speaking English is low in Malaysia. It is caused by several factors such as lack of vocabulary, poor pronunciation, weak grammar and poor fluency that hinders the mastery of English language. In this research, Oral Proficiency in English for Secondary Schools (OPS-English) Programme was employed to improve students’ speaking skill by engaging them in vocabulary based activities. The main objectives of this study are to investigate the effectiveness of OPS-English in improving the students speaking skills and increasing their vocabulary count. This is an experimental pretest-posttest control group design study which involved 70 students from a school located in one of the districts in Kedah, Malaysia.  The duration of the study was 8 weeks. The data collection was done using pre-test and post-test. The data from the pre-test and post-test was analysed quantitatively using independent sample test. The findings of this study show that OPS-English can improve students’ vocabulary. This is proven by experimental group’s students’ test score that showed improvement in the post-test. OPS-English is a suitable programme that should be used to improve students’ vocabulary. The result of this study provides useful insights for English language teachers in teaching speaking. Keywords: OPS-English, speaking ability, secondary school students, vocabulary activities