English Language Proficiency Skills Among High School Students: Basis for an Intervention Program

Speaking proficiency has special value anywhere in the world. It needs to be possessed by every individual to bring change to society. This clenches the amplified direction of the current study, where its primary objective is to assess the speaking skills of the SHS-HUMMS students of the DNHS. This study envisioned identifying the speaking factors in terms of grammar, vocabulary, aspects of discourse, pronunciation, and interaction. It utilizes the quanticorrelational descriptive method, which uses the purposive sampling procedure. Standardized rubrics for speaking skills were utilized, tabulated, and interpreted using the appropriate tools. This was further validated by the concurrent opinions of two language experts in the area of linguistics. Overall, the findings revealed a speaking peculiarity in proficiency. This surfaced after the data were treated with statistical measures using frequency and percentage, Kruskal-Wallis H-value for pairwise comparison, ANOVA, and Shapiro-Wilk for multi-variant normality. This was explained using a contingency table. Furthermore, the results showed no significant difference between the levels of indicators affecting speaking skills. Two factors that affected the respondents’ speaking skills, however, were pronunciation and interaction. Overall, an intervention program was put in place in order to address the speaking problem of the respondents.


INTRODUCTION
Good English, when used either in speaking or writing, is a necessity for every person. This will help to establish a clearer and better communication interaction. It is well known that English is generally spoken by most humans as their media to transfer intentions, such as giving services and asking for something. According to Jabbarova (2020), communication skills are extremely important and required in this age of globalization, particularly communication between nations. In addition, Rao (2019) stated that speaking is the most important skill to master among the four main skills required for learning a foreign or second language In fact, producing utterances is challenging when students are asked by a teacher to share their ideas about certain topics in front of the class. They face various mistakes that make them have poor categories of good English-speaking skills, but it is possible to find people who can produce the different sounds of a foreign language appropriately; hence, they lack the ability to communicate their ideas correctly, but there are some people who have the ability to express their ideas clearly, which, at the same time, cannot pronounce all the words correctly. This idea is akin to the quest for language research that must be addressed in the present study.
The contextual set up of this research suggests that there is a need to examine the speaking skills of HUMMS students at Dalipuga National High School.
According to the study of Sari & Syarfi (2014), students realized in which speaking's roles need more preparations, well-pronounced should be clear for each English class, it must be produced in grammatically correct, a good expressive and bodily language, text, and context are richly vocabularies and high confidence. Speaking, such as reading or writing, is crucial for learning. It is worthwhile to understand this fundamental attribute in the present study. There is a real need for speaking skills in students today (Eslit, 2019). Therefore, for students with worse speaking performance, remedial learning is required to strengthen their achievement. In this case, the teacher needs to implement an appropriate method and media to achieve the target aims for the current topic.
The purpose of this study was to assess the English language speaking skills used by students when they make a conversation, dialogue, and discussion, to improve their skills, to help students overcome difficulties, and to suggest new strategies for teaching speaking specifically in pronunciation and interaction that may help both students and teachers.
Overall, this study intended to assess the speaking skills of the respondents and implement an intervention program to address their peaking difficulties, particularly in the area of pronunciation and interaction. This needs to be addressed properly for them to become effective speakers and communicate well. This study aimed to assess the speaking skills of senior high school students of Dalipuga National High School as a basis for speaking intervention programs and sought to answer the following questions.
(1) What is the level of students' speaking skills in terms of grammar and vocabulary, discourse, pronunciation, and interaction? (2) Is there a significant difference in the level of factors affecting learners' speaking skills? (3) What is a learner's competence in speaking skills? (4) How does students' speaking competence influence the factors affecting their speaking skills? (5) What English intervention programs can be crafted based on the findings of this study?

Research Design
To see the general picture of the speaking English speaking skills of the respondents, the study used a one-minute video of the SHS-HUMSS learners of DNHS. A quantitative correlational descriptive research design was used. Thus, this study was a quantitative and correlational study using descriptiveevaluative content analysis as its tool. Quantitative research is illustrated with its intentions, and its methods create numbers rather than words as data for the assessment. This means that the study's data will be illustrated, recognized, and scrutinized using a rating rubric. As a descriptive study, it gathered particulars and evidence by describing present occurrences. It identifies the situation or area of concern factually and accurately. The researcher used the one-minute video output of the students in gathering the data, which was then measured according to its level of accuracy-based form of the given factors using standardized rubrics from Cambridge University. This type of research method did not simply make the act of accumulate and tabulate facts, but encompassed proper analysis, interpretation, similarities, and identification of relationships of the data  (Patton and Cochran, 2012).

Locale of the Study
This study was conducted at Dalipuga National High School, Bay View, Brgy.
Dalipuga, Iligan City. The said school was located at the upper part portion of the said barangay from the National Highway going to its neighboring City, Cagayan De Oro. A barangay known as the industrial barangay in Iligan City because it is situated by the number of industries and factories namely, Abiotiz Corporation, Pilmico Corporation and Coal Energy Power Supply.
DNHS especially the SHS-HUMMS students were known to be as active and winning students in terms of the different contest, may either be in school base, divisional, regional, and inter-barangay. Some of them are exposed with different extra-curricular and academic activities. Despite its location, since the place was quite elevated and most of the students' need to walk every day, they are still eager to go to school and were very participative in the different activities in the school.

Sampling Procedure
This study made use of purposive sampling wherein the researcher selected a sample based on the given information about the population. The participants were selected based on the purpose of the sample that can provide profound and comprehensive information. Presumably, a purposive sampling method would allow the researcher gather quantifiable information from the data being collected.

Instrument Used
To assess the English-speaking skills of SHS-HUMS students of DNHS, activity like one-minute video recording expressing their own idea of the presented picture were mainly use in this study. Thus, this study provided opportunities for students to answer extemporaneous speech to test their speaking skills. This one-minute video recording was conducted on 30 SHS-HUMSS students who are studying in DNHS.
Analysis was done by analyzing the speaking flaw made by the respondents using the proficiency rubrics.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
This chapter explained of the data gathered and deal with the result of the analysis that were presented in the table below. This was hoped to answer the survey assessing the English-speaking skills of SHS-HUMMS of DNHS. To ensure the clarity and consistency in the discussion, the presentation of findings follows a sequence based on the This implies that, there was an even distribution of level of student's speaking skills highlighting the four indicators with the rate of outstanding. These also means that majority of the students reach the standard level of their speaking skills. With the result, it was suggested that remediation activities will be given to sustain the level of skills of the students.
According to Lightbrown & Spada (2010) in learning second or foreign languages, motivation can be divided into two factors, they are communicative needs of the students and their attitudes towards the language community. In this case, the students will be motivated in learning a second/foreign language just because they need to learn and communicate it in a social large scale to support their professional ambition in the future. Therefore, they need to have a good attitude toward people who speak the target language because they need to have a contact with them. In addition, another factor which contributes to the students' motivation is a manner or attitude to reasons of why they want to perceive their intended result. In short, their motivation can influence their decision on being involved or not to a certain situation in language learning such as in speaking class.   Table 2  According to (Lumettu, 2018) Table 3 shows the level of the students' speaking skills performance, in which 11 out of This implies that, students showed a good degree of control of a range of simple and some complex grammatical forms, produces extended stretches of language with very little hesitation, was intelligible and intonation was appropriate, initiated and responded appropriately, linking contributions to those of other speakers. With these, it was highly suggested that enhancement activities like constant interaction with peers, public speaking, and the like will help the students polish their speaking skills.
In support with this idea, Tuan & Nhu (2014), stipulated that student to student interaction occurs among learners within a classroom context where the teacher plays the role of a monitor and learners are the main participants. It occurs in groups (student-student interaction) and in pairs (peer interaction). All factors affecting speaking skills of the students significantly influenced their speaking performance. R-squared ( 2 ) indicates a 99.9% of the variation in the students' speaking performance can be accounted for by the grammar and vocabulary, aspects of discourse, pronunciation, and interaction. This means that the speaking performance of the students can be predicted with these factors almost certainly. The analysis prediction model was also highly significant (F = 79475.550, p < .001) which confirms the previous statement that students' grammar and vocabulary, aspects of discourse, pronunciation, and interaction significantly predicted their speaking performance.
With the result, the significant finding predicted with the biggest positive impact was the pronunciation with coefficient result of ( =.325). This was followed by aspects of discourse with coefficient result of ( =.274). Interaction with ( =.251), and grammar and vocabulary with ( =.240). As this effect illustrates that when students' pronunciation and others were at the highest levels then expectedly, they can perform at the highest level of speaking performance.
This implies that, with the pronunciation as the highest positive impact it means that the students can efficiently deliver and can perform the highest level of speaking performance may it be in a usual conversation with peers, group discussion and the deliberation during public speaking performances. With high recommendation of the application of aspects According to Erickson and Astorga (2015), the results of employing listening skills will support the improvement of speaking. Therefore, data from 120 students at a higher education institution in Chile were analyzed; 60 of them, were provided with merely listening-focused 26 instruction and activities, whereas another group of 60 students was given a normal English teaching. The aim of this research is to discover the efficiency of utilizing intensive Listening-based instruction to enhance oral skills in students who are learning English as a second language. The parallel analysis of pre-and post-test rubric labels and scores indicated that there was a link between listening proficiency and a little improvement in functional and interactive oral skills.

Problem 5: What English intervention program can be crafted based on the findings
of the study?

Rationale
The speaking intervention program entitled "Speaking Confidence Program" aims to enhance and develop the speaking skills to boost confidence of the students in making conversation and communication. It particularly enhances the pronunciation and interaction skills which found to be the weakest skills the students' needs to develop to communicate effectively. With this program it highlights the specified objectives to address the needs of the students and updates the improvement in each participant. It also identifies the targets, strategies, MOV's, persons involved, timeline and success indicators to monitor the progress of the program.
The said program was implemented from June 2022 -September 2022 among SHS-HUMMS students at Dalipuga National High School.