Learning & Improving English Communication With Volleyball - A Qualitative Study

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

In the early 1990s, academic experts perceived that communicative language teaching (CLT) had become a concept for approaches and syllabuses that encompass both the objectives and steps of classroom learning, for curriculum implementation that considers capabilities in terms of active participation and aims to improve future SLA research studies to catalyse its advancement. CLT is flexible by nature and there are simply too many ways for it to be manipulated in order to make it suitable and efficient for every educator’s student profiles and their respective learning environments. Hence, the researcher has chosen to try adapting CLT by playing sports – and volleyball was chosen; as it is one of a few team sports that involves significant amount of both verbal and non-verbal in-game communications betwixt all the players (D’Elia et al., 2020).

Volleyball

As volleyball has existed for over a century, its origins are pretty basic. According to historical documents, William G. Morgan, who created volleyball in 1895, had a sudden inspiration of providing an alternate physical exercise for those who felt basketball's 'bumping' or 'jolting' excessively demanding. William G. Morgan surveyed the available athletic games and selected those that he believed best fit his objective .Volleyball’s regulations varied according to region; nonetheless, national titles were held in a number of nations. Thus, volleyball developed into an increasingly professional sport requires a great deal of physical and technical ability . Currently, it is believed that volleyball is being played by over 800 million people worldwide.

Learning in sports – recent theory and recommendations

Recently, researchers have theorised that learning in sports may help promote critical thinking and an openness to experience learning (Ronkainen et al., 2021). Language educators and researchers typically correlate non-linguistic domains with teaching English by engaging English for Specific Purposes (ESP) philosophies, which also can also include sports. It has been recently recommended that teaching English with the integration of sports element needs to be improvised not just at university levels but also at school levels (Mendes et al., 2021) and professional working levels (Pranoto & Suprayogi, 2020). Hence, this research also addresses the recommendations stated previously.

Data Collection

Being actively involved in the recreational volleyball matches as a presumed foreign lecturer who did not understand Malay, the students had no choice but to speak English to communicate with the researcher whilst playing volleyball. This natural setting as a fellow recreational volleyball player enabled the researcher to verbally communicate with the students during the matches and actively observe their English communication abilities at the same time. The pilot research was carried out for 51 days in the span of 14 weeks; the observation days were not pre-planned with students to ensure data validity and reliability. As it turned out, researcher only happened to be available during the playing days in Week 1, Week 5, and Week 10. Hence, these days were used to collect the data needed. The in-game communications were recorded and described as field notes in a smartphone app during the interval periods in between the matches. Every conversation had would revolve around actual volleyball game plays, such as positions, strategies, instructions, suggestions, questions, and celebratory cheers. Aside from the volleyball basics listed earlier, some plays could only be explained using diagrams in Figure 2.

Volleyball tosses by a setter.

Participant Observation

A quick search in Google Scholar using the phrase “participant observation in sports research” revealed only three relevant results out of 473,000 results found without any specific range of publication year (Google Scholar, 2022). The lack of prior qualitative studies that utilized participant observation method for sports research has been one of the two main reasons of why this method was selected. The researcher, who happened to have more than 12 years of experience as a semi-professional volleyball player, an amateur volleyball coach, and a local university’s volleyball club advisor, had already possessed the necessary background knowledge and playing skills of the sport – this made the researcher a perfect ‘participant’ for this observation. Taylor et al. (2015) had thoroughly elaborated that participant observation researchers need to “blend into the woodwork”; in this research, the researcher’s past experiences and skills have proven that he had already grasped the required understanding of the settings. Another crucial reason for selecting participant observation is: there was already a presumed, mistaken perception amongst the students that the researcher is a foreigner who apparently did not understand Malay – the students’ first language. Hence, the researcher had decided to stay in the presumed character and joined the recreational volleyball sessions as a ‘foreign lecturer who can play volleyball’. This had proven to be extremely beneficial to this research because even though they still used Malay significantly as per their constant interactions with each other, the students naturally had to use English whenever they have to converse with the researcher. With these reasons in mind, the researcher even volunteered as a setter to promote more one-to-one communications with the students because setters control all the major offensive patterns. All these unplanned settings not only rejected potential bias elements, but also strengthen the validity of the data – because the actual representativeness of the linguistical features used could be assured in real-time settings .

Field notes

As suggested and explained by Taylor et al. (2015), researchers need to be critical when it comes to using field notes for contemporary qualitative research; primary concerns include how notes are recorded, what kind of notes are being kept, the possibilities of requiring informed consents from certain parties, and organization of data categories. As recommended by many past qualitative research experts, the researcher had used abbreviations, pseudonyms and unique keywords to protect the students’ privacy and confidentiality. In addition, the researcher had never asked anything concerning their demographic details (age, gender, hometown, etc.) or student profile (student ID number, current semester, program, course, etc.) to further reduce the possibility of the students’ identities being revealed in the future. By using a default, factory-setting ‘Notepad’ smartphone app to record notes during the short interval in between sets, most descriptions and conversations could be recorded fairly easily because of the categorized outlines made prior to playing the games. As these data were only used in this research solely to improve the students’ English proficiency levels, the researcher viewed that no informed consents were required from the students. Apart from the hidden identities and the sole objective of improving the students’ English proficiency levels, the researcher also perceived the observation sessions as an extension of learning more on how to educate the students better – these were the highlighted representations of the data collected .

Unstructured interviews

For this study, the researcher decided to proceed with unstructured interviews because according to Alsaawi (2014), this method’s flexibility provides lots of leeway and freedom for the students in answering them. This would also naturally cause minimal interjections for and from the researcher whilst asking questions. Alsaawi (2014) summarized that apart from the reasons mentioned previously, it would be efficient if the researcher has singled out the focus of then intended domain – in this case, the researcher only asked questions pertaining to volleyball skills and game plays. The researcher also used a specific variation of unstructured interviews that does not include having pre-planned questions – as explained by Adhabi and Anozie (2017). They called it non-directive interview, which signifies that the researcher would already have a strong grasp of the intended research contexts and the ability to control the directions of questions towards the relevant matter at hand – volleyball skills and game plays . As an example: if the researcher (as the setter) would be planning for an attack, he would have aptly instructed both outside hitter and opposite to prepare for A5 and D9 tosses respectively whilst quickly reminding the ones behind the 3-meter line to receive and pass the first ball up high towards the setter. A normal conversation would be expected to sound something similar to the interactive dialogue below:

Setter: “Outside hitter, listen up! You’ll get an A5 after this.”

Outside hitter: “Alright setter, I’m open!”

Setter: “Opposite, get ready for a D9 toss. That’ll be yours!”

Opposite: “I’m ready! Just give it to me!”

Setter: “The others! Make sure you pass the ball up high so that I can toss to the hitters!”

The others: “OK! We’ll give you a nice pass!”

In-game conversations like the ones prepared above would have been continuously uttered and shouted depending on the real-time rotations and offensive / defensive formations. Playing as the setter, the researcher would converse non-stop throughout the matches for both (i) play-making strategical awareness, and (ii) collecting data for further analysis. On average, at least four volleyball matches could be completed in the span of roughly two hours every day. The length of each match can easily differ from each other depending on several factors such current temperature and weather conditions (windy condition, bright sunlight, etc.), individual performances and volleyball rallies. Hence, matches could end as fast as 15 minutes and could go up to 30 minutes per match. All the relevant data from observation, field notes, and unstructured interviews would later be triangulated to increase the credibility and validity the future results that would be generated by further analysis with thematic coding.

Samples

For this research, 11 Malay undergraduates from Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Melaka were observed whilst playing volleyball in a recreational setting. Their actual academic levels were not ascertained, but they could most likely be a mixture of groups of students from either a Diploma program or a Bachelor’s Degree program or both. All of them were regular, recreational volleyball players who would play volleyball at the university’s public sport center late in the afternoons almost every day regardless of whether it would be weekdays or weekends. Figure 3 displays the layout of an official volleyball court:

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As no demographic details or student profiles were recorded, the only known similarity that can be confirmed visually was their passion in playing volleyball. It has been duly ascertained, however, that none of them (i) were non-Malay students, because all UiTM campuses only have Malay undergraduate students; and (ii) had an advanced English proficiency level; because everyone whom the researcher talked to could not form complete, grammatically – correct sentences as their verbal replies. These confirmations were within expectations – as explained in the methods’ introductory paragraph earlier. In terms of individual volleyball innate talents and physical skills, everyone’s level differs somewhat slightly. All of them had differing physical heights – from as short as 145cm to as tall as 180cm. They also showcased various levels of body conditionings, fitness, jumping abilities, and physical strengths. If they were indeed sharing a similarity in these aspects, it would be the notion that their individual skills as volleyball players were not up to par compared to the researcher’s own volleyball skills who has played as a semi-professional volleyball athlete for several years.

Data interpretations and discussions

From the triangulated data, it can be initially summarized that the students gradually uttered not only more words and phrases, but also sentences to communicate with everyone during the matches. The sentence structures in Week 1 showed that they had uttered short and brief sentences; most of them were simple sentences. Week 1’s sentences showed a low average of number of words used in a sentence – the numbers range in single digits. The vocabulary used was basic in nature and the level of confidence shown was not high. Awkwardness was detected whenever the researcher asked questions or initiated communications in the court. Some of them hesitated to answer and started to look at their teammates for assistance in giving responses. Their awkward smiles and stuttered speeches also gave the impressions that they were not used to conversing with a supposed foreigner – or perhaps, it was because they were simply not used to conversing in English outside of their classrooms. There were also a number of instances which reflected their lack of awareness in utilizing proper modal verbs (such as can, must, will, should, etc.) and subject-verb agreements (SVA; such as is and are with the correlating verbs). In addition, they also incorporated a few localized volleyball jargons to indicate certain events or situations; all of which were not recognized based on Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) standardized guidelines. For this issue, it also proved that they never had any prior professional experience as a volleyball athlete.

However, starting from Week 5, the lengths as well as the types of sentence structures spoken increased steadily. The average word count in their sentences reached double digits; their vocabulary ranges also showed improvements in terms of the variety of volleyball jargons used such as ‘floater’, ‘pancake’, ‘dummy’, and ‘cross’. Most probably because of stronger resolves and increased familiarity with the researcher in court for the past week, the students seemed as if they had a booster for confidence. They had begun initiating conversations using the second language instead of their mother tongue before they gave lengthier verbal responses and more variations of non-verbal feedbacks. They even elaborated specific instructions for certain plays and movements by using various volleyball jargons, particularly for offensive plays such as ‘fast ball’, ‘open ball’, ‘sub ball’, ‘back line ball’, jump serve, and ‘dump’. This proved that the students not only had the passion to improve their skills, but also the drive to improve their English communication skills by not being ashamed to try initiating conversations and giving responses.

Week 10 showed extensive progress if it was compared to the data collected in Week 1. Not only they started using significantly more jargons and longer sentences, but they also voiced out their responses with loud inflections. Aside from more varied and longer sentences (compound sentences and complex sentences could also be heard), they also asked questions and gave specific instructions with relevant recommendations. As an example, when a player advised the other teammates with “Remember guys, if you stay in front, you must take care of front zones only. Let others at (the) back receive high serves. All (must) bend down!” and / or requested a specific toss with “Setter, I prefer if the toss is close to the net and not far from the net”, these possibly showed either comfortability, spontaneity, or even confidence in L2. Hence, they have reached a level where they were able to inclusively (i) communicate with better English proficiency levels, and (ii) focused on the intensity of the actual matches. At this stage, they no longer needed to pause and think of a proper response in English – they could do it almost naturally without any reinforcement or assistance by the researcher.