INTRODUCTION I.1 Rationale of the study: Increasing the students’ participation in language classroom activities is very crucial to the success in language learning. However, the question of how to increase the young learners’ time-on-task is really complicated. As many researchers and studies on the second language acquisition point out that the process of acquiring a second language grammar is not substantially affected by age, but the process of acquiring pronunciation, proficiency and especially, native accents is acquired better by children. That means young learners have more advantages when they early start to learn a second language. Nevertheless, young learners cannot concentrate for very long on monotonous language learning activities. In language teaching, there is a number of ways to involve the young learners such as games, media , and the use of all those facilities is obviously helpful for motivating learners. There are various types of facilities. Native speakers can be considered as a facility. However, in Vietnamese schools settings it is not easy to have native speakers for students to engage in the real social interaction and to be more exposed to native accents. Instead, students can watch native speakers on Videos or VCDs or DVDs (in the latter parts of this study, the term VCDs will be used to refer to all three means). Moreover, young learners usually are more visually oriented. Hypothetically, the use of videos in classroom settings could help to prolong young learners’ span of concentration and to motivate them during classroom activities. Yet, the issue seems to have been underexplored. The reality showed that the use of VCDs in schools was a rare and luxurious thing in the past. Nowadays, the use of VCDs and other means is not yet increased in language teaching. That is a reason why this study is designed to fill this gap in the literature. I.2 Aim of the study This study aims at exploring the possibility of using VCDs to increase the young learners’ time-on-task. Specifically, the aims of the study are to explore: ã Teachers and learners’ perception of the advantages of VCDs over audiocassettes. ã The extent to which VCDs increase learners’ time-on-task. ã The pupils’ attitudes toward using VCDs in the classroom. I.3 Scope of the study Definition: VCD stands for Video CD. Developed in the early 90's by JVC, Matsu****a, Philips, and Sony, VCDs, although having limited success in the U.S., became popular, mostly in Asia, for the playback of video content. For this study, the author would conduct a research on 10 English teachers and 50 pupils in Hanoi. These 50 pupils are in normal classes of a normal school. They are in the labor area - their parents all come from the working class - so most of them do not have condition to go to extra English courses. However, they have enabled to study English at school since grade 3 and have acquired an average level with about 800 word vocabulary. There are three types of textbooks used for normal primary schools in Vietnam: Let’s Learn (published with the assistance of a Singaporean publishing house); the textbook officially published by the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam, and Let’s Go. Every school has the right to choose what material it likes to teach students. The school under this research has chosen Let’s Go because it is a publication of the Oxford University, and it has both cassettes and VCDs while the two other types of textbooks only have cassettes. The students under the research study Let’s Go 2B. Thus, this research paper only refers to the use of VCDs included with the textbook Let’s Go 2. For the sake of this research, the author selects 4 lessons. The VCDs is included with the textbook and is illustrated with the first and second part of every unit. (Let’s talk and Let’s sing). I.4 Organization of the study This minor thesis includes five chapters: - Chapter 1: Introduction, which presents the rationale for choosing the topic, the aims, the scope, method and organization of the study. - Chapter 2: Setting up some theoretical backgrounds, which are relevant to the purpose of the study - Chapter 3: Methodology, which provides an overview of participants’ background information and method of collecting data. - Chapter 4: This part deals with data collection, findings and discussions - Chapter 5: Summary of the thesis, limitation and suggestions for further study.