Impact of using selected oral activities in promoting the second language learners' speaking ability

Abstract

English language ability is represented by four basic categories of skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. In a modern society all these skills are interrelated as they are all needed in one way or another for communication. The skill of speaking is more crucial and fundamental than others as it helps to mnemonically maintain a strong command of the relevant language that can be readily utilized in any communicative situation arising in an emergency. Even, psycho-linguistically, its indispensability is recognized as the ideas for communication are produced in the mind in a process of conceptualizing various objects in the life world and formulating various thoughts about them in terms of spoken expressions. Moreover, the skill of speaking is a significant part of the speaker’s consciousness. Yet, very unfortunately, in the educational system of Sri Lanka, the development of spoken skills in English is taken for granted. As a result there is no emphasis on teaching or assessing the skill of speaking English. Coming from a school system where the skill of speaking English is blatantly undermined, the majority of the university students suffer from a severe handicap in the context of English language ability. During university education they are faced with a great demand for achieving the relevant speaking skills as they are supposed to carry out numerous activities in English; attend English-medium lectures, gather information from a variety of sources available only in English, produce assignments in English, take part in presentations and discussions conducted in English, and visit various places where the general command is English. The main objective of this research is to investigate a method of promoting spoken skills among the undergraduate through a mechanism implemented by means of twelve types of oral activities that are used as teaching materials as well as test batteries namely, group discussion, role play, simulation, information gap, brainstorming, story-telling, interviews, story completion, reporting, playing cards, picture narrating & describing and finding the differences in pictures. Further this research tests how effective the selected oral activities are in promoting spoken skill, investigates the best activities to enhance speaking ability and provides some suggestions to promote it. The quantitative and qualitative method was conducted to reach these objectives. A questionnaire was distributed among twenty teachers of English to identify the effectiveness of selected twelve oral activities prescribed by language teaching professionals. And an informal interview was conducted to derive those teachers' suggestions to improve speaking ability. The results show that four oral activities namely group discussion, role play, interviews and storytelling are more effective activities to increase student talk time and oral performance. Some suggestions and implications to teach oral language were taken from the informal interviews with the teachers.