scholarly journals The effectiveness of Online Virtual Tours in Developing EFL Speaking Skills among Secondary School Students

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-136
Author(s):  
Sherihan Mostafa Eissa
2019 ◽  
Vol X (28) ◽  
pp. 203-224
Author(s):  
Ivana Odža ◽  
Mirjana Matea Kovač

The paper examines the attitudes of secondary school students, e. g. grammar school and craftmanship secondary school, toward their own language competences in the native (Croatian) and foreign (English) language. The testing instrument is a questionnaire with statements compiled according to questionnaires used to study attitudes toward the native and / or foreign language. The aim of the research is to observe the level of awareness of the respondents about their own language competences. The results of the statistical analysis indicate that the students of both populations are satisfied with their speaking skills in both languages. They also claim to recognize their own errors, as well as the errors and speech disfluencies of others. Grammar school students, unlike students from the craftmanship secondary school, find the introduction of a course that would further develop speaking skills useful. The obtained results are not in line with the dominant curricular guidelines for teaching the native language, especially those related to the area of speaking competences, emphasizing the need to strengthen the basic, spoken, and consequently written competences of students. The reasons for such attitudes could be explained by insufficient knowledge of the underlying features of highly developed communication competence and consequently of insufficient awareness of their own, as a necessary prerequisite for successful interaction in the contemporary society. The research results point to the necessity of acquiring a more objective perception of students about their own language competences. Keywords: speaking competences; speech errors; speech disfluency; students’ attitudes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136216882110506
Author(s):  
Abid el Majidi ◽  
Rick de Graaff ◽  
Daniel Janssen

Many secondary school students’ second language (L2) speaking skills suffer from deficiencies; the effects thereof are detrimental to their academic and career opportunities in a globalized world that highlights the importance of oral communication skills. Debate has been considered a potentially effective speaking pedagogical tool that can scaffold learning processes in ways that can lead to language development. This study investigates the effect of a debate intervention on English L2 speaking competence of Dutch secondary school students. Following a pretest–posttest control group design, we elicited speech samples from opinion tasks which we coded in terms of measures of speech quantity, fluency, complexity, accuracy and cohesion. Multilevel analysis results indicate that after the intervention, the intervention group produced more language which was more fluent, accurate, coherent and lexically more sophisticated relative to the control group. These findings, which have significant implications for L2 speaking development, are discussed in relation to specific characteristics of L2 debate pedagogy.


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