Communicative language teaching techniques for enriching the speaking skill in high school students

Abstract

This research project is intended to analyze how communicative language teaching techniques influence the enrichment of the speaking skill in high school students. In order to determine how these two variables are interrelated, extensive research was done by reading several books, articles and journals in relation to each variable. Special attention was given to the book “Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching” written by Larsen (2000), for gathering information about the independent variable (Communicative Language Teaching Techniques) and “How To Teach Speaking” by Thornbury (2005) to get information about the dependent variable (The Speaking Skill). Furthermore, a survey entailing 10 questions was applied to 12 English teachers and 234 second year baccalaureate students after it was validated by three experts. This survey permitted to get a more approached panorama of how these two variables are taken into consideration and applied in the English classrooms of the Ambato High School. Once the results were cautiously analyzed and systematically tabulated, the established hypothesis was verified through using the Student’s T-test. These results stated that indeed, communicative language teaching techniques do influence the enrichment of the speaking skill in high school students. The results obtained also led to draw several conclusions and recommendations. One of the most important conclusions pointed out that the majority of students believe that they learn English best through interactive tasks, but unfortunately teachers do not seem to frequently apply a variety of techniques that foster communication in the classroom. Hence, it was seen that students do not get enough opportunities to interact among themselves to practice using the language in such an authentic, enjoyable and meaningful manner. The recommendation for this conclusion was to devise a handbook, which entails 20 communicative language teaching techniques (some adapted, and others created) that teachers can use in their classes so that their students are encouraged to practice their speaking skill more often. Therefore, the proposal to address the research problem identified in this investigative project is the presentation of the handbook with 20 CLT techniques, which are distributed to address and enhance several speaking subskills such as fluency, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and functions.