Fostering oral production in 10th grade high school chilean students :compulsory speaking time and task-based language teaching

Abstract

The basis of this project was to evaluate the impact of a furtherance of the communication competences by implementing a compulsory task-based speaking time in an EFL classroom of a public high school in Santiago. A pre-test and a post-test were designed to identify the speaking level of the participants in order to see if there was an improvement after the implementation. This approach focused on collaborative work, and oral skills, which are the basis for the communicative approach. Even though time was not enough for the implementation to work as expected, the results of the second test showed an improvement in other areas that were not expected, it means that the task-based speaking time might be more effective as long as the methodology had a long-time implementation, but also other factors appeared during the time the investigation was being done, such as the type of evaluation or the scaffolding implemented during lessons. Keywords: speaking, task-based learning, collaborative work, communicative approach.