Differential Effects of Conversation, Free Discussion, and Presentation on Fluent Speaking Achievement

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of three different speaking activities in classrooms on the fluency improvement of the learners. The participants of the study were 40 EFL learners from two private language centers of Ardabil in Iran. The participants’ homogeneity was checked through Oxford Placement Test. Then, the selected participants were interviewed in order to be rated on their fluency. The interviewer completed the Fluency Rating Scale suggested by Fulcher (1996). Then, the participants were divided into 4 groups (with 10 students in each). One group was the control group with no treatment. One of the three speaking fluency tasks (conversation, presentation, free discussion) was given to each experiment group. At the end of 10 treatment sessions, another interview was performed and the learners’ fluency were ranked.In this study we used non-pragmatic version of ANOVA. The results revealed that the difference between the first fluency scores and the second was not significant in the control group. However, there was a significant difference in conversation group’s performance from the first fluency evaluation to the second one considering the significance level of .05. The same result was revealed for the free discussion group’s fluency performance. On the contrary, no significant difference was observed in the fluency ranking of the presentation group at the significance level of .05 or less. The pedagogical implications can be for teachers, syllabus designers, curriculum developers and material writers.

Keywords:

Conversation , Free Discussion , Presentation , Fluent Speaking