Investigating EFL Pre-Service Teachers’ Knowledge of Teaching Academic Speaking: The Cases of Skills and Competences, Technology Use, Feedback and Assessment Strategies

The present study was aimed to investigate the competencies an EFL teacher require to teach academic speaking, theirtechnology use in teaching academic speaking, and how to give feedback and assess academic speaking. Theparticipants were 120 pre-service teachers studying TEFL at Iran University of Science and Technology. Theresearchers developed 4 open-ended questions about EFL teachers' competences, technology use, giving feedback andassessing academic speaking, and the participants were asked to answer the questions comprehensively. The mostimportant criteria for EFL teachers' competences were knowledge of language and teaching. Pre-service teachers werealso eager about the implementation of technology in academic speaking classes and numerous technologicalapplications, websites and tools for teaching academic speaking were introduced.With respect to feedback, the mostfrequent pattern belonged to delayed feedback, whereas other suggestions were based on the opportunity rises, implicit,explicit, and on spot feedback. Regarding assessing speaking, some scoring schemes and rubrics of international tests,such as TOEFL and IELTS comprising of fluency, accuracy, cohesion, a wide range of lexical and grammatical items,correct pronunciation and intonation were recommended.

Keywords:

academic speaking , speaking competences , oral feedback , technology use , speaking assessment