The Effect of Story Retelling Technique on Iranian Pre-intermediate EFL Students' Overall Speaking Ability and their Fluency and Accuracy

Since speaking is important for most students, teachers should equip themselves with up- to - date techniques and methods of teaching this skill. One of these ways is using short story retelling technique (SSRT). This study aimed to investigate whether using SSRT improves students' overall speaking ability and their fluency and accuracy. Speaking English with a high level of accuracy means you speak correctly, with very few mistakes, while speaking fluently means you speak easily, quickly and with few pauses. For this purpose, 60 male and female pre-intermediate students from a private language institutes in Galikesh,Iran were chosen as the participants of the study. The students were considered homogeneous based on the placement test given by the institute. They were placed randomly in two groups, control group and experimental group. The study was based on pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental design. To ascertain the homogeneity of the participants in terms of speaking a picture description task was given to the participants at the beginning of the study. In pre-test the researcher used the picture description to elicit student's speech samples. The samples were rated based on Farhadi, Jafarpoor,and Birjandi(1994)'s scale. The students in the experimental group received the story retelling technique treatment for 8 sessions and teacher gave short stories to students and they should read and retell them based on what they had learned in retelling steps, while those in the control group continued in traditional way. Finalizing the treatment, the researcher gave the final exam, i.e., the same picture description to both groups. Finally the same speaking checklist was used to rate studentsspeaking fluency and grammatical accuracy. The intra-rater reliability for the pre-test and post-test scores were 0.93 and 0.91 respectively. At the end the researcher used independent sample t-test to analyze the data and compared the mean scores of students in pre-test and post-test and concluded that implementing 3rd Intternattiionall Conference on Applliied Research iin Language Sttudiies www.ELSconf.ir 2 story retelling technique can significantly promote the students' overall speaking ability and their fluency and accuracy. The results have some implications for teaching speaking in the Iranian EFL context.

Keywords:

story retelling , fluency , accuracy , speaking ability