Towards a new integrated approach to the teaching of oral expression.

Abstract

This study investigates the teaching of Oral Expression to second year Licence students at the Department of Letters and English; it studies the method(s) implemented and seeks to find out whether a pre-defined syllabus is available. A pre-experimental study was conducted to investigate the teaching of this module using a teachers’ questionnaire, classroom observations, and a teachers’ interview. The questionnaire revealed that the majority of the teachers are unaware of language teaching methods, due to the unavailability of teacher training programs. The classroom observations and the teachers’ interview confirmed the absence of a syllabus, a fact which led teachers to be randomly free in their teaching as they deliver completely heterogeneous contents. On the basis of these findings, the present research sets out to suggest an eclectic approach and an integrated syllabus to teach this module. It aims at proving the importance of designing and providing a well-defined program mainly based on the students’ needs and interests. Another equally significant aim is to shed light on the teaching of interactional skills to help the students become more communicatively competent. We hypothesized that if teachers of Oral Expression followed a pre-defined syllabus, their teaching process would be more coherent and the students would achieve more homogeneous results. We also hypothesized that if the students were introduced to aspects of interactional talk, they would improve their interactional skills and communicative competence. The two hypotheses are tested by means of a pre-test and post-test design in which one control group and one experimental group are involved. The results obtained validate both hypotheses. The students in the two groups attained utterly heterogeneous levels of skills acquisition. And after introducing the students in the experimental group to aspects of talk as interaction and conversational techniques, their interactional skills have improved, and they have been able to produce a natural conversational output.