THE ROLE OF PEDAGOGICAL FILMS IN DEVELOPING IRANIAN PRE-INTERMEDIATE EFL LEARNERS’ SPEAKING SKILL: THE CASE OF MOTIVATION

This study investigated the role of pedagogical films in developing Iranian pre-intermediate students’ speaking skill among English as foreign language (EFL) learners. It also dealt with the role of pedagogical films on learnersʹ motivation to participate in speaking activities interactively. Speaking skill is one of the challenges in Iranian classroom since teachers in EFL classes focused mostly on written cues rather than spoken tasks. Thus this research hypothesized that using interesting and short films may affect their speaking skill and also motivation. This issue has been somehow rarely explored in Iranian universities. The reason for this may have been the poor performance of pre-intermediate students in speaking EFL. To achieve this purpose, a proficiency test was administered to 120 university students. Then 54 pre-intermediate language learners who were homogeneous in terms of their rank scores were selected and randomly divided in two equal groups in size. i.e., as experimental and control groups. To assess their speaking proficiency at the beginning of the treatment period, both groups participated in a pre-test interview and scored based on a speaking checklist (Hughes, 2003) and filled in a motivation questionnaire (Dornyei, 2003; Dornyei, Csize & Nemeth, 2006; among others). Experimental group watched the pedagogical films and the participants in control group listened to the audio CDs of those films. After 10 sessions of treatment, both groups were interviewed on the similar topics covered in the pre-test and filled in the same questionnaire. The effect of pedagogical films on the groups’ speaking achievement was evaluated through Independent Samples t-test analysis. Moreover, the learners’ motivation on the post- questionnaire was assessed through Mann-Whitney U test. Results showed that experimental group outperformed control group since pedagogical films had a positive effect on developing speaking skill among pre-intermediate EFL learners (p < 05) in the experimental group. EFL teachers may use pedagogical films to raise the learners’ motivation which reciprocally affects their participation in classroom speaking activities.