The Effect of Using Audio-Visual and Visual Aids on Fostering Speaking Skill in Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT)

To make teaching more effective, teachers make use of several aids as help while teaching. One of these aids is visual aid used in teaching a language or a skill of a language. In the teaching of language, the main purpose of the use of audio-visual aids is to enable the teacher to make his lessons effective and interesting. Such type of teaching makes the idea permanent in the pupils mind. Books and other printed materials have been the basic tools of teaching for centuries, and they are still of great importance. For this reason, Jeon (2005) argues that language acquisition is an extremely complex process which involves the interaction of many different variables such as materials, feedback, and activities and TBLT influences these variables positively. In other words, TBLT provides learners with authentic and meaning-based materials, real life communicative activities and motivating feedback. Consequently, in an Asian country like Iran where learners rarely have the possibility of using English outside the classroom, being provided with abundant opportunities for target language use in the classroom is extremely necessary. In this study, the researcher is interested to investigate if there is any effect of using visual and audio- visual aids on teaching speaking in TBLT. To this end 60 male students were chosen from a private English institute to be divided in 2 groups of 30, one as experimental and the other as control group, and be under the treatment of teaching speaking skill by the use of audio-visual and visual aids. Both groups experienced TOEFL test as pre-test and post-test. The experimental group undergone the treatment, using visual and audio- visual aids, pictures and movie clips, to have a better function in speaking for a term including 15 sessions of instruction. The researcher used an independent sample T-TEST through SPSS program to check if there is any significance difference between the two groups. As the results demonstrated, the experimental group acted significantly different from the control group.