Pragmatic Eliciting Tasks vs. Traditional Speaking Activities to Foster Oral Proficiency: A Comparative Study

The purpose of the current study was to compare the impact of pragmatic eliciting tasks versus traditional speaking activities on Iranian EFL learners’ oral proficiency. In the first step, 60 pre-intermediate students were chosen based on the results of an Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) and then randomly divided into two equal groups, namely an experimental group and a control group. Then they were pretested through a researcher-made speaking test extracted from New Interchange Book 1. After that, the participants of experimental groups received the treatment which was pragmatic eliciting tasks comprising explicit usage of pragmatic functions of speech (i.e., greetings, requests, complaining, thanking, etc.). They figure out how to utilize pragmatic functions of language in the proper contexts and how to comprehend these language functions explicitly. On the other hand, the control group received these pragmatic tasks implicitly mainly through listening and question and answer activities in the classroom. The control group additionally used oral performances through the textbook activities and exercises in the classroom. The whole treatment lasted 12 sessions of 60 minutes. After the treatment, the control and experimental groups took the post-test of speaking which was a modified version of pretest. When the data were collected, Independent and Paired Samples T-tests were run to analyse them. The findings showed that experimental group outperformed the control group. The results revealed that those students who taught pragmatic eliciting tasks explicitly were better than those who taught implicitly.