One semester of speaking tasks – an experimental approach with low proficiency students

This study tested the hypothesis postulating that Malaysian undergraduate students with

low proficiency would make the most rapid progress in English if all guided learning

time (tutorials and lectures) in the first semester was used entirely for speaking tasks. The

study took the form of a Non-Equivalent Groups design with 59 Malaysian undergraduate

students in their first semester, the majority of whom had scored only Band 1 or Band 2 in

the MUET exam. The students were allocated alphabetically to an experimental group of

30 students, who were taught using all of the contact hours for speaking tasks and a control

group of 29 students who were taught using “as normal” method – including grammar

explanation and examples; reading; writing and listening tasks. All students took a pre-
test at the start of the semester and a post-test at the end of the semester, which assessed

their abilities in speaking, writing, reading and listening. Since, scores did not conform to

a normal distribution so the Wilcoxon Sigma rank test was used to assess the difference

in the scores between the pre-test and post-test, while the ManWhitney test was used to

compare the changes in the scores between the experimental and control groups. The

analysis showed no significant difference between the control group and the experimental

group, in terms of the changes in the scores between pre-test and post-test.