Developing EFL Students' Speaking : Brainstorming Vs. Role-play (original) (raw)

Due to the lack of preparation for the speaking activities, some of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students face serious problems in speaking skill. The present study aims at investigating the relationship between brainstorming and role-play as the two widespread prespeaking activities which was carried out between the two class groups -students undertaking a full-course of study in Lang. Lab. 2 in Islamic Azad University, Dezful branch, Iran and through a standard proficiency test derived from NTC's TOEFL Test, it was observed that the students were homogeneous. Each class group was given necessary treatment separately to implement each of the mentioned pre-speaking activities as a warm up before the speaking phase in five sessions. Then, based on the speaking scale developed by an interview ranging from 1 to 6, where 1 means memorized proficiency and 6 stands for native proficiency , was utilized for each class group to assess EFL students' speaking proficiency , and the obtained scores were applied in one independent sample t-test. Since the t-observed was more than the tcritical, the first hypothesis was verified. That is, those who implement brainstorming as their pre-speaking activity have a stronger performance in their speaking phase than those who utilize role-play as their pre-speaking activity. The pedagogical implications of the present study are 1) recognizing the EFL students' tendency to brainstorming as the most provoking pre-speaking activity 2) providing the students with an atmosphere wherein brainstorming can be implemented before the speaking phase. 3245 www.ijllalw.org 212 (2006), this stage includes two focus areas: engage-instruct-initiate sequence, and grouping students. The first area concerns engagement of students, techniques for drawing attention or involving students, providing students with instructions and initiating students to start the activity. The second area deals with setting students into groups, providing this is required by the nature of the activity. introduced some of these activities including discussion, simulation, role-play, simulation, story -telling, information gap, brainstorming, story completion, reporting and so on among which brainstorming and role-play seem more influential than others. Brainstorming as a pre-speaking activity motivates students to produce ideas in a limited time. Depending on the context, either individual or group brainstorming is effective and learners generate ideas quickly and freely. The good characteristic of brainstorming is that the students are not criticized for their ideas so students will be open to sharing new ideas. Another pre-speaking activity is role-play in which students pretend they are in various social contexts and have a variety of social roles, and the teacher gives information to the learners such as who they are and what they think or feel .