The Role of Oral Communicative Tasks (OCT) in Developing the Spoken Proficiency of Engineering Students

S. Shantha, S. Mekala

Abstract


The mastery of speaking skills in English has become a major requisite in engineering industry. Engineers are expected to possess speaking skills for executing their routine activities and career prospects. The article focuses on the experimental study conducted to improve English spoken proficiency of Indian engineering students using task-based approach. Tasks are activities that concentrates on the learners in providing the main context and focus for learning. Therefore, a task facilitates the learners to use language rather than to learn it. This article further explores the pivotal role played by the pedagogical intervention in enabling the learners to improve their speaking skill in L2. The participants of the study chosen for control and experimental group were first year civil engineering students comprising 38 in each group respectively. The vital tool used in the study is oral communicative tasks administered to the experimental group. The oral communicative tasks enabled the students to think and generate sentences on their own orally. The‘t’ Test was computed to compare the performance of the students in control and experiment groups.The results of the statistical analysis revealed that there was a significant level of improvement in the oral proficiency of the experimental group.

 


Keywords


oral communicative tasks (OCT), pedagogical intervention, spoken proficiency, Task-based language teaching

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.2p.161

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