Peer working and Speaking Fluency in EFL Contexts

Abstract

Learning a foreign language is definitely one main challenge for beginners, especially when related to formal and standard forms. Its difficulty emerges more prominently when it comes to deal with oral aspects of language, as they are dominated by certain psychological and cultural backgrounds. Thus, for the reason of highlighting the role of peer working in EFL speaking classes, an experiment has been conducted at the level of ENS Laghouat in Algeria, first year English language students, learning the Oral Expression module. The number of students is 66 forming two balanced groups: thirty three students each, during the academic year 2018/2019, with four hours and a half per week. The principle of the experiment was to ask participants of the experiment group to work in peers to develop a specific oral task and present it in each session in a bisected way for two weeks (six sessions), after they have been doing oral tasks individually at least for two months. Simultaneously the control group students carried out their oral tasks ordinarily for the same period of time. Such an experiment has been followed by a comparative analysis the findings of which proved that the experiment group has shown a high level of oral performance and fluent interaction for 88% participants, whereas the control group participants remained with an ordinary rate of oral interaction and fluency, not exceeding 46%, using the interview in pre- and post-experimental phases as a means of data collection. All in all, this peer working strategy needs to be resuscitated in our Algerian EFL classes, so as to reap satisfactory results notably at the level of this important communicative productive skill, at early beginnings of foreign language learning, for the reason that learners tend to exclude all forms of timidity, fear and ambiguity in understanding a given task through a reciprocal manner with each other. By the end, this strategy meant to alleviate the psychological as well as the cultural constraints noticed when communicating orally in English as a foreign language with its various topics.