Communicative language teaching (CLT) activities to develop English speaking skills

Abstract

Currently, society requires highly trained professionals in all areas, and the English language is not the exception, that is why students need to learn to communicate in a foreign language. However, the development of speaking skill has not been easy to acquire due to the traditional methodologies such as memorization of dialogues, repetitions, excessive grammatical activities and absence of updated material used during the teaching-learning process of the English language. That is why the objective of this research study is to analyze the Communicative Approach CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) as a method to improve the Speaking Skill in the third level English students of the Language Center of the Technical University of Babahoyo. Therefore, during the research period the researcher established two groups of 30 participants each. The methods applied in this study was quantitative and qualitative. In the first phase, a pretest was applied to know the initial situation of the 60 participants. In the second phase, a post-test was used to determine the influence on improving the speaking skills using communicative activities. The quantitative method was used to know the attitudes of the participants towards the CLT methodology. It was done through a survey which was only applied to the treatment group. Afterward, the data collection and analysis was carried out, and the results showed that the use of communicative activities had a positive effect on the development of oral skills; likewise, the participants said they felt satisfied and very motivated with the implementation of the communicative activities based on CLT approach.