Questioning strategies and speaking skills

Abstract

The current research aimed at identifying the influence of questioning strategies on the speaking skills of students. The researcher utilized a variation of a quasi-experimental design also known as a one-group pretest-posttest design. Furthermore, the quantitative approach was used since results were gathered and analyzed statistically. Regarding the modality, bibliographic and field research was used since the researcher had to look for reliable information to set the foundation to create meaningful questions using the revised Bloom’s taxonomy. In the same way, field research allowed the researcher to conduct their study in the proposed place. Moreover, the study took place at Universidad Técnica de Ambato where the participants involved were a group of 38 students in the second semester of the major of Pedagogía de los Idiomas Nacionales y Extranjeros. Regarding the instrument used for data collection, a standardized test of Cambridge was used as a pre and post-test, and to assess speaking skills the researcher used a standardized rubric with four categories: grammar and vocabulary, discourse management, pronunciation, and interactive communication. Finally, the results displayed that 1) lower-order questions were answered the most than higher-order questions, 2) the quality of answers in both categories of lower and higher-order thinking skills did increase significantly, 3) students’ results of their speaking performance showed a significance increase in the post-test, and finally 4) pronunciation was the strongest skill of participants at the beginning but discourse management and pronunciation ended up being the strongest skills of participants, meaning that one speaking subskill was developed with the experiment.