The Socratic Method and the oral acquisition of the English Language

Abstract

The teaching of English as a foreign language has evolved throughout history in order to acquire different areas of knowledge. By implementing classes, students can make significant progress in learning. Thus, this research work aims to determine the incidence of the Socratic Method in the oral acquisition of the English language in the first semester of Pedagogía de los Idiomas Nacionales y Extranjeros major at Universidad Técnica de Ambato. To do this, it was based on a bibliographic research to collect information from different authors on the variables; as well as in the field by having direct access to the population under study. In addition, this research has a qualitative and quantitative approach, with a quasi-experimental design, in which a pre-test and post-test analysis was used for the analysis of the information collected through the rubric for the Socratic Method focused on a total of 27 students of A2 level of languages. Subsequently, the scores were entered into the SPSS tool and a statistical treatment with the Shapiro-Wilk test was used, showing that there is no normality in all the data series. Therefore, the Wilcoxon signed rank test was applied, testing the hypothesis, where the Socratic Method does influence the oral skills of students, with scores higher than 8.50 in the post test. In this way, as conclusions it is evident that the Socratic Method supports the development of cognitive and critical thinking, since the students ask questions and create concrete and structured sentences. Thus, the actions of the rubric with the greatest improvement in the post test are: "answer questions by adding" with 20% and "explain the situation" with 20%.