Recent growth of English as an international language of communication highlights the importance of SPEAKING which everyone needs to use in a multiplicity of contexts. Scholars have shown that concept mapping increases vocabulary learning, and organization of knowledge. However, its impact on enhancing SPEAKING FLUENCY is overlooked. This research project investigates the effect of concept mapping on SPEAKING FLUENCY of Iranian intermediate EFL students. To achieve its purpose, the following research question was proposed: Does concept mapping have any statistically significant effect on SPEAKING FLUENCY of the aforementioned students? 80 second term EFL university students were randomly selected and were randomly assigned to a control and experimental group. We employed concept mapping in the experimental group for twenty two sessions. When the treatment was over a proficiency test was administered to the students as a post-test. The distributions of scores for each variable by all subjects were examined and the results showed that concept mapping had statistically significant effect on SPEAKING FLUENCY of intermediate EFL students.

This study aimed to investigate whether creativity and instrumental/ integrative motivation can predict EFL students' language accuracy and FLUENCY in SPEAKING task. 80 participants were chosen for the research; they were studying English as a foreign language in intermediate level at language institutes. Their mother tongue was Persian. First, they were asked to complete Abedi's sixty-item questionnaire. Then they were given a SPEAKING (shipwreck) task and their performance was recorded so as to be evaluated in both accuracy and FLUENCY by two examiners later. Finally, they answered the Gardner’ s attitude/Motivation test battery (AMTB). The results obtained from the goodness of fit test showed that creativity and instrumental motivation can predict the accuracy of SPEAKING. The significance of effect coefficients showed that creativity and instrumental motivation can predict the FLUENCY of SPEAKING. Furthermore, creativity and integrative motivation can predict the FLUENCY of SPEAKING. But creativity and integrative motivation can not predict the accuracy. The result of this research suggested some recommendations on educational methods and mentioned points for future researches.

This meta-analysis is an investigation into the impressibility of two dimensions of the SPEAKING skill, namely accuracy and FLUENCY, in relation to the experimented treatments among Iranian EFL undergraduates. Having surveyed a collected bank of 74 research reports, the relationships among the variables in the 14 included studies were examined. More specifically, the analysis involved a statistical review of 67 effect sizes (at 95% CI) calculated from studies conducted between 2006 and 2016, including 890 participants. The analysis indicated that in 77% of the experimented treatments, the students performed as well as the students in the regular programs with no significant improvement in oral accuracy. The analysis also demonstrated that 63% of the treatments did not yield significant improvement in oral FLUENCY in comparison with the regular instruction. Moreover, the synthesis of the effects of the contextual factors showed that low-level (i. e., elementary) learners experienced a better improvement in SPEAKING performance. The analysis also revealed that, among the experimented treatments, dialogic tasks were most effective on oral accuracy while interviews were influential in promoting the students’ both oral accuracy and FLUENCY. Finally, the quality of the study reports was analyzed and some directions for further research were suggested.

The present mixed methods study examined how enhancing young EFL learners’ metacognitive awareness through a teaching-SPEAKING framework developed their L2 SPEAKING FLUENCY after the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve this, 60 Iranian intermediate EFL learners aged 12 to 15 were selected and randomly divided into two groups: experimental (n = 30) and control (n = 30). An EFL teacher instructed the participants in the experimental group to engage in a 7-stage teaching-SPEAKING cycle online for 10 sessions, while the control group followed the conventional method for teaching L2 SPEAKING. Participants in the experimental group were requested to document their perceptions of the metacognitive training in diaries and submit them to the designated teacher online. Their oral performances and perceptions were recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed before, during, and after the intervention. Results indicated a statistically significant improvement in the experimental group’s metacognitive awareness of L2 SPEAKING, along with a notable enhancement in their L2 FLUENCY by the end of the intervention. Additionally, participants expressed an overall positive attitude toward the teaching-SPEAKING cycle. These findings hold pedagogical significance as they advocate for implementing more metacognitive awareness-raising frameworks on online platforms.

The activity of SPEAKING is conducted spontaneously and there is not much time devoted to preplanning and arranging the utterances the speaker intends to deliver. Briefly defined, gambits and routines refer to the words and phrases that facilitate the flow of conversations. As such, one way to help learners acquire oral proficiency is to teach gambits that support the social skills emphasized. The present study aimed to investigate the SPEAKING FLUENCY of Iranian intermediate EFL learners through conversational gambits and routines. To this end, the subjects of the present study consisted of an experimental group and a control group each containing 30 students who attended listening and SPEAKING classes. To count the frequency of gambit tokens and identify their functions, the recorded data were analyzed utilizing Keller and Warner’s classification of conversational gambits. The results of the t-test revealed that the experimental group possessed better SPEAKING FLUENCY based on the occurrences of gambit categories. There was a positive correlation between the number of gambits and the scores of FLUENCY test. Evidently, the findings of the present study may have implications for EFL teachers and syllabus designers.

This study investigated the effect of Ted Talk videos in enhancing the SPEAKING proficiency of intermediate EFL learners (English as a Foreign Language). A convenience sample of 60 EFL (English as a foreign language) learners (aged 16-21) studying at a private language institute were recruited. Participants were homogenized based on English language proficiency through an initial Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Subsequently, they completed the SPEAKING section of the Preliminary English Test (PET) as a pre-test to establish a baseline measure of their SPEAKING skills. Participants were then randomly assigned to either an experimental group receiving TED talk videos or a control group receiving conventional instruction using traditional methods such as dialogue roleplays. Following the ten-week intervention period, all participants completed the PET SPEAKING test again as a post-test. The study employed established metrics to assess SPEAKING proficiency, including Error-Free Clauses per T-unit (EFC/T) for accuracy and words produced per minute (W/M) for FLUENCY. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics (version 24.0). The research adhered to ethical guidelines set forth by BERA (2011). The study revealed a statistically significant improvement in SPEAKING accuracy and FLUENCY for participants in the TED Talks group compared to the control group. This is supported by the higher mean scores achieved by the experimental group in the post-test and confirmed by the MANOVA analysis. This finding suggests that incorporating TED talk videos into EFL curricula may be a beneficial strategy for enhancing SPEAKING skills.

This study aimed to investigate the extent to which L2 learners' use of L1 improves their SPEAKING ability. Employing a quasi-experimental research design, the researchers studied the effect of learner code-switching on their SPEAKING accuracy, FLUENCY, and complexity scores. The participants of this study were 117 lower-intermediate students receiving English instruction in eight intact classes in different branches of a private institute. These classes were assigned to two +code-switching and –, code-switching treatments randomly. While the participants in the +code-switching group could use Farsi for at most 30 seconds in each activity, those in the –, code-switching group were not allowed to switch to their mother tongue. The findings of this study showed that there were no significant differences between the students’,SPEAKING ability in terms of FLUENCY and accuracy across the two groups. The complexity scores of the +codeswitching group, however, was significantly higher than those in the –, code-switching group. The results also showed a significant improvement in the SPEAKING of the students in both groups. Based on the results, it can be said that that the use of controlled amounts of learner code-switching could be useful when complexity is the focus of an activity. Furthermore, no sign of detrimental effect of learner code-switching was traced in our study.

Since the 1970s, self-assessment in education has gained increasing currency and has been studied in a considerable number of quantitative studies. In line with this theoretical and experimental background, this study aimed at investigating the effect of self-assessment on intermediate and upper-intermediate language learners’ SPEAKING FLUENCY and accuracy in Iran. Thirty pre-intermediate and thirty upper-intermediate students participated in the study in a pretest-posttest control/experimental group design. The data were analyzed through ANCOVA test. The results indicated that self-assessment positively affected participants’ SPEAKING accuracy and FLUENCY. Also, self-assessment had a greater effect on upper-intermediate learners than pre-intermediate ones. Moreover, SPEAKING FLUENCY benefitted more from self-assessment than SPEAKING accuracy did. The findings can be applied by both EFL learners and teachers.