Developing Year 10 Students' Willingness to Communicate with a Task-Based EFL Speaking Course

Abstract

The thesis investigates teaching oral English in 10th grade in an Estonian state gymnasium with a task-based speaking course and evaluating students’ perceived willingness to communicate and competence in speaking. The research aims to find out what effect will a task-based EFL speaking course have on students' willingness to communicate and their perceived competence in speaking English. The speaking course had 30 contact lessons of 45 minutes. During the action research, 21 mostly open-ended speaking tasks and a number of additional activities, five getting-to-know and 10 warm-up activities for starting the lessons, suitable for year 10 students, were compiled and tried out with two groups of EFL learners of 10th grade, 33 students in total, in January and February 2024. Teacher notes from the implementation stage are added to the description of tasks, in Appendix 1. After the course, a questionnaire was filled out by the students about their willingness to communicate in English before and after the course, as well as their perceived competence in speaking English, and feedback was asked to the tasks and the course in general. The last part of the action research is a reflection of the findings and discussion on the future, as all of the students who participated, think that open-ended speaking tasks in a cooperative environment should be a natural part of English lessons at the gymnasium level.