The effects of Personally Adapted Monologue Memorization on Iranian EFL Learners Oral Proficiency, Accuracy and Fluency

Aram Reza Sadeghi¹ Roya Sadat Hosseini²

1) Assistant professor at Semnan University
2) M.A Student in TEFL

Publication : 2nd International Conference on Behavioral Science and Social Studies(2ibsconf.com)
Abstract :
This study investigates the influence of using Personally Adapted Monologue Memorization (PAMM) procedure on Iranian EFL learners’ oral proficiency and two of its components (i.e., accuracy and fluency).Thirty Iranian eight grade secondary school students were randomly divided into one experimental group (EG) and one control group (CG) who were proved to be homogeneous in terms of general English proficiency of Nelson test (100 A) (Fowler & Coe, 1976, p.22) prior to the treatment. These students were 15 in each group. The EG received the treatment, which was PAMM instruction and the CG received the ordinary practice of speaking English. The students in the EG were to personally adapt each monologue and memorize it for the next session, then they were asked to talk accordingly. The materials for this study consisted of three samples of monologues for each topic, 10 topics in all, which were provided according to the students’ votes to list of topics with the highest frequency. The treatment was run for 12 sessions, one school semester for 4 months, and at the end of the experiment, all the subjects were given the same oral interview test as the post-test. We conducted a pre/post interview test in which individual performances were separately tape-recorded and later transcribed and scored by two raters (inter-rater reliability) to measure oral proficiency and two of its components (i.e., accuracy and fluency) according to Ur’s oral testing (1996, p 135). Multivariate analysis of variance were used to check the hypotheses. Results showed that PAMM instruction led to significantly superior performance in EG across all dependent variables. Meanwhile, the effect was greater in the case of fluency than accuracy. This study verified the importance of PAMM instruction as an effective way to achieve a good command of speaking skill.
Keywords : PAMM; Oral proficiency; Accuracy; Fluency