conversation (interaction) components and the linguistics components. Throughout the oral test students are encouraged to speak and then assessed on the basis of that speech. The materials for the proficiency test consist of 35
questions including grammar, vocabulary and sentence completion. The materials for the pretest of speaking of the study included of 30 questions to be answered by the students in both groups orally. The materials for the study’s treatment consisted of teaching speaking with the students traditional teaching materials in speaking but with the role-play techniques such as acting out, group work, etc. for the experimental group and without the mentioned techniques using the existing methods of teaching speaking) for the control group. The role-play has three steps during the treatment of students pre role-play, while role-play and after role-play. In the pre role play steps, materials were (technical data, activities, background information and rules) and language
frequently used vocabularies, idioms and some grammatical rules) are taken from the prescribed textbook, usually the teacher and in some cases the students, who have long experience in some contexts. The students were given the relevant words or phrases employ in role play techniques in order to participate effectively in such activity and have time to practice the role play without taking times to know the meaning of unknown words. The second stage is during role-play, in this step, students read the text and acting a role as clarified in the model conversation, firstly be familiar with the situation and studied the words items and idioms needed in the situation. Secondly, the students create their own script. In such stage usually the teacher did not help students
in writing their own words, all students did the writing and try to correct their mistakes without saying it loudly, and such issue due to unfamiliarity with role play technique in the classroom and with low self-confidence of their language. They were stimulated to enlarge the model conversation by adding extra questions with their, or by practicing it with anew situation (e.g. students may create anew situation, which completely differ from the one in the original model, and establish new conversation. To avoid students sitting with the same partner, the students were randomly divided into new partner every week. Students also had enough time to prepare
themselves before they started, to decide about the way they would manage their role and briefly rehearse between two students for example. While the practice, they were asked for assistant from their teacher or maybe from any group who had a higher level in the English language. Since the communication type is the goal. Role play interactions can be occurred among 3-5 different students. This could lead the students to participate in a variety of communications with different students in the same interaction. This assisted students to be familiar and cope with a given situations and communication steps in spontaneous way, and act out the language they need in such a context normally. At the end, students typed their conversations and they recorded only in their post role play stage. The third stage is after role play which is the feedback stage. The students received feedback from each other and the teacher as well. During this stage, the teacher may arrange the activities of the language which may help the students as a whole, depend on the noticing of the role plays in an early stage. Students can express themselves freely and effectively about how they want to interact in certain contexts but they were unable to. After practicing
on their own conversations, students began typing their own text. During typing, each student should play both roles (he/she could be a client and customer. Anyway, in the post role play stage, students did not need to typed themselves, but the recording of such audio had already been done in the while role play stage at the same time as they acted their role-play with 3-5 different students. Finally, the materials for the post-test of the study consisted of the same 30 questions in the pretest of speaking to be answered by the students in both groups. The students performance in the pre and posttests of speaking were scored depending on five aspects pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary,
fluency and comprehension, the criteria were adopted from Farhadi, Jafarpoor and Birjandi's (2000) as rating scale.
G. The Procedures The speaking class met three times a week. The teacher reads the conversation aloud and then pointing a couple of students to read it in front of the whole class. Then, the teacher pointed out to the students if they faced any difficulty words or expressions in order to analyze and explain them. Students were asked to be in their assigned groups from last class during the three hours. Only given some minutes to remember and practice their conversations. Then, they were called up randomly to practice. This step conducted to encourage students, meanwhile the teacher should grad their performance on a scale of 1 to 20. In addition, a peer observation is conducted by asking students to grade their colleagues in similar scale. Member of each pair were scrambled with each time of practicing anew conversation to avoid of feeing board. Whenever the teacher had spare time (which was rare, he asked couples perform in front of the whole classmates and also practice one of the previous conversations or they can choose a subject to talk about.
VI.
R
ESULTS
The data of the current study are analyzed by applying the following statistical methods a t-value (t-test) was calculated between the post-test scores of speaking skill in the two groups of students to show the impact in the hypothesis of the study. The mean scores of the two groups have been compared where the mean score of the experimental group is 15.27, while the mean score of the control group is 6.36. This indicates that there is a significant difference in the total scores JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING AND RESEARCH 2017 ACADEMY PUBLICATION
of post-test between the experimental and control groups in a favor of the experimental group. This confirms that the experimental group is better than the control group (see table 1). TABLE
(1) THE TOTALS CORES OF THE
P
OST
-T
EST
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