An Investigation on the Effect of Teaching Conversation on Developing EFL Learners’ Discourse Competence in Speaking

Abstract

with twenty second year students to investigate the effect of teaching the speech action of news announcement through consciousness-raising activities on developing learners’ spoken discourse competence. The data gathered from the teacher questionnaire and classroom observation revealed that the teachers adopted a rather traditional and teacher-centered way of teaching which put focus on learners’ linguistic knowledge and overlooked the development of their conversational competence. The findings obtained from the experimental tests showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in producing syntactically and sequentially better organized conversations with the appropriate use of formulaic language.