Developing Speaking Skills Through Self-Assessment of High School Students’ Interaction

Abstract

Developing speaking skills in students is one aspect to consider in our classrooms. Speaking is a crucial form of communication in day-to-day interactions (Gayratovna, 2021). It helps students to participate in class and have casual conversations, not only among peers but also people in general. For this reason, implementing speaking strategies, as an ongoing process, can positively impact students’ interactions in order to produce and convey the precise message. There are various factors at some public schools in Ecuador that prevent the development of this skill. For instance, in a public school in Cuenca, there are only three hours of English instruction per week in all the classes. Students only learn vocabulary and grammar in written production and do not have the opportunities to practice speaking activities. According to Prayuda (2021), affective factors also avoid the development of students’ speaking skills since students feel nervous when they have to talk. It is a common problem also detected at this public school where students forget their words and get blocked. Consequently, students cannot use the language learned to speak English. It is difficult for them to produce short and simple sentences or express their ideas naturally. Hence, researchers consider that one strategy that can help students from 2nd grade of high school develop and improve speaking skills is self-assessment of their spoken interactions. This strategy enables students identify their strengths and work on and improve their weaknesses when speaking in English. Therefore, this study seeks to improve the 2nd level of high school students' speaking abilities by using the self-assessment strategy to produce basic sentences during interactions. This study's research question is: To what extent does the use of self-assessment improve the students’ speaking skills?