Abstract
While most studies focus on individual training of oral communication in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), this study took a social constructivist perspective in examining the effect of an interpersonal process, that is, peer feedback, on the development of oral communication performance and communication strategy use. A mobile application was developed to facilitate learners’ engagement in discussion tasks, replay their conversation as well as carry out peer feedback. To examine the effect of mobile-assisted peer feedback, a quasi-experimental was conducted at a vocational university in Taiwan for five weeks. Forty EFL participants were assigned to an experimental group (n = 20), who received peer feedback on their oral communication performance and strategy use, and a control group (n = 20), who received no peer feedback on their oral communication ability and strategy use. The results show that the use of peer feedback enhanced students’ oral communication performance but did not improve their communication strategy use. The findings suggest that with the support of mobile-based peer feedback, students were able to monitor their oral production and provide/receive corrective feedback that enhanced their overall communication performance. It was also found that the feedback provided by the students was not concrete enough to address the use of the target communication strategies. However, the peer feedback data show that students tended to provide varying communication strategies that were not taught in the study but were considered beneficial to their overall oral communication performance. Possible explanations for the findings and future directions are discussed in this paper.
Highlights
The ability of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners to perform oral communication requires knowledge of the language, that is, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation ability, and the use of strategic knowledge, that is, another subset of language skills for fostering the conversation
This study is among the few to examine the effect of reciprocal peer feedback on the use of communication strategies and oral communication performance from a social constructivism perspective
The design of the peer feedback embedded in a mobile application aimed to provide opportunities for leaners to learn from their peers, who would vary in their oral skills and competence, as well as opportunities to become aware of their use of communication strategies with the feedback they received
Summary
The ability of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners to perform oral communication requires knowledge of the language, that is, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation ability, and the use of strategic knowledge, that is, another subset of language skills for fostering the conversation. This subset of skills can be termed communication strategies and its employment in conversational contexts means that any meaningful investigation of the learners’ EFL speaking ability must include an analysis of their employment of communication strategies. In addition to interpersonal benefits, these strategies enhance the learners’ oral communication proficiency, that is, they have particular intrapersonal benefits, because through negotiating, learners develop the specific abilities to modify their oral discourse, making it more intellectual and comprehensible, and they learn how to seek for the content lacking in the other participant’s spoken production (Long 1983; Rabab’ah 2016)
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