Effects of Strategy-based Instruction on Korean EFL College-level Students' English Speaking Abilities and their Communication Strategy Use

Abstract

The research of communication strategies has been conducted over three decades. A considerable amount of studies have focused on the identification and classification of communication strategies. However, there has been relatively a small amount of research on the relationship of communication strategy use, types of task, and strategy instruction effect. This study examines how strategy-based instruction could affect Korean EFL college-level students' English speaking abilities and their strategy use in relation to two speaking task types. A total of 81 students participated in the research, and they were divided into the experimental group who received the strategy instruction and the control group who had no strategy instruction. The results showed that both control and experimental groups have significantly improved their speaking proficiency in terms of their overall speaking performance. However, when their speaking abilities were compared by subscales, such as accuracy, fluency and pronunciation, significant differences were found in the accuracy and fluency areas on the picture description. The findings also revealed that the strategy instruction positively influenced the students' use of the speaking strategies, and their strategy uses were somewhat different from the task type. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed.