Mobile-based aural oral skill lessons: The effects on EFL teacher trainees’ oral performance

Abstract

EFL teacher-educators and teachers are seen as ignorant of teaching aural skills for referring to resource shortages is a common mechanism for their scapegoating. It hinders students’ opportunity to boost oral proficiency in the abundance of their smartphones in the classrooms to learn aural and oral skills. Hence, Moodle 3.0, a learning application, was used to create and deliver aural comprehension lessons by customizing audiovisual texts on social media to practice oral skills. A one-group-only quasi-experimental, Interrupted Time Series Design was employed to investigate the effect of mobile-based aural comprehension lessons on the general and specific oral skills’ performances of the preservice teacher trainees at Arba Minch Teacher Education College in Ethiopia. A total of 25 trainees of the 3-year diploma program were taken comprehensively as samples. To analyze data quantitatively, in addition to descriptive methods, Kruskal-Wallis, and Wilcoxson’s Signed Rank Tests were run to inferentially determine the significance of differences in the effects across the oral sub-skills and on the trainees’ general oral performance, respectively. Thus, the results disclosed that mobile-based aural oral skill lessons had positive significance in the trainees’ general oral performance without significant differences in the effects in performance across the oral sub-skills. Finally, the researchers recommended others to investigate and minimize first language interference and pronunciation problems of EFL learners. The EFL teacher trainees’ learning styles should also be further studied to understand the effect of mobile-based aural-oral skill lessons on their EFL learning/studying habits after the exposure to mobile-based lessons.