Title of the article in English: Using creative strategies “digital puppets” to promote students' speaking skills

Abstract

Speech is the most complex skill to develop when learning the English language. As such, it is essential to use authentic resources to facilitate their development. For this reason, the objective of this research work was to determine the influence of puppets on the ability to speak in eighth-grade students of the Antonio Carrillo Moscoso Educational Unit of Pillaro Canton. The research used a mixed cross-sectional approach. In addition, it required a quasi-experimental design with a control group and an experimental group. Additionally, a total of 36 students participated in the study, 18 girls and 18 boys aged 12 to 13 from classrooms A and B. Likewise, the information was collected through the application of a pre and post test. The same one that was taken from the speech section of the KET A2 validated by Cambridge. In the same way, different treatments were applied using strategies such as: plays, oral presentation activities and cooperative exercises to verify the hypothesis. Finally, the Wilcoxon statistical test was used to analyze the data and found that Z has a significance of -3.757b (bilateral) and the signed range was 0.000. The significance was less than 0.05, so the null hypothesis was rejected and the alternative hypothesis was accepted. In conclusion, the puppets helped the students improve their oral expression because the experimental group showed an increase of 2.8 points in the posttest, while the control group only gained 0.3 thousandths. Students also improved four aspects of language such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and interactive communication.