Finland-Swedish Upper Secondary School Students’ Perspectives on Development and Assessment of Speaking Skills : A Case Study of the Effects of Pedagogical Intervention

Abstract

Proficient speaking skills are highly valued in any language, although the skill of speaking tends to be somewhat neglected in the formal teaching context, with the written form at the forefront of development and assessment. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of Finland-Swedish upper secondary school students’ perspectives on the development and assessment of speaking skills in English, as well as comparing these attitudes before and after an intervention of lessons focusing explicitly on two subskills of speaking, pronunciation and spoken fluency.

The data was collected via two surveys, one of which was distributed before the pedagogical intervention and the other one after, yielding 15 and 17 responses respectively. As such, the present study is somewhat exploratory in its design since the same group of students responded to both surveys. Circumstances did not permit a longer intervention, and the surveys were distributed in quick succession. Therefore, the results in this study are approached tentatively, as an indication of how these methods may be received by a specific group of students. As a case study with a small sample, the results were mainly analyzed via presenting the distribution in raw numbers and comparing the pre- and postsurvey responses on a 5-point Likert scale. A content analysis was also conducted for the open-ended questions in the postsurvey.

The class generally valued the development and assessment of speaking skills both before and after the intervention, motivated by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The students also appreciated the systematic and explicit development of both pronunciation and fluency, with slightly more importance placed on fluency. It was also conveyed that different aspects of language anxiety can more easily arise in connection to the assessment of speaking, which calls for a wider incorporation of different subskills of speaking and their development over time, so as to avoid placing excessive pressure on one single opportunity of assessment as it may contribute to an unreliable evaluation.

The results also suggest that the students in this group believe in a more thorough implementation of a language skill as important as speaking into our education system, although the students’ views on what speaking skills might entail remained somewhat unclear or influenced by the intervention. It is concluded that speaking and its subskills should be more systematically incorporated into language teaching from an earlier stage— alongside reading, writing, and listening—in order to provide the basis for more secure and confident development of all four major language skills.