Effect of the communicative approach on the listening and speaking skills of Saudi secondary school students: an experimental study

Abstract

This thesis attempts to measure the effect of the implementation of the communicative approach (CA) on the listening and speaking skills of Saudi third year secondary students. In order to address this issue, a quantitative study was conducted on two randomly selected intact classes at Dammam Tenth Secondary School. These two classes were assigned as experimental group (37 students) and control group (41 students). It was particularly hypothesized that the students taught according to the CA would score higher in the post-test than in the pre-test and that there would be statistically significant differences at the level of .05 between the post-test mean scores of the experimental group and the control group. Various communicative activities were used with the experimental group while the control group was exposed to traditional, non communicative, instruction using structurally based methods, such as the audio-lingual method. A pre-test was administered to both groups at the beginning of the experiment to ensure that they had the same language background. At the end of the experiment, a post-test was assigned to both groups to determine whether the CA had positively affected the students' listening and speaking abilities. The experiment lasted approximately seven weeks of the first semester of 1428 (2007). The study has revealed that: (1) the CA had a positive effect on the students' listening and speaking skills; (2) the experimental group obtained somewhat higher scores in the post-test than in the pre-test, making the difference between the pre-test and post-test scores statistically significant; (3) the difference between the pre-test and the post-test for the control group was not statistically significant; and (4) the experimental students were more differentiated than the control students, as shown by a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of both groups in the post-test in favor of the experimental students. In light of these results, the following recommendations were made: (1) that a shift should be made from non-communicative to communicative ELT; (2) that educational policy-makers should consider the applicability of the CA in the Saudi context; (3) that EFL teachers should receive in-service training in applying CA principles; (4) that students should be encouraged to speak the target language with their colleagues; and (5) that local ELT textbook writers should work along communicative lines.