The Effect of Teaching Strategic Competence on Speaking Performance of EFL Learners

Communicative strategies have always been of much concern to applied linguists. Whether teaching communicative strategies has any significant impact on second language learners’ speaking or not has also controversial among language teachers. This study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit teaching of some of the communicative strategies (CSs) on language performance of Iranian language learners of English. It was also an attempt to study the stability of teaching CSs. The participants of the study were 60 male and female language learners. The experimental group received a 10-week-treatment on CSs. The data were gathered through three oral production tests consisting of the same tasks including group discussion, story retelling, and picture description. The data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics (Chi-square test). The results of the study indicated that there was significant difference between control and experimental groups in the use of CSs; whereas, the results of the first posttest showed that there was a significant difference between the groups in the use of seven out of the nine strategies. Moreover, the results indicated that the effect of teaching CSs was stable even after a long interval.