Students’ Attitudes towards Using Interactive Teaching and its Influence on their Oral Skills

Abstract

Nowadays, the oral proficiency is considered as the best indicator of language proficiency by most of the learners, employers, and even teachers. The present study aims at investigating the efficiency of using interaction as a technique in the oral class to improve the oral skills of the third year students of English as a Foreign Language at the University Centre of Mila. In order to prove or disapprove this, we have hypothesized that an interaction-based approach to teaching oral English can be implicated despite the present difficulties, that students have positive attitudes and common preferences towards interaction, and that the use of the interaction in the EFL oral class will help learners to enhance their oral performance. To test the validity of these hypotheses, we have conducted a descriptive study based on two research tools. Students had been given questionnaires to be answered and teachers had been interviewed. The questionnaire consists of 17 questions and had been administered to twenty 3rd year LMD students at the English department of the university centre of Mila. The interview consists of 8 questions given to 3 teachers of oral expression. All of them are teaching at the same department during the academic year 2012-2013. The discussion of the results has confirmed the 3 hypotheses; it shows that interaction-based approach to teaching oral expression is applicable, students have positive attitudes and common preferences towards interaction and interaction have positive influence on the student’s oral performance. At the end, we recommend of using this technique in teaching foreign languages side to side to teaching their foreign cultures and literatures in order to reach fluency and oral proficiency.