Speaking in EFL Classrooms

Speaking is often viewed as a fundamental ability in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lessons, but it is also one of the most challenging skills. Unlike receptive skills such as listening and reading, speaking requires learners to produce language in real time, respond to others and keep the interaction going. They need a basic control of vocabulary and grammar, but they must also use this knowledge spontaneously and appropriately in real situations. Harmer (2007: 123) points out that speaking is more than producing sounds or isolated words; it means using language actively in communication.

In EFL environments, stronger speaking skills help learners express their views, ask relevant questions and take part in discussions. Spoken performance often shows how well they can participate in academic tasks, professional exchanges or informal social situations where English is needed. (Brown (2001: 267)) links this to communicative competence, understood as the ability to use language appropriately across different social contexts. Spoken proficiency is a key part of this competence. For many EFL learners, being able to speak with some fluency is therefore considered a main indicator of success.

Speaking is also closely connected to language acquisition. Interactionist perspectives suggest that using the target language in meaningful conversation supports learning because learners notice gaps in their knowledge, test hypotheses and adjust their expressions. (Thornbury (2005: 4)) argues that confidence and fluency do not come only from learning vocabulary and grammar rules, but also from repeated speaking practice in situations that are similar to real life. In this sense, speaking is both a goal of instruction and a means through which learners internalise language structures and patterns.

Speaking in a foreign language classroom is usually described as a language skill. However, for learners, speaking is more than producing correct sentences. When learners speak, they do it in front of others. Their classmates and the teacher listen to them and react. For this reason, speaking often feels personal. Learners may feel confident, unsure or nervous when they speak. They also bring their past classroom experiences with them. As Gregersen and MacIntyre point out, these personal factors influence how comfortable learners feel when using a foreign language in class ((Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014: 32–42)). This helps explain why learners with similar language knowledge do not always participate in speaking activities in the same way.

Speaking acts as a bridge between learners' knowledge of the language and their ability to use it in practice. It turns passive knowledge into active use. When learners engage in conversation, they test their language with other people and receive immediate feedback. Nunan (2003, pp. 55–56) recommends that speaking allows learners to interact with their environment and offers many opportunities for negotiating meaning, which is essential for second language development.

When learners use English to express ideas or tell short personal stories, they must select vocabulary, apply grammar and organise their thoughts into a coherent message. In this process, they are not only repeating what they have learned; they are also restructuring and strengthening their knowledge. Bygate (1987, pp. 5–7) notes that speaking is more than producing separate utterances. It involves planning, negotiation and some improvisation. These processes help learners deepen their understanding of the language and move towards more automatic use.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) gives a central place to oral interaction. Oral production and oral interaction are seen as key parts of communicative competence ((Council of Europe, 2020)). Learners are expected to express ideas clearly, participate in conversations and adapt their speech to different situations and purposes.

Even though speaking is essential, many EFL learners find it the most difficult skill to develop. Various factors can limit oral proficiency, including linguistic, psychological and contextual barriers. Language anxiety is a major psychological obstacle. Learners who feel anxious about speaking may avoid participation or only say very little. MacIntyre and Gardner (1991, p. 96) found that foreign language anxiety is negatively related to speaking performance, especially when learners must speak spontaneously or in situations that feel high stakes.

Limited exposure to authentic speaking situations creates another problem. In many EFL contexts, learners have few chances to talk with native speakers or to use English outside the classroom. They may depend heavily on scripted dialogues or textbook phrases, and some errors can become fossilized. Harmer (2007, p. 387) argues that short, enjoyable fluency activities can help students become more confident about speaking, which suggests that regular communicative practice is important for developing fluency and confidence.

Speaking tasks can also cause cognitive overload. Learners need to remember words, apply grammar rules, control pronunciation and organise ideas at the same time, often under time pressure. For learners at lower proficiency levels, this can lead to many pauses, broken flow or even complete avoidance of the speaking task. Brown (2001, pp. 270–271) explains that speaking involves both automatic and controlled processes and that building automaticity takes time and focused practice.

Cultural and educational backgrounds can create additional difficulties. Many learners come from systems that focus strongly on grammar-translation and memorization, while communicative practice receives less attention. In classrooms where risk-taking is not encouraged and emotional support is weak, learners are less likely to participate. Gregersen and MacIntyre (2014, p. 231) imply that learners are more willing to participate when tasks are relevant, meaningful and appropriately demanding for their level.

EFL methods support speaking development in different ways. Controlled approaches can help learners prepare vocabulary, grammar patterns, pronunciation, and short responses. However, learners also need chances to use English for meaningful interaction. Komorowska and Krajka (2020, pp. 154–158) explain that modern communicative approaches place more emphasis on learner-centredness, fluency, open-ended tasks, and active participation.

Communicative and task-based approaches are especially useful for speaking. Nunan (2004, pp. 1–3) argues that classroom tasks should connect language learning with meaningful language use. In such tasks, learners use English to exchange information, solve problems, or complete shared activities, not only to practise grammar forms.

Teaching speaking also requires balance. Goh and Burns (2012, pp. 49–53) state that speaking should include fluency, accuracy, interaction, discourse, pronunciation, and communication strategies. Burns (2019, p. 6) also notes that learners need preparation, scaffolding, feedback, and follow-up, not only speaking practice.

For young learners, speaking tasks should be short, concrete, varied, and age-appropriate. Rokita-Jaśkow and Ellis (2019, pp. 2–3) suggest that early foreign language teaching should include enjoyable and multisensory activities. Butler (2026, pp. 1–2) also notes that tasks for children need special adaptation. Therefore, speaking development in young EFL classrooms should combine structured support with meaningful communication.

Overall, these approaches show that speaking development in young EFL classrooms needs both structured support and meaningful communication.

Speaking activities in EFL classes can take many different forms. Some tasks focus more on accuracy, while others allow more room for fluency and creativity. In this thesis, special attention is given to activities that are related to learners' Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and that can be repeated as part of the speaking activity set in the empirical study. Broader classroom activity types were operationalised through a repeated speaking activity set including Free-topic Speaking, Information-gap, Supported Role-play, Planning Time, and Structured Turn-taking.

Group discussions are a common way of practising speaking in EFL classrooms. In pairs or small groups, learners share ideas, respond to each other and negotiate meaning. Compared with whole-class question-answer sequences, pair and group work give more learners a chance to speak and can help reduce anxiety because learners talk to peers rather than in front of the entire class. Harmer (2007, p. 386) notes that pair-work and group-work give everyone a chance to speak and can feel less pressurized for many learners. Brown (2001, p. 267) argues that pair and group work also promote communicative competence by encouraging spontaneous speech and interaction strategies. Bygate (2001, pp. 14–20) adds that group discussions help learners practise turn-taking, polite interruption, asking for clarification and reacting to others' opinions.

Role-playing activities create situations that resemble everyday encounters, such as asking for information, dealing with a small problem or speaking to a shop assistant. Learners take on different roles and use language that fits the situation and the relationship between speakers. Role-plays can reduce personal pressure because learners speak as characters rather than as themselves. Harmer (2007, pp. 392–393) explains that simulation and role-play can be motivating and allow hesitant students to be more confident because they can "hide" behind the role. Role-plays also allow some creativity and improvisation, which can make speaking practice more engaging and memorable.

Communication tasks are designed so that learners must use language to exchange information or reach a non-linguistic goal, such as solving a problem or making a joint decision. To complete the task, learners need to ask questions, clarify meaning, check details and sometimes persuade others. The main focus is on meaning, although form can be addressed before or after the task. Nunan (2004, pp. 1–3) explains that tasks connect classroom learning with real-world language use and give learners a communicative purpose beyond practising language forms. When learners feel that what they say has a clear purpose, they may become less worried about making mistakes and more willing to speak.

TBLT supports the use of meaningful classroom tasks with clear communicative outcomes. This is relevant to WTC because learners may be more willing to speak when tasks are meaningful, manageable, and interactive. Le and Tran (2019, pp. 253–255) also show that task types, topics, teacher support, classroom atmosphere, and interlocutors can influence students' WTC in speaking classes. Their findings further suggest that preparation time, pair/group work, meaningful tasks, games, role-play, and positive feedback may encourage students to speak more actively ((Le & Tran, 2019, pp. 258–261)).

Theoretical perspectives on speaking in EFL highlight both cognitive and communicative dimensions of the skill. Researchers such as Thornbury, Harmer, Bygate and Nunan underline the need for automatisation, interactional skills and purposeful task-based practice.

Thornbury (2005: 4) argues that speaking draws on knowledge, but this knowledge must be used under time pressure. Learners need a certain level of automatisation so that they can retrieve and combine language without thinking too slowly about each form. Without chances to use the language in real-time interaction, this automatisation is difficult to achieve.

Harmer (2007: 123) distinguishes between controlled, guided and free speaking activities. Controlled activities, such as drills, focus mainly on accuracy. Guided activities allow some creativity within a structured frame, as in many information-gap tasks. Free activities, such as discussions and debates, encourage fluency. A balanced speaking programme includes all three so that learners can develop both accuracy and communicative confidence.

Bygate (1987: 5–7) makes a useful distinction between motor-perceptive skills, which involve producing and perceiving sounds, and interaction skills, which involve managing turns, clarifying meaning and responding to others. In many EFL classrooms, learners spend much time on motor-perceptive practice, such as repeating sentences or practising sounds, but have fewer chances to develop interaction skills. As a result, some learners know many words and structures but still find it hard to participate in spontaneous conversation.

Nunan (2004: 56) supports the use of task-based work to develop speaking. He argues that learners should engage in tasks that mirror how language is used in real life, for example by planning an event or exchanging information needed to complete a joint product. In such tasks, speaking is treated as a tool for doing things with others, not just as a subject to be tested.

The CEFR is a framework developed by the Council of Europe (2020) to support language teaching, learning and assessment. It offers a shared way to describe what learners can do at different levels. In the CEFR, communicative competence is presented as a combination of linguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and strategic resources. Instead of focusing only on grammatical accuracy, the framework highlights what learners can do in real-life situations, such as starting a conversation, describing experiences or joining a simple discussion.

Unlike written communication, which allows for deliberate planning, drafting, and retrospective editing, speaking is characterized by its immediacy and spontaneity. During oral interaction, language production occurs online, demanding that learners retrieve lexical items, execute grammatical structures, monitor phonological output, and respond to incoming interlocutor input near-simultaneously. This structural immediacy introduces a profound level of temporal pressure.

According to Thornbury (2005), spoken language knowledge must be deployed under acute time constraints, which severely tests the learner's processing capacity. To maintain a conversational flow, cognitive operations — specifically planning, formulation, and articulation — must operate concurrently rather than sequentially.

Bygate (2001) further operationalizes this cognitive demand by distinguishing between execution under pressure and the underlying linguistic knowledge base. Foreign language learners, particularly at early proficiency levels, often struggle because their controlled language processes have not yet achieved automaticity. When cognitive real-time processing demands exceed the learner's available cognitive resources, the system suffers load issues, manifesting as lengthy pauses, structural avoidance, or complete communication breakdowns.

In the focal Polish primary school classroom, these theoretical challenges of real-time language processing were highly visible during the interaction of the four young learners. Operating at an A1 level of proficiency within a restricted instructional setting, the children faced intense cognitive load when forced to construct spoken utterances spontaneously.

Classroom observations revealed that temporal pressure routinely dictated the direction of peer-to-peer interaction. When a hesitant learner experienced delays in lexical retrieval or sentence formulation, the communicative window frequently shut — either because more confident peers claimed the floor or because the teacher felt compelled to intervene to sustain lesson pacing.

Consequently, real-time processing under time pressure represents a critical barrier to classroom participation. This demonstrates that a learner's immediate classroom engagement is not merely a function of stable linguistic knowledge, but is profoundly shaped by their situational capacity to manage the cognitive demands of online communication.

The paradigm of language teaching has shifted significantly from a traditional obsession with absolute grammatical perfection and native-like pronunciation toward the broader concept of communicative competence. As outlined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), communicative success is defined by a learner's practical capacity to mobilize linguistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic resources to achieve real-world communication goals.

In this contemporary framework, the ultimate benchmark of oral production is not the complete absence of errors, but rather the degree of intelligibility and interactional efficacy. Harmer (2007) argues that prioritizing fluency over rigorous accuracy during communicative tasks creates a more authentic language environment where learners focus on creating shared meaning rather than self-monitoring for minor grammatical slips.

Furthermore, Goh and Burns (2012) emphasize that a competent speaker must possess discourse competence — the ability to connect ideas and manage turn-taking routines — alongside strategic competence, which allows learners to overcome temporary vocabulary gaps through compensation techniques such as gesturing or asking for repetition.

Within the microcosm of the small-group EFL classroom, the interplay between linguistic accuracy, intelligibility, and communicative confidence directly influences peer dynamics and student positioning. Learners who display an advanced command of structural forms may remain peripheral if they lack the strategic confidence to initiate a conversation or claim a turn.

Conversely, as noted in the baseline profiles of this study, some learners with highly restricted language resources show high interactional success because they maintain clear intelligibility, speak clearly, and leverage conversational strategies like active repetition or simple peer-directed questions.

These distinct individual profiles underscore that communicative competence is highly situated and socially constructed within the classroom. A learner's position within the group is constantly renegotiated during tasks, signaling a clear pedagogical need for activities that systematically support both foundational language structures and interactive, anxiety-free communication strategies.

Historically, the teaching of speaking skills in foreign language education has relied heavily on behaviorist-inspired, teacher-led drill practices. Under this traditional orientation, speaking is viewed primarily as a mechanism for reinforcing newly introduced grammar and vocabulary, rather than an independent communicative skill. Controlled oral drills, structural pattern practice, and scripted textbook dialogue repetitions dominate the lesson structure.

While Harmer (2007) acknowledges that highly controlled activities serve a pedagogical purpose by familiarizing young learners with basic phonological patterns and reducing immediate anxiety through predictability, they offer limited opportunities for true cognitive engagement.

Drill-based approaches focus almost exclusively on what Bygate (1987) describes as motor-perceptive skills, leaving interactional skills largely undeveloped. Because students are not required to make autonomous choices regarding semantic meaning or functional language use, drill-based traditions often fail to prepare young learners for the unpredictable nature of spontaneous communication outside of highly structured teacher-led routines.

To bridge the gap between mechanical repetition and spontaneous language use, modern pedagogy champions Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). Nunan (2004) defines a communicative task as a contextualized classroom activity that requires learners to manipulate, comprehend, and interact using the target language while their primary focus remains on mobilizing meaning rather than displaying grammatical form.

Under a task-based orientation, classroom activities are designed around a non-linguistic outcome, such as solving a riddle, collaborating on a project, or exchanging hidden information to bridge an informational gap. This structural shift alters the emotional and cognitive conditions of speaking.

When speaking is framed as an active tool to accomplish a shared goal with a peer, rather than an overt test of linguistic accuracy, the psychological pressure of performance is mitigated. By framing interaction around purposeful tasks, TBLT aligns closely with the cultivation of a student's Willingness to Communicate (WTC) by providing a supportive environment where language is acquired naturally through meaningful use.

Classroom interaction formats serve as the architectural framework that either restricts or expands opportunities for student talk. Traditional whole-class interaction is almost exclusively dominated by the teacher-led Initiation–Response–Feedback (IRF) cycle, which severely limits the overall volume of active individual output.

In contrast, small-group interaction, particularly a stable 1:4 group structure, shifts the communicative dynamics. Group work fundamentally reallocates talk time, ensuring that each child has regular, low-anxiety opportunities to engage in genuine negotiation of meaning.

Cao and Philp (2006) demonstrate that interactional context profoundly shapes a learner's behavioral manifestation of WTC; their empirical findings show that students routinely display a higher frequency of self-initiated turns, clarifying questions, and peer-directed explanations within small-group structures compared to teacher-fronted whole-class settings. The intimacy of a group of four provides a secure social space where young learners can build cooperative discourse routines, practice real-time turn-taking, and provide mutual linguistic support without fear of public evaluation.

In this action research project, the four focal Grade 2 learners functioned as a fixed, collaborative 1:4 group across the eight-week intervention. This regular setup allowed for the gradual emergence of distinct participation patterns and social roles within the group.

Baseline observations showed an initial imbalance: more proficient or confident students naturally dominated the speaking slots and initiated tasks, whereas quieter peers submissively accepted responsive roles, often depending on explicit teacher prompts or first-language translations to participate.

The introduction of the repeated speaking activity set — specifically structured turn-taking routines, information-gap pairs, and interactive board games — was explicitly designed to challenge and reshape these fixed group hierarchies. By tracking these evolving peer dynamics, this study illustrates how deliberate task design and stable interaction formats can balance out uneven participation patterns, reduce situational speaking anxiety, and encourage a more democratic distribution of voluntary, self-initiated communication among young EFL learners.