EFL Learners' Engagement: Empowering EFL Young Learners to Initiate Speaking Through Personalizing Meaningful EFL Classroom Activities

Abstract

—The study aims to determine whether personalizing classroom activities with meaningful and realistic situations can encourage EFL beginners to apply their learning experiences to verbal practices. The study employs a pretest, a posttest, and an interview as tools for data collection. Although the learning material was the same for both groups, the control group's participants were taught in a classroom using a traditional method based on one-size-fits-all instruction, whereas the experimental group's participants used a personalized learning method. The findings show that participants in the experimental group, whose class uses the personalized learning method, outperform participants in the control group, whose class uses the traditional method based on one-size-fits-all instruction. Hence, personalizing classroom learning experiences is an effective means of empowering EFL beginners to initiate speaking, particularly at the early stage of their learning. Thus, it recommends personalized classroom activities as an effective means for engaging beginners in verbal practices.