The usage of spoken word poetry to teach speaking skills in the ESL Classroom

Abstract

Speaking is always regarded as a difficult task to perform by many ESL learners. Basic knowledge of vocabulary, sentence structures and pronunciation are a must to speak and respond accordingly. Therefore, this paper explores the usage of Spoken Word Poetry (SWP) as an alternative method to teach speaking skills in the ESL classroom. This study engaged a quantitative method approach to collect the data namely experimental method. The aim of this study is to identify the extent to which SWP improves students speaking skills in the ESL classroom. Ninety ESL learners of Health Sciences participated in the study. Students were placed into two groups, an experimental group and control group to test the usage of SWP in the classroom. The findings revealed a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group students receiving SWP approaches. Based on mean, the experimental group showed better score (mean = 15.36) than the control group (mean 11.42) in their post-test. It was observed as well that the experimental group had higher scores of post-test than control group in terms of vocabulary knowledge especially the usage of low frequency words. In addition, at the end of the study, it was seen that the post-test scores of the students in the experimental group were higher than the post-test scores of students in the control group even though they were almost equal before the study. Therefore, based on these findings, the current study shows that it is significant to use SWP as a new approach to teach speaking skills in the ESL classroom as its improved students’ proficiency in speaking.