Communication Activities with Indigenous Content for Enhancing Speaking Skills of Undergraduate Students in ESL Classroom

Abstract

This paper aims to study and equate the oral or verbal ability of the second-year students of B.Sc., Physics and Mathematics courses of Thiagarajar College, Madurai, by using three communication activities with indigenous content and also to analyze the learners' attitude during the period. The students are exposed to a learner-centered classroom that demands communication activities. This study uses communication activities with indigenous content. It is an experimental single-group pretest and posttest design. The subjects are forty-five students of second-year Physics and Mathematics courses. The quantitative data are obtained from speaking assessments and the attitude of learners. The research instruments consist of lesson plans, an oral communication competence test and an attitude questionnaire. In addition, this paper finds that these three activities, namely the Picture Description, Description of Video Clip and Asking and Answering Questions with indigenous components, could enhance the speaking ability of the undergraduate students and their attitude towards learning speaking skills in English. This study recommends that the second language teacher should focus on activities to enrich the learners' active vocabulary by providing indigenous content for better interaction and oral competence so that the teacher can deal with the second language classroom with communication activities with the native material.