The effects of strategy training on 5th grade students' speaking strategy use

In recent years, a number of studies have been focused on the effect of communication strategy training on learners' strategic competence and speaking ability. Communication strategies appeared as having a crucial importance due to their complementary roles in coping with the problems when communicating in L2. If learners have inadequate vocabulary knowledge and weak sentence building skills, effective use of these strategies would allow them to function as successful speakers in any communication context. Thus learners can benefit from strategy training on appropriate and effective use of these strategies. The literature on adult learners provides us much evidence to support the hypothesis that communication strategies facilitate learners' communicative ability; however, such evidence remains unclear when young learners are in question. To this end, 127 5th grade students aged 11 were involved in this study in a state school in Bursa, Turkey. Two intact groups were assigned randomly to the treatment (n=21) and control (n=18) groups. The study provided evidence on a four-month, an embedded mixed methods quasi-experimental design investigating the effect of strategy training on the experimental group students' speaking strategy use. With this design children's speaking strategy use survey and classroom observation tally instruments were utilized before and after the intervention. The results revealed that the experimental group showed a significant increase in their speaking strategy use when compared to the control group. Classroom observation results also provided that the students improved their ability to handle communication problems and developed positive feelings towards participation in learning activities. The study offers suggestions for teachers with regard to the reality where the efforts have been made on the fund of knowledge rather than the development of ability to use the language.