Effectiveness of using task-based language teaching to enhance speaking performance among Malaysian Polytechnic ESL students

Speaking is generally considered the most fundamental skill that needs to be acquired by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) to communicate their ideas, opinions, feelings, thoughts and emotions to others. However, many Malaysian polytechnic ESL students still find speaking very difficult to master and tend to demonstrate low performance in speaking ability. To overcome this problem, English language lecturers must provide students with opportunities to communicate and use the language in authentic situations. An approach that has been receiving significant attention in the field of language pedagogy and second language acquisition in the past decade is taskbased language teaching (TBLT). Despite receiving sustained academic attention from scholars, there has been very little research on the implementation of TBLT in the Malaysian polytechnic context. Hence, this study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of using task-based language teaching to enhance speaking performance among Malaysian polytechnic ESL students. This study adopted a quasi-experimental research design. Two intact classes of thirty students each enrolled in the Communicative English II course participated in the study. The students of the treatment group received the proposed TBLT instructions for three weeks while students in the control group received Presentation, Practice, Production (PPP) instructions. A pre-oral presentation test and a post-oral presentation test were administered to measure students’ speaking performance in both groups. Paired sample t-test was employed to analyse the data collected. The findings of the study showed that students in the treatment group who received taskbased language teaching instructions performed significantly better than students in the control group who received the Presentation, Practice, Production (PPP) instruction in their oral presentation test. The findings of the study have practical implications for improving teaching practices and provide insights into the use of TBLT for teaching speaking skills.

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