Constructing a Natural Conversation Learning Activity to Improve Students’ English-Speaking Skills

As a medium of communication, language encapsulates four core competencies: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Notably, speaking, which facilitates direct communication, is critical. Yet, Taiwan's English pedagogy heavily emphasizes reading, inadvertently fostering a deficit in speaking skills among students. Addressing this, the current study proposes an English conversational practice system that adheres to language acquisition tenets, integrating 10-minute mini-lessons for English listening and speaking exercises. In these activities, students utilize a natural approach, engaging with the system-provided English conversational audio to refine their listening and speaking skills. The system, furnished with a recording function, empowers students to engage in self-paced English listening and speaking practice during their free time. The process of "listening to system audio, followed by speaking practice (recording), and re-recording" offers students corrective feedback from their recordings, enhancing their pronunciation, grammar, and fluency - vital elements of conversational competency. Additionally, the system incorporates a voice-based chatbot, facilitating situational speaking exercises based on the practice topics. The overarching goal of this study is to instill in students the skill to transfer their learning to diverse conversational contexts they might encounter, fostering habitual speaking to mitigate the disparity in the development of the four English language skills.