Abstract:

The curriculum at the University of Guayaquil requires English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pre-service teachers to meet the B1 level of EFL proficiency, as established in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) descriptors, by the end of the third semester. Nevertheless, encouraging students to produce language orally has proven to be one of the most challenging tasks for EFL instructors, especially in online teaching contexts. It is then necessary to search for strategies that provide proper input and scaffold learners’ speaking skills.

Modeling mainly consists of presenting examples or demonstrations to guide students’ performance. Regarding the teaching of EFL speaking, the strategy can be applied to provide examples of personal recounts and short speeches about different topics for learners to visualize a clear pattern to follow and imitate. Through the application of this strategy, students can produce the target language by adapting the given model to provide narratives or descriptions of different topics as a linear sequence of points.

The purpose of this study was to analyze pre-service teachers’ perspectives on the use of modeling strategies to develop EFL speaking skills in online classes. The population included thirty-eight EFL pre-service teachers in the third semester of studies; a convenience sample of twelve students participated in semi-structured oral interviews. A qualitative-method approach was applied to analyze and obtain deep insight into participants’ experience on working with modeling speaking strategies along the third semester in the English Language Level B1 course. Results showed that students considered that their speaking performance improved in terms of accuracy, fluency, interaction and coherence as a result of the implementation of these strategies.

Keywords:

Modeling, EFL speaking Skills, pre-service teachers.