Facilitating and Improving Speaking Accuracy through Self-correction and Self-awareness in TOEFL Independent Speaking Tasks

Abstract

Assessing the speaking skills of language learners has always been in the agenda considering the fact that speaking correspondingly involves comprehension, and interaction is almost impossible without comprehension in the target language. During the independent speaking tasks of the TOEFL-IBT test, candidates often make grammar mistakes, and since they have limited time for self-correction, they cannot answer the questions fully, and eventually they run out of time finishing the task completely. These mistakes directly affect candidates’ speaking negatively, and they often seek ways to make fewer mistakes so that they can focus more on supporting their ideas and fluency. The purpose of this study is to find out if a TOEFL test candidate is likely to use the target language more efficiently in the successive and subsequent trials based on self-correction and self-awareness of errors. For this purpose, a Turkish learner of English preparing to take TOEFL-IBT test in a private English language school was assessed on an 8-step speaking test trial for the 14 speaking questions for the independent speaking tasks of the TOEFL-IBT test. After each trial, the participant’s reflections were analyzed through coding and under three themes: lexis, elaboration and structure. The results of this study indicated that, through awareness raising and self-correction, the participant’s speaking skills improved in terms of vocabulary range, elaboration, using discourse linkers based on the raters’ judgments, however, there was no noticeable improvement regarding sentence structure. The participant also reported that self-correction was an effective way to remember the errors and considered the raters’ feedback useful in becoming more aware of certain areas. The interview results revealed that the learner preferred discovery learning rather than rote.