الملخص الإنجليزي
The present study attempted to diagnose the difficulties that Omani secondary school students encounter in their oral production in English as a foreign language and to identify the causes of these difficulties.
To attain these objectives, the following research questions were addressed:
1. What are the most serious difficulties (linguistic and pragmatic) that Omani secondary school students encounter in their learning of the speaking skill as perceived by their teachers?
2. To what extent do the students' speaking difficulties (as perceived by their teachers) vary according to the students' instructional levels?
3. What are, in the teachers' opinion, the main causes of the difficulties that Omani secondary school students encounter in their oral production?
4. What are the most common types of the linguistic errors that Omani secondary school students actually make in their oral production?
5. What are the most serious pragmatic difficulties that Omani secondary school students actually encounter in their oral production?
6. To what extent do the actual difficulties, linguistic and pragmatic, of the learners vary according to students' gender?
7. To what extent do the actual difficulties, linguistic and pragmatic, of the learners' vary according to their instructional levels?
The population of this study consisted of all secondary school students from the Muscat region. Information about the speaking difficulties of these students was first obtained from their EFL teachers. For this purpose, a questionnaire was developed, piloted, validated and then administrated to 97 EFL teachers from the Muscat region. These teachers were asked to rate sets of pre-determined speaking difficulty areas in terms of how serious they were for their students. After the collection of this set of data, the researcher proceeded to conduct interviews (after piloting) with the students themselves.
The total number of the sample of the students interviewed was 60, 30 from First Secondary and 30 from Third Secondary (half male and half female). These interviews sought to elicit the subjects' ability and difficulty in fulfilling a number of selected communicative functions. The analysis of the interview data was performed by five native-speaking teachers of English from the Language Centre at Sultan Qaboos University. These teachers listened to the audio-taped materials with the purpose of identifying the linguistic errors and rating (on a 5 - point Likert scale) the students' success in carrying out the communicative tasks. The reliability of the rating was maximized through an initial workshop (self-training) session in which all five raters worked together on all the responses of five subjects. The purpose was to ensure maximum agreement before working separately on the remainder of the sample.
The results of the analysis of the questionnaire data showed that, according to the teachers, the linguistic domain constitutes the most serious area of difficulty for the students. This is especially true in the case of vocabulary and grammar. The pragmatic domain was considered less serious than the linguistic one, but more important than the conceptual one. The teachers' questionnaire responses also showed that the level of difficulty in all the areas considered was the same for both instructional levels and did not diminish across these levels. Analysis of the causes of the students' oral difficulties indicated that teachers blamed the curriculum more than they blamed themselves or the students.
Analysis of the interview data confirmed the teachers' opinion about the grammatical and lexical difficulties. Errors due to insufficient learning were more common than the ones due to other sources such as interference and overgeneralization. The analysis of the pragmatic skills indicated no weaknesses in any particular communicative function. The females were found to have less difficulty in some language areas (lexis and morphology); however, no such differences were noted in pragmatic skills. With regard to the comparison across instructional levels, only minor improvements were observed from First to Third secondary levels. Among the recommendations suggested by the present study are:
(1) To place greater emphasis on the grammatical and vocabulary activities.
(2) To make serious attempts to improve the overall quality of teaching English in our school system, especially at the secondary level
(3) To carry out other and more sophisticated diagnostic studies of the other language skills namely: listening, reading, and writing.
