The use of YouTube in developing the speaking skills of Jordanian EFL university students

Abstract

This study examines the effectiveness of using YouTube videos in teaching the speaking skills among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in Jordan. The study sample comprised 80 students attending Oral Skills classes in the English Language and Literature Department at a private university in Jordan. The participants were equally divided into a control group and an experimental group of 40 students each. The experimental group was taught through the use of YouTube videos, while the control group was taught the speaking skills using the traditional approach. A pre-test and a post-test were administered to the two groups. Four TEFL experts were asked to rate the participants’ performance using the IELTS speaking band descriptors, which consist of four main categories: fluency & coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range & accuracy, and pronunciation. The findings showed that the performance of the two groups was improved. However, compared to the traditional group, the experimental group demonstrated a relatively better improvement. The results also showed significant progress in the speaking performance of the students subjected to the YouTube experiment. Of all the four constructs under investigation, pronunciation and fluency & coherence were the most noticeably advanced in the performance of the YouTube experimental group. The present study recommends that YouTube videos be embedded into the EFL classroom to improve students' speaking skills.

Youtube for Teaching Listening in English Language: the Benefits in Experts’ Views

“…YouTube is a good site to be used in enhancing students' listening comprehension. It was discovered that YouTube supply both visual and audio to the learners which gave the students the opportunity to figure out the speech or words that they heard while learning the subject content as well as improving their language ability (Saed et al, 2021;Selvi et al, 2020). The study result shows that students' motivation and participation can be enhancing when using YouTube as authentic materials.…”

“…Furthermore, YouTube videos give the students chance to memorize the lesson more easily. Some previous researcher also had been examined the effect of using YouTube video in teaching listening skill (Ho & Tai, 2020;Saed et al, 2021). The result of the research showed that there was a positive effect of using YouTube video in improving students' listening ability.…”

Effective and Meaningful Online Learning in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Best Practice in Integrating Local Culture in EFL

“…For the students, online learning with various materials and strategies makes the EFL teaching and learning process interesting [63]. In terms of the students' achievement on language skills and language elements, some studies also confirmed that the use of online learning could help the students to improve their competence in those language skills and elements [64]- [67]. However, technology is merely a tool that helps the teachers deliver the instruction.…”

Vlogging as an Assessment Tool in ELT: A Study Among Adult Learners in a Distance Learning Programme

“…Studies have observed that the use of technology in English language teaching (ELT) fosters autonomous learning and decreases students' anxiety about the learning process. Many researchers have explored the use of social media platforms in ELT, such as Twitter (Upadhyay & Upadhyay, 2020), Instagram (Wulandari, 2019), YouTube channel (Saed et al, 2021;Sari, 2017), Facebook group (Ab Manan, 2012;Mabuan & Ebron, 2016;Ong et al, 2020). All these studies have concluded that incorporating the use of social media in ELT is able to promote autonomous learning among ESL learners.…”