The Effect of Genre-Based Teaching on EFL Learners' Speaking Performance

The present study examined the effect of genre-based tasks on EFL learners' speaking performance and probed whether genre-based tasks may empower EFL learners to perform better on speaking tests. A further concern of the study was to explore whether the effect of genre-based tasks on speaking ability of EFL learners varied across different age groups, i.e. teenagers (13-16 years old) and young adults (24-27 years old). To this end, some generic based consciousness-raising tasks (CRT) were adapted from the model proposed by Benedict (2006) to develop control of a genre used as the treatment procedures. Two different speaking tests of different genres (e.g. recount, report, review, etc.), used as pretest and posttest, were administered to 120 senior university students majoring in English language translation. The results indicated that consciousness-raising tasks significantly affected EFL learners' speaking performance. However, the effect of generic-based CRTs did not vary across different age groups. Overall, the findings provided empirical support for the facilitative effect of generic-based consciousness-raising tasks on speaking performance of EFL learners. The findings may promise implications for EFL speaking syllabuses and provide guidelines to designers to accommodate the insights derived from the genre-based instruction perspective.