Think-Pair-Share: An Active Learning Strategy to Enhance EFL Learners’ Oral Communication Skills

Abstract

Mastering communication skills has become a requirement to integrate with global societies that have adopted English as a lingua franca for communication. However, given the obstacles Omani students face, including a limited vocabulary, a mass of grammatical errors, and an inability to construct correct sentences, teaching oral communication skills cannot be considered a facile task. Therefore, the primary purpose of conducting this study was to investigate the effect of the Think-Pair-Share strategy (TPS), an active learning strategy, on Omani EFL high school learners’ oral communication skills. Moreover, it aimed to survey the target sample’s opinions on the usefulness of the TPS strategy. The current study targeted two groups of 10th-grade students enrolled in Al-Rubaie’ Al-Najaria for Girls School (9–12). The 60 students participating in this study were divided into two groups with an equal number of students: 30 students in the experimental group and 30 in the control group. An oral communication test, a questionnaire, and a TPS teaching manual were used to obtain data. Additionally, the TPS treatment was carried out in 12 sessions held over a month-and-a-half. As for data analysis, independent samples t-tests, paired-samples t-tests, and one-way multivariate analysis of variance tests were used. The findings showed that the strategy did not contribute to achieving a significant difference between the means of the experimental and control groups, except in one sub-skill, which was pronunciation. Although the results were not completely in favour of the experimental group, the participating students expressed positive opinions about the benefit they gained from the strategy in developing their oral communication skills.