Speaking in the EFL classroom : A qualitative study of how four compulsory school teachers view the role of oral proficiency

Research shows that oral proficiency is a big part of communicative competence, and therefore highly relevant for EFL teachers in today’s society. This study aims to investigate what types of activities four EFL teachers in secondary school in Sweden prefer to use in order to practice and assess their students’ oral proficiency. This study further seeks to give an insight in what the four teachers focus on when assessing their students’ oral proficiency. The method used for this study was qualitative, semi- structured interviews with four EFL teachers of different secondary schools in south of Sweden. Furthermore, the data was later coded and analysed with inspiration of the Grounded theory methodology. The results of this study showed that the four teachers used different oral activities very often in their teaching, especially different kinds of discussions. The oral activities were often connected to other projects and assignments that included other skills such as reading and writing. Therefore, the oral proficiency activities were only said to be clearly planned and assessed once or twice per term. Moreover, the four teachers main focus when assessing the students’ oral proficiency seemed to be phenomena like fluency, clearness, adaption to purpose and strategy- usage.