Afro-English classroom project, as an alternative to improve the speaking skill of ninth graders

Abstract

The need to learn a foreign language has grown significantly today because the phenomenon of globalization has allowed communication and cultural exchange between people from different places. In Colombia, through the bilingualism program of the Ministry of Education (MEN), alternatives have been sought to integrate English teaching in public schools. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the impact of an Afro-English classroom project as an alternative to improve speaking skills from an intercultural perspective of ninth graders from a public school. Subsequently, the purpose of this research is to diagnose students’ speaking skill level through the assessment of the effectiveness of the Afro-English classroom project in order to determine learners’ improvement on oral production and their reflection on learning the target language from a cultural point of view. Furthermore, this is a qualitative action research study. Likewise, the data collection instruments were a pre-test, a post-test, a survey, an interview, and observations. Moreover, regarding the oral production, the results indicate that in in terms of the linguistic competence this study showed that students faced difficulties in the use of some grammatical structures, such as syntax, verb forms, lexical morphemes construction, omission of words, past tense coherence, prepositions of time, and the accordance with the third person singular. Subsequently, the results illustrate that the Afro-English classroom project implementation had a positive effect on different components of the speaking skill, such as pronunciation, vocabulary, and interaction. Likewise, the findings showed that integrating cultural topics in the language classroom is effective for students’ learning process because they were interested and motivated to participate in the class’s activities. Besides, the experience of integrating Afro-culture in class was positive because the students became aware of the value of their own culture and significant things such as not being racist or discriminatory. On this basis, it is recommended to include cultural topics in the English classroom to make the language learning process more interesting for the students. Besides, this research has benefits for other English teachers at public schools because they can use cultural activities within their lessons in order to help their students to improve their English skills.