EFL Textbooks, L2 Contacts, and Teacher Self-Efficacy: Impact on Learners’ Development of Oral Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency

Researchers have extensively compared different L2 learning contexts, such as EFL versus study-abroad, for their impacts on oral production; however, scant attention, if any, has been paid to comparing EFL settings in terms of input factors such as textbooks, amount of contacts in L2, and teachers. Accordingly, the effects of these factors on the oral production skills were investigated in this study. To this end, in a longitudinal study that spanned nearly three months, speech samples were elicited from three groups of Persian speaking advanced learners of English (N = 72) through oral narrative tasks and were scored for complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). A one-way MANOVA was used to compare the means. The average number of subordinate clauses per AS-unit was used to measure grammatical complexity, “D” was a measure of lexical complexity, the percentage of error-free clauses was an index of accuracy, and the number of dysfluencies was calculated to be an indicator of fluency. After a period of time, the results provided strong evidence for the significantly different rates of progress among the learners of the three EFL settings on lexical complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Evaluation of course materials, amount of learners’ contact in L2, and teachers’ self-efficacy revealed that these different rates of progress might well be attributed to the characteristics of the speaking tasks in the textbooks. One important implication is that gains in a special dimension of oral production can be produced if EFL curriculum developers provide target learners with speaking tasks bearing particular features.