The Effect of Drama Activities in Enhancing Saudi EFL Learners’ Speaking Skills and Attitudes

The current research aimed to investigate the effect of using drama activities, as implemented in the English language classes and combined with pedagogical practices to develop Preparatory Year Deanship students’ speaking skills and their attitudes towards speaking at one of the Saudi universities in Riyadh province. The participants of this study were sixty students who had studied Reading and Writing and Listening and Speaking in level two. They were classified into two groups including control and experimental groups. The two groups were administered a -prposttest to measure the targeted speaking skills before and after the treatment. The speaking test included three main parts: Telling a personal story, expressing opinions and direct questions. The other data-collecting technique was a questionnaire to test students’ attitudes towards learning speaking. The experimental group students were subjected to drama-based lessons in their speaking classrooms such as role-playing, simulation, improvisation and story-telling. After analyzing the data, the results revealed that using drama activities enhanced experimental group students’ speaking skills. Further, those students developed positive attitudes towards speaking in English as a foreign language classroom.