APPLYING SPEAKING STRATEGIES IN THE EFL CLASSROOM

Oral proficiency is often the single most visible outcome by which learners and programs are judged, yet speaking remains one of the hardest skills to teach well in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting. Limited exposure to authentic interaction outside class, large heterogeneous groups, anxiety, and fossilized errors all conspire to keep many learners at a plateau. Over the last three decades, however, a body of research has converged on a set of “speaking strategies” that—when explicitly taught and consistently recycled—can help students overcome communicative breakdowns, stretch output, and ultimately become more autonomous speakers [4]. This annotation synthesizes key strategy types, summarizes representative classroom applications, and highlights cautions and unresolved questions for practitioners.