A Structured Collaborative Speaking Protocol to Support Communicative Confidence: An Instructor-Matched Clustered Quasi-Experimental Evaluation

Communicative speaking activities do not always provide equitable or psychologically manageable opportunities for all learners in university English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. This article presents a reproducible structured collaborative speaking protocol and documents its feasibility and preliminary outcomes through an instructor-matched clustered quasi-experimental design. The multicomponent protocol combined rotating interactional roles, repeated speaking attempts, criterion-based peer feedback, one observable revision target, guided reflection, and scheduled behavior-focused video review. It was implemented once weekly for eight weeks in eight intact university EFL classes organized into four instructor-matched pairs. Within each pair, one class received the structured collaborative speaking condition and the other received an active-comparison condition matched for task topics, session duration, preparation time, and number of speaking attempts. Communicative confidence was the primary outcome and was assessed at baseline, post-intervention, and four-week follow-up. Willingness to communicate, speaking anxiety, speaking self-efficacy, perceived peer psychological safety, and independently rated speaking performance were secondary exploratory outcomes. Weekly process measures documented participation, state anxiety, feedback uptake, fidelity, contamination, and video-review completion. A total of 180 students entered the study; 176 completed the post-intervention assessment, and 159 completed follow-up. The protocol met the prespecified feasibility thresholds. Communicative confidence increased in both conditions, with a larger instructor-matched class-level increase in the structured condition at post-intervention, where the matched difference in change was 0.38 on a 1-7 scale (95% confidence interval, 0.24-0.52; four instructor-matched pairs), and at follow-up, where the matched difference in change was 0.55 (95% confidence interval, 0.38-0.72; four instructor-matched pairs). Because condition placement was nonrandom and the number of independent clusters was small, the estimates are best interpreted as preliminary class-level evidence rather than confirmatory evidence of general effectiveness.