The Effectiveness of Socratic Dialogue in Developing Oral Communication Skills Among Malaysian AFL Learners: An Applied Linguistic Study

This study explored the effectiveness of Socratic dialogue as a pedagogical approach in enhancing the oral communication skills of Malaysian AFL university learners in the context of AFL instruction. The study employed a quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test control group design with a 13-week treatment period that involved 124 Malaysian AFL university students randomly selected at the class level between 2 groups: Socratic dialogue intervention group and conventional oral communication instruction control group. Oral communication skills were evaluated based on four criteria: fluent speech and delivery, critical elaboration of discourse, interactional pragmatic competence and argumentative coherence. The results of analysis of covariance showed statistically significant gains for Socratic dialogue participants on all four skill dimensions, with the highest gains in the critical discourse elaboration dimension and the argumentative coherence dimension. Themes that emerged from the complementary qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with the students and the classroom observation field notes were the following: (i) the transformative nature of questioning in oral self-monitoring, (ii) building intellectual courage in Arabic communication, and (iii) the challenge of cultural negotiation between Socratic confrontation norms and Jordanian-Arabic communicative values. The results showed that Socratic dialogue is pedagogically powerful and culturally nuanced for fostering AFL oral competence in Jordanian higher education and thus has important implications for curriculum design, teacher training and classroom discourse.