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ABSTRACT
This quantitative study was designed to explore English Language Teachers' perception of the effectiveness of using authentic videos in the classroom in terms of improving the speaking skills at the Ishik University preparatory school of English language. It also aimed to indicate associated factors that might influence the effectiveness of authentic videos from the teachers ' perspective. An online questionnaire survey including open-ended questions, dealing with attitudes and perceptions of authentic video usage to improve speaking skills from the teacher perspective, was distributed to 43 teachers. 30 of those teachers responded the questionnaire within 15 days in preparatory school of Ishik University located in Erbil, Iraq. The results of this study showed that teachers are satisfied with using authentic video materials during the EFL courses. They also indicated that using authentic videos motivates the students to take part in speaking classes. Moreover, from the teachers' perspectives, authentic videos help students to improve their self-esteem while speaking more than those who are studying traditionally.
Keywords: authenticity, authentic videos, enhancing speaking skill, visual aids.
INTRODUCTION:
'Speaking' has been based on the reflection of sentence-based view of proficiency prevailing in audiolingual and other drill-based methodologies of the 1970s (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2013). Since then, when the humanism began to have a decisive impact on education, the traditional authoritative teachercentered instruction gave way to the learner-centered mode of instruction (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991). Grammar translation-based methodologies were left their places to communicative teaching and learning approaches that were established around notions, functions, skills, tasks and other nongrammatical units of organizations (Richard, 2017). The course syllabi and teaching methodologies were shifted from teacher centered to student centered education during the emergence of the communicative language teaching approaches (Berardo, 2006); (Hedge, 2001); (Richard, 2001). Speaking skill was influenced from this paradigm shift as well, and fluency became one of the most prominent goals of speaking skills and it has been developed through the use of information-gap and other real-life communication materials (Senior, 2005), with limited English language proficiency.
University-level EFL courses typically use a variety of speaking tools prepared by the professional commercial printing houses such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge, Pearson, etc. for developing the students' speaking skills in English. As (Young 2000) asserted that the...