Impact of Pushed Output on Students' Oral Production

Abstract

With the advent of communicative methodologies, the promise to develop both fluency and accuracy was made as a goal for teaching and learning English as an international language. However, it did not happen (Richards, 2008). In an attempt to equalize students’ both semantic and syntactic competence, this study investigates the impact of Swain’s (1985) oral pushed output hypothesis on EFL intermediate students’ L2 oral production under a mixed method approach. The participants were 16 seventh grade EFL students from a private school in Ibagué, Colombia that were randomly assigned to an output and a non-output group. For five weeks, the output group underwent oral pushed output activities while the non-output group was merely exposed to comprehension activities. Quantitative and qualitative instruments to collect the data included pretest and posttest, audiorecordings, stimulated recalls, and interviews. Results revealed that although pushing students to produce meaningful oral output does not promote significant noticing of their linguistic problems in past narrative forms, students can modify more oral output through one-way pushed output activities than two-way activities and equalize their semantic and syntactic competence since they can engage in both processsings. Additionally, students perceived oral pushed output as an affectivity regulator in L2 oral production and as a trigger of exposure to L2 vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.