Bài báo khoa học

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the application of intensive reading as pre-speaking and extra activities to improve freshmen’s speaking performance. A questionnaire was first distributed to find out the difficulties faced by a group of 71 EFL students when learning speaking skill. The data revealed that the biggest obstacle for the participants in learning speaking skill is lack of necessary vocabulary and structures, which has prevented them from getting involved with the activities during the lessons and affects negatively their speaking performance. Then, two classes of 34 and 37 students were involved in the research as an experimental group and controlled group. During the term, supplementary reading texts from various sources were assigned to 34 students in the experimental group to read before or during class time while no supplementary materials were designed to 37 other students in the cotrolled group. A pre-test and a post-test were used in order to measure the differences between the results of the two groups. It was found that intensive reading had positive impacts on students' speaking performance. On the basis of the findings, some implications were also suggested for better results in applying intensive reading in teaching speaking skill in the EFL context.