CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS AFTER PROPOSAL

At first, this research began with the concern about learners that despite spending years
attending English classes, and even studying autonomously, were unable to speak in
English and if they did, were unable to hold a conversation. Then, this research was
conducted aiming at developing the speaking skill while attempting to close the gap
between school English and real English. The research was carried out in a sample of 23
high school students, with mostly an A2 in writing and reading level of English; however,
speaking was not in that level of proficiency. Here we presented 8 workshops but the
research was limited due to time availability and we only implemented 62% of them, but in
the future it may be extended not only in time but also in the amount of students taken for
the sample and we expect it can work out especially on the impact authentic and semiauthentic audio visual resources have on all four skills, listening, speaking, reading and
writing. In addition to that, the use of authentic and semi authentic audiovisual would
preferably be used with learners with an intermediate or higher level of English since it is
easier to find and adapt authentic material for them.
From this research and after much consideration, we concluded that in order to be really
successful it is necessary to mainly, be consistent throughout the whole process of the
workshops completion, unfortunately, these workshops were not continuously carried out
since the schools, the teachers and the researchers time were limited. Moreover,
scaffolding almost guaranteed students completion of the usually last speaking task with
ease, since by the end of the workshop they were absolutely acquainted with the
vocabulary, the expressions, the examples and prompts given throughout it, that speaking
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seemed an effortless exercise for some. Phonetics also played a major role in the
development of speaking in this research because this allowed us to realize that some
students did not speak because they simply were not confident enough to do it, but after
approaching the workshop in a sometimes humorous way, students were more confident
and willing to participate. A significant aspect that we tried to keep in mind at all times
when creating a workshop was students preferences and opinions, but sometimes because
of the urge to fit an authentic audiovisual with the topics in the curriculum we failed to
obliged to that, causing students to be more excited about certain activities than others. On
top of that searching, adapting and creating a workshop for a particular video or audio can
be particularly time consuming; therefore, authentic audiovisuals should be seen as a
complement to a course book instead of the main source for teaching. A student-centered
class was definitely a change students were not used to do it. At the beginning of this
project, some of them were reluctant to participate in front of the whole class. Thus,
teachers should expect and be patient towards a slow adaptation. A feature that did not play
to our advantage was not having subtitles and transcripts available for all of our activities,
so some students simply got discouraged when they were not able to follow what was going
on in a particular video clip. And lastly, instructors should not rely completely on
technology due to the technical issues that may occur, so it is best to always have a plan b
that may include having an extra laptop to display a video or a different activity related to
the topic prepared that does not depend on electronics.
In a world where your knowledge of a language is judged based on how well you can speak
it, oral production should be priority among teachers, students and curricula.
Acknowledging, of course that it could be one of the most difficult skills to master. The
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challenging task to facilitate it should be approached with creativity, patience and without
fear, and since failing can be discouraging, students should be guided every step of the way
until they are capable of completing the task by themselves, in other words, we recommend
scaffolding as the method of choice. Furthermore, a key component of our research was the
first workshop dedicated to phonetics; it is a component that should not be let out in any
speaking oriented activity. Another aspect that should not be taken for granted is the
students opinions and preferences, forasmuch as this is of crucial importance to keep
students engaged and motivated to keep going.
And lastly, classes should be dynamic enough and planned in a student-centered manner
seeing that their active participation is crucial in their development of production skills and
their own learning in general, so there should always be opportunities for open questions,
and enough time for creative oral activities such as role playing and story-telling. And in
closing, there is very important feature when dealing with videos: subtitles. The teacher
should have subtitles and/or transcripts available depending on the level of English of the
students, and provide them when he/she sees it fits.

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