Factors Detrimental to Oral Communication in Secondary School Contexts

This study aims to explore factors inhibiting L2 learners’ oral communication in Korean EFL secondary school contexts. For this purpose, this study employed a questionnaire survey, which consisted of six overall types of communication obstacles: linguistic, background knowledge, cognitive, affective, interactional, and institutional domains. A total of 337 questionnaires were collected from three student groups: middle school, general high school, and vocational high school students. The results show that the vocational high school students face greater trouble with linguistic, background knowledge, cognitive and affective factors than do the middle school and general high school groups when speaking English. They also show that institutional factors cause greater speaking problems for the general and vocational high school students than for the middle school students. A comparison between engineering and commercial high school students reveals no statistically significant differences in most of the communication barriers except for the institutional factors. Another noteworthy finding is that many subsets of communication obstacles in the vocational high school group are significantly correlated with each other, one problem interacting with another. On the basis of the results, pedagogical implications are provided together with helpful suggestions for overcoming speaking difficulties in secondary school contexts. (195)