appropriation based syllabus and advanced efl learners’ speaking skill: the case of chunksoncard activities

The impetus for conducting the present study came from thornbury's (2005) approach to teach speaking in which he claimed that awarenessraising techniques, along with appropriation strategies, facilitate the process of teaching and learning speaking. therefore, the present study attempted to explore the impact of the appropriationbased syllabus to teach speaking by using chunksoncard activity. accordingly, 60 female and male iranian advanced efl learners were selected from a private language institute and were assigned to four groups. the four groups were male experimental and control groups as well as female experimental and control groups. to examine the effect of the treatment, the participants were pre and posttested on speaking skill. they took part in 14 treatment sessions in which the experimental group practiced the chunksoncard method through drilling while the control group practiced the conventional approach. the results of oneway anova revealed significant differences among the posttest scores of the four groups. according to the findings, the mean score for male learners in the experimental group differed significantly from female and male learners in the control groups. similarly, the mean score of female learners in the experimental group differed significantly from female and male learners in the control groups. the results of pairedsamples ttest for each group also indicated that the appropriationbased teaching of lexical chunks had significant impacts on both genders’ speaking skills.