Iraqi EFL preparatory students’ lateral thinking and its relationship with speaking proficiency

الملخص EN

One of the basic reasons for learning and studying FL is to be able for communicating with others and speaking fluently, but most of students do not feel that they are confident enough when they were trying to develop their speaking skill.

Language in its nature is productive, when it is used in a creative way.

Speaking can be considered to be more productive than other language skills.

Lateral thinking is a unique form of thinking proposed by De Bono.

He believed that creation is the ability to see the changes and it results in the generation of new ideas and breaking out the concept of old ideas.

This type of thinking can decide the outcome of one’s speaking and the main work of lateral thinking is to enable the brain to find out many different perceptions or possibilities.

This study aims at finding out Iraqi EFL preparatory students’ levels of speaking proficiency and lateral thinking.

In addition, finding out Iraqi EFL preparatory students’ relationship between speaking proficiency with lateral thinking.

The population of this study covers Iraqi EFL preparatory school students at Baghdad, Al- Rusafa 1st, and the sample consists of (300) students (boys and girls) has been chosen.

The instruments of the current study comprise two instruments.

The first one is a test for lateral thinking which includes (20) items, in addition, speaking proficiency test (an interview) consisted of six questions.

After making sure of the validity and the reliability of the instruments, they have been applied and the data have been collected.

Then a number of statistical tools have been used for analyzing the data that obtained.

The findings revealed that Iraqi EFL preparatory students have a good level at lateral thinking, while concerning speaking proficiency their level shown that they were at a medium level.

In addition, concerning the correlation between lateral thinking and speaking proficiency the results revealed that there is a positive relationship between them.

The current study concludes that lateral thinking has an effect on speaking proficiency.