Current hot topics as inspirational resources for motivating students in speaking activity

Abstract EN

The present study aims at showing hot topics as inspirational resources for speaking activities.

It highlights the role of motivation in language learning and the activities used in speaking skill in the English language classrooms.

The study aims at realizing the most motivating topics that learners prefer for speaking activities, and also it shows the role of motivation in having such topics and the difficulties facing learners while having topics for discussion.

It also demonstrates the extent to which topic discussion helps students improve their speaking skill.

For the methodology, a mixed-method has been used and it is done in two stages.

First, some topics in speaking books are selected and utilized in designing a questionnaire.

The questionnaire consisted of three sections.

The first and the third section consisted of a number of close-ended questions, while the second section composed of 6 open-ended questions.

Based on the findings of the study, the topic ‘Travel’ was found motivating for Kurdish EFL learners.

The results also revealed that some difficulties such as lack of motivation, lack of speaking skills, unfamiliarity with a topic, difficulty of a topic, a topic which is not culturally appropriate, and having no prior knowledge of the topic are difficulties facing second-language learners while having a topic for class discussion and speaking activity.