Improving English Speaking Skills Through Private Tutoring: Case of 4th Year Ghardaia Middle School Students

Abstract

Obstacles related to public classroom environment represent a challenge for the Algerian EFL learner, especially when it comes to bettering their speaking prowess, which leads the students to seek supplementary classes in private tutoring schools. The aim of this paper is to provide comprehensive review of the relationship between private tutoring and the development of speaking skills. Drawing on existing literature and research studies, the attempts to highlight the key findings and implications of private tutoring on speaking skills. The study followed a true experimental, pretest-posttest one group, design with a, randomly assigned, sample of 11 middle school students from various schools in Ghardaia city, Algeria. The intervention lasted for four weeks. The data gathering tools that were used to carry this investigation were, a pretest, a posttest, a students’ questionnaire, and structured interviews with a sample of five English Language teachers from four different middle schools in Ghardaia. Findings revealed that private tutoring schools had a crucial role in improving the speaking skills, by playing a complementary role to that of the public school, and through the use of creative teaching methods such as educational games and the employment of audio-visual aids.