The Role of Age and Gender in Speaking ability of Iranian EFL Learners

Many of those who learn a foreign language do so in order to be able to communicate with nativespeakers in real life situation. They wish to interact with the speech community in such a waythat they are accepted as a member of that community. Thus, the main goal of learning alanguage is to use it in communication in its spoken form. The present study aims to investigatethe effect of two demographic features, namely age and gender on speaking ability of thestudents. To this end, sixty students who were learning English at a language institute in Yazdwere selected to participate in the study. They were assigned to one control group and twoexperimental groups. Students in one experimental group had teacher-learner interaction on theirspeaking and students in another experimental group had learner-learner interaction. Pretest,posttest, and some interviews were conducted during experimental phase of the study and in fact,the data of the current study was collected during 8 sessions of treatment. Descriptive statistics offrequency and percentage was applied for data analysis. The results of the study demonstrate thatstudents’ age and gender affected speaking ability of the learners and the average of accuracyand fluency of the female and older students was higher than ones of male and younger learners.The present study also has some pedagogical implications for both learners and teachers.

کلیدواژه ها:

Demographic features ، Speaking ability ، EFL learners