The Effectiveness of Strategic Activities on the Conversational Skills A Case Study: Persian Language Learners Abroad

This paper investigates the effectiveness of those activities which are based on all types of strategies for teaching conversational skills. These strategies are practiced in the form of 17 activities and their effectiveness on the oral language performane of Persian learners has been investigated. The second language learning strategies in this research are dependent on two Kuhn's paradigms and include "learning" and "using" second language. The former consists of recognition and acceptance of materials, distinction from other materials, categorizing them for a better learning, constant involvement with materials, using common memorization methods for rehearsal to improve natural conversation learning. The teacher's Linguistics and Iranology knowledge in choosing teaching materials, producing similarities and differences in two languages, lexical and syntactic categorizations of activities based on the first to the third strategies were implemented in the classroom. Informal gatherings, appropriate assignments of certain tasks like memorizing the dialogues or proverbs were practiced for the fourth and the fifth strategies. These strategies were applied on 19 undergaduate intermediate Persian language learners, with Slav mother tongue in 5 successive semesters from 2011 to 2013. In this research, it was affirmed that there is a positive correlation between using strategic activities with the improvement of converational skill of language learners. That is, the more learners are active in the activities related to strategies, the better they become in the conversational skill.