Questioning Techniques and the Development of Secondary Stage EFL Students' Speaking skills

The present study was intended to identify the effect of a questioning -techniques based program on developing speaking skills of first year secondary students in Egypt. The study adopted the single experimental group pre-posttest design and the participants were 40 secondary school students selected from one of Cairo schools, named; Ahmed Orabi Secondary school for Girls. The study used the following instruments ; a list of speaking skills, a list of some questioning techniques , a pre-posttest for measuring speaking skills, besides, a training program based on using adapted activities from students’ prescribed Text book "Hello 1". The total time assigned for the implementation of the program was 12 hours. The data collected was analyzed using the SPSS package and T-Test value was used to measure the effect of the used questioning techniques on developing the speaking skills of the study participants. Results revealed that the proposed training program was proved to be effective in developing major speaking skills of the study participants as there was a statistically significant difference between the mean score of participants in pre - post administrations of the whole test and in the test of each sub-speaking skill (pronunciation, fluency, grammar, and vocabulary items) as well in favor of the post administration. A number of recommendations and suggestions for further research were proposed in the light of the study results.