English Major Students’ Speaking Ability and Areas of Their Weaknesses in Assessment: A Cross-Sectional Study

The current quantitative research utilized a cross-sectional comparative study to investigate speaking proficiency of different English major students (EMSs) groups throughout the course of the foregoing three years. The study applied a self-assessment of speaking ability to measure both the students’ English speaking proficiency and the particular parts of the assessment in which they struggle.  The target population were EMSs of three consecutive years, i.e. students of  2022, 2023, and 2024 with 34 students of each. The results of self-assessment of the speaking ability were quantitatively analyzed using SPSS version 24.0 software. One-Way ANOVA was employed to see the differences in the mean scores (M) achieved by each of the three groups of students. The findings showed that all EMSs’ English-speaking abilities fall into the ‘insufficient’ category, indicating that all student groups have subpar English-speaking abilities.  There is no significant improvement in EMSs’ speaking performance during the last three years. The three groups of EMSs experience the same difficulties in speaking (i.e., pronunciation and fluency). These issues may serve as the basis for further efforts aimed at enhancing EFL students’ speaking performance.