Fostering the speaking skills through the use of cartoons to teach idiomatic expressions applied in the EFL classroom with students of ninth level of basic education at Isabel Moscoso High School

Abstract

The goal of this project is to improve speaking skills through the use of cartoons to help students to acquire idioms in the ninth level of basic education in an EFL classroom. This project was carried out at Isabel Moscoso High School in the city of Cuenca. The participants were 22 students whose average age was 13 years old. These students actively participated using suitable material about cartoons given by researchers. This plan was done in order to implement meaningful techniques to teach idioms to beginning students. Also, this paper shows different strategies to teach these expression using cartoons and different activities that motivate students to speak and use them in the classroom. Furthermore, this project achieved the goals that were initiated because the use of pictures in the classroom demonstrated that students could assimilate idiomatic vocabulary in an easy and fun way. Therefore, this project shows that these resources help students to acquire idioms since all collected data was analyzed and tabulated to get real evidence that cartoons work in the process of teaching and learning idioms.