Empowering Students’ Speaking with Authentic Tasks to Learn English beyond the Classroom: Student-Generated Video

Abstract

The growing demand for English speaking proficiency in EFL contexts highlights the need for learning approaches that provide authentic communication opportunities beyond traditional classroom practices. Limited exposure to real-life language use often restricts students’ speaking development, confidence, and engagement. Integrating student-generated videos as authentic tasks offers an alternative pathway by allowing learners to actively construct language through meaningful digital experiences. A qualitative approach was employed to explore students’ perceptions, reflective experiences, and speaking performance in learning speaking skills through student-generated video projects. Data were collected using questionnaires, reflective journals, and speaking performance assessments involving undergraduate EFL students. The findings reveal that video-based authentic tasks enhanced students’ confidence, fluency, vocabulary development, pronunciation awareness, and communicative engagement. Reflective journals indicated the emergence of metacognitive awareness, emotional regulation, and learner autonomy as students evaluated their learning processes and identified strategies for improvement. Speaking assessment results further demonstrated positive development across fluency, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar accuracy, and comprehension, although grammatical accuracy remained relatively lower compared to other components. The integration of rehearsal, reflection, and authentic communication within video production created a holistic learning environment supporting both linguistic and psychological aspects of speaking development. These findings suggest that student-generated video projects can serve as effective technology-mediated authentic learning practices that foster communicative competence and active learner participation in EFL speaking instruction.