The Impact of the Topic Familiarity on EFL Students’ Speaking Scores

Topic familiarity is an important issue for oral assessment. There may be factors (such as readinesss through in-class activities or background knowledge of the students) that affect students’success. Furthermore, familiarity with the ‘speaking exam’ topics before the exams may contribute to this issue. Therefore, this study investigated if students’ familiarity with the ‘speaking exam’ topics before the exams has a positive effect on students’ speaking scores or not. The study was conducted at Gaziantep University School of Foreign Languages with 245 students and 25 interviwers. The data was collected by means of interviews in three stages. The first and second stages were to examine the difference between two different implementations about students’speaking topic familiarity. The third stage was to investigate the opinions of the students about the implementation. The results revealed that the students’ un/familiarity with the speaking topics before the exams made no difference on the students’ speaking scores