a dissertation sbmetted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of degre "Licence en langue et littérature anglaises"

Résumé

The present work deals with the assessment of the level of oral fluency in BacI and BacII students at the University of Burundi in the English Department . It firstly investigates the level of oral fluency in English of BacI and BacII students. Secondly it suggests several ways of improving the level of oral fluency of English Department students in general and BacI and BacII students in particular.

In my study, I was guided by four research questions that were answered all along my research.

To find answers to those questions, oral expression lecturers and BacI and BacII students were distributed a questionnaire using the simple random sampling technique for students and an interview was scheduled with BacI and BacII students. The students and the oral expression lecturers 'answers from the questionnaire as well as answers from the interview scheduled with BacI and BacII students made me to conclude that class sizes, oral expression syllabus structure, teaching materials and the linguistic homogeneity are the causes of BacI and BacII students' low level of oral fluency and that group works, conversation in and outside the classroom can contribute to overcome the problem of the English speaking community and therefore increase the level of oral fluency of BacII students.

I ended this research by formulating some recommendations to different actors who can contribute to the development ot the speaking skill with the aim of developing oral fluency.