Mohammad Bagherkhatibi - Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran

The present study examines the effect of genre-based tasks on EFL learners’ speaking performance and probes whether genre-based tasks may empower EFL learners to perform better on speaking tests.A further concern of the study is to explore whether the effect of genre-based tasks on speaking abilityof EFL learners varies across different age groups, that is, teenagers (13-16 years old) and young adults (24-27 years old). To this end, some genre consciousness-raising tasks were adapted from the model proposed by Benedict (2006) to develop control of a genre used as the treatment procedures.Two different speaking tests of different genres (e.g., recount, report, review, etc.), used as pre and posttest, were administered to 120 senior university students majoring in English language translation.The results indicated that consciousness-raising tasks significantly affected EFL learners’ speakingperformance. However, the effect of genre consciousness-raising tasks did not vary across differentage groups. Overall, the findings provide empirical support for the facilitative effect of genre consciousness-raising tasks on speaking performance of EFL learners. The findings may promise implications for EFL speaking syllabuses and provide guidelines to designers to accommodate theinsights derived from the genre-based instruction perspective.