<![CDATA[This study aimed to examine the impact of self-talk as a form of private speech within Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) on students’ English-speaking performance. The study employed a quantitative approach with a pre-experimental one-group pretest–posttest design. The participants were 15 eleventh-grade students at Pondok Pesantren Darul Istiqamah Makassar. Data were collected through oral speaking tests administered before and after four treatment sessions involving structured self-talk practice. Students’ performances were assessed in terms of fluency, accuracy, and comprehensibility and analyzed using descriptive statistics, the Shapiro–Wilk normality test, and a paired-samples t-test. The results showed an increase in the mean speaking score from 34.22 in the pre-test to 62.67 in the post-test. The paired-samples t-test revealed a statistically significant difference between the two scores (t(14) = -15.025, p < .001). The improvement was observed across the three speaking aspects, with fluency showing the most prominent improvement, followed by comprehensibility and accuracy. The findings suggest that self-talk as a form of private speech can support EFL learners’ speaking development by providing opportunities for rehearsal, self-regulation, reduced hesitation, and gradual movement toward more independent performance. Therefore, it can be concluded that the implementation of the self-talk strategy had a positive and significant impact on the English-speaking performance of the eleventh-grade students at Pondok Pesantren Darul Istiqamah Makassar. ]]>
Copyrights © 2026
