THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING IN ENHANCING EFL LEARNERS' SPEAKING SKILLS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN A CENTRAL ASIAN UNIVERSITY CONTEXT

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been widely advocated as an effective methodology for developing speaking proficiency in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts; however, its practical implementation and measurable outcomes in post-Soviet Central Asian educational settings remain underexplored. This study investigates the effectiveness of CLT-based instruction in improving oral communication skills among Uzbek EFL learners at the tertiary level. A quasi-experimental design was employed, involving 62 first-year university participants (31 experimental, 31 control) at a state university in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Over a 12-week period, the experimental group received CLT-oriented lessons emphasising communicative tasks, role plays, information-gap activities, and structured debates, while the control group received conventional grammar-translation instruction. Pre- and post-test oral proficiency scores were collected using an adapted IELTS speaking rubric evaluated by two trained raters. Quantitative analysis revealed a statistically significant improvement in the experimental group's post-test scores (t = 6.34, p < .001, d = 1.14) compared to the control group (t = 2.11, p = .042, d = 0.32). Qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 12 experimental-group participants identified three themes: enhanced communicative motivation, reduced language anxiety, and development of strategic communication skills. The study concludes that CLT, when appropriately adapted to the Uzbek sociocultural context, significantly enhances EFL speaking performance and recommends its systematic integration into Central Asian university-level English programmes.