Elevating Ielts Speaking Scores by Evaluating the Effectiveness of Response Drilling for Formulaic Language Acquisition

This study employed a quasi-experimental pre-test and post-test design to examine the effectiveness of the response drilling technique in improving formulaic language use in the IELTS speaking test. The study was conducted at the English Development Centre (EDC) of an educational institute in Surabaya, Indonesia, between February and April 2026. Five undergraduate students enrolled in the Intensive International Undergraduate Program participated in the study: two students (n = 2) were assigned to the experimental group and three students (n = 3) to the control group. Due to the small sample size, non-parametric statistics were employed. The Mann–Whitney U test was used to compare gain scores between groups, while the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to examine within-group improvement. The findings indicate that the experimental group showed greater improvement across all four IELTS Speaking criteria, particularly in Lexical Resource and Fluency and Coherence. However, due to the limited sample size, these findings should be interpreted as exploratory and cannot be generalized. The study contributes a preliminary pedagogical framework for integrating formulaic language instruction through response drilling in IELTS preparation classes.