schools in the 2023 - 2024 academic year in Milagro city. A non-experimental research design was

applied in this study to determine the achievement of communication competences based on the second

thread from the Ecuadorian EFL curriculum. A questionnaire was elaborated to score listening

students achieved a pre-intermediate-level proficiency (B1) in their oral communication production.

For this reason, this study wants to measure oral communication production and prove if the English

learning process has been achieved successfully according to the curricular objective of English as a

Foreign Language in Ecuador.

Keywords: curriculum, ecuadorian baccalaureate, oral communication, exit profile

Esta investigación tiene como objetivo probar la producción de la comunicación oral de los estudiantes

de bachillerato de los colegios públicos en el año académico 2023 - 2024 en la ciudad de Milagro. En

este estudio se aplicó un diseño de investigación no experimental para determinar el logro de las

competencias de comunicación basado en el segundo hilo del currículo EFL ecuatoriano. Se elaboró un

cuestionario para evaluar las habilidades de comprensión de la escucha y se utilizó una lista de

verificación para valorar las capacidades de producción oral. Ambos instrumentos de recopilación de

datos fueron aplicados y calificados a 100 con la participación de 300 estudiantes de bachillerato de

catorce escuelas secundarias públicas, lo que significa que este procedimiento de evaluación nos

permite tener un resultado cuantitativo basado en los criterios e indicadores de la Guía Nacional del

Mastery of the English language is essential for achieving success in both academic and social domains.

Scholars such as Crystal (2003) and Warschauer (2005) have conducted extensive studies on the

academic opportunities and exposes them to other cultures and ways of thinking. English as a foreign

language enriches the human experience by facilitating communication and the exchange of ideas inside

and outside the classrooms.

Ecuador introduced a new National Curriculum in 2016, which contains an English as a Foreign

Language (EFL) curriculum divided into sublevels starting from Basic General Education to

Baccalaureate. Within the context of the Ecuadorian EFL curriculum, it is worth noting that learning

objectives occupy an important place in achieving a successful educational outcome. Performance

criteria skills are linked to evaluation criteria and indicators contributing to the Baccalaureate student's

exit profile. These carefully constructed goals form the foundation for desired learning outcomes for

students beginning to learn English as a foreign language (Lopez et al., 2021). By providing a roadmap

curriculum, learning objectives, and assessment criteria are closely linked to create language learning

opportunities that can inspire transformation.

The learning objectives in the Ecuadorian English as a Foreign Language curriculum serve as a guiding

star, illuminating the desired learning outcomes for students beginning to learn English as a foreign

language (Alvarez & Guevara, 2021). These carefully designed objectives are embedded within a

curriculum is appropriate, engages students, and leaves a lasting impact on them through various

linguistic elements (Villafuerte & Mosquera, 2020). Therefore, the structure to achieve the planned

objectives shows that high school students must reach level B1 according to the CEFR (Ministerio de

Educación, 2016).

The Ecuadorian EFL curriculum has five threads: Communication and cultural awareness, Oral

communication, Reading, Writing, and Language through the arts. This study focuses on the curricular

thread 2: Oral communication (listening and speaking) that provides a detailed understanding of the

pedagogical strategies and learning outcomes needed to develop language learners' effective

communication skills. Oral communication, including listening and speaking skills, is an essential

foundation of Ecuador's English curriculum, reflecting the importance of learning communicative and

developing effective English language teaching strategies and materials for students in Ecuador's high

schools.

This study applied a non-experimental research design with the analysis of quantitative data. Campbell

2024 from Milagro city and identify any factors influencing their proficiency through a test and

checklist as data collection instruments.

During our analysis to determine the effectiveness of the exit profile based on the second thread Oral

communication from the Ecuadorian EFL curriculum, baccalaureate students from public high schools

in Milagro city were selected by calculating the population and sample size. This process was

challenging, and it was hard to take a complete group of students from the different public schools. In

the final report from Educational Unit District Milagro (2023), nineteen public high schools, and

fourteen institutions participated in this research study. Moreover, around 3000 students graduated from

these public high schools, and our sample was selected randomly from a total of 300 students from the

primary source of quantitative data collection were a listening test and a checklist for speaking, used to

measure their language proficiency based on the skills with performance criteria from the Ecuadorian

EFL curriculum second thread. Yousef (2023) states in his article how beneficial it is to measure

listening and speaking with correct data collection instruments. The test was developed using Google

Forms as a technological tool to collect the quantitative data required, and it contains three different

audios with questions focused on listening for meaning and specific information. In addition, the

According to the oral communication thread and its indicators for the performance criteria, graduate

students did not obtain a high score in their evaluations based on the communication competences

established in the Ecuadorian English Curriculum. This research evaluated some performance criteria

to measure oral communication production and listening for specific details. The quantitative data

collected were calculated by the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) program, and found

the following results:

For the present study, descriptive statistics have been used to characterize the study population. Taking

as reference the participation of 300 participants, this, in turn, is distributed as follows. In Figure 1,

53.33% were female, while 46.67% were male. Figure 2 shows the percentage of age of participation,

with age with the highest participation being the age of 17, corresponding to 61.67%, followed by those

Table 1 and Figure 3 show gender participation between the ages of 17, 18, and 19 years. The female

sex accounted for 53.33% of those aged 17 (117 people – 39.00%), 18 years (38 people – 12.67%) and

Table 2 compares the averages between the two gender tests where a one-factor ANOVA was applied,

which shows a small significant difference between the male and female genders in the application of

the Listening Test with a value of 069. Similarly, in the Speaking Test by gender, in this case, they did

not present a difference between groups with a value of 983.