The Impact of Youglish on English Speaking Proficiency in Higher Education

The era of globalization and information and knowledge in which we find ourselves requires Higher Education to develop English-speaking proficiency in its students to adequately respond to academic and occupational challenges, taking advantage of the virtues of the variety of resources offered by technology. YouGlish is an online oral dictionary whose features can be leveraged for the development of Englishspeaking proficiency. This study aims to determine the impact of using YouGlish on English speaking proficiency in its subskills of fluency, grammatical appropriateness, pronunciation, communicative interaction, and vocabulary. The research was of quasi-experimental design and was carried out with a sample of 38 students, 19 students in the Control Group and 19 students in the Experimental Group, from a national university in Peru. For data collection, a pre-test and a post-test were applied concerning English-speaking proficiency, and a perception questionnaire on the use of YouGlish was also used. The arithmetic mean indicates that there was an improvement of 45.26 points using YouGlish when comparing the input and output tests. Thus, concluding with an increase in English-speaking proficiency among university students.