The study of oral fluency development in ESL

1. The study of oral fluency development in ESL A colloquium on teaching and learning world languages Queens College, March 27, 2008 Nel de Jong

2. What is fluency? • What does it mean to say “He’s fluent in French”? • What does it mean when a teacher grades a student on accuracy and fluency? • Broad vs. narrow definition (Lennon, 1990) • Broad: general oral proficiency • Narrow: speed and smoothness of oral delivery • Fluency is a characteristic of the speaker, or of his/her speech (product)

3. Determinants of fluency • The fluency of the product is determined by the speaker • His/her knowledge and processing • Characteristics, like extraversion • It’s also determined by the task: • Is there time for planning? • How complex is the task? • How familiar is the topic? Speaker Task Product Adapted from Tavakoli & Skehan (2005)

4. Model of the speaker • What does a speaker do? • Think of what to say • Find the right words • Put the words into a sentence • Use grammar rules for word order, agreement, tense marking • Pronounce the words and sentences

5. Model of the speaker Conceptualizer Topic familiarity and planning affect the conceptualizer Formulator Grammatical encoding Lexicon (lemmas) A slowdown or breakdown in one of the components will affect fluency Phonological encoding Topic familiarity affects the lexicon Articulator Levelt (1989)

6. Speech samples • More fluent Less fluent

7. Speaker A I love doing sport and uh but I don't like to watch them in on tv so: I think sports uh can keep your mind active and um I like some kind of ah sports like running and yoga and swimming an:d &form [: for] instance running uh I run I try to run everyday but I can't sometimes I go: running with my roommate sometimes to the park which is close to our apartment and uh after that we do some yoga for two hour:s

8. Speaker B • yes um I like sport uh because it's very good and very entertaining and it help a lot uh without exercise our body our physical uh physic so uh my favorite sport is soccer &com uh we call it football but my country not over here American call it soccer an:d why I like soccer is just because it's the most popular uh sport in my country and even in the world a:lso xxx the most uh popular sport in the world an:d I do play &ad I play I play soccer and I like to watch it too I used to play back to my country when I &wa when uh when I when I was there an:d uh uh

9. Speech samples • More fluent Less fluent Speaker B Speaker A

10. Speaker A (2) • everyone should have a way: to do some exercises and exercises uh keeps your mind active for instance I li:ke to do running and yo:ga and swimming I love to ru:n every day but sometim:es I can't so I try to run twice a week or more than that uh it is a good idea: to have someone that encourages you to do: something like my roommate my roommate always encourages me to to run or to: to do the yoga with him

11. Speech samples • More fluent Less fluent Speaker B Speaker A Speaker A (2) What happened to Speaker A?

12. Repetition • Speaker A spoke about the same topic three times • The third time: • Messages were already created (conceptualizer) • Vocabulary was already activated (lexicon) • Some grammar was activated (e.g., past tense forms; formulator) • The processes went more smoothly

13. Benefit of repetition Conceptualizer Formulator In a repeated speech, some knowledge is already activated, and therefore easier to access Grammatical encoding Lexicon (lemmas) Phonological encoding Articulator

14. How to measure fluencyof the speech product • There are many different ways in which fluency has been measured: • Articulation rate (words/syllables per minute) • Length, number, position of pauses • Length of fluent runs (number of words/syllables between pauses) • Phonation/time ratio (% of time filled with speech) • Number of hesitations (I like to to to run) • And more…

15. How to measure fluencyof the speaker • There are two types of knowledge • Declarative (knowing that…) • Flexible, but slow • Procedural (knowing how to…) • Less flexible, but fast • When it comes to oral fluency, we’re interested in procedural knowledge • It’s fast and doesn’t take up a lot of cognitive resources • Declarative knowledge can be proceduralized

16. Testing proceduralization • Proceduralization leads to higher fluency, because students can more easily construct longer and more complex sentences(Towell, Hawkins & Bazergui, 1996). This can be measured as: • Mean Length of Fluent Run: increase • Mean Length of Pause: stable or decrease • Phonation/Time Ratio: stable or increase • Proceduralization applies to the lexicon and the grammatical encoder (in the formulator)

17. How to develop fluency in the classroom • 4/3/2 Procedure • Talk about a topic for 4 minutes • Retell in 3 minutes • Retell in 2 minutes • Although students cannot repeat verbatim, they can benefit from recently having generated semantic content, and having selected vocabulary and syntactic constructions (Maurice, 1983; Nation, 1989) • Computerized version: individual, no pair work

18. Research Questions • Does repetition of a short speech increase fluency? • Repetition (1 topic) vs. No Repetition (3 topics) • If so: • What is affected? • Proceduralization • Speed (articulation rate) • Is it a long-term effect?

19. Participants • Level 4: high intermediate • Randomly assigned • 19 students • 19-37 yrs (mean 25 yrs) • L1s: Arabic, Chinese, Korean, other

20. Conditions • Two conditions • Repetition: 1 topic • No Repetition: 3 different topics

21. Procedure • One practice session • Three training sessions of 4/3/2 technique • Tests: Two-minute Recorded Speaking Activities (RSAs) about unrelated topics • Pretest: 3-4 days before training • Immediate posttest: week after training • Delayed posttest: 3.5 weeks after training

22. Preparation: Take notes

23. Speaking

24. Results: pre- and posttests Proceduralization Pause = silent or filled with non-verbal fillers (e.g., uh, um)

25. Results: pre- and posttests Proceduralization Pause = silent or filled with non-verbal fillers (e.g., uh, um)

26. Summary of pre- and posttests results • Some evidence for proceduralization in Repetition condition • Markers of fluency • shorter pauses • more speech • The effect was found on the posttest • One week AFTER training

27. Results: 4/3/2 training Improvement on all measures But no effect of condition Pause = silent or filled with non-verbal fillers (e.g., uh, um)

28. Hesitations • How about hesitations? • Hesitations without correction: • He encourages me to to run • There's a park by my by my apartment • Hesitations with correction (monitoring): • I don’t like to watch sports in on TV • When he see me when he sees me

29. Results: 4/3/2 trainingHesitations Hesitations w/o correction: No effect of repetition Hesitations with correction: No effect of repetition

30. Lexical variety (MSTTR) • How about lexical variety? • Number of different words used • Compare • I like pets. Cats are nice. I like cats. • 6 types / 9 tokens = .67 • I like pets, especially cats because they are nice • 9 types / 9 tokens = 1.00 • The Mean Segmental Type/Token Ratio (MSTTR) corrects for speech length • MSTTR: Mean Type/Token ratio of segments of 40 words

31. Results: 4/3/2 trainingLexical variety (MSTTR) Type/token ratio increases for both groups

32. Future studies • What linguistic knowledge is involved? (Spring 2008) • Vocabulary: breadth and depth • Morphosyntactic and syntactic structures: accurate use and complexity of constructions • Does pre-training these knowledge components accelerate fluency development? (Fall 2008) • How does time pressure influence fluency development in the 4/3/2 task? (Spring 2008)

33. Benefits of 4/3/2 in language lab • For students: • Improvement in fluency • More speaking time per student • For teachers, potentially: • Streamlining the process of collecting speech samples and giving feedback • For researchers: • Streamlining data collection

34. Conclusion • The 4/3/2 task seems to work because of repetition • Repetition seems to result in proceduralization of knowledge (vocabulary or grammar) • Leading to an increase in fluency • The effect is retained for at least a month

35. Many thanks to: • Prof. C.A. Perfetti, Dr. L.K. Halderman • Research assistants: Colleen Davy, Rhonda McClain, Jessica Hogan • The students and teachers at the ELI of the University of Pittsburgh • Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center Nel de Jong, cornelia.dejong@qc.cuny.edu This work was supported by the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, which is funded by the National Science Foundation award number SBE-0354420.

36. Extra slides …

37. RSA Topics Fall 2006 • Pretest: How do you feel about pets? • Posttest: Talk about a person who was very important to you in the past. • Delayed posttest: What is the biggest problem your country is facing today?

38. Open questions Further analyses • Do higher-proficiency students benefit more or less from the 4/3/2 training than lower-proficiency students? • Low intermediate vs. high intermediate • How does 4/3/2 affect accuracy and complexity? • Target-like use and type–token ratio

39. Accuracy and complexity measures • Target-like use • Noun plurals • Indefinite articles • Subject–verb agreement • Regular past tense • Relative clauses • Mean Segmental Type–Token Ratio (normalized for length of recording)

40. Open questions Future studies • What is being proceduralized? What is the role of vocabulary and (morpho)syntactic knowledge in fluency? • Can a pre-training increase the effect of the 4/3/2 procedure? • How do repetition and time pressure influence fluency development in the 4/3/2 task?

41. Repetition and Time Pressure • Repetition enables more retrieval, thus decreasing working memory load, opening up resources to construct new and more complex output • Time pressure may encourage retrieval and discourage construction of more complex output

42. Individual analyses (preliminary) • Repetition: pretest – immediate posttest • 7 out of 10 students improved: pause length decreased with stable length of fluent run and phonation/time ratio • 2 out of 10 students did not improve • 1 student showed a trade-off between pause length (shorter) and length of fluent run (also shorter)

43. Individual analyses (preliminary) • No Repetition : pretest – immediate posttest • 0 out of 9 students improved • 1 student showed a trade-off between pause length (longer) and length of fluent run (also longer) • Performance of 3 out of 9 students became worse (shorter fluent runs, longer pauses)