The Development Of Accuracy And Fluency Of The Senior High School Students’ Oral English Proficiency

It is commonly accepted by L2 teaching practitioners and SLA researchers that the constructs which represent the L2 proficiency are multicomponential in nature.And the status of the framework of Complexity,Accuracy and Fluency(CAF,for short)as principal dimensions of L2 performance and proficiency has been justified both theoretically and empirically(Housen et al.,2009).First,the greater complexity(more elaborate and more sophisticated in L2knowledge)indicates the internalization of new L2 elements.Second,learners’ increase in complexity as well as accuracy imply the stage of modification of L2 knowledge as learners restructure their L2 system.Third,the stage of consolidation and proceduralisation of L2 knowledge is identified by the better fluency through the greater control over the L2 system(De Graaff & Housen 2009;Skehan,2003).Previous studies of L2 learners’ performance under CAF triad,be it in oral form or in written form,were mainly conducted in western countries.Besides the participants of these studies were mostly adult L2 learners of English or other European languages(Florence,2009;Spoelman & Verspoor,2010;Leonard & Shea,2017).Studies concerning the development of Chinese leaners of English were comparatively fewer,not to mention the longitudinal study of oral English development of low-intermediate Chinese students in senior high schools in a natural teaching context.The present study,which belongs to a part of a larger project of English Curriculum Reform led by a professor in a key Teacher Education University in China,targets 34 Chinese EFL learners in senior high school as participants in one of cities in eastern China.The focal point in this study is to investigate the development of L2 learners’ oral accuracy and fluency and the relationship within accuracy and fluency measures as well as the relationship between the two constructs under intensive instructions over 6months.Through audio-transcription and the analysis by a series of statistic tools,the results show that there are significant development among all the 6 measures in accuracy and fluency in L2 learners’ speech.Moreover,there is positive correlation within accuracy and within fluency measures.And the trade-off effect was found between accuracy and fluency measures.Under individual level,learners’ growth trajectories in two dimensions display multifarious patterns over time.To study L2 speakers’ growth of accuracy and fluency means to investigate the degree of the L2 leaners’ development of learned linguistic knowledge and the development of their linguistic processing ability.And by studying the relationship between accuracy and fluency,we can see how well the L2 learners can proceduralize and generalize the knowledge which has already been acquired in the learning context.As Skehan(1996)emphasized,English Language Teaching profession has been obsessively concerned with teacher,very much at the expense of the language learner.It’s time to focus on the learning process from the learners’ perspective and to see how subtle and intricate change they had experienced over time,according to which,the teachers can create more opportunity for students in L2 language learning.