| The 4/3/2 technique (or "the 4/3/2 activity") is devised for providing spoken fluency practice for learners of English as a second language. In the 4/3/2 activity, learners tell the same story three times to different listeners with one minute reduced for each retelling.Based on the previous studies on L2 oral fluency, the present study investigates the effects of the 4/3/2 technique on ten non-English major students' oral fluency improvement. As Riggenbach (1991) puts it, fluency is a highly complex phenomenon, and it should be defined from different perspectives. Fast speed of speaking and few or short pauses actually can't reflect L2 oral fluency comprehensively. According to the features of the 4/3/2 technique, it is thought that the positive effects of the 4/3/2 technique on L2 oral fluency improvement can be reflected by the fact that learners are able to deliver smoother, more accurate and more complex talks under time constraint. Accordingly, temporal indices, linguistic indices and performing indices are employed in the present study to measure L2 oral fluency. Temporal indices consist of speech rate (SR), articulation rate (AR), phonation/ time ratio (PTR), mean length of run (MLR) and average length of pause (ALP). Linguistic indices contain the ratio of error-free T-unit (REFT) and subordinate clauses per T-unit (SCT). Performing indices include repairs per 100 syllables (R100), self-corrections per 100 syllables (SCI00), and repetitions and hesitations per 100syllables (RH100).The present research is carried out in the following way. First, the corpus for the present study was set up by transferring the recordings of the subjects' speech production to a computer hard disk. Then the raw data were collected based on the calculation for each fluency variable. The time for articulating and pausing was measured with the help of the COOL EDIT 1.0 software. Next, each two talks was compared to find out whether the subjects were able to produce more fluent speech in the latter talk as compared with the former talk. Paired-sample Mests were employed to reveal whether the subjects achieved significant improvement in fluency indices when they moved from one talk to another talk. All statistical analyses were performed by using the SPSS 10.0/PC package. Finally, the findings were analyzed and discussed.The major findings of the quantitative analysis include: (i) the subjects generally showed some improvement in terms of all the fluency indices, with the exception of the ratio of self-corrections per 100 syllables (SCI00) in the 2-minute talk being higher as compared with the 3-minute talk; (ii) significant improvement has been found on 21 out of the 30 comparisons of each two talks in terms of all the fluency indices; (iii) among the comparisons of each two talks, the improvement from the 4-minute talk to the 2-minute talk was the most significant, which implies that the more opportunities for repetition, the morefluent the speech production will be; (iv) the subjects didn't show significant improvement in subordinate clauses per T-unit (SCT), which suggests the subjects were not skillful in filling the time with some complex constructions under time constraint; and (v) some subjects didn't show the expected improvement in oral fluency over three deliveries of the same talk. Possible explanations for the exceptions in the experiment were provided in the present paper.The qualitative findings are: (i) omitting or reducing some information was the major strategy for the subject to fit the talk into reduced time available, however, the subject was also able to change some grammatical constructions or use some subordinate clauses; and (ii) the subjects gained time for planning by means of unfilled pauses, filled pauses (a/z-phenomenon) and lexical repetitions, and they used few verbal fillers such as / mean and as you know.In all, the findings of the present study not only prove the value of the 4/3/2 technique as a fluency training activity, but also convince us that "fluency is a traina...
|
PDF Full Text Request