Empirical Studies On L2 Oral Fluency Development Of Non-Enlgish Majors

The development of oral fluency has been within the concern of second language acquisition. However, it is so far regrettable that the development of oral fluency of the non-English majors' has seldom been studied.In the light of Levelt's model of speech production and Anderson's (1983) ACT* model of skill acquisition, the present thesis conducts an empirical into L2 oral fluency development as revealed from 10 non-English majors' two oral productions at an interval of sixteen weeks. The research question for the empirical study is, what kind of development do L2 learners demonstrate in their oral fluency after a semester's learning at university level?Four categories of fluency indices, i.e., temporal indices, content indices, linguistic indices and performing indices were adopted to analyze the subjects' oral production quantitatively. The study also analyzed the data qualitatively from four aspects including the purposes of pauses, use of lexical phrases, lexical accuracy and variation and past tense marking.Progress is measured with a pretest and a posttest, yielding these major findings: (1) The use of lexical phrases contributed greatly to the development of oral fluency, especially in the respect of mean length of run, notably the repair-free speech runs with 9 syllables and above, in which the subjects in the present study made the greatest development. By storing a number of frequently needed words strings (lexical phrases) as individual whole units, L2 learners could easily call up and use them without the need to compose them on-line through word selection and grammatical sequencing. In this way there is less demand on cognitive capacity because the lexical phrases are "ready to go" and inquire little or no additional processing. (2) With more attention being paid to the linguistic accuracy, L2 learners make fewer mistakes in their oral production. However, the relatively small improvement in the frequency of subordinate clauses also indicates that the process of generalization and proceduralization is still inadequate and not capable enough of grammatically encoding the complex message into complex structures. (3) While L2 learners make significant improvements in the speech rate, they do not show corresponding improvements in the articulation rate, i.e., the speed at which the sounds are articulated with no reference to pauses etc.. It can be concluded that the articulator does not enjoy as much development as the conceptualizer and the formulator. The evidence from this study suggests that the L2 learners reach a "plateau" with respect to articulation rate. Such a plateau appears to be reached while development of proceduralization in the formulator is still in progress.