| Oral fluency is an important factor in the use of English to measure the level of English.In the measurement of oral fluency,pause is one of the important time indicators.Pause is an essential part of speaking.It reflects the speaker's internal activities in the process of speech planning.False pause or improper pause may cause semantic ambiguity in oral production,thereby it would obstruct the listener's understanding.At the same time,the performance of pause is a complex system.The definition of pause is the result of many factors.The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between oral fluency and pause frequency in L2 learners.This thesis aims to solve the following questions:(1)What's the main distribution of pause positions and pause frequency in second language learners' oral English fluency?(2)What's the specific relationship between oral fluency and pause frequency? The sample consisted of 32 L2 learners,aged between 25 and 26,and among them,there are 15 male and 17 female.All the subjects were the second-year post-graduate students who were volunteers and English Teaching major from exchange programs at the Humanities and Social Sciences University in Warsaw.And their mother tongue are not English.The subjects were asked to give two to three minutes' short speeches about the advantages and disadvantages of studying English as a second language and all the content of the speech were recorded by MP3 player.Due to the study required,the recording must be equal or more than two minutes,the author deleted the recordings which were less than two minutes,finally there are 30 valid recording materials.Then the author transcribed the recording materials,and used Cool Edit Pro2.1 to analyze the position of the pause,the number of pause,and the duration of the pause.Besides,the author adopted Raupach's(1980)opinion that set 0.3 seconds as the cut point of pause so the valid pause must equal to longer than 0.3 seconds.After that,using the calculation formulas of the five indicators of oral fluency(Towell et al,1996;Zhang Wenzhong,1999)and the calculation formula of the pause frequency,to calculate the corresponding five values of the oral fluency and the corresponding values of the pause frequency.Finally,the author used SPSS 23.0 to analyze the relationship between the five indicators of oral fluency and the pause frequency.The results show that(1)the pause position of L2 learners is mostly in phrases and sentences,and a small part is between sentences.The reason for internal pauses in the syntactic units is mostly hesitation,and the reason for syntactic boundary pauses is natural pauses.According to the data of the five indicators of oral fluency and the pause frequency,combined with the waveform diagram displayed by Cool Edit Pro 2.1,it can be concluded that if there are more pause times,longer pause duration,and slower speaking rate,the oral fluency will be worse.On the contrary,if there are less pause times,shorter pause duration,and the faster speaking rate,the oral fluency will be better.(2)Through the correlation analysis between oral fluency and pause frequency by SPSS 23.0,the author confirms the pause frequency is significantly correlated with the mean length of runs and the speaking rate of oral fluency.Meanwhile it is negatively correlated which means that the faster the speaking rate and the longer the mean length of runs are,the lower the pause frequency is.The slower the speaking rate and the shorter the mean length of runs are,the higher the pause frequency is.According to the above research,this study puts forward some specific suggestions for the second language teachers,during the process of oral teaching,teachers can improve the oral fluency by learning and mastering the second language pause modes. |
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