Effect Of Pre-task Preparation Time On Fluency And Accuracy Of Intermediate Chinese Learners' Speech Production

With the development of Task-based Approach in the field of second language acquisition,the relationship between task conditions and oral output has also attracted the attention of some scholars at home and abroad.However,the relationship between task preparation time and accuracy and fluency,has not been determined yet.Up to now,relevant studies at home and abroad have focused on spoken English,while few studies have focused on Chinese as a second language.This study compares the accuracy and fluency of oral production of intermediate Chinese learners with different preparation time by experimental method.Meanwhile,Skehan's Limited Attentional Capacity Model and Robinson's Multiple Attentional Resources Model are validated.Thirty-six students who have passed the HSK Intermediate Oral Examination majored in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Shanghai International Studies University were selected as the subjects of this study.One month before the formal test,42 subjects were given a present test with 3-minutes preparation time.Finally,36 subjects with no significant difference in their oral proficiency were selected according to their oral performance.All the subjects were randomly divided into three groups,each with a pre-task preparation time of 0/1/5 minutes.In the experiment,all the participants must complete an oral task of picture-reading and speaking in a specified time.This oral investigation method is familiar to the participants and meets the cognitive requirements of the intermediate learners.Quantitative analysis of the text data is made from the following characteristics: the rate of fluency B,silent pause,voiced pause and corrected repetition,and the syntactic accuracy and lexical accuracy of the representative accuracy.The results of this study are as follows:1.With the increase of pre-task preparation time,learners' speaking fluency and accuracy have increased,and the number of words produced per minute is increased,pauses and revisions are reduced,and the accuracy is higher.2.Pre-task preparation time has different effects on fluency and accuracy.In fluency,there are significant differences in rate B and correction repetition time between the 5-minute group and the unprepared group.In terms of accuracy,the vocabulary accuracy of the 5-minute group was significantly improved.This experiment enriches the research on the influence of pre-task preparationtime on oral fluency and accuracy,and validates Robinson's Multiple Attentional Resources Model,that is,with the reduction of preparation time,task cognitive difficulty increases,and the characteristics of oral production decrease.On the basis of the results of the study,we discussed the enlightenment of pre-task preparation time on improving learners' oral expression ability in task-based oral production,and put forward some suggestions for the teaching and testing of Chinese as a second language,as well as some suggestions for further research on similar topics by other researchers in the future.