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An Empirical Study On English Oral Fluency Development Of Senior High School Students

Posted on:2020-11-10Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L S YeFull Text:PDF
GTID:2415330575960428Subject:Education
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Fluency constitutes an essential component of second language proficiency.Through fully analysis and research of oral fluency and its development,we could provide valuable reference for future English teaching and learning.Based on Levelt's speech production model and Kormos' s model of L2 speech production,the present study describes the general developmental trend,features and cognitive process of oral fluency.The present study adopts the cross-sectional method to investigate how high school students' English oral fluency develops over three years and what characterizes their development.The subjects in the present study include 36 students(12 from Grade One,12 from Grade Two and 12 from Grade Three which can represent for each grade's English proficiency)in a key senior high school in Nanchang.Each group of the three grades were composed of students with different levels.All the participants completed the oral test.In order to make comparison of pauses made by L2 learners and native speakers of English,a teacher in Jiangxi Normal University who comes from America was also invited to take the oral test.Five oral test papers which integrated some oral training exercises for college entrance English speaking were used to test the oral fluency.The subjects' oral productions were recorded by a digital voice recorder,and the recording were stored in the computer and transcribed as Word documents.Then these oral productions were analyzed in speed fluency,breakdown fluency,and repair fluency,with seven indices(speaking rate,phonation/time ratio,mean length of run,total silence,number of pauses,average length of pauses and repairs per 100 syllabus).Cool Edit Pro 2.1 was used to calculate the time spent speaking and pause,the number of syllabus was calculated through syllable counter(http://www.syllablecount.com).Then one-way ANOVA in SPSS 17.0 was adopted to analyze the data.Additionally,in terms of content and pause,qualitative data were also used to analyze.The findings are:(1)From the aspect of speed fluency,there exits significant difference in all the indices among three grades.The whole developmental trend is significantly rising.Students speak faster,spend more time in speaking and utter more syllabus.The oral fluency in senior two is best among the three grades,and students got the most remarkable oral enhancement during the period between senior one to senior two.(2)As for the aspect of breakdown fluency,the results of total silence and average length of pauses did not show significant difference among the three grades,but the results from the number of pauses indicate significant difference.(3)From the aspect of repair fluency,the results show that there is significant difference among three grades.The number of repairs decreased,and the decline from senior one to senior two is the most obvious.(4)For qualitative results,in the terms of content,students' oral production became more complete and coherent,and they put more attention on their utterance's logic and comprehensibility.From the aspect of pauses,L2 learners pause more frequently in the middle of clauses while native speaker pauses at the end.The findings could offer some suggestions and guidelines for oral English learning and teaching.First,for education authorities,it is high time to adjust curriculum provisions of Grade Three,since students in Grade Three made little progress in fluency.Second,teachers can guide students how to use chunks and fillers in order to reduce the number of pauses and to produce fluent speech.Third,teachers can teach students how to pause appropriately.
Keywords/Search Tags:oral fluency, developmental trend, senior high school students
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