article on English fluency
plz answer its holidays homework
Answers
Answer:
This study reports on using fluency awareness to develop speaking ability for Japanese students over a one-year course in communicative English. Past studies on fluency and speaking rate are reviewed and classroom practices designed to promote fluency are explained. A simple test with scores that are easily calculated and understood by students for generating fluency scores is described. This test can be used by speaking teachers for a rough estimate of fluency in low-stakes classroom assessments. The statistical analyses done for this study found that students showed substantial progress in their fluency in terms of words per minute over the course of a year. In the decade that I have spent teaching Japanese college students English as a second language, I have consistently found that students at the college level lack fluency in speaking English. Many times when I have read these same students' writing samples I have understood that their proficiency in English is not nearly as bad as their speaking ability made it seem; students do gain an intermediate-level facility with reading and writing English from their studies in secondary school. In teaching first-year English at the university level, therefore, one of my goals has been to improve students' ability to feel confident in using the knowledge they already possess in order to speak more fluently. This paper will report on tasks that I implemented at Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University in the 2015 school year that appear to have helped students push themselves to speak more quickly and thus sound more fluent in English. The students who are described in this study are freshman majoring in English who should have an inherently high level of motivation, but I would characterize their speaking ability as beginner or low-intermediate. In this study I will be focusing on fluency as a measurable quality of the speech sample, which Lennon (1990) called fluency in the narrow sense and which Segalowitz (2010) called utterance fluency. Being more fluent in this sense means speaking quickly but also having fewer pauses and false starts, and having pauses in appropriate places (Al-Sibai, 2004; Chambers, 1997). How can fluency be increased? One influential idea in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is that because of humans' cognitive abilities, there must be a trade-off between the fluency, accuracy, and complexity of utterances of non-native speakers of languages (Skehan & Foster, 2008; Wang & Skehan, 2009). For example, if the speaker is bringing attention to the task of speaking without making any grammatical mistakes (thus focusing on accuracy), their fluency may decrease as they attempt to consciously monitor their utterances. Of course, this trade-off is not always necessary; for example, for speakers for whom most grammatical structures have become proceduralized and automatic, the trade-off between accuracy and fluency would not need to occur (DeKeyser, 2007). Another way to increase the attentional resources would be to repeat a task. Research on the interaction of fluency, accuracy and complexity has found that if language learners have time to plan what they are going to say (Yuan & Ellis, 2003) or are repeating a task (Bygate, 2001) this can free up more attentional resources and fluency on the task improves. Improved fluency, of course, is a desirable characteristic. A number of studies have found that students are perceived as more fluent speakers in general when they use a faster speech rate and have fewer pauses