Fluency

"Prosody in simultaneous interpreting (SI) depends on duration, acoustic intensity and fundamental frequency (Ahrens 2005). Most perceptive studies of SI prosody have consisted in manipulating isolated prosodic features and observing their impact on the listeners’ perception (e.g., Collados Aís 2002/1998; Rennert 2010). One exception is Shlesinger’s study (1994) of the natural prosodic features of SI and their perceptive impact. Shlesinger contributed to defining the distinguishing prosody of SI. Moreover, she observed that unmanipulated SI prosody could deteriorate the listeners’ understanding of the speech content.

This paper follows up on Shlesinger’s study (1994) and introduces a proposal for a larger scale study of the nature and perceptive impact of SI prosody. Our framework entails the descriptive and perceptive aspects of prosody after Ahrens (2005) and Götz (2013). We formulate two main hypotheses about SI prosodic features: (1) they are less numerous in shadowed and read-aloud speech than in interpreted speech; (2) they deteriorate the listeners’ understanding and rating of the interpreter’s performance.

We propose to measure the perceptive impact of SI prosody with a questionnaire (see, e.g., Reithofer 2011)."

This article is about L2 writing and its development, and it examines fluency in relation to proficiency. Fluency in L2 writing can be understood in two ways: the fluency of the written texts (or the outcome) or the fluency of the writing process. Traditionally, fluency measures have been based on the former. The fluency of the writing process, in contrast, is still an under-researched issue. University students studying English or Swedish as their major subject were asked to write (or type) two texts (a narrative and an argumentative text), and a keystroke-logging programme was used to record the writing process, including pauses and all revisions. The texts produced were assessed for their proficiency on a standard six-point scale. The fluency of the writing process was measured by both traditional (offline) and new (on-line) measures. The findings suggest that fluency measures (of both types) correlate with L2 writing proficiency only to some extent, and thus the relationship is ...

This study investigated the effects of a six-month course in speed reading on three areas of reading proficiency development: (1) general reading comprehension; (2) knowledge of high-frequency vocabulary; and (3) reading-rate and accuracy. The participants (N = 105) were Japanese students studying English as a foreign language in Grade 10 of a Japanese private senior high school, randomly assigned to an experimental group (n =51), which received the speed reading treatment, and a control group (n =54), which received supplementary activities focused on high-frequency vocabulary development. The findings indicated that both the experimental and control groups made significant improvements in general reading comprehension. However, there was no significant difference between the experimental group (M = 14.27, SD = 4.01) and control group M = 14.31, SD = 4.07; t (103) = -.051, p= .959. Both the experimental group (M = 1.29, SD = 2.52) and control group (M = 1.35, SD = 2.49) increased t...

The Semantic Verbal Fluency (SVF) test entails the generation of words from a given category within a pre-set time of 60 seconds. Objectives: To verify whether socio-demographic and clinical data of individuals with dementia correlate with the performance on the SVF test and to ascertain whether differences among the criteria of number of answers, clusters and data spread over the intervals, predict clinical results. Methods: This was a retrospective study of 49 charts of demented patients classified according to the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale. We correlated education, age and gender, as well as CDR and Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) scores with the number of answers, clustering and switching distributed over four 15-second intervals on the SVF test. Results: The correlation between number of answers and quartiles was weak (r=0.407, p=0.004; r=0.484, p<0.001) but correlation between the number of clusters and responses was strong (r=0.883, p<0.001). The number of item...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of Neurological Impress Method (NIM) on reading fluency of students with learning disabilities in Amman, Jordan. A sample of forty students (boys and girls) between the ages 10-12 years old with learning disabilities were selected from the Fourth Amman Educational Directorate in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.Students focused groups in this research were separated into two different groups including the satisfactory controlled group. The participants were taught for one complete semester. Two hypotheses were formulated to guide this research.Statistical analysis to the gathered data revealed that the focused group of students who were trained according to the scheduled strategy to improve students reading ability or became more fluent in reading.Full analyses were applied using the T-test on all available data, indicating that students who were trained according to the scheduled strategy.The study found out that the strategy r...

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a significant percent of 4th grade students read below the basic level. In one elementary school students participated in additional reading instruction as intervention for students scoring basic and below basic on the state standardized test. The purpose of this ex post facto nonexperimental quantitative study was to determine the effectiveness of direct instruction versus fluency (repeated reading) instruction on the reading achievement of 4th grade
students. This study is based on the theory of automatic information processing in reading and the theory of prosody. The overarching research question for this study examined if the reading achievement scores of 4th grade students improved with fluency instruction or direct instruction. Two separate years of archived data from the 2011-2012 (Group A) and 2012-2013 (Group B) school years were used to examine student reading
levels using the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) test. Sample size for both Group A and Group B equaled 76 participants respectively. Use of an independent samples t test indicated there was a significant mean difference of reading achievement scores between student groups as measured by the DRA. Students who received fluency instruction achieved greater comprehension scores than students who did not receive fluency instruction. Findings from this study give indication of improvement in reading achievement with the implementation of fluency instruction. Implications for social change include changing the behavior, perceptions, and customs of teachers towards students in and urban public school and district through professional development and professional learning community sessions.

Objective fluency judgment has always been a formidable task in language testing. Nonetheless, temporal fluency is the type of fluency which can be measured and quantified. Given that, temporal fluency is also known as temporal measures of fluency (Luoma, 2004). Furthermore, it has aroused considerable interest in analyzing speech of language learners in terms of quantitative measures (Kormos & Denes, 2004; Freed, 1995; Riggenbach, 1991; Lennon, 1990). They suggested that certain measures of fluency can more objectively specify fluency level and that perceptual understanding of fluency to a high extent correlate with these measures. Following these studies, the present study was an endeavor to relate quantitative measures of fluency and assessment of fluency in oral speech of L2 learners. To do so 30 advanced EFL learners whose speaking score on TOEFL iBT scale was between 19 to 22, i.e. B2 on CEFR scale, were selected. Then, they were given a picture strip as the elicitation task and asked to make up a story based on that. Their voice was recorded, transcribed and further analyzed by voice analysis software called PRAAT to calculate seven measures of fluency. Meanwhile, two trained listeners were required to rate the recordings, scoring them from 1 to 9. Finally, the relationship between these variables was calculated. The results showed that judge listeners' ratings of fluency were highly correlated with speech rate, phonation time ratio, and mean length of runs. Moreover, among the measures of temporal fluency speech rate proved significantly correlated with articulation rate, phonation time ratio, and mean length of runs.

This study investigated whether two groups of 6-year-old beginning readers taught to read by a phonics and by a “book experience” non-phonics approach would differ in reading
comprehension as well as the processes of word recognition. The two groups were matched for word recognition but despite this, the phonics taught children had higher reading comprehension.
Phonics taught children produced more contextually appropriate errors, and in both single word and text reading made more spoken attempts at reading unknown words. The non-phonics taught children had much faster reading reaction times to familiar words but they scored less in phoneme segmentation and nonword reading tasks. Compared with the nonphonics group, the phonics group spent more time in attempts at identifying unknown words
and this included using contextual information, which apparently resulted in more rehearsal of the meaning of the story text and hence better reading comprehension performance.

The title of this paper is the impact of English pronunciation on effective oral communication. Therefore, in this paper, the researcher aims to explore whether the Sudanese secondary EFL learners' weakness in English pronunciation is regarded as a main obstacle for them to speak in English. Consequently, the researcher investigates the relation between pronunciation and oral communication in English and tries to show that pronunciation is one of the most important elements of effective oral communication. In spite of the important of English pronunciation skill in the field of language learning and teaching as one of the most important elements of effective oral communication, English pronunciation is still an area of teaching which is often neglected by English EFL teachers and learners at secondary schools in Sudan. Therefore, learners at secondary schools in Sudan have many problems with pronunciation in English when they try to speak in English. To that end, this paper focuses on areas of pronunciation problems that face learners at secondary school in Sudan, which lead to serious breakdown in oral communication in English and then tries to find solutions to them so as to ensure effective English oral communication. Thus, the researcher describes the causes behind the problems of pronunciation that the Sudanese learners of English at secondary schools face while trying to speak in English and the ways to cope with them. In this paper, the researcher, followed the descriptive analytic method and used a questionnaire as a main tool for data collection. The data gathered from the questionnaire are analyzed qualitatively. The results of the study displayed that the Sudanese secondary EFL learners' weakness in English pronunciation is regarded as a main obstacle for them to speak in English.

Over the last three decades, emotional intelligence (EI) has received considerable empirical attention especially in academic context. Following this line of research, the study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between trait EI and EFL learners' second language (L2) oral performance. A sample of 102 Iranian EFL students, all between 13 and 18 years old (approximately half male and half female), performed an oral narrative task under laboratory conditions and completed the trait emotional intelligence questionnaire-adolescent short form (TEIQue-ASF), which is used to measure global trait EI. The correlational analysis of the results indicated a positive relationship between EI and learners' L2 oral performance as measured in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency. Those with higher degree of EI were able to produce more accurate and complex language. The relationship between EI and fluency measures, however, did not reach significance. Findings of this study point to the importance of focusing on learners' emotions and finding strategies to foster it.

The Use of TED Talks to Improve Students' Speaking Skill at EFL Classroom (a Pre-Experimental Research) This study aims to improve students' speaking skill by using TED Talks and focus on speaking fluency. The writer apply Pre-Experimental method with one group pre-test and post-test design by using test to measure the students' ability. The sample of this research is the EFL students at 2nd semester in Muhammadiyah University of Makassar. The sample will take by using purposive sampling technique.

Speaking is one of the vital skills that should be acquired by the students in English classroom. Utilization
of effective teaching techniques are essential in teaching speaking for the students to enhance their oral
skills. Relative to this, the study aimed to determine the effects of storytelling-based activities on the
speaking proficiency of Grade 7 students of Sampaguita Village National High School, A.Y. 2020-2021. This
study is experimental in nature as it investigated the effects of a teaching technique i.e. storytelling-based
activity with great emphasis on the respondents’ speaking proficiency. It is aspired to find out the
significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the respondents in their speaking
proficiency before and after using story-telling activities. Thirty (30) respondents of grade 7 students from
Sampaguita Village National High School were used and the study covered in two weeks. The researcher
used a teacher-made pre and post assessment speaking activity, exemplars and a speaking assessment
rubric as the instruments of the study. Statistical treatment utilized in the study was mean, standard
deviation, frequency, percentages, and sample t-test. The result showed that there was a significant
difference between the pretest and posttest of the respondents in their speaking proficiency before and
after using story-telling activities. This implies that the use of storytelling-based activities has great
contribution in enhancing the speaking skills of the students. Thus, rejecting the null hypothesis. Since the
use of storytelling-based activities improved the speaking skills of the students, teachers and
administrators can use storytelling-based activities as a technique in teaching speaking. Additionally,
extension center for speaking can be organized to promote speaking in English and for students to practice
or enhance their skills in speaking.

[ The original PhD dissertation may be read and authenticated from the website of the University of Newcastle, NSW, at http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804346 ]

This thesis argues that foreign and second language teaching productivity can only reach its proper potential when it is accorded priority, second only to language learner productivity, amongst the many competing productivities which are always asserted by stakeholders in educational institutions.

A theoretical foundation for the research is established by examining the historical concept of productivity, and its more recent manifestation as knowledge worker productivity, especially as applied to teachers.

The empirical basis of the thesis is sourced from a chronological series of twenty biographical case studies in language teaching venues in Australia, New Zealand, Oceania and East Asia. The biographical case study methodology, although rare in applied linguistics, is justified by reference to its wide and growing application in other fields of qualitative research. The case studies are analysed for common patterns of productivity, as well as teaching productivity inhibition or failure.

It was affirmed across all of the case studies without exception that external parties could not control or even reliably predict what individual students might learn, and how well, from instances of instructed language teaching. This was regardless of the power of institutional players, external resources, curriculums or the teacher. Student belief in the immediate value of what was to be learned in a given lesson, and personal confidence in an ability to learn it were the most critical factors.

Teaching productivity was found to turn, ultimately, on the teacher's ability to influence the probability of student learning. The teacher could best influence learning probability by enhancing student motivation. The most effective environments for teaching productivity were seen to be those where the teacher was professionally equipped and politically enabled to exercise judgements which maximized opportunities for student language learning productivity. A negotiated pact concerning both curriculum and method often proved effective, especially with mature students, and at times required some deception of institutional authorities.

Empirically, the encouragement of reciprocal learning relationships between teacher and students was found to be powerfully enabling for language teaching productivity in the case studies.

In many venues a small but effective minority of 'intimate learners' were also able to leverage their language learning productivity by forging more personal relationships with the teacher.

The wider cultural paradigm within each of the countries represented in the case studies sanctioned different paths and limitations for both language learners and teachers, and hence was seen to influence teaching productivity in critical ways. It was found that under certain conditions, notably (but not exclusively) those prevailing in many East Asian educational institutions, that certification of foreign language skills had a higher cultural, employment and monetary value than the actual ability to exercise foreign language skills.

A negative influence on teacher productivity in many of the case studies was an ignorance about language learning and teaching amongst institutional players. The disregard of language teacher professionalism was fed by a belief that being able to speak a language was all that was necessary to teach it, and reinforced by misinterpreting the meaning of test results. Related to this, an imbalance of power relationships between teachers or students with other institutional interests was consistently found to interfere with teaching and learning productivities. Overall, the model of productivity understood in institutions instanced by the case studies tended to reflect a 19th Century economic paradigm of capital, raw materials (students) and labour (dispensable classroom workers) rather than any more sophisticated grasp of knowledge worker productivity.

It was demonstrated in the context of the case studies that productivity, and in particular knowledge worker productivity, is a complex concept whose facets require detailed analysis to arrive at a proper understanding of the role that foreign and second language teachers play in educational institutions.

The way we understand a narrative sequence of images may seem effortless, given the prevalence of comics and picture stories across contemporary society. Yet, visual narrative comprehension involves greater complexity than is often acknowledged, as suggested by an emerging field of psychological research. This work has contributed to a growing understanding of how visual narratives are processed, how such mechanisms overlap with those of other expressive modalities like language, and how such comprehension involves a developmental trajectory that requires exposure to visual narrative systems. Altogether, such work reinforces visual narratives as a basic human expressive capacity carrying great potential for exploring fundamental questions about the mind.

The role of online reviews provided by consumers for other consumers has been a crucial element to the plans of every marketing practitioner in the last few years, as online reviews appear to be influential in consumer decision making. Thus, it is greatly important for both professionals and consumers to discover the aspects that can make an online review worth reading. This study investigates the effect of length, expertise and text’s fluency on the perceived “helpfulness” of online reviews. We examine the effects of these factors and their interactions by analyzing a respectable number of online reviews and their details, which are provided by a major online user reviews website. Our analysis suggests that length has a positive effect on helpfulness, and longer reviews tend to get more positive votes than shorter reviews. Also, the text’s fluency plays an important role on their perceived helpfulness, as reviews with difficult to read text receive less positive votes. This study also shows that the expertise of the person who writes an online review is positively related to the helpfulness of online reviews.

English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' communicative competence presents a challenge for both students and instructors. Being communicatively competent leads the language user to avoid any kind of breakdown of communication; thus, reaching fluency which is the main aim of foreign language learners (EFL learners). The acquisition of the notion of formulaicity provides a great deal of help for EFL learners to achieve native-like language proficiency and that is the main hypothesis of this study. The main aim of this research is to draw learners' attention towards formulaic language and to investigate its effects on their communicative competence. To achieve this purpose, the present research is designed to answer the following questions: (1) what is formulaicity? (2) Is the acquisition of formulaic language important for EFL learners to reach communicative competence? (3) Is designing a course for this subject helpful to reach learners' language aims? An experiment is conducted through a pre and a post test in addition to the treatment of six sessions of instruction to carry out the comparative study using the paired t test result as statistical proof. After the comparison of the pre-test and the post test, the results revealed a substantial progress for the experimental group's communicative competence and thus their conversational competence as well. As a result, formulaic language needs to be an essential part of EFL learners' curriculum according to its variation and enormous effects on learners' communicative competence in both writing and speaking skills.

The aim of this study was to investigate the causes and the solutions of Saudi EFL university instructors’ barriers to teaching the speaking skill. The sample of the study consisted of 132 randomly-selected EFL preparatory year instructors at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, and King Saud University in Riyadh city. Three instruments were utilized to collect data for the study: the first one was a questionnaire, the second was semi-structured interviews, and the third one was lectures observations. The researcher designed a five-point Likert scale questionnaire to collect the data of the study which was validated by a panel of raters consisting of ten university professors and instructors. To ensure reliability, Cronbach Alpha formula was calculated. Besides, The findings of the study revealed that the causes of Saudi EFL university instructors’ barriers to teaching the speaking skill in the preparatory year were as follows: students’ use of L1 during group work or pair work, lack of vocabulary, fear of making mistakes, lack of self-confidence, and lack of motivation. Furthermore, the study results advocated the following solutions to Saudi EFL university instructors’ barriers to teaching the speaking skill: enhancing students’ self-confidence to speak without fear, correcting students’ mistakes kindly, meeting students’ needs in speaking textbooks, and adopting recent motivating techniques, increasing the motivating speaking activities in textbooks, and testing the speaking skill. Finally, the study concluded that teacher training and preparation programs should help EFL instructors overcome and avoid such teaching barriers in teaching the speaking skills

It is commonly assumed that children with dyslexia are slower at
handwriting than other children. However, evidence of slow handwriting in children with dyslexia is very mixed. Thirty-one children with dyslexia, aged 9 years, were compared to both age-matched children and younger spelling-ability matched children. Participants completed an alphabet-writing task and a composition task on the surface of a digital writing tablet. Children with dyslexia wrote the same amount of letters per minute in the alphabet task but wrote fewer words per minute when composing their texts than children of the same age. Crucially, no differences were found between children with dyslexia and their same age peers for speed of handwriting execution, measured by the tablet, when writing the alphabet or composing their texts. However, children with dyslexia were found to pause within their compositions as often as the spelling ability matched group. Thus handwriting execution is not impaired in children with dyslexia. The slow writing that is typical of children with dyslexia is due to pausing more often when composing and is related to spelling ability. This may reflect processing problems in response to high
cognitive load through having to contend with spelling and composing concurrently.

This thesis investigates the expenditure of cognitive effort in post-editing of machine translation. A mixed-method approach involving the use of eye movements, subjective ratings and think-aloud protocols was adopted for the investigation. The project aims at revealing connections between cognitive effort and variables including linguistic characteristics of the source text and the machine-translation output, post-editors’ individual traits, different linguistic aspects of the activity attended to during the task, and the quality of the post-edited texts, assessed by human translators in terms of fluency (linguistic quality) and adequacy (faithfulness to the source text). Two tasks were conducted to pursue these aims: one involving eye tracking and a self-report scale of cognitive effort, and another carried out by a different, but comparable, sample of participants, under a think-aloud condition. Results indicate that variables such as an automatic machine-translation quality score and source-text type-token ratio are good predictors of cognitive effort in post-editing. The relationship between cognitive effort and post-editors’ traits was found to be a complex one, with significant links in this respect only appearing in the context of interactions between variables. A complex relationship was also found between editing behaviour and the quality of the post-edited text: the number of changes implemented was found to have a generally positive association with post-edited fluency, though cognitive effort was found to be negatively correlated with both the fluency and adequacy of the post-edited texts. Mental processes involving grammar and lexis were significantly related to the levels of cognitive effort expended by participants. These were also the aspects most frequently attended to in the activity. From a methodological perspective, despite the criticisms received by the think-aloud method in previous research, empirical data obtained in this project indicates that think-aloud protocols correlate with eye movements and subjective ratings as measures of cognitive effort.

This article contains the script, or the conference speech of my 45-minute talk that was presented on September 19th, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The event (titled ELT Day II) took place at Disal Botafogo and provided a setting for discussing recent developments in ELT. I hope this article equips you with better solutions for global challenges on fostering an atmosphere that is conducive to fluency and language development. Motivating students and caring about the learning environment is what keeps me going. Devising solutions usually brings challenges to any setting, and that is part of an inclusive environment, which embraces critical thinking and positive dissent.