The 5th Annual International Conference of the Asian Association for Language Assessment (AALA) (AALA 2018)

245 / 2018-04-15 18:17:55

Analyzing Speaking Tasks: Lexical knowledge and fluency in monologic and dialogic speaking tasks

fluency, oral proficiency, speaking tasks

Plenary track > Principles and methodology of developing standards for language assessment

The current paper explores potential relationships between speaking task, fluency, and lexical knowledge. Recent findings (Tavakoli, 2016; De Jong et al., 2012; Saito, et al., 2016) suggest that when assessing L2 speakers’ oral proficiency, fluency scores vary depending on the task according to such indices as articulation, pausing and sophistication. We present a study in which we use the three (monologic, quasi-dialogic, and dialogic) speaking tasks, taken from the IELTS test. We also explore the claim that lexical frequency profile data can inform vocabulary needs, based on Walters (2012) suggestion that ‘reporting a lexical frequency profile of the lower frequency words, rather than a single score, might make [results] more useful in comparing individual learners’ (p.184).

Our subjects were 44 Japanese learners of English (L2). The subjects responded to the three IELTS speaking prompts. We carried out both fluency and lexical analyses as well as productive vocabulary testing. We examined the lexical frequency profiles of their spoken corpora, in addition to rating fluency in terms of pause length, articulation rate, lexical diversity, and sophistication, according to two recent and much cited fluency studies De Jong et al. (2012) and Saito et al. (2016). Subjects also completed two vocabulary measures designed to elicit productive vocabulary (Lex30; Meara and Fitzpatrick, 2000) and vocabulary size (New Vocabulary Levels Test; McLean and Kramer, 2015).

We report two major findings from our data. First, comparisons between test scores indicate that subjects rate more highly for fluency performance in dialogic tasks than in monologic tasks. Second, when we explore the lexical frequency profiles of our subject corpora, we find that subject ‘mastery’ (Laufer and Nation, 1999) of specific frequency bands (i.e. knowledge of 2k band, 3k band, etc.) correlates with fluency indices such as articulation rate, lexical sophistication, and lexical diversity. We discuss these findings in terms of practical classroom assessment applications relevant to instructors, second language learners, and policy makers.