Investigating the effects of task repetition on fluency and accuracy in English oral performance of low level adult students: A case study at Vietnam air defence and air force academy

The major aims of this case study were to investigate the effects of task repetition on three adult students’ accuracy and fluency in speaking English. Also, it sought to examine changes to the level of anxiety when speaking, which is a secondary aim. Qualitative research method was applied, with assistance of some quantitative analysis.

INVESTIGATING THE EFFECTS OF TASK

REPETITION ON FLUENCY AND ACCURACY

IN ENGLISH ORAL PERFORMANCE OF LOW LEVEL

ADULT STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY

AT VIETNAM AIR DEFENCE AND AIR FORCE ACADEMY

ABSTRACT

The major aims of this case study were to investigate the effects of task repetition on three adult students’ accuracy and fluency in speaking English Also, it sought to examine changes to the level

of anxiety when speaking, which is a secondary aim Qualitative research method was applied, with assistance of some quantitative analysis The findings revealed that the participants generally showed improvements in their accuracy, while fluency took slightly different ends As regards the level of anxiety, some minor decrease was observed as a result of repeating the task Besides, all the participants made modification of content in their second presentation, which opens a new research domain for my future study

Keywords: accuracy, fluency, task repetition, teaching English speaking, Vietnam Air Defence

and Air Force Academy

LUONG THI PHUONG *

* Vietnam Air Defence and Air Force Academy,  phuong.luong9@gmail.com

Received:23/12/2018; Revised: 31/01/2019; Accepted: 28/4/2019

1 INTRODUCTION

This paper reports a case study done at Vietnam

Air Defence and Air Force Academy (hereafter

referred to as VADAFA), aiming at examining the

effects of task repetition on learners’ accuracy and

fluency when speaking about a past event Besides,

it was expected that students would feel less

anxious when speaking English in front of others

as a result of being familiar with the task The

students at VADAFA follow a ten-month intensive

English course which is specially designed for

the military officers who have been experienced

in their profession for at least three years Though

the researcher is not the main instructor of this

class, so far she has taught them for a few weeks

as a supplementary teacher The course uses the

English File series as course books, and includes

English speaking as one of the major macro skills

to be taught and tested on The target students are mainly the ones who wish to develop further in their career by pursuing higher education either abroad or in-country Even if some of them have no intention to study further, being fluent in English speaking may be a great advantage when they have opportunities to join international conferences and workshops

During the period of ten months, the course runs for five successive classes a week, from Monday to Friday, consisting of five forty-five-minute sessions per day This syllabus in fact

allows the students to practise a substantial

amount of speaking activities both in and after the

class So far, a commonplace of a speaking lesson

has been the fact that the teacher provides one or

two short speaking activities, whether guided or

free, then while monitoring, s/he often gives

on-the-spot feedback, either implicitly or explicitly,

on some basic mistakes such as the pronunciation

of sounds, verb tenses, or subject-verb agreement

At the end of the course, the students will have

already practised a variety of topics ranging

from elementary to intermediate level, plus the

same amount of situations in which they need

to use functional English Most of these topics

and situations will reoccur in the end-of-course

examination After testing three different courses,

however, the researcher found that a majority

of students performed the oral task with limited

accuracy and fluency Moreover, many of them

showed a high degree of anxiety or nervousness

when speaking in front of the others As soon as

they start speaking English, for instance, some

of them displayed these feelings through their

trembling voice or hands, while some others

showed evidence of tension on their face When

it came to communication with foreign friends,

these shortcomings became a real hinderance to

their mutual understanding

While reflecting back on the teaching of

speaking skill that the researcher and other English

instructors at VADAFA have been applying, it

seems that although this intense syllabus may

result in the students “knowing” a huge amount

of speaking tasks, yet their being able to use the

appropriate language to “perform” the tasks is

open to question In other words, our delivery of

speaking activities are somehow superficial Lynch

(2001) has a related concern and he explains this

reality by stating that nowadays teachers try to

maximize learner activity and output at the expense

of allowing too little time for reflection (p.124)

In addition, our traditional ways of correcting

speaking errors and giving feedback appear to be

ineffective as many of the students tend to make the same mistakes that have already been corrected before This may be because once the students are really involved in the speaking, they normally focus their attention on the content of what they intend to say, “rather than on potentially helpful signals from their interlocutor about what they have already said” (Lynch, 2007, p.312)

Bearing those sources of the VADAFA students’ speaking weaknesses in mind, this case study aimed to answer the following primary question:

• In what ways can task repetition improve

my learners’ accuracy and fluency in their English oral performance?

And the following subquestion:

• How does the degree of learners’ anxiety

in English speaking change as a result of being familiar with the task?

It was hoped that the transcribing process, which makes the student’s speaking visible, would be a favourable condition for the students

to first of all raise awareness of the strengths and weaknesses in their oral product More specifically, learners are in fact encouraged to “externalize their thoughts about the formal correctness and semantic precision of their own output” (Lynch

2001, p.131) In the similar vein, Mennim (2003) also states that the procedures of this innovation not only encourage real-time language processing, but a more explicit language focus that could allow more time for the noticing of language forms as well (p.133) Furthermore, the repetition process enables the automatization of procedures to take place, which offers learners more attentional resources to devote to other components of task execution (Finardi, 2008, p.138) This condition, hopefully, would by nature result in more fluent speaking Consequently, the level of anxiety when speaking English may decrease as a by-product All in all, this route to noticing, supported

by reflective self-correction, interactive peer

correction, supplementary teacher intervention

with explicit feedback, would possibly make a

contributing factor to successful language learning

(Lynch, 2001)

A considerable number of professionals in

the research world have also made use of task

familiarity, for various purposes and in various

contexts One of the pioneers who set the earliest

ground for repetition of task in second language

acquisition may be Bygate Martin and Porter

Don The three-month study that Bygate and

Porter (1991) carried out in the United Kingdom

was to examine whether repeating a task for the

second time has any effects on students’ language

production in terms of fluency and linguistic

complexity Other researchers interested in the

influence of repeating a task on fluency, accuracy,

and complexity of second language output include

Mennim (2003), Finardi (2008), Birjandi and

Ahangari (2008), Baleghizadeh and Derakhshesh

(2012) Additionally, Lynch (2001) investigates

the effects of task familiarity on noticing, while

Finardi (2008) examines the relationship between

this variation and working memory capacity

2 THE STUDY

2.1 Participants

The participants of the current research were three

adult male students studying in one intact English

class, which the researcher described earlier in

this report One of them is in his late twenties,

and the other two are in their early thirties At the

time of the study, the English proficiency of two

students was roughly at elementary level, and the

other student was at beginner level All of them

are military officers who share the same first

language, that is Vietnamese, and similar cultural

background Although preparation for a speaking

task is something these students are familiar

with, they have been experienced in neither

videorecording nor transcribing their speech before These learners voluntarily took part in the project by signing a consent in which the purposes

as well as the procedures of the study were thoroughly stated, and the participants’ rights were clearly mentioned Further, one of the ways the researcher guaranteed the subjects’ confidentiality was to name them pseudonymously

2.2 Methodology

First and foremost, the researcher’s choice of qualitative case study was initiated by Bent Flyvbjerg’s viewpoints as he argues that the closeness of the case study to real-life situations and its multiple wealth of details are not only important for the development of a nuanced view of reality, but also for researchers’ own learning processes in improving the skills needed to do good research (Flyvbjerg, 2006, p 223) More specifically, case studies produce context-dependent experience and knowledge, which is essential for any researchers who aim to develop from rule-based beginners to high level experts, as Flyvbjerg (2006) expands his ideas

Most importantly, qualitative case study is pertinent to this research aim in that, according

to Baxter and Jack (2008), this design empowers the researcher to answer “how” and “why” type questions, and at the same time takes the influential contextual factors into consideration For such a novice researcher, a case study is an exceptional opportunity to gain enormous insight into a case (Baxter and Jack, 2008, p.556) This is because

by means of gathering data from various sources, the researcher can explore a phenomenon through

a variety of lenses, hence multiple facets of the issue are able to be illuminated and understood (Baxter and Jack, 2008, p.554) The concerned issue is therefore scrutinized from a holistic view, and biased interpretation of data is hoped to be avoided as a result Another plausible reason was that qualitative studies enable the researcher to

explore new areas of research via its “principle

of openness” (Flick et al., 2004, p.9), thus

professional reflection and development becomes

a nonstop process

Yet two of the drawbacks of qualitative case

study are claimed to be the lack of rigour and weak

grounds for establishing reliability and generality

as a consequence of small sampling (Zainal,

2007, p.5) In an attempt to minimize these

disadvantages, the researcher triangulated the data

sources by using three tools, including physical

artifacts, videotapes, and face-to-face individual

semi-structured interviews The first source of data

is in the form of the transcripts of student’s oral

performance in time 1 and time 2 Lynch (2007)

points out that by examining their transcription,

the students are more likely to be able to notice,

remember, and produce reprocessed forms

highlighted in the feedback (p.312) This visible

form of speech was obviously crucial for the

participants to analyse not just the use of language

forms, but the pronunciation of words as well

Accordingly, the use of and changes in students’

interlanguage may be easier to be evaluated

Videotapes was a dual-purpose tool because they

provided audio source for the transcribing as well

as the analysing of sounds, while it was hoped to

better the researcher’s verification of the changes

in students’ affective variables The reason for the

use of videotape is that the researcher could obtain

supplementary information on body language

and facial expressions from this source (Hinchey,

2008, p.85), though at some surface level The

last method of data collection, which is

semi-structured interviewing, is significantly beneficial

to the research aims One of the rationales for this

method lies in the fact that qualitative interviews

can provide rich and in-depth information about

the experiences of individuals, as concluded by

Dicicco-Bloom and Crabtree (2006) By means

of talking face-to-face to the researcher, the

participants have a chance to provide the most direct,

relevant, and hopefully reliable information about

the issues being studied (Hinchey, 2008, p.81)

2.3 Procedures and data collection

The research site was an ordinary classroom at VADAFA with pleasantly quiet surroundings The stages of the two-week research are as follows:

Stage 1: On the 18th February 2013, each of the three students (whose pseudonymous names are Minh, Thanh, and Hieu) was given a topic

in which they had to narrate their last holiday in about five minutes Narrating has been a common activity in this course, yet they were not told about this specific topic until the first stage took place They had five minutes to prepare for the speaking, and could make some notes on a piece of paper

Stage 2: The students spoke without scripts in

front of the researcher and other two participants Their performance was videotaped

Stage 3: At home, the students watched and

listened to their performance again using their personal computer, and handwrote their entire speech verbatim with double-spacing They then tried to correct any mistakes by themselves in red pen, before doing peer correction with another participant (Transcript 1)

Stage 4: Four days after stage 3, the students

gave transcript 1 to the teacher, who then indicated further corrections and feedback on what the students had missed (Transcript 2)

Stage 5: One day later, the researcher returned

transcript 2 to its original writer At this stage, the participants re-read their transcript, and they could ask about any points they were unclear in the feedback On the same day, she spent forty five minutes to revise some of the basic linguistic points that the students had trouble with, and about one hour to drill pronunciation of the words that they failed to utter in their speech Also, the researcher introduced some supplementary materials for self-study, and had them practise pronunciation with the Pronunciation Power software at home

Stage 6: The second trial speaking was

videorecorded on the tenth day of the study This

time the transcribing was done by the researcher

Stage 7: On the 4th March 2013, the students

were invited to take part in an individual indepth

interview, with the questions being sent to them in

advance so that they could have time to consider

their answers to those questions The interviews

lasted about twenty minutes each, and were

taperecorded This final stage aimed to delve into

the learners’ views on their own English speaking

problems, their understandings of the innovation

process, and most crucially, their appraisal of the

research as a whole in regards to their learning

style and context

Basically, the case study followed Mennim

(2003) and some of the aforementioned scholars’

procedures, yet it was different from the previous

research in some fundamental points First of all,

most of these studies were done within classroom

hours, and covered a fairly long time span, which

is up to three months, whereas this two-week

project took place after class hours, in students’ self

study time This is because the three participants

had to attend normal lessons in the morning

with the rest of the class However, in the

self-study session, they also need to be present in the

classroom for two hours in the afternoon, without

teacher’s monitoring In addition, the very busy

working schedules of both the researcher and the

participants restricted the length of time allocated

for the research, so the researcher had the learners

complete stage three at home in their own time

The second difference is that while the subjects

in previous studies were mainly at intermediate

English proficiency level, all of the participants in

this study were at low level when they started to

take part in the research Taking these contextual

features into great account, the speaking time for

the topic was restricted to as short as five minutes,

and only a limited number of basic linguistic

features was measured That is to say the term

“accuracy” in my research question limits itself

to the ability to build simple sentences using appropriate verb forms, subject-verb agreement, and correct forms of plural nouns Accuracy here also means producing understandable segmental aspects of pronunciation, which are individual sounds Evidence of increased fluency may take various forms, yet due to the small scope of the present study, the amount of pausing and self-repair was taken into account in order to examine the effects of increasing task familiarity According

to Bygate and Porter (1991), pausing is taken as

an indication of the number of selection or access problems engaged by the speaker, and includes individual filled and unfilled pauses (p.42) Repairs are considered as false starts, repetitions of words

or utterances, incomplete fragments, redundant repeated words, which indicates the speaker’s hesitation about lexical decision (Bygate & Porter,

1991, p.42)

As far as the project was carried on, there appeared a few practical ethical issues that are worth reporting The first constraint was again related to the time arranged for the stages As two

of the participants often had unexpected personal business to do during the research process, the researcher had to rearrange stage 6 and stage 7 twice so that every subject could manage to be ready for the activity Given the fact that people are not always willing to speak truthfully during interviews (Hinchey, 2008, p.81), on the one hand, the researcher clearly advised them of the protection of the learners’ anonymity and the confidentiality of their information, and she tried to develop a rapport with these learners on the other hand Dicicco-Bloom and Crabtree (2006) argue that rapport, which includes trust and respect for the interviewee and the information s/he shares, plays a vital role in the interview (p.316) By setting

up a secure and comfortable environment for the videoing as well as interviewing, this positive relationship was successfully created during this entire research process, particularly during the interviewing time Besides, it seems that as the

subjects are all adults, they were free from any fears

of telling the truth of their speaking shortcomings

and the reasons behind that Another potential

issue was the English translation of the interviews

As all of the students were low-level English

speakers, the interviews were done in Vietnamese,

which might result in the unreliable translation

into English as well as misrepresentation The

researcher therefore asked the participants to

check the interview’s transcripts for clarification

and admendment if needed After that, she invited

another competent colleague to read the translation

and gave feedback on unclear points Furthermore,

while analysing the interviews, she relistened to

the original recording so as to ensure the nature

of the learner’s intonation, pauses, and hesitations

3 DATA ANALYSIS

The data will be presented on a theme-by-theme

basis, using qualitative content analysis approach,

yet including some quantitative summary The

researcher compared the rehearsed transcription

with the final one to evaluate the changes to

students’ use of verb forms, subject-verb agreement,

and plural forms of nouns Also, the changes to

the pronunciation as well as the level of fluency

were investigated through both the transcripts and

videorecordings Changes to levels of anxiety was

evidenced mostly from the interview, and some

from the videos Surprisingly, some changes in

content will be discussed here, though they are not

the original focus of the research It is important

to note that the students were supposed to speak

in five minutes, but on both occasions they spoke

for less than the allowed time, maybe due to their

inadequate interlanguage This results in the

amount of evidence exemplified hereafter

3.1 Verb forms

In general, the group successfully modified their

use of verb forms after reviewing their rehearsed

transcripts On the first artifacts, the total number

of mistakes spotted by both the students and the researcher is 11, and about half of them were successfully repaired in the second trial speaking

Table 1 Response to feedback: Verb forms

Student Number of

suggested repairs

on 1 st

transcript

Targetlike repairs in final presentation

Structure left out in final presentation

Hieu made the fewest mistakes of verb forms, but he did not repeat one of them in his final speech Thanh reused more than half of the verbs,

he left one highlighted verb unrepaired:

Rehearsal Final Performance

We get up early and walking We got up early and and

walk and walking

Thanh showed his confusion about the form

of the verb “walk”, which might be explained by the fact that he had had little practice on using simple sentences with compound predicates This

is coupled with his opinion in the interview about his English speaking weaknesses:

“ One of the most serious difficulties I have

been facing in speaking English was the insufficient knowledge of grammar , while the teachers have not created regular speaking practice activities”

Both Minh and Thanh replaced their suggested repairs with more familiar verb forms

Student Rehearsal Final Performance Minh We enjoy it so much We loved the holiday so much.

Thanh I like saw the fields I liked the fields

Basically, the students were able to make their own alternations to the use of most verb forms in the final speaking, yet to some extent, they seemed

to be afraid of repeating the same mistakes, even

when those mistakes had been already corrected

by the teacher on the first transcript

3.2 Subject-verb agreement

As the student narrated a past event, the instances

of subject-verb agreement were not frequently

observed Totally, 4 errors were noted on the

rehearsals

Table 2 Response to feedback: Subject-verb

agreement

Student Suggested

repairs on 1 st

transcript

Targetlike repairs in final presentation

Structure left out in final presentation Minh - It were next

to

- It look like a

- It was next to

- Ø

1

Thanh - She live with - She lives with 0

Unsurprisingly, all the examples of this type of

fallacies lie in the third person singular subject-verb

agreement, which is a very common trouble when

the VADAFA students use present simple verbs

Three of the errors were noticed and successfully

modified by the students themselves as they

worked with their peer before the researcher made

the final feedback

3.3 Plural forms of nouns

The amount of suggested corrections of this

category vary greatly across the subjects The

largest number of mistakes was found in Minh’s

speech, and he responded very well to five out of

six spotted occasions Besides, he was the only one

who misused two new plural nouns in the second

presentation This may mean that Minh needs

more time to practise this specific linguistic area

Thanh made the most mistakes on verb forms,

but he showed a good grasp of plural forms of

nouns, though he used only 3 plural nouns in his

first speech Also, very few plural nouns were

observed in Hieu’s first transcript, and he included changes to both instances in the final performance

as a result of collaborating with one of his partners

It is worth noting that both Minh and Hieu left out the final letter “s” in all the 8 nouns highlighted

in the first transcripts This can be explained by that they did not know when to use a plural noun,

or that they understood the rules of using plural nouns, but failed to utter them The former could

be a more reasonable explanation because at the time the study was implemented, they learners had merely had some practice on spelling rules

of plural nouns without being provided with the clarification of their use However, Thanh was an exception because before this course, as he stated

in the interview, he had learnt English for longer time than the other two participants and might have practised using plural nouns more often

3.4 Pronunciation of sounds

The most frequently occurring inaccuracies noted

in the students’ rehearsal presentations belong

to this theme Totally, 27 mispronounced words were highlighted, yet only about half of them were correctly altered by the students It seems that most

of the recalled words sound more similar to some

of Vietnamese sounds such as also, ice creams,

holiday, rice, as crowded as.

In addition, all the participants had difficulty pronouncing newly-added words in their second speaking, with Hieu facing the most challenges

Table 3 Response to feedback: Plural forms of nouns

Student Number of

suggested repairs on 1 st

transcript

Targetlike repairs

in final presentation

Nouns left out in final presentation

New suggested repairs

in final presentation

Thanh 0 0 0 0

He failed to fix three words (especially, ancient,

much) when repeating the task, while including

five more cases of mispronunciation in his second

trial, which are went, last, stayed, restaurant,

talk These examples indicate Hieu’s inconsistent

imperfection in different aspects of sounds, that is

he had troubles with pronouncing not only vowel

and consonant sounds, but also cluster sounds

Minh made his own alternations to

pronunciation of less than half of the spotted

words The three repeated errors include next, West,

wild, and the two new errors include August and

walk He appeared to find cluster sounds the most

challenging because he pronounced next as /nek/,

West as /wet/, wild as /wai/, August as /ɔːgə/ Unlike

Minh, Thanh was unable to fix the words with /ʃ/

sounds, including fishing, fresh, she, and some final

sounds, as in will and wife in his second speech

Although the teacher’s feedback, one-hour

pronunciation drilling lesson, and student’s self

practice with Pronunciation Power software

could result in only half of fruitful targetlike

modifications, these interventions helped the

students, though to a modest extent, achieve such

nontargetlike repairs as word stress, schwa and

sound linking

Schwa

Minh: the bank of the lake, around

Thanh: a long time ago

Sound linking

Thanh: and I

Hieu: was in

The numerical evidence in Table 5 clearly demonstrates that these students found pronunciation of sounds more challenging than other aspects of English language mentioned in this study This is in accordance with their opinions

in the interviews

Minh:

“ One of the problems I have in speaking English is the pronunciation of individual sounds because I could not pronounce the words correctly right at the beginning, so it becomes my pidginised language.”

Thanh:

“ even some of the teachers do not have good pronunciation, so it is difficult for the students to know whether they themselves pronounce correctly

or not , the accuracy in pronunciation is one of the most serious problems to me ”

Hieu:

“ I find vocabulary and pronunciation the most problematic”.

Paradoxically, at VADAFA, the majority of the current English teachers were originally trained

as Russian teachers When English language became one of the main foreign languages to be taught at this school about twelve years ago, those teachers joined a two-year English course as an

ad hoc solution to the new working situation As

a result, not only their pronunciation of English is strongly influenced by Russian accent, but many

of them underestimate the importance of teaching pronunciation Most of the teachers who have been teaching these three participants are no exception, which may explain why Minh could not pronounce the words correctly at the first time, while Thanh found it difficult to know whether he pronounces the words accurately or not

Table 4 Response to feedback: Pronunciation of

sounds

Student Number of

suggested

repairs

on 1 st

transcript

Targetlike repairs

in final presentation

Words left out in final presentation

New suggested repairs in final presentation Minh 11 5 3 2

Thanh 8 4 0 2

Hieu 8 5 0 5

3.5 Fluency

The researcher followed Bygate and Porter’s

(1991) procedures of observing changes in

students’ fluency, in which the ratios of the amount

of pauses and the amount of self-repair to number

of words were calculated This is to say the higher

the ratio is, the less fluent their speech is

Table 5 Comparison of fluency measures on the

task at Time 1 and Time 2.

Student task (Time 1) Narrative task (Time 2) Narrative

Ratio

pauses: number

of words

Minh 0,11 0,11

Thanh 0,31 0,10

Hieu 0,36 0,16

Repairs: number

of words Minh Thanh None0,11 0,020,04

Hieu 0,06 0,03

Total Minh 0,11 0,13

Thanh 0,42 0,14

Hieu 0,42 0,19

Two out of three students (Thanh and Hieu)

showed dramatic improvements in fluency in the

familiar mode, with regard to a decrease in pauses

and in self-repairs However, given that Hieu had a

lower general English proficiency than Thanh, he

created more pauses at Time 1 and at Time 2 than

Thanh Also, Hieu did not make many self-repairs

because perhaps his interlanguage was limited

Minh was the only one who went against the trend

of the other two subjects as he made no changes to

the proportion of pauses, and even increased his

self-repairs at Time 2 Nevertheless, it is important

to note that amongst the three subjects, Minh

committed the least pauses as well as repairs,

which also means he was a more fluent English

speaker than Thanh and Hieu

3.6 Degree of anxiety

This affective aspect proved to be the most

difficult to be measured When scrutinizing the

videorecordings, the researcher found very little

evidence of improvement in students’ confidence The data therefore came mostly from the interviews Thanh was the only one who stated that “so far anxiety when speaking English is not a problem for me”, yet he also confirmed that “After seeing and understanding my weaknesses in the transcript, and being actively involved in diminishing these weaknesses, I felt more confident” Unlike Thanh, anxiety when speaking English was a real problem for Hieu and Minh As a result of being familiar with the task, both the two students expressed that in the second speaking, they felt a little bit more confident, but the feelings of anxiety and nervousness still existed

Minh:

“I felt a bit less anxious because after my mistakes were corrected, I reviewed them, familiarized myself with the words and structures, and was no longer afraid of making these mistakes, especially the ones on pronunciation”.

3.7 Elaboration of content

This was an unexpected area of student focus, yet it is worth some analysis as it may open new aspects for future investigation Quantitatively, in their second trial, Minh and Hieu increased the amount of independent clauses, while Thanh did not produce extra sentences

Table 6 Number of independent clauses and time

of speech

independent clauses-Time 1

Number of independent clauses-Time 2

Minh 16 18

Thanh 19 19

Nevertheless, on a qualitative basis, all of the three participants not only inserted new contents but also modified their language so as to make

it more comprehensible in the final presentation

In many instances, the elaboration of content

aimed to expand the ideas and add more detailed

descriptions

Student Content Time 1 Content Time 2

good.

and my two

sister were very

interested in them.

the weather was so good It

was sunny and windy, and very pleasant.

My sisters were very interested in them They fed the monkeys bread and banana

Thanh my grandmother

can walk My grandmother can walk Si very kind, very funny And I

and my wife love si very much

Hieu I liked food here so

much Weee had a party inn a restaurant near the sea I I

liked food here so mut.

Interestingly, all of the students made some

alternations to contents, that is they left out some

information in the first speech, and/or added

different ideas in the second one For example, the

sentence “We take photograph in My Khe beach”

was not repeated in Hieu’s final presentation

Instead, he ended his narration by making a

completely new utterance: “I enjoyed traveling

to Danang, I hope I will return Danang soon.”

Obviously, the modification of content helped

the speech more refined, and accordingly, more

sophisticated

4 DISCUSSION

4.1 Discussion

In general, the learners showed a certain extent

of improvement in both accuracy and fluency in

performing the familiar narrative task after about

two weeks, with only one exception of Minh on

fluency Bearing in mind that Minh’s English

proficiency was the best of the three students, as

shown in his classroom performance and regular

test marks, task repetition may not be much

effective in accelerating fluency of higher level

students, whereas the effects were more clearly identified in lower level learners In Minh’s case, the reason could be that he added more new information in his second story than the other two participants, thus executing more self-repairs was inevitable This result was partly in line with Bygate and Porter’s (1991) research in which their two students coming from English as

a Foreign Language (EFL) backgrounds gained more fluency in the repeated task than the one who spoke English as a second language

As subject-verb agreement and verb forms are not totally new linguistic areas to these students, they made relatively successful alternations to these features However, it is possible that one

of the ways these students avoided repeating the mistakes was to eliminate some of the sentences which included the highlighted verbs in the first transcript, even when these verbs were already feedbacked by the researcher The changes to plural nouns were somehow productive partly because adding letter “s” to a noun is a more simple way than adding “es” or utterly changing the spelling of it As a result, the students perhaps found it fairly easy to pronounce this kind of plural forms However, because only a limited number of plural nouns were used by the three learners, plus Minh had the same trouble with two new nouns

in his second speaking, it might be concluded that these participants need more explanations and practice on how to use plural nouns

Pronunciation of individual English sounds, unfortunately, has never been systematically introduced to these students before Neither had they had a chance to practise pronunciation with

a software In addition, the teacher’s intervening lesson was too short to provide a thorough drill

on the entire sound system, whereas student’s self study with Pronunciation Power software

in fact depended much on each individual’s time management These might explain why the subjects demonstrated fairly modest advancement

in this particular section Despite this fact, a bright