The effect of Task Repetition with Dictation Intervention on the Development of Chinese University Minority EFL Students’ Spoken English: A Case Study of Honghe University in Yunnan Province

Authors

  • Chu Tan School of Foreign Language, Honghe University (HU), China

Keywords:

task repetition (TR) with dictation intervention, speaking fluency, Chinese minority university students

Abstract

The current paper shows and discusses the findings of a quasiexperimental study with a group of first-year minority students (N=12) at Honghe University in Yunnan province, China, which investigated the application of TR with post-task intervention (dictation) on minority university students’ spoken English fluency. In this regard, a speaking practice (4/3/2 technique) with dictation intervention including 16 monologue topics, a pre-test and a post-test were conducted to explore the development of the minority students’ spoken English fluency under the TR with dictation intervention. Also, a focus-group discussion was adopted to explore the effects of TR with dictation intervention on the improvement of the spoken fluency from the students’ perspectives. The results show that the students’ spoken fluency was developed through the calculation of four variables, including the mean length of the run (MLR), phonation time ratio (PTR), average pause length (ALP) and repair per 100 syllables (R100).

Besides, the results of the focus-group discussion reveal that the students’ spoken fluency was enhanced from different aspects, such as the improvement of confidence and interests, the content or topic familiarity, the cultivation of sense of language, the development of organization skill, logicality and coherence and the building of linguistic skills though selfdiagnostic with dictation; also, these aspects affected the improvement of the students’ spoken fluency in this study. Finally, related pedagogical implications and recommendations for the future study are discussed at the end of this paper.  

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Published

2019-09-18