An Exploration of Measures to Detect Changes in Speaking Performance : A Case Study Based on Picture Description

概要

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Although L2 speaking research has utilized many measures of speaking performance, the qualities of the measures have not been scrutinized. The current study attempts to examine the features of 67 measures used to assess fluency, accuracy, syntactic complexity, and lexical complexity and to identify "progress-sensitive measures" that can show changes after short-term speaking instruction (Tonkyn, 2007). Two groups of learners (high school and university) took a pretest and a posttest involving picture description. The results showed two measures indicating consistent differences between the pretest and posttest across the two groups: the number of tokens per minute and the number of cohesive devices per AS-unit (Analysis of Speech unit). Comparisons between two definitions of AS-units and clauses suggested that a broad definition (originally proposed by Foster, Tonkyn, & Wigglesworth, 2000) tends to work better in AS-units and clauses. The superiority of the number of tokens and types over their square root was also demonstrated among high school students. An investigation of the effect of an AS-unit or a clause as a denominator showed that AS-unit-based measures tend to work better than clause-based measures for syntactic complexity, whereas clause-based measures function better for accuracy.
社団法人大学英語教育学会の論文
2010-03-30