A Study on the Effectiveness of Oral Reading Activities to Improve Speaking Ability

概要

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Our previous research disclosed that oral reading such as "read and look up" combined with "personalized oral reading" is highly correlated with speaking ability. This is because this sort of oral reading embeds semantic and grammatical verification and restructuring, and thus increases learners' cognitive load. This result led to a further hypothesis; if oral reading instruction which involves high cognitive load is continued for a certain period of time, learners' speaking ability can be improved. A two-month experiment was conducted to verify this hypothesis with the first-year upper secondary school pupils as the participants. The participants were divided into two groups according to the different degrees of cognitive load accompanying the oral reading activities they were engaged in. The result of the experiment disclosed different levels of improvement in the participants' speaking ability, depending upon different degrees of cognitive load of the oral reading activities; greater cognitive load led to greater improvement in speaking ability. This finding endorses the pedagogical value of oral reading activities as preparatory practice in speaking as long as they involve high cognitive load.
2012-10-30