The Influence of a 7-Week Spoken English Course on the Use of Stalling Mechanisms : A Mixed-methods Study of Fluency Development
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Julkaisu on tekijänoikeussäännösten alainen. Teosta voi lukea ja tulostaa henkilökohtaista käyttöä varten. Käyttö kaupallisiin tarkoituksiin on kielletty.
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This MA thesis studies the influence that a 7-week spoken English course has on spoken English
development. The study examines the changes in the use of stalling mechanisms as indicators of fluency by
investigating both group-level changes and individual variation during the course. The topic of fluency is
current in Finland as oral L2 proficiency is considered increasingly more in teaching, with suggestions to
include spoken language testing in the matriculation examination having already been made. As of now,
Finnish upper secondary schools offer only one spoken English course as an elective (ENA8) that focuses on
oral performance, and the aim of this thesis is to investigate how short-term structured instruction influences
fluency development during that course. 33 students were examined for their use of stalling mechanisms by
analysing speech samples that were recorded before and after the course. The speech samples were
transcribed into written format and annotations were made for five stalling mechanisms: silent and filled
pauses, drawls, filler words and repetitions. In the group level analysis, the development in the frequency of
every stalling mechanism was analysed individually to discover statistically significant changes during the
course. This was accompanied by a qualitative study based on extreme case sampling (Dörnyei 2007) to give
more detailed insight into individual variation inside the group and short-term gains that are achievable.
The results show that group-level changes were mixed. Statistically significant development was observed in
the frequency of silent pauses, drawls and Finnish influence on filled pauses, but not in the other stalling
mechanisms. Individual variation within the group was substantial, with some students improving their
fluency significantly, gaining improvements in the frequency, duration and distribution of silent pauses and
other stalling mechanisms, indicating that while group-level development might be harder to detect,
individually students can improve greatly during a short timeframe.