The impact of immediate task repetition on breakdown fluency

Abstract

The focus of the present study is to explore the relationship between the task repetition including a tightly structured narrative and the breakdown fluency, i.e. number of pauses per minute, average duration of pauses, and phonation-time ratio. Thirty-three Croatian learners of English performed the narrative task twice. The temporal fluency variables were extracted by speech analysis program Praat in order to be automatically measured for evaluation (Boersma & Weenink, 2017). The results show that during the immediate, second encounter with the same task, the subjects employ significantly less pauses and their average length also decreases significantly. The significant difference is also obtained for the phonation-time ratio. The recorded progress in fluency measures can be explained by the priming effect and, consequently, the reduced cognitive load. The presented results point to the conclusion that well-known topics with a tightly structured storyline are connected with improvements in fluency, regarding breakdown fluency variables, even in the case of learners at a higher level of language proficiency. The findings of the study have implications for L2 pedagogy, highlighting the effective impact of task repetition on the development of oral fluency.