Development Of Fluency Research Articles

Effects of pushed production of single words and multiword patterns on L2 oral fluency: Some evidence from temporal measurements

AbstractThe contribution of formulaic sequences (FSs) to native speaker fluency is uncontroversial, but their contribution to L2 fluency is often assumed. These units package both meaning and form in an entire unit and facilitatebothconceptualization and formulation of speech. These are the ‘fluency assumptions’ of these FSs. This study asks if the ‘fluency assumptions’ of FSs can be imitated in classroom settings by pushing learners to use common multiword (MW) patterns to achieve a kind of ‘instruction-enhanced L2 fluency’. It also compares the outcome with the teaching of single words (SWs). Learners’ (a) temporal fluency and (b) fluency at the levels of conceptualizing and formulating speech were assessed. Towell, R., R. Hawkins & N. Bazergui. 1996. The development of fluency in advanced learners of French.Applied Linguistics17 (1). 84–119, avant-garde approach to analyzing fluency was drawn on in the discussion of the results. Broadly, instructing MW patterns and SWs sped up formulation processes but made demands on speech conceptualization, and there existed other subtle differences.

The development of complexity, accuracy, and fluency in ESP learners’ writing: A dynamic systems theory

The complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) have been ignored in the writing development of English for specific purposes (ESP) learners. Hence, the purpose of this study was to investigate the development of CAF in the ESP learners while they wrote essays requiring their topical knowledge and the ones requiring their general knowledge. The study benefited from a dynamic systems theory to investigate the development trends of four ESP learners’ writing. During the two months the essays of the ESP learners were examined through different indicators of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The results revealed that the complexity index of both topical and general essays written by the ESP learners went through the same trends of development. However, this was not the case for the ESP learners’ writing fluency and accuracy. Furthermore, the findings revealed that the ESP learners had higher index of complexity, accuracy, and fluency in topical essays at the beginning of the program and at the end of it when compared with the general essays. Additionally, some variations had been observed among the participants.

The Location and Effects of Visual Hemisphere-Specific Stimulation on Reading Fluency in Children With the Characteristics of Dyslexia

Fluency is used as an indicator of reading proficiency. Many students with reading disabilities are unable to benefit from typical interventions. This study is designed to replicate Lorusso, Facoetti, Paganoni, Pezzani, and Molteni’s (2006) work using FlashWord, a computer program that tachistoscopically presents words in the right or left visual hemi-field in English and locates through fMRI imaging the processing areas involved in fluency development. Our participants were 15 students who were ages 8 to 19 years and had reading disabilities randomly assigned to Intervention (n = 9) and Delayed Intervention (n = 6) groups. Functional imaging studies focused on analyzing activations in the left hemisphere (LH) superior temporal gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the LH inferior occipito-temporal/fusiform area (visual-word form area [VWFA]). Analysis of intervention data showed that 6 of the 9 Intervention group participants (67%) achieved levels of automatic processing and increased their reading rate by an average of 20 words per minute after participating in the FlashWord intervention. Analyses of fMRI group activation maps and mean activation levels in regions of interest document processing changes in VWFA activations that could be related to the increase in reading speed and confirm these locations as essential to developing fluency.

L2 Utterance Fluency Development Before, During, and After Residence Abroad: A Multidimensional Investigation

This study investigated second language fluency development over a nearly 2‐year period which included an academic year abroad and the year immediately following the participants' return to their home university. Data from 24 L1 English learners of Spanish were collected 6 times: once before, 3 times during, and 2 times after a 9‐month stay abroad. Participants were recorded orally retelling a picture‐based narrative, and data were coded for 9 measures of utterance fluency. Results indicated different developmental trends: Gains in speed fluency appeared quickly and were maintained after the return from study abroad, whereas gains in breakdown fluency often took longer and were more sensitive to attrition after returning home. There were no changes over time in repair fluency. These results appear to indicate that some fluency improvements are more robust and less likely to be affected by the change in context (study abroad vs. home country). The findings fill a gap in our understanding of the relationship between oral fluency development and second language speech production processes, and have implications for study abroad researchers as well as post‐study abroad instruction.

Post-primary reading fluency development: A latent change approach

In a longitudinal study, we investigated the post-primary reading fluency development of 1034 Dutch adolescents enrolled in four tracks of secondary education (high, intermediate, low, special education), using a multiple-group latent change approach. We assessed adolescents' word, pseudoword and text reading fluency, as well as their rapid naming abilities, at the beginning and after a half-year of education. The results showed that fluency development for real words, pseudowords and texts continues beyond the primary grades, and that the degree of improvement was similar across educational tracks. Word reading fluency and change in word reading fluency predicted text reading fluency development. No additional effect was found for pseudoword reading fluency. Finally, rapid naming ability was not only related to initial text reading fluency, but also to development of text reading fluency. Implications of these findings for assessment and intervention are discussed.

Reading Fluency for the iGeneration: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of MP3 Use and Teacher Experience

Reading fluency has been identified as an essential skill in early readers. The technological boom to which students in the iGeneration have been exposed, has produced many potential tools for developing reading fluency. This study investigated reading fluency and technology. The design of the study presented here allowed the researchers to ask two questions related to the development of reading fluency in 2nd graders. First, did the use of MP3 players as an at-home tool increase reading fluency in 2nd graders? Second, did teacher experience increase the reading fluency of these 2nd graders? The results indicated that the use of MP3 players as an at-home tool did not have a statistically significant impact on reading fluency. However, teacher experience did have a statistically significant impact on reading fluency. Several explanations for these results are discussed including the, perhaps, outdated choice of the MP3 player as the technological tool utilized in the study. In addition, questions are raised about the efficacy of using the MP3 player as a homework-type of assignment. While the importance of establishing a solid home-school connection is noted, schools may need to rethink the most beneficial methods for building that connection with ALL parents/families. Teacher experience is, not surprisingly, connected to student achievement. This result highlighted the need for schools to develop an environment for beginning teachers to grow and find support. Keeping teachers in the classroom is of utmost importance to student achievement.

Development of Fluency, Accuracy, and Complexity in Productive Skills of EFL learners across Gender and Proficiency: A Chaos Complexity Approach

This study was an attempt to investigate the developmental rate of fluency, accuracy and complexity among 12 EFL learners within the framework of chaos complexity theory. To carry out this study, 6 female and 6 male participants in two levels of proficiency (pre-and upper-intermediate) were put in two classes taught by the same teacher and following the same course. Every two months (for a period of four months) they were asked to write a narrative using the pictorial sequence of a story, and they were also asked to tell the same story orally after three days. Their productions were analyzed for fluency, accuracy and complexity (lexical and grammatical). The results, compared inter and inrta-individually, revealed that there was no common pattern of development among different learners with different proficiency or gender. A closer examination of the oral and written productions of these learners showed that the emergence of complexity, fluency, and accuracy could be seen as a system adapting to a changing context, in which the language resources of each individual were uniquely transformed through use and in which chaos, dynamicity, unpredictability, and self-organization were clearly observed in the participants’ productions.

Preliminary evaluation of the efficacy of an intervention incorporating precision teaching to train procedural skills among final cycle medical students

IntroductionA lack of preparedness for practice has been observed among new medical graduates. Simulation technology may offer one means of producing competency. This paper describes the application of a simulation-based...

Cognitive predictors of literacy acquisition in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji

We examined the role of different cognitive skills in word reading (accuracy and fluency) and spelling accuracy in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Japanese Hiragana and Kanji are strikingly contrastive orthographies: Hiragana has consistent character-sound correspondences with a limited symbol set, whereas Kanji has inconsistent character-sound correspondences with a large symbol set. One hundred sixty-nine Japanese children were assessed at the beginning of grade 1 on reading accuracy and fluency, spelling, phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid automatized naming (RAN), orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness, and on reading and spelling at the middle of grade 1. The results showed remarkable differences in the cognitive predictors of early reading accuracy and spelling development in Hiragana and Kanji, and somewhat lesser differences in the predictors of fluency development. Phonological awareness was a unique predictor of Hiragana reading accuracy and spelling, but its impact was relatively weak and transient. This finding is in line with those reported in consistent orthographies with contained symbol sets such as Finnish and Greek. In contrast, RAN and morphological awareness were more important predictors of Kanji than of Hiragana, and the patterns of relationships for Kanji were similar to those found in inconsistent orthographies with extensive symbol sets such as Chinese. The findings suggested that Japanese children learning two contrastive orthographic systems develop partially separate cognitive bases rather than a single basis for literacy acquisition.

Effects of Intensive Fluency Instruction on the Reading Proficiency of Third-Grade Struggling Readers

ABSTRACTThe present study examined the impact of an intensive reading fluency intervention on the overall reading performance of 37 struggling readers in 3rd grade. Students’ 3rd-grade classroom teachers and/or their performance on a state-mandated reading achievement test given toward the end of the 3rd-grade school year identified them for the study. Selected students participated in a 25-session summer reading clinic. The main instructional intervention was the Fluency Development Lesson, which is an intensive fluency instruction program. Immediately prior to and after the summer reading program clinicians pre- and posttested students on a variety of reading competencies. Analyses of pre- and posttest scores showed that students who had received fluency instruction in the summer clinic made substantial and significant gains in their reading performance. This is noteworthy because despite the fact that many students actually lose ground in their reading achievement over summer, these students made significant reading performance gains. We discuss the practical implications of the results.

The Development of Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency in L2 Written Production through Informal Participation in Online Activities

Research into the online informal learning of English (OILE) examines how non-native speakers of English may develop L2 skills through participation in leisure activities on the Internet in the target language. Such activities include, e.g., watching television series, films or videos, interacting on Facebook, reading articles or listening to music. Recent OILE studies have focused on students at French universities and have sought to both inventory language users’ online participation habits and track their L2 development (Kusyk & Sockett, 2012; Sockett, 2011; Sockett, 2014; Toffoli & Sockett, 2015; Sockett & Kusyk, 2015). This paper provides updated OILE participation data on French students and, for the first time, German university students. In order to increase awareness about current OILE practices, results of a questionnaire (N = 953) of OILE habits are presented. In addition, development in complexity, accuracy and fluency of three individual study participants was tracked over a period of five months. Results show a great deal of inter- and intraindividual variation, highlighting the need to consider L2 development as a complex and nonlinear process, especially when analyzed within an online, informal context.

A two-step sampling weight approach to growth mixture modeling for emergent and developing skills with distributional changes over time

Emergent reading skills are crucial to the development of fluency and comprehension, and as such, assessing kindergarten entry skills is critical to inform educational decisions. However, skills that are assessed too early are likely to yield many zero scores, as most students do not yet have the experience or ability to perform the task. Although these floor effects typically lessen across time to show near-normal distributions, growth models cannot accommodate repeated measures with different distributions. The purposes of this paper are to (a) introduce a two-step sampling weight approach to growth mixture modeling that addresses distributions changing over time, and (b) apply the approach to a sample of 1911 kindergarten students universally screened on an emergent reading skill (letter sound fluency) across the year. Results distinguish between students that begin at zero and make meaningful gains and those who begin at zero and do not. We discuss the methodological implications of our approach and the practical implications for growth modeling and early identification.

Changes in semantic fluency across childhood: Normative data from Australian-English speakers

Purpose: Verbal fluency tests are often used as part of an assessment battery to investigate children’s lexical knowledge as well as executive function skills. To date, however, issues surrounding consistency of measurement cloud comparisons across studies, with the developmental performance of Australian-English speaking children also currently lacking. This study tracked verbal fluency development as measured by two semantic fluency tasks that included coding of fluency, clustering and switching type responses.Method: Participants included 355 typically developing Australian-English speaking children (4–10 years) and 46 young adults. Total fluency was determined by the number of words produced for each category (Animals or Food), minus repetitions and rule violations. Semantic clusters (words generated within a subcategory) were coded while switches between single words or subcategories were differentiated and coded as either hard or cluster switches.Result: Fluency showed consistent improvement over age. Cluster Switches and Hard Switches showed some evidence of a plateau in performance relative to fluency, but in opposite direction. Other measures showed no strong trends over age. Results were similar for both semantic categories.Conclusion: Our results highlight the rich information available within a semantic fluency task and the importance of differentiating hard and cluster switches in paediatric samples.

Performance evaluation of introducing group technology into machining industry with data envelopment analysis

Because of abundant manpower, easy acquisition of land resources, large markets, and rapidly development of demands, fluency, rapidness, and mass production were the keys in the layout pattern and process design of factories established by early China enterprises. Following the economic take-off, increasing civil consumption power, and rising labor awareness, enterprises faced the pressure of increasing costs. Moreover, the prevalence of economy of scale, the fierce homogeneous competition, and the mainstream awareness of personalized consumption habits further transformed goods into the production trend of small-volume production of a wide range of different items. With the similarity between production process and product design, manufacturing systems in group technology were divided into several manufacturing cells, and the machines producing the same product series were gathered to form a “cell”. Such a manufacturing process and layout pattern was called “cellular manufacturing”. The application of Envelope Method in this study expects to introduce the optimal model of group technology for the rest manufacturers improving the process efficiency.Based on 2013 Chinese Association of Machinery Industry manufacturer list and the manufacturers’ prospectuses and annual reports, this study combines Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Slack Variable Analysis to measure the total efficiency (TE), pure technical efficiency (PTE), and scale efficiency (SE) of machining industry in China introducing group technology for the reference of manufacturers subsequently introducing group technology. The empirical result reveals that KEYARROW (China) Co., Ltd., as the most efficient sector, shows the overall production efficiency 1, while the rest companies reveal low overall production efficiency, especially Tai Shyang Co., Ltd. appears the lowest overall efficiency to be relatively the most inefficient sector. In other words, in addition to the DMU with the relative overall production efficiency 1, the rest 12 DMUs are relatively inefficient sectors.

АУДІОВІЗУАЛЬНА СКЛАДОВА В ЦИКЛІ ФОРМУВАННЯ ІНШОМОВНОЇ КОМУНІКАТИВНОЇ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТІ У МОНОЛОГІЧНОМУ МОВЛЕННІ СТУДЕНТІВ НЕМОВНИХ СПЕЦІАЛЬНОСТЕЙ НА ЗАСАДАХ ІМПЛІЦИТНОЇ ПРОФЕСІЙНОЇ ОРІЄНТАЦІЇ

Background: Video is an audio-visual medium, with the sound and vision being separate components or played together. On the strength of these two modes of video application methodologists distinguish between two basic approaches: 1) manip­ulative prognostic strategy and 2) integrated audio and video combined strategy. The former fosters students’ ability to predict developments in the video content in prospect or retrospect and produce utterances on the basis of what the learners have seen or heard. But the latter strategy is of more communicative value as it presents complete communicative situations with verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication in the real world. Purpose. The purpose of our research is to devise audiovisual implicit specializing with the view to developing integrated socio-cultural and professionally oriented communicative foreign language competence of non-linguistic students at the prima­ry stage of higher education on the basis of integrated audio and video combined strategy. Results. The implementation of audiovisual component implies: 1) meeting the requirements of the National Curriculum for Universities in English for Specific Purposes (ESP); 2) using video for implicit specializing; 3) following successive stages of gradual speech skills development; 4) employing collective interaction patterns. Guided by the Curriculum, we selected videos with typical communicative situations in the areas of economy and tourism. Though covering communication in non-professional spheres, these videos contain quite a number of lexical units that can be employed to develop integrated socio-cultural and professionally oriented communicative foreign language competence at the primary stage of higher education. We also devised successive stages of gradual speech skills development with video and proposed exercises based on role play and collective interaction patterns. Discussion. If compared with implicit specializing on the basis of printed materials audiovisual implicit specializing has a number of advantages. Audiovisual component: - increases the number of lexical units memorized by students twice; - provides the articulation patterns for lexical units of economic and tourist registers to be perceived and followed by stu­dents; - promotes the development of speech fluency at the stage of synchronized reproductive speaking while viewing the video with the sound off; - imparts dynamic character to communicative exercises.

Effects of In-class Extensive Reading on Reading Fluency Development

Effects of In-class Extensive Reading on Reading Fluency Development

The role of input in second language oral ability development in foreign language classrooms: A longitudinal study

The current project longitudinally investigated the extent to which first-year Japanese university students developed their second language (L2) oral ability in relation to increased input in foreign language classrooms. Their spontaneous speech was elicited at the beginning, middle and end of one academic year, and then judged by linguistically trained coders for pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary and grammar qualities. According to the statistical analyses, the total amount of input (operationalized as number of English classes taken and L2 use outside of classrooms) was significantly related to the participants’ quick and immediate development of fluency and lexicogrammar during the first semester. Their pronunciation development was mixed, either subject to continuous change over two academic semesters (for prosody) or limited within the timeframe of the study (for segmentals). Similar to naturalistic L2 speech learning, the findings support the multifaceted role of input in different areas of oral proficiency development in foreign language classrooms.

DEVELOPMENT OF COMPLEXITY, ACCURACY, AND FLUENCY IN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ WRITTEN FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION

The present study aims to longitudinally depict the dynamic and interactive development of Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF) in multilingual learners’ L2 and L3 writing. The data sources include free writing tasks written in L2 French and L3 English by 45 high school participants over a period of four semesters. CAF dimensions are measured using a variation of Hunt’s T-units (1964). Analysis ofthe quantitative data obtained suggests that CAF measures develop differently for learners’ L2 French and L3 English. They increase more persistently in L3 English, and they display the characteristics of a dynamic, non-linear system characterized by ups and downs particularly in L2 French. In light of the results, we suggest more and denser longitudinal data to explore the nature of interactions between these dimensions in foreign language development, particularly at the individual level.Keywords: CAF, proficiency, interaction.

The assessment of Bosnian EFL learners’ knowledge by two different measures: test and writing assignment

Abstract English is taught as a foreign language in elementary and high schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH). However, since the number of English classes per week is very limited they should be utilized in the best possible way to produce proficient users of English. Nowadays, when language proficiency is viewed as one’s ability to speak and write in the target language and not about it, the need for the proficiency evaluation in schools arises. The present study attempts to shed a spot of light on this issue, investigating two very common ways of assessing students’ knowledge in schools, namely tests and writing assignments. Hence, through the interviews with English teachers and the analysis of students’ tests and writing assignments, the current paper explores the ways in which these two measures are realized, the tasks they consist of, the type of linguistic knowledge they are used to evaluate, their levels of difficulty, and the type of corrective feedback teachers provide on both of them. The results suggest that teachers on both measure rather students’ explicit than their implicit knowledge, focusing much more on accuracy than fluency development.

Investigating Patterns of Errors for Specific Comprehension and Fluency Difficulties

Although word reading has traditionally been viewed as a foundational skill for development of reading fluency and comprehension, some children demonstrate “specific” reading comprehension problems, in the context of intact word reading. The purpose of this study was to identify specific patterns of errors associated with reading profiles—basic reading difficulties (BRD), reading fluency difficulties (RFD), reading comprehension difficulties (RCD), and typical readers (total n = 821). Results indicated significant differences between the groups on most error factors. Post hoc analyses indicated there were no significant differences between the RFD and RCD groups, but these groups demonstrated different patterns of significant weakness relative to typical readers. The RFD group was weaker in spelling and oral expression whereas the RCD group demonstrated difficulties in writing mechanics and listening comprehension. These findings indicate that comprehension deficits cannot be attributed only to fluency difficulties and that specific reading difficulties may translate to other aspects of achievement.