Oral Production Skills Research Articles

The Enhancing French Oral Production Skills Through Digital Media: The Effectiveness of the 'French School TV' YouTube Channel in Secondary Education

This study investigates the effectiveness of the "French School TV" YouTube channel in enhancing the oral production skills of secondary school students learning French at MAS YASPI Medan. Employing a pre-experimental design, 26 students from class X Agama were subjected to a pre-test to assess their initial proficiency in introducing themselves in French. The intervention involved the use of YouTube videos from the "French School TV" channel over two sessions, focusing on self-introduction skills. A post-test was conducted to evaluate the improvement in students' oral production skills. The results demonstrated a significant improvement in the students' performance, with the average score rising from 26.92 in the pre-test to 84.58 in the post-test. Statistical analyses, including the Shapiro-Wilk normality test and paired sample t-test, confirmed the normal distribution of data and the significant difference between pre-test and post-test scores (p-value = 0.000). The N-Gain analysis further validated the intervention's effectiveness, with an average N-Gain score of 0.85, categorizing it as "highly effective." These findings suggest that integrating digital media, specifically YouTube, into the language curriculum can significantly enhance student engagement and learning outcomes. The study highlights the need for modern teaching tools and adequate teacher training to maximize the benefits of digital resources. While the results are promising, further research with larger and more diverse samples is recommended to validate these findings and explore the long-term effects of digital media on various aspects of language learning. The present study implies that the "French School TV" YouTube channel is a highly effective tool for improving the oral production skills of students learning French, offering valuable insights for educators, policymakers, and researchers in the field of language education.

Understanding Communication Barriers: Demographic Variables and Language Needs in the Interaction between English-Speaking Animal Professionals and Spanish-Speaking Animal Caretakers.

This study focused on assessing the language needs of English-speaking animal professionals in their interactions with Hispanic/Spanish-speaking animal caretakers. A survey was administered to a target audience of non-Spanish speaking and bilingual animal professionals to identify communication gaps while interacting with Hispanic/Spanish-speaking animal caretakers. The data was analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics, including ordinal regression analyses to examine the impact of demographic variables on respondents' answer choices. The results showed that English-speaking professionals struggled with written and oral communication, which differed compared to bilingual professionals (p < 0.05). Additionally, responses of female professionals varied regarding the aspects of Spanish necessary for interacting with Hispanic/Spanish-speaking animal caretakers, as well as the topics likely to be addressed when agriculture professionals communicate with animal caretakers (p < 0.05). Communication difficulties in the oral medium for both oral receptive skills (listening) and oral productive skills (speaking) were reported as the major barriers that animal professionals need to overcome in their attempt to communicate with the Hispanic/Spanish-speaking workforce in farm settings. This emphasizes the need to address oral communication barriers, and to a lesser degree, the development of reading and writing skills. The topics: typical clinical signs of illness, euthanasia, treatment-drugs, and identification of sick or injured animals were identified as the most likely to be addressed during on-farm interactions. These findings indicate that there are gaps in communication that need to be overcome to improve communication with on-farm Hispanic/Spanish-speaking animal caretakers and consequently contribute to enhancing animal health, welfare, and production.

Enhancing Oral Production in Integrated English Blended Teaching through a Production-Oriented Approach: An Action Research Study

A huge theory-practice gap is reflected in very limited previous research on a Production- Oriented Approach (POA) in tertiary education. Based on POA and Blended Learning theory, both qualitative and quantitative methods, including questionnaires, classroom observation, and interviews, were used to collect data during and after each round of action research, aiming at bridging the gap between theory and practice, exploring building an Integrated English blended teaching model with POA theory as a guide in planning-acting-observing-reflecting, summarizing the action plan, and improving the efficiency of oral production of integrated English blended teaching. Two rounds of action research were carried out in the Oral production of Integrated English blended classroom teaching, each containing 4 steps: problemsfocusing, plan-proposing, process-observing, and assessing &amp; reflection. In the second round, some improvements were practiced solving the problems that occurred in the first round, focusing more on application and assessment. Applying the Integrated English blended teaching model with POA theory proved that POA has a positive effect on improving the teaching effect and students’ evaluation of teaching activities, teaching models, personal learning evaluation, and teachers’ teaching evaluation, which may contribute to the understanding of the impact of technology on oral production in IEBT and provide practical insights for educators to effectively leverage technology for enhancing students’ oral production skills.

INTEGRATED SKILLS APPROACH

Most English teachers in Kazakhstan have been familiar with the notion of oral communication skills, receptive skills (readingand listening) and productive skills (speaking and writing). Yet, most of them have not realized thatintegrating oral communication, receptive and productive skills into an English lesson is important for their learners toachieve lesson aims. This paper, therefore, would like to address how to implement teaching stagescovering those skills for the integration purpose. For practical reasons, the writer will apply the stagesin a reading lesson. The teaching stages include eliciting ideas, highlighting lexis and their meanings, predicting text, ordering jumbled paragraphs, listening, reading comprehension, and acting out the story/speaking. By applying those stages, the writer expects theaudience to realize that integrating oral communication, receptive and productive skills into an English lesson is feasible andvaluable to measure whether or not the learners have achieved the lesson aims.

Music as a Medium of Instruction (MMI): A new pedagogical approach to English language teaching for students with and without music training

Recent research shows that musical training improves children’s development of oral and aural skills. This study focuses on developing and testing a methodological framework (Music as a Medium of instruction, MMI) in English language teaching (ELT) by contrasting MMI and gamification methodologies with the participation of 22 Spanish children all born in 2008. The differences in progression between participants with and without previous instrumental training are also discussed. Generalized linear model procedures were used for each outcome variable (listening comprehension and oral production skills) to investigate the effect of independent variables (MMI vs. gamification; students with music training vs. learners without music training). Results revealed that students of the MMI group had significantly higher scores than the gamification group in oral production. Significant improvement was traced in listening comprehension in the MMI group. This study provides promising initial evidence that the MMI approach can be at least as beneficial as gamification-based approaches for young learners in the ELT classroom. However, results need to be established on firmer grounds, for instance by using fully randomized experimental designs and by conducting mediation analyses.

TED Talks for Developing (EFL) Oral Production Skills of Secondary School Students

TED Talks for Developing (EFL) Oral Production Skills of Secondary School Students

Improving Oral Production Skills in the Business English Class Through Creative Dubbing

Improving Oral Production Skills in the Business English Class Through Creative Dubbing

Oral production skills and pronunciation improvement in MOOCs for migrants and refugees: an unavoidable challenge

This article is focused on the challenges posed by the development of oral production skills (speaking, pronunciation) in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a resource that is totally conditioned by the technologies and has very limited posibilities for individual adaptation. First of all, the difficulties that this goal poses are reviewed and confronted with some successful precedents that show how to deal with those challenges. Next, we present a case study in which some strategies and resources have been used to develop oral skills and improve pronunciation in technologically mediated environments, an Spanish L-MOOC for migrants and refugees, absolute beginners, developed at UNED (Spain).

Oral and Verbal Praxis in Impaired Language Learners.

In the context of language descriptions, the terms oral and verbal praxis refer to volitional movements for performing oral gestures and movements for speech. These movements involve programming articulators and rapid sequences of muscle firings that are required for speech sound productions. A growing body of research has highlighted the links between oral motor kinematics and language production skills in both typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental language disorders, including Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Yet, there have been limited attempts to assess the link between non-linguistic and linguistic development. In the present study, we investigated oral and verbal praxis behaviors in children with SLI. Fifteen children with SLI formed a clinical group and 15 children with typical development who were matched to the clinical group for chronological age, gender, and socio-economic status formed the TD group. We assessed participants in both groups for their language abilities with age-appropriate standardized language tests. To investigate oral and verbal praxis behaviors, we administered the Assessment Protocol for Oral Motor, Oral Praxis and Verbal Praxis Skills to the two groups. We used the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test to compare the two groups with respect to oral and verbal praxis measures; and we found a significant difference between isolated and sequential movements in the oral praxis section in two age subgroups of these groups (p ≤ .05). Spearman's correlations revealed a strong correlation between core language scores and sequential movements in the younger children with SLI and in TD children. These results showed co-morbidity between SLI and poor oral motor skills, suggesting that SLI is not just a language disorder, but a group of co-morbid conditions that include oral motor and verbal praxis difficulties.

Developing speaking skills and learning pronunciation with new technologies in the French as a foreign language classroom

This study examines the role that new technologies, social media and telecollaborative projects have played in the development of oral production skills, as well as in learning and correction in pronunciation. During the period 2005 to 2015 several experiments were conducted for this purpose as part of a French language course at the University of León, Spain. We sought to examine the characteristics and modalities of different oral productions from students, as well as ICT tools and teaching tasks which led to the creation of audiovisual recordings published in a number of educational web environments (weblogs, podcasts, social networks, education platforms). We looked also at the role which students, tutors and teachers play in the correction of pronunciation, taking into consideration the feedback strategies that have been observed in their interaction, with particular focus on autocorrective feedback such as in collaborative pronunciation tasks corrected by the students. We have also attempted to gauge the reactions of students to the use of these tools, learning environments and pronunciation tasks, by undertaking three surveys which focus on their pronunciation and ICT skills in the context of French as a Foreign Language.

Integrating Drama With Language and Content to Enhance Students' English Oral Production Skills

This study aimed at investigating the effect of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and drama on developing 7th graders’ English oral production skills. The sample of the study was (80) 7th graders (divided into two equal groups) from D/Balah preparatory school in Gaza Strip. The researcher used an oral production skills test as the tool of the study. The findings revealed that the suggested program based on CLIL and Drama was effective to improve 7th graders’ oral production skills.

Pronunciation Can Be Acquired Outside the Classroom: Design and Assessment of Homework‐Based Training

AbstractEven though there is ample evidence that pronunciation plays a crucial role in effective second language (L2) communication, pronunciation training is frequently neglected in L2 classrooms due to time constraints or because instructors do not feel adequately prepared to teach pronunciation. To address this discrepancy, the present study investigates the effectiveness of a novel, homework‐based method of pronunciation instruction. Novice German learners’ (N = 122) perception and oral production skills on the word and sentence level were assessed at the beginning and the end of the semester. Learners were assigned to 1 of 3 groups: a homework‐based pronunciation training group, an in‐class training group, and a control group. The results showed that the learners in the homework training group significantly outperformed learners in the control group on some (but not all) measures of phonological perception skills and on comprehensibility measures of productions of individual words. Results further revealed no significant difference between learners who received homework‐based or in‐class pronunciation training and responses on a debriefing questionnaire showed that learners were equally satisfied with both training modalities. Taken together, these results suggest that homework‐based pronunciation training is similarly effective as in‐class practice.

Phonological short-term memory capacity and L2 oral performance

AbstractPhonological short-term memory (PSTM) capacity is the ability to retain verbal information briefly (Archibald &amp; Gathercole, 2006). Since PSTM facilitates the storage of verbal material, one expects a positive relationship between PSTM and several aspects of second language (L2) learning. Some studies have found a relationship between PSTM and oral production skills, such as fluency (e.g.,O’Brien et al., 2006). This paper reports on the results of a study that looked at the inter-relations between complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF), and between these dimensions and PSTM. One hundred and thirty-five L2 learners of Spanish participated in the study. Results showed that performance in one L2 speech dimension did not have a negative impact on performance in another dimension, but that as complexity increased or decreased, there was a better chance of fluency than accuracy also increasing or decreasing. PSTM capacity was related to complexity and fluency, but not to accuracy. These results were interpreted as lending some support to Skehan’s Trade-off Hypothesis (Skehan, 2009).

THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE E IMMERSIVE IN ENHANCING STUDENTS’ EFL SPEAKING ABILITY

This study investigates the effectiveness of students’ EFL speaking ability, using the E Immersive through yutube . It aims to explore whether e immersive effective in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context is more effective on the students’ speech development as a teaching approach. A quasi experimental design was employed for the study. The participants were 40 students of English department of STKIP PGRI Jombang who were taking Speaking class in their fourth semester at STKIP PGRI Jombang. The quantitative data were taken from students’ speaking test. The research finding revealed that the students’ achievement of experimental group in speaking ability is higher than control group and the students responses showed that they had almost positive response in taking the speaking class by employing immersive multimedia which reduced the use of code-switching strategies by the students and enabled them to develop oral production skills in English It implied that E immersive learning is effective to be implemented in speaking class.

IDub - El potencial del doblaje intralingual en el aprendizaje de idiomas extranjeros: cómo evaluar la tarea

Author/s&#x0D; Noa TalavánTomás CostalUniversidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain&#x0D; &#x0D; ABSTRACT&#x0D; Research on the use of active dubbing activities in foreign language learning is gaining an increasing amount of attention. The most obvious skill to be enhanced in this context is oral production and a few authors have already mentioned the potential benefits of asking students to record their voices in a ‘semi-professional’ manner. The present project attempts to assess the potential of intralingual dubbing (English-English) to develop general oral production skills in adult university students of English B2 level in an online learning environment, and to provide general guidelines of dubbing task assessment for practitioners. To this end, a group of undergraduate pre-intermediate students worked on ten sequenced activities using short videos taken from an American sitcom over a period of two months. The research study included language assessment tests, questionnaires and observation as the basic data gathering tools to make the results as reliable and thorough as possible for this type of educational setting. The conclusions provide a good starting point for the establishment of basic guidelines that may help teachers implement dubbing tasks in the language class.

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ОРГАНІЗАЦІЇ ПРОЦЕСУ НАВЧАННЯ МОНОЛОГІЧНОГО МОВЛЕННЯ СТУДЕНТІВ СПЕЦІАЛЬНОСТІ «ПРАВО» НА ЗАСАДАХ ДИФЕРЕНЦІЙОВАНОГО ПІДХОДУ

Background: Among numerous issues of differentiated teaching, the problem of building competence in oral monologic production in Law students – considering the level of independence and knowledge of students – has not been studied in depth yet. This causes difficulties for providing qualitative foreign language (FL) education to Law majors who have not attained the appropriate level in FL communicative competence in conditions of homogenous training groups. Purpose. The article aims to prove the effectiveness of the system of exercises and tasks designed to enhance English monologic production skills in Law students based on differentiated approach with regard to individual and psychological characteristics of learners, their cognitive needs, communicative abilities, motivation, independence, professional mindset and professional activity. Results. The system of exercises and tasks for building the competence under discussion requires specification of phases in the teaching process. Therefore, the author presents a three-phase process for teaching English oral monologic production to law students. The phases involve pre-text, text-reproductive and productive stages of developing monologic skills. Discussion. The process of teaching is organized in four stages: diagnostic, planning, teaching and final. The diagnostic stage is designed to measure the level of students’ knowledge and independence with a view of differentiating the groups of learners. The planning stage aims at developing educational content and materials as well as correlating them with the level of students’ knowledge and independence. The teaching stage involves instruction based on implementation of the system of exercises and tasks which were designed to purposefully address oral monologic production skills in the classroom. The final stage focuses on observing the dynamics in students’ monologic performance and independence as well as on rearranging training groups based on students’ performance level.

The Oral Narrative Comprehension and Production Abilities of Verbal Preschoolers on the Autism Spectrum.

This study described the oral narrative comprehension and production skills of verbal preschool-age children on the autism spectrum and investigated correlations between oral narrative ability and norm-referenced language test performance. Twenty-nine preschool-age children (aged 4;0-5;9 years;months) with autism, who obtained an age-equivalent score of at least 36 months on the expressive communication subscale of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-Second Edition (Sparrow, Cicchetti, & Balla, 2005), participated. Children listened to an unfamiliar fictional narrative and answered comprehension questions afterward. After listening to the narrative a second time, children were asked to retell the narrative without picture support. Narratives were transcribed and analyzed for length, semantic diversity, grammatical complexity and accuracy, intelligibility, inclusion of critical events, and narrative stage. All children participated in the comprehension task, and 19 children produced an analyzable narrative retell. Compared with published data on typically developing children, significant difficulties were observed in narrative comprehension, intelligibility, and grammatical accuracy. Most of the children told descriptive or action sequences, with only 1 child producing an abbreviated episode. Significant positive correlations were found (a) between performance on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Fourth Edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) and semantic diversity and narrative comprehension and (b) between parent-reported receptive communication competence (Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-Second Edition) and narrative comprehension. This study provides preliminary evidence of specific difficulties in oral narrative comprehension and production skills in verbal preschoolers on the autism spectrum.

The effects of CLIL on oral comprehension and production: a longitudinal case study

ABSTRACTThis article reports on the outcomes of a longitudinal case study to gauge the impact of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) on two of the least researched language skills: oral comprehension and production. It worked with 24 students in the fourth grade of Compulsory Secondary Education in a public school in Andalusia (southern Spain) over the course of a year and a half in order to measure the impact of CLIL on oral comprehension and production skills after a one-year intervention programme (post-test) and to determine whether its effects pervade after a six-month period (second post-test), when these same students are in Baccalaureate. The results reveal that, contrary to what has traditionally been sustained in bilingual education, it was productive, as opposed to receptive, oral skills which were more positively affected by CLIL in the medium- and long term. The outcomes also provide interesting data on what aspects of oral competence are particularly amenable to being taught through CLIL (e.g. more cognitively complex listening activities) and which need to de developed over a longer time span in order to be significantly improved (e.g. pronunciation and fluency).

Designing a digital pedagogical pattern for improving foreign language learners’ oral proficiency

South African undergraduate foreign language students need more opportunity to practise their oral language skills. Not only do appeals to focus more on oral productive skills feature in scholarly literature (Delena-le Roux 2010), it is also one of the main conclusions from a survey among beginner students of French at the Potchefstroom Campus of North-West University (South Africa). It was therefore necessary to design a teaching and learning intervention, specifically aimed at improving beginner students’ oral communication skills in French. Laurillard’s (2012) Conversational Framework inspired the design of a digital pedagogical pattern (DPP), consisting of context and pedagogy descriptors for the development of foreign language learners’ oral communication skills. The Conversational Framework analyses formal learning and challenges the use of new technologies in learning. The implementation process of a DPP for the development of students’ (French) oral skills involved three cycles, each with specific outcomes and three groups of participants: the control group and two experimental groups. Field-testing the proposed DPP provided important insights which should be integrated in the design of subsequent digital pedagogical patterns in the specific context: limiting the participant groups to two; decreasing the number of interventions to be implemented in the limited teaching time of a semester; ensuring that each step adheres to the requirements of the Conversational Framework. Student results from the learning interventions in future studies should reveal which intervention better promotes oral communication skills.

Lexical difficulty – using elicited imitation to study child L2

This paper reports a post-hoc analysis of the influence of lexical difficulty of cue sentences on performance in an elicited imitation (EI) task to assess oral production skills for 645 child L2 English learners in instructional settings. This formed part of a large-scale investigation into effectiveness of foreign language teaching in Polish primary schools. EI item design and scoring, IRT and post-hoc lexical analysis of items is described in detail. The research aim was to resolve how much the lexical complexity of items (lexical density, morphological complexity, function word density, and sentence length) contributed to item difficulty and scores. Sentence length, as number of words, predicted better than number of syllables. Function words also contributed, and their importance to EI item construction is discussed. It is suggested that future research should examine phonological aspects of cue sentences to explain potential sources for variability. EI is shown to be a reliable and robust method for young L2 learners with potential for classroom assessment by teachers for emergent oral production skills.