A Longitudinal Study of Low-Proficiency Learners’ English Oral Proficiency Development

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The primary purpose of this longitudinal study was to investigate the degree to which complexity, accuracy, lexis, and fluency developed under pre-task planning and on-line planning, which is defined as planning that occurs while learners are performing the task (R. Ellis, 2003), conditions involving task repetition, within a single session and throughout one academic year. Low-proficiency Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) (n = 15) performed an oral narration task three times within a single session and repeated similar narration tasks eight times during the academic year. The results showed that the learners’ syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, syntactic accuracy, and oral fluency increased by repeating the same task within a single session. Furthermore, their syntactic and lexical complexity also increased significantly by repeating the same type of task over the year; however, their oral fluency and syntactic accuracy did not increase throughout the year. These findings support the importance of pre-task planning, on-line planning, and task repetition for improving low-proficiency learners’ oral proficiency in EFL classrooms.

Journal

  • JACET Journal

    JACET Journal 68 (0), 27-52, 2024

    The Japan Association of College English Teachers

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