Chapter 2. Grammatical structures and oral fluency in immediate task repetition

Optimizing Fluency Training for Speaking Skills Transfer: Comparing the Effects of Blocked and Interleaved Task Repetition

“…Three prompts (bicycle, tiger, and race), each consisting of six‐panel picture stories, were used for the fluency training. They had been adopted from Heaton (1996) by de Jong and Vercellotti (2016) and de Jong and Tillman (2018) in their research on L2 oral production. All three picture stories and the guiding questions for them (available in the IRIS digital repository of data collection instruments, see Marsden, Mackey, & Plonsky, 2016) were adopted from their studies.…”

“…Each training session lasted about 30 minutes. Although authors of some previous studies have gradually imposed time pressure on repeated task performance using the 4/3/2 procedure (e.g., de Jong & Perfetti, 2011; de Jong & Tillman, 2018), the participants in the current study were allowed the same amount of time (i.e., 3 minutes) for each narration throughout the experiment. This schedule was adopted because imposing time pressure sometimes reduces the amount of repetition in subsequent performances (in part due to learners’ tendency to leave out information in order to meet the time requirements), which may lead to less ideal conditions for proceduralization (N. de Jong, personal communication, October 16, 2018).…”

“…Fourth, a more detailed performance analysis during training may highlight other differences between blocked and interleaved practice. For instance, repeated use of the same lexical and N‐grams across training (and indeed testing) performances might be examined (de Jong & Tillman, 2018; Tavakoli & Uchihara, 2020; Saito, 2020) because blocked practice may encourage the use of the same linguistic constructions and thus facilitate L2 proceduralization. According to usage‐based perspectives in L2 acquisition (e.g., Ellis & Wulff, 2015), linguistic constructions can range from phonological, lexical, to grammatical structures, with varying levels of abstraction (e.g., give it to George , give O to O, V+ O + to O).…”

Revisiting the Impact of 4/3/2 and 3/3/3 Tasks on Learners’ Speaking Performance and Development : A Learner’s Perspective

“…Despite its roles in facilitating the development of learners' speaking performance, there is considerable variability among these studies in terms of its effect on learners' development of fluency, syntactic complexity and accuracy (De Jong & Tillman, 2018). Thus, the present study examines and compares the impact of increasing time pressure (4/3/2 task) and same task repetition (3/3/3 task) to a learner's development of speaking fluency and accuracy.…”

The Effects of Task Repetition on Child EFL Learners’ Oral Performance

“…Turning to child populations, although some of the existing research has exclusively focused on procedural repetition (Pinter, 2005(Pinter, , 2007a(Pinter, , 2007bSample & Michel, 2014;de Jong & Tillman, 2018), several studies have looked into the impact of repeating a task with the same content on children's oral production. Van den Branden (1997) was among the first to observe children's repeated task performance.…”