EFL Speaking Fluency through Authentic Oral Production

Abstract

This article describes the development of speaking fluency through authentic oral production in a six-week action research study of a public high school in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The methodology included a pre-test and a post-test that measured quantitative aspects of student’s spoken fluency (speed, pauses, repetitions, and corrections), a survey with closed-ended questions that collected learners’ perspectives towards their own speaking fluency, and an interview that addressed students’ opinions towards the elements of this action research. Twenty-four students’ audio recordings were analyzed and the results indicated that there was a significant increase of students’ speaking fluency. Results also showed that student’s perspectives on the innovation were positive since it raised awareness of their mistakes, helped them feel more confident, and let them practice the target language with autonomy outside the school boundaries. However, some considered that time and the lack of equipment and technological skills were issues that made the activity look less pleasant. This paper affirms that authentic oral production, facilitated by vlogging, helps students develop speaking fluency. Other EFL teachers and professionals in this field who would like to improve the fluency of their students in their oral production may consider reading this paper.

Video-Based Tasks in Strengthening Speaking Skills of EFL College Students

“…Video as an interactive media enables learners to achieve English fluency. This idea is supported by findings conducted by (Lopez et al, 2021;Putri & Rahmani, 2019), who claimed that video is the ideal platform for fostering fluency and speaking accuracy. Respondents utilized these video-based tasks to reflect on their speaking accuracy and fluency errors, including utterance speed, tone, stress, pauses, repetitions, and corrections.…”

Effectiveness of a Proposed Program Integrating MALL & Reciprocal Listening to Podcasts in Fostering EFL Faculty of Biotechnology Students’ HOTS, Vocabulary Acquisition and Speaking Fluency

“…In their study, Kana'an and Ahlullahsiddiqui (2021) promoted Saudi English majors' speaking fluency through the incidental learning of vocabulary as the students read varied written texts. On their part, Lopez, Becerra and Avila (2021) found that encouraging Ecuadorian senior high school students to record and post their own created videos on YouTube fostered their speaking fluency; they, also, found that most of their study participants had positive attitudes towards such an instructional procedure. Specifically, creating and posting these YouTube videos increased their normal speech rate as well as reduced their pauses, repetitions and corrections.…”

Embodied modes in L2 French video reflections: Supporting metalinguistic awareness, organization, and community

“…These studies have elucidated the benefits of multimodal composing for language learners’ multilingual identity development (Anderson & Macleroy, 2017; Kim, 2018; Kumagai et al, 2015) and learning of course content (Goulah, 2017; Yi, 2014). For example, creating L2 English vlogs helped high school students in Ecuador to augment their metalinguistic awareness (Lopez et al, 2021), or “the ability to distance oneself from the content of speech to reflect upon and manipulate the structure of language” (Altman et al, 2018, p. 3). In the study abroad context, multimodal composing through video reflections has also been found to promote metalinguistic awareness by encouraging learners of French to engage in practices of language rehearsal, language repair, and reflection on linguistic goals (Amgott, 2020).…”