Fluency development in the ESL classroom: The impact of immediate task repetition and procedural repetition on learners’ oral fluency

When they have the opportunity to repeat a pedagogic task, learners speak with a higher degree of fluency during the second or subsequent performance. The impact of repetition on learners’ fluency on entirely new tasks, however, is less clear. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of two inherently repetitive pedagogic task sequences on short-term fluency and also the extent to which any increased fluency in the short-term was maintained on a new task (i.e. a ‘transfer effect’). One of these task sequences involved repetition of the same task (TR) and the other engaged learners in repeating the task procedure but with new content (PR). 64 ESL students were divided among three groups: Task Repetition (TR), Procedural Repetition (PR), and Control (C). Participants in all three groups were recorded speaking during a pre- and post-test stage. In addition, the two experimental groups (TR and PR) took part in a training session between pre- and post-test which was also audio-recorded. For the TR group, the session involved performing a narrative task three times. For the PR group, the session required learners to perform three different narrative tasks of the same type (i.e. picture narrative). Participants’ oral performances were analysed in terms of a range of fluency measures, representing different aspects of fluency (i.e. speed, breakdown, repair) at pre-test and post-test and also during the training session (i.e. all three performances for both experimental groups). The findings revealed that oral fluency increased during the training session only for the TR group and between pre- and post-test only for the PR group relative to the control. These findings are explained in terms of the different sorts of ‘practice’ which the two task sequences provide and the different ways they impact upon the speech production process. The methodological and pedagogic implications of the study’s findings are also discussed.