Browsing by Subject "L2 spoken interaction"

This study examines the frequency and duration of switching pauses (pauses between speaker turns) in relationship to interaction and fluency grades on a high-stakes paired speaking test for English students in upper secondary school in Finland. Six paired conversations from the national elective spoken English course ENA8 were taken from FUSE, the Finnish Upper Secondary School Corpus of Spoken English. The switching pauses of the L2 (second language) English conversations were measured by frequency and duration using the “speech analysis in phonetics” software program Praat in order to investigate how significantly the frequency and duration of switching pauses differ according to the breakdown of the upper secondary school students’ assigned interaction and fluency grades. While pause frequency and duration are established metrics for helping determine the level of individual speech fluency, far less research has addressed the impact of pausing on a speaker’s perceived interactional fluency level: the contextualized property of the joint production, i.e. interaction, of the participants of any conversation. Due to the paucity of research on interactional fluency, this thesis aims to contribute to FUSE, and by extension, VÄISKI, Suullisen kielitaidon opetuksen kehittämishanke, a “Development Project for Teaching Oral Skills.” An important aspect of teaching is assessment, and accurately assessing paired speaking tests is the most difficult aspect of implementing them due to the spontaneous nature of the output such tests are intended to produce. From the perspective of assessment, the results of this study show that the frequency of switching pauses impacted students’ interaction and fluency scores more consistently than the duration of switching pauses. The twelve students’ mean frequency of switching pauses per minute was 9. The mean duration of shared switching pauses per minute (including within-turn pauses) for all students was 2.41 seconds, with a mean average of .33 seconds per switching pause. The prevalence of matching fluency and interaction scores between speaking partners might confirm the need for further assessment guidance to teachers who grade paired speaking tests.