| Oral fluency is one of the most important and explicit indices to measure theexpressive ability, and the development of oral fluency is a concern in secondlanguage acquisition research in recent years.The thesis mainly adopts Levelt’s model of speech production and Kormos’smodel of second language production, to investigate the development of the oralfluency of English majors through one and a half year in university. The study utilizestwo categories of fluency indices which include fluency and expressiveness to make aquantitative analysis through three tests in one and half a years. Then, the subjects’oral fluency development is analyzed qualitatively by two aspects, i.e., pause andcontents. At last, the developmental trend is illustrated from the perspective of speechproduction.Nine English majors from a university in Jiangxi Province are chosen in thisstudy. The content of the tests integrates the oral tests in TOEFL, IELTS and TEM4,and the subjects’ oral production are recorded by a digital voice recorder, then the oralproduction were transformed into written form. At last, ANOVA in SPSS17.0isadopted to analyze the improvement of oral English by8fluency indices.Through the comparison of each test, there are some major findings:(1)In termsof temporal indices, the oral production in the second or third test is greatly improvedin the aspects of speaking rate, phonation/time ratio, articulation rate and averagelength of pause. We find the subjects are more efficient to plan their utterances, andthe expression become more fluent;(2) In terms of performing indices, it showsobvious significance in the aspects of Repairs per100syllables and Ratio of prunedlength. It indicated that the subjects’ procedural ability was strengthened, and the loadof dealing with the speech production was exacerbated.The findings reveal the process of L2oral fluency development, and cause someimplications on oral English teaching. Teachers should think high of the practice oforal production and cultivate students’ ability of using lexicon, in order to reduce thetime of picking up utterances. Besides, it’s also necessary for students to expandscope of knowledge, in order to express themselves in English as much as possible,then improve the quality of oral production. |
