Fluency Summer Intern Project

Purpose of the Project

The goal of the project is to gain further insight into the development of fluency, accuracy and complexity during fluency training, and the retention and transfer of that development to a delayed posttest. The fluency training is the 4/3/2 task, developed by Nation (1989), in which students prepare a four minute talk and repeat it twice: first in three minutes, then in two minutes.

Summary of Analyses

Data was collected under two different conditions. The first condition was that students would repeat their speech, developed from a prompt concerning a singular topic, on three occasions. The second condition was that students would be asked to address three different topics. Data consists of recordings from the 4/3/2 task, as well as from pre- and posttests. Articulation rate, morphology, syntax, mean length of utterance, and mean length of pauses will all be examined.

Research Questions

1. Does the repetition of the second and third telling of the subject's speech, in which new semantic information is not required, result in changes in fluency, morphosyntactic accuracy, and complexity?

2. What types of changes, if any, occur? What causes these changes?

3. Are the changes retained for atleast one week?