The Effects of Pre-task Planning Activities on Fluency in Group Discussions

There are a variety of methods used by EDC instructors with the goal of preparing students to actively participate in group discussions. However, due to the nature of individual differences in language learning, and the changing moods and motivations of learners, instructors must find a variety of means to help prepare classes to have successful discussions. One sign of a successful discussion is the absence of unusually long silences (inter-turn gaps). This reflective paper focuses on the use of several different pre-task planning (PTP) activities for one class in particular, and the effects these preparation methods have on student performance in group discussions: primarily the frequency and length of silences. Theories within the areas of sociolinguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) are referenced in an attempt to better understand the usefulness of PTP in promoting learners to develop more fluent L2 discussions. INTRODUCTION This project was started after an initial observation of one particular group (hereby referred to as Class A) in which every week, students consistently encountered instances of silence in their group discussions of three to four members. This was seen as a unique problem and uncommon compared to the progress of the other twelve classes taught in the Fall 2013 semester. An instructor might expect a lower level class to have more instances of silence in group discussions because of limited L2 proficiency, or a lack of understanding the instructions or task, but this was not the case for the Class A. All eight students showed positive signs of comprehension during instructor led explanations and presentations, and had no trouble starting activities once prompted. The problem of silence for this group occurred when the floor was open for any of the group members to speak, not when the speaker took an extended amount of time to think of how to explain his or her ideas. Class A’s silences are considered unusually lengthy for a fluent discussion based on Sacks et al. (1974)’s findings that highly proficient speakers will tend to have very short gaps between one speaking turn to the next, measureable by less than a second. Although in a first language (L1), turns are usually smooth and more automated with minimal gaps, in a second language (L2), limited linguistic and interactional competence hinder this natural fluency (Levinson, 1983). Current research has looked at the ways in which a student’s L2 can be developed, distinguishing three aspects of L2 performance: fluency, accuracy, and complexity (Foster and Skehan, 1996; Skehan and Foster, 1997; Skehan, 1998). Skehan (1998) defines the three dimensions of language production as; accuracy (how closely the L2 language produced conforms to target language norms), complexity (the use of interlanguage forms that are complex and structured), and fluency (the speaker’s ability to produce language in real time). For the context of this paper, L2 learner fluency will be the primary focus, omitting the dimensions of accuracy and complexity. More specifically, fluency will be considered the amount silence in group discussions (i.e. the more silence, the less fluent the discussion). The two main areas of research used in this study are inter-turn gaps and pre-task planning (PTP) activities. Inter-turn gaps (Ryoo, 2011) is a fairly recent term adapted from Levinson (1983)’s attributable silence referring to any unusually lengthy silences between speaking turns. These speaking turns could be from one speaker to the next, or when one speaker continues his or her turn after no other member takes the floor. These inter-turn gaps often CS3校_[FINAL] New Directions in Teaching and Learning English Discussion_merged. pdf 14/04/14 15:58 128 ( )