Kurtis McDonald
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Task-Based LearningJapanese university students’ interactive English speaking development more
Sat, Jul 9, 11:45-12:10 Asia/Tokyo
This longitudinal, mixed methods research study explored the development of interactive L2 English speaking abilities of 92 first-year Japanese university students in order to determine what progress was made, how that progress could be attributed to the changing relationships among the facets of speaking ability investigated, and how much influence a few key social and individual differences were found to exert on the overall trajectories identified. Over two 15-week semesters, participants completed a series of ten 10-minute group discussion tasks using the same pre- and post-task procedures. The performances were rated using established criteria dedicated to complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) as well as interactional engagement and overall communicative effectiveness. Self-rated questionnaire measures of topic difficulty and group member familiarity were also collected, as were personality and self-efficacy measures and scores from the TOEIC test. The results indicated small but significant improvements in the participants’ mean interactive English speaking abilities across each term and the entire academic year, accounting for relatively large amounts of the variance in the measures predicted by the social and individual difference factors. Inspection of the five rating scale dimensions revealed relatively strong relationships amongst them all as well as evidence of connected growth over time.