Longitudinal Study on Fluency Among Novice Learners of Japanese

Abstract

The present study examined various aspects of the development of learners' fluency in Japanese using a large set of speech samples collected over a long period, using an online speaking practice/assessment system called Speak Everywhere. The purpose of the present study was to examine: (1) how the fluency related measures changed over time, and (2) which linguistic factors were correlated with each fluency measure. This study used oral production of English-speaking learners enrolled in the first year Japanese courses at a university in the U.S. The students submitted two types of speaking assignments using Speak Everywhere: (1) sentence-level oral reading and (2) short Q&A. The assignments were collected at the end of each chapter for two quarters. The study used speech rate and pause related fluency measures adapted from Ginther, Dimova, and Yang (2010). For the data analysis, we used Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2011) for acoustic analysis and Mecab (Kudo, 2011) for morphological analysis. The results of one-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed that several measures of fluency deteriorated in both oral reading and Q&A tasks as expected from the previous research (Segalowitz & Freed, 2004). This study then examined what complexity factors affected these measures, using the mixed model approach. Overall, it was found that because various factors influence the development of fluency, temporal measures alone cannot explain fluency development.

Factors associated with improvement in oral fluency when using video‐synchronous mediated communication with native speakers

“…Second, reliable tools for the objective measurement of fluency are readily available and can be utilized across languages (Boersma & Weenink, ). Finally, in regard to measuring oral accuracy and complexity, a number of standards have been created for English (Thai & Boors, 2016) but the same cannot be said for Japanese, especially for Japanese FL learners (Hirotani, Matsumoto, & Fukuda, ). This study focused on the five metrics of fluency that were suggested by Boersma and Weenink () and Hirotani et al ().…”

“…Finally, in regard to measuring oral accuracy and complexity, a number of standards have been created for English (Thai & Boors, 2016) but the same cannot be said for Japanese, especially for Japanese FL learners (Hirotani, Matsumoto, & Fukuda, ). This study focused on the five metrics of fluency that were suggested by Boersma and Weenink () and Hirotani et al (). These factors have been successfully used to judge the fluency of FL learners of Japanese in previous studies (e.g., Hirotani et al, ; Matsushita, ) and include the number of syllables spoken, the number of pauses, the speech rate (number of syllables spoken per second), the articulation rate (number of syllables per phonation time), and the average syllable duration (ASD—speaking time per syllable).…”

The Development of L2 Japanese Self‐Introductions in an Asynchronous Computer‐Mediated Language Exchange

“…Although one might expect a task‐related practice effect with regard to fluency, the second self‐introductions were not mere repetitions of the first as they were substantially revised. Moreover, no study of L2 learners in formal classroom settings to date has found significant improvement in general spoken fluency in such a short timeframe (see, e.g., Hirotani, Matsumoto, & Fukada, ; Segalowitz & Freed, ).…”

Enhancing English as a Second Language Learners’ Speaking Skills through Authentic Videoconferencing

“…"The basic measures of fluency are the rates (in time) of the production of spoken linguistic units, like words per minute" (Bernstein et al, 2010(Bernstein et al, : p. 1241. Five metrics of fluency have been identified by Hirotani et al (2012) in their study to observe the fluency of learners studying Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) and these factors include the number of syllables spoken, the number of pauses, the speech rate number of syllables spoken per second, the articulation rate number of syllables per phonation time, and the Average Syllable Duration (ASD)-speaking time per syllable (Spring et al, 2019).…”