英语学习者口语产出停顿与语法错误相关性研究A Correlational Study of EFL Learners’ Pauses and Grammatical Errors in Oral Production开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述包含参考文献）

2.1 Literature review2.1 Fluency in oral productionThere are many views about oral English fluency of second language learners. Fluency is usually described as a label of communicative ability. Researchers and scholars define oral fluency in different ways and aspects. Some of them think if we evaluate ones oral fluency, we should pay attention to phonology, syntax and semantic rules of the language when immersing himself in certain language materials. And some believe oral fluency means the smoothness or flow when speaking quickly based on the combination of sounds, syllables, words and phrases. In this paper, the writer will list some of the definitions of oral fluency.Many researchers in L1 and L2 language learning field have attempted to define fluency of oral speech. Leeson (1975) gives fluency a definition in the first language field. He considered a fluent language master as one who has the ability to utter indefinitely many sentences that are pertaining to phonology, syntax and semantic rules of the language after being exposed to certain amount of those language materials. Harrell (2007) puts forward that fluency is a speech language pathology term that means the smoothness or flow with which sounds, syllables, words and phrases are joined together when speaking quickly. They define oral fluency in the aspects of sounds, syllables, words and phrases. And most of those aspects are about the time indices and both of these two scholars pay attention to the smooth production about the oral English but ignore the accuracy and the understanding among those people who are communicating with each other. If defining oral fluency, the content of the oral production and the communication between the two speakers should also be concerned. Guillot (1999) agrees that oral fluency is a measurement both of production andreception of speech, as a fluent speaker must be able to understand and respond to others in conversation. Crookes (1991) points out that with the help of cognitive psychology development, the study of SLA speech production has become a promising area of work. However, He also said that the study on oral fluency had been largely ignored. Both students and teachers attached much importance to fluency in second language learning but they could not fully understand it (Schmidt, 1992). Fillmore (1979) identified four different things as criteria for the judgment of a person as a fluent speaker. First, we might be thinking of a speaker who easily fills a period of time with spoken words(Kuiper Tillis, 1986). Secondly we might have more qualities of speech than quantities in mind and a fluent speaker is the one whose speech is coherent, complex, and dense. Thirdly, we might also consider someone to be especially fluent if he always seems to know the appropriate expressions to express in a wide variety of contexts, identifying fluency with pragmatic and affective skills. Finally, a fluent speaker may be one with the exceptional control of language over the aesthetical functions of language including creativity and imagination, punning, joking and the creation of metaphors and so on (Schmidt, 1992). In fact, he believes that differences on fluency lie in the different usage of language. His definition of fluency comes from the point of language production. He believes that fluency should be described as a rapid and effective processing ability when a speaker actually produces a sentence and focuses on interaction. Yu (2013) suggests that fluency affecting spoken English expression of spoken English is usually measured by time as the primary measure. The pause mentioned in this paper is a basic indicator of the time index. Pause studies have become a major point of interest in oral fluency research. "As an important time indicator of oral fluency measurement, the pause affects the speaker's fluency. Inappropriate pauses can lead to dismemberment of statement structure and confusion of language rules, thus affecting language understanding and communication ".2.2 Accuracy in oral productionIn recent years, although oral English has placed more emphasis on the purpose ofEnglish communication, the communication of oral English is still limited to the ability to communicate and express. There are no requirements for whether the language meets the rules and habits, which ignores the quality of its oral production. In addition, there is not enough training for college students oral English. Under the influence of the examination system, English teaching invests a lot of time in reading, writing and listening, which makesstudents' oral English communication meet certain difficulties. (Zhang, 2015).Grammatical errors are still considered the main factor in determining the degree of oral accuracy. Grammatical errors have a deep impact on oral communication. Structural errors can seriously affect the expression of English consciousness, while local errors will not have a direct impact on the oral communication process, but the enthusiasm and confidence of the communicators are affected to a certain extent. At present, the grammar errors of college students' oral English are widely distributed and widely involved. Due to improper practice and native language interference, college students' English language mastery can not reach the expected effect, among which the basic knowledge of grammar is the most obvious. Without sufficient oral English training, the improvement of their oral communication level has been directly affected (Cheng, 2011). Grammatical errors are still considered the main factor in determining the degree of oral accuracy. Students oral grammatical errors can be divided into nine categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, crowns, pronouns, semantic confusion and Chinese errors (Na Guo, 2013).2.3 Empirical studies of fluency and accuracy in oral productionIn the related studies, a considerable part focuses only on oral fluency. For example, Arevart and Nation (1991) and Nation (1989) have designed a 4 / 3 / 2 repeat oral practice method. The practitioner tells three different objects the same thing to three different objects. Each telling time was reduced from 4 to 3 minutes and then to 2 minutes. The results showed that several repetitions of the same practice material exceeded the usual performance in oral fluency. Nation (1989) and Arevart Nation (1991) applied this technique to classroom practice and research and showed a significant improvement in oral fluency in most subjects and that repeating several times was much better than repetition, so it can be said that "fluency is a skill acquired through training". 4 / 3 / 2 Teaching skills have three distinctive features: the continuous transformation of the listener role, the three repetitions of stories, and the time shortening.In teaching practice, these three characteristics are interdependent and indispensable. The constant transformation of the listener role ensures that the speaker's attention is always focused on the same story message. The speaker tries to tell it to three different listeners. Although the story message is repeated three times, the listener gets new information, thus eliminating the boredom of the listener and making them interested. Repeat the same story effectively improves the speaker's language fluency because the speaker tells the same story three times, ensuring that the speaker becomes more familiar with the content and form of the material told, thus improving the telling speed and fluency. The shortening of time, which is shortened from four minutes to 3 minutes to 2 minutes, not only forces the speaker to increase the speed of the story, but also restricts the speaker to add new content to three and 2 minutes of narration, which is particularly important because the increase of new content necessarily leads to a decrease in the story to be told. Three repeats of the same story can fully demonstrate the fluency and accuracy of the speaker's language expression.Some studies have also examined oral indicators other than fluency. In the case study of Bygate (1996), subjects were asked to retell a story and repeat it again three days later. The results showed that after repeated retelling, all the indicators of the language form had changed accordingly. Not only has fluency significantly improved, language accuracy is also greatly improved, vocabulary use is more diverse, and syntactic structure is more complex. Gass (1999) also used a story retelling form. Learners made great progress in the overall oral level, accuracy, syntax and vocabulary through three retelling of the same or different stories in about two weeks. The study also confirmed that the increased frequency of exercises could familiarize learners with the practice content, thus gradually shifting attention to the control language form. As shown by some experiments, Zhou (2005) believes that the oral English teaching should transcend the traditional single paradigm of listening and speaking binding, reasonably intervene in the visual input, make the listening and sound input and text reading input pay equal attention or alternately, make full use of the complementary effects of different input modes, and comprehensively improve the students' oral fluency, accuracy and complexity.There are also studies focusing on psychological aspects. Taylor (1976) proposes that a " within-phrase or within-sentence hesitant pause seems to reflect the difficulty of choosing a word from multiple words." The Goldman-Eislers (1968) experiments showed that the hesitant pause reflects the process of picking up words after the speaker chooses them. Within-sentence pause, unpredictable and very lexical before pause and vocabulary extraction are related, pause between sentences and sequential choice of the next sentence and syntactic coding. Chambers (1997) pointed out that expressing new ideas in his mother language is easier to pause than daily communication, and the silence or pause in the middle of a sentence indicates various search: search for new ideas, the best words or grammar form to express new ideas. Although there are many studies on oral fluency and accuracy and pauses, few have explored the associations of the three.

2. 研究的基本内容、问题解决措施及方案

1.Research TopicThis thesis aims to investigate whether there is a correlation between the number of pauses and the number of syntactic errors in EFL learners' oral retelling performance. Specifically, it will answer the following question: Is there significant correlation between between the number of pauses and the number of syntactic errors in EFL learners' oral retelling? 2.Research MethodsThe thesis will use the following methods:The observations of this study were the transcribed text of 30 English students participating in TEM(Test for English Majors)-Grade 4 Oral test examines. The story of a competitive little boy competing in three races is about 337 words. Stories have obvious temporal order, almost no inserted background events, simple story structure and syntactic structure, statistically found average word number of about 10 per T unit, a ratio of 1.18 per T unit including clause, and 0.18 for each clause including subordinate. The retelling task requires learners to immediately repeat the story after wearing headphones in the language lab, allowing them to take notes while listening, for about 3 minutes, and the retelling results are saved as an audio file. The measurement of text difficulty will be made by measuring the number of pauses , grammatical errors and oral fluency.The thesis will uses data analysis software SPSS25.0 and Pearson correlation coefficient to further process the collected data, and then analyze the effect of the number of pauses on grammatical errors.