Article published In:
International Journal of Learner Corpus ResearchVol. 9:2 (2023) ► pp.155–179
Research article
Oral reading tasks as proficiency indicators
Insights from a learner corpus study
This study aims to explore the potential of oral reading tasks to establish learners’ proficiency when compiling
learner corpora. Informed by research on oral reading fluency, we selected a text containing a variety of linguistic features and
submitted it to 68 English learners in Taiwan, who were interviewed for the construction of a large spoken corpus of L2 English
across proficiency levels. Their proficiency was rated by trained Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR;
Council of Europe, 2001, 2018, 2020) raters and ranged from A1 to B2. The performances in the reading passage were
analyzed for reading rate and reading disfluencies. The relationship between reading measures and language scores was analyzed
using spine plots, revealing a strong association between reading rate and language level. The number of disfluencies did not show
a significant association with language level when all disfluencies were counted together. However, when different types of
disfluencies were treated separately, false starts were found to be associated with language level (even though the relationship
was less clear than the one reported between reading rate and language level). The study demonstrates that including a carefully
selected reading passage among the tasks when compiling spoken learner corpora may be an efficient way of collecting data relating
to learner performance in speech.
Keywords: reading fluency, L2 proficiency, reading rate, reading disfluencies, proficiency in learner corpora
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Reading rate and disfluencies as potential measures of L2 proficiency
- 3.Data and method
- 4.Results
- 4.1Reading rate – descriptive statistics
- 4.2Disfluencies – descriptive statistics
- 4.2.1Skipped words
- 4.2.2Repeats
- 4.2.3False starts
- 4.2.4Self-corrections
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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