Chapter published in:
Learning Language through Task Repetition
Edited by Martin Bygate
[Task-Based Language Teaching 11] 2018
► pp. 43–73

Chapter 2
Grammatical structures and oral fluency in immediate task repetition

Trigrams across repeated performances

| Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
| Independent researcher

In this study we examine to what extent words and grammatical structures are re-used when a speaking task is repeated with the same content (i.e., specific task repetition). We examine this re-use, which has been argued to support proceduralization and fluency development (N. de Jong & Perfetti, 2011), under both constant and increasing time pressure, and we investigate the correlation between re-use and fluency. The analyses are performed not only on individual words but also on trigrams, which are sequences of three words (e.g., the red car; here: lexical trigrams) or three parts of speech (e.g., det adj noun: POS trigrams), to capture grammatical structure. Thirty-nine adult ESL speakers completed repeated retellings of one to three picture stories. One group followed the 4/3/2 procedure (Nation, 1989), which involves three iterations with gradually increasing time pressure; for the other group the available time was constant. The extent of re-use of words and grammatical structures across task iterations was calculated using cosine similarity with tf-idf weighting (Manning, Raghavan, & Schütze, 2008), which adjusts for the frequency of words or trigrams, both within an iteration and across iterations and speakers. It was found that immediate task repetition had a strong effect on re-use at the level of individual words and trigrams, but increasing time pressure did not. The relationship between re-use and fluency was variable, but showed higher re-use for speakers struggling with fluency. We conclude that, if fluency development is to be stimulated by re-use of words and grammatical structures, it can be done with specific task repetition, whether under increasing time pressure or not.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Immediate task repetition
  • What speakers do when they repeat a task
  • Measuring similarity between iterations
    • What to count: Similarity at the level of the word and above
    • How to compute similarity: Using frequency to estimate informativeness
    • How to compute similarity: Cosine similarity with tf-idf weighting
  • Research questions
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Materials
    • Procedure
    • Analysis
  • Results
    • Re-use between and within prompts
    • Re-use under constant and decreasing time and by iteration
    • Correlations between similarity and fluency
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tblt.11.02jon
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