Speaker
Description
As oral fluency has been widely recognized as a major indicator of speaking proficiency, to have a good command of spoken English, learners of English as a foreign language should incorporate strategies and methods to improve oral fluency in their study routine. This would be found lacking without deliberate practice as the common rhetoric: “Practice makes perfect” has articulated and left little room for argument. The remaining ground for researchers, as a result, is concerned with the what’s and the how’s. What to practice and how to practice are essential questions to which the answers can inform learners of how to plan and structure their study so that they can make their time and effort worthwhile and can accordingly see improvement.
Among various strategies to improve foreign language proficiency is the so-called 3/2/1 technique which is essentially a practice conditioned by gradually decreasing time of speech. This form of deliberate practice has been deployed in various situational contexts.
The extent to which the 3/2/1 practice can help improve oral fluency in monologues is what this research project had aimed to find out. The participants are two learners of English as a foreign language whose proficiency at the time of the study was upper-intermediate. Quantitative data on components making up speech fluency were collected, and a speech analysis software was utilized to yield statistical data on different measures of speech fluency. The analyzed data suggested improvements in oral fluency of both participants.
