论文总字数：30729字

摘 要

Introduction 1

Literature Review 2

2.1 Theoretical issues 2

2.1.1 Levelt’s Model of Oral Production 2

2.1.2 Language proficiency 2

2.1.3 Planning 3

2.1.4 Accuracy 3

2.1.5 The interplay of language proficiency and planning on oral production 4

2.2 Empirical studies 4

2.2.1 Studies on the effects of language proficiecny on oral production 4

2.2.2 Studies on the effects of planning on oral production 4

2.2.3 Studies on the effects of language proficiency and planning on oral production 5

2.2.4 Limitations of previous studies 6

Methodology 7

3.1 Research questions 7

3.2 Participants 7

3.3 Data collection 7

3.3.1 Proficiency Level 7

3.3.2 Picture-narrative task 8

3.3.3 Proficiency test 8

3.4 Procedure 8

3.5 Data analysis 9

3.5.1 Language proficiency 9

3.5.2 Accuracy 9

Results and Discussion 11

4.1 Results of ANOVA in terms of the percentage of error-free clauses 11

4.2 Results of ANOVA in terms of the percentage of correct-verb forms 12

4.3 Discussion 14

Conclusions 16

5.1 Major findings of the study 16

5.2 Limitations and suggestions for future research 16

References 18

Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to those who have helped me a lot with my BA thesis writing. Without their help, completion of this thesis would have been impossible.

My deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Mr. Han Yawen, for his painstaking effort in guiding me through the various stages of writing this paper. During my working on the paper, he helped me with choosing the topic, collecting the samples, and accessing the software for treating the data. His profound insights broadened my horizon in linguistic studies. The work would not have been possible without his patient guidance, continuous encouragement and generous support.

I would like to thank all the other teachers for their enlightenment, knowledge, encouragement and help throughout my undergraduate study at Nanjing Tech University.

Special thanks go to my dear friends and fellow students, who have accompanied me throughout the four years at the university.

Last but not least, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my parents and for their love and support all these years.

Abstract

Oral production is a complicated cognitive activity and oral accuracy is an important index to evaluate oral production. This study examined how language proficiency and planning affect Chinese EFL learners’ oral accuracy. A total 51 English major sophomores in a university of Technology in China were tested. Results of two-way ANOVA test indicated that language proficiency and planning time had a consistent effect on Chinese EFL learners’ oral accuracy to some extent. It also indicated that there were little interaction effects between language proficiency and planning time on oral accuracy.

Key words: language proficiency; planning time; oral accuracy; oral production

中文摘要

口语产出是一项复杂的认知活动，口语准确度是评价口语产出的一个重要指标。本研究考察语言水平和准备时间对中国英语学习者口语准确度的影响。本研究选取了中国某工业大学51名大二英语专业学生参与实验。 通过双因素方差分析，研究发现，在某种程度上语言水平和准备时间对中国英语学习者口语准确度有显著效应。语言水平和准备时间对中国英语学习者口语准确度没有交互影响。

关键词：语言水平 准备时间 口语准确度 口语产出

1. Introduction

Oral accuracy, fluency and complexity are three elements to assess oral levels. Nowadays, Chinese EFL learners attach more importance to the accuracy of their oral English. That is because, no matter in second language or in foreign language teaching, accuracy is an important criterion to measure EFL learners’ competence of oral English. In light of previous studies, planning time and language proficiency of EFL learners have influences on oral accuracy to some extent（Foster amp;Skehan，1996）, but there are fewer studies conducted on the interrelationship among language proficiency, planning time and oral accuracy.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Theoretical issues

2.1.1 Levelt’s Model of Oral Production

An influential model of speech production is put forward by Levelt in 1989. Declarative knowledge is distinguished from procedural knowledge. Automatic processing is differentiated from controlled processing. Levelt`s speech production model consists of the following components: a knowledge component, a conceptualized, a formulator, an articulacy and a speech-comprehension system. What is most close to oral output is the conceptualization, the formulator and the articulator. In the conceptualization, the speaker chooses the declarative knowledge related to the intentions and orders the information for pre-verbal message. In the formulator, the speaker selects acceptable language forms from the mental lexicon to convert pre-verbal messages into phonological plans. Then the actual speech is realized in the articulator.

2.1.2 Language proficiency

The definition of language proficiency is the ability of an individual to perform or speak in an acquired language. To some degree language proficiency implies SFL learner’s language skill. Reading English journal articles has been an important way for English learners to improve their language proficiency. The relationship between language proficiency and oral output is a little complex--there exists a linear relationship between language proficiency and oral accuracy, which implies that compared with complexity and fluency, accuracy is the most significant index to explore oral competence.

2.1.3 Planning

According to L2 studies and task-based studies, planning is the cognitive process of considering or organizing what you will do in the event of something happening. This process covers both preverbal automation (Levelt, 1977; Baars, 1980) and long-range organization of expression.

In light of preceding studies, giving learners the opportunity to plan a narrative before they speak it (i.e., pretask planning) brings about momentous gains in accuracy. Many SLA learners especially learners who are at low levels, they are unable to obtain immediate plans in most cases and have to recreate the plan. In addition, the process of recreating the plan is under control of high-intensity consciousness. In order to ease the tenseness, pre-task planning is recommended as an effective solution to improve oral output and reduce communication pressure (Crooks, 1989:11; Foster amp; Skehan, 1996:18). It is witnessed that pre-task planning has a significant effect on SLA learners’ lectures.

2.1.4 Accuracy

The fact that in most the researches settling similar questions is taken into consideration, a criteria for evaluating accuracy includes phonological, grammatical, morphological, social-linguistic and other elements. However in oral-accuracy-related researches, grammatical accuracy is believed to be the major element. Some of the researchers (Crookes 1998; Wigglesworth 1997) concentrated on a certain part of grammatical accuracy, for example the correct use of articles, while testing accuracy. Foster, Tohkyn amp; Wigglesworth (2000) believed that accuracy still lies in the grammatical level. Some others tested the correct use of grammatical tense. In the current research, the author makes several references to the way of testing the percentage of error-free clauses and the accuracy rate of verb use adopted by Foster amp; Skehan (1996), Skehan amp; Foster (1997), Mehnert (1998), and Wendel (1997). Foster amp; Skehan (1996) defined accuracy as the similarity of the language forms to the target language. Ortega (1999) still used the grammatical accuracy to judge the morphological coherence between the noun and adjunct. Considering the indices to measure accuracy, one researcher adopted “As-unit" to measure the oral accuracy of 10 freshmen of English major (Xu, 2005). That is, accuracy is reflected by REFAS (ratio of error-free As-unit), REW (ratio of errors per100 words) and SRE (ratio of self-repairs).

2.1.5 The interplay of language proficiency and planning on oral production

For decades, a lot of studies have been carried out to investigate oral accuracy, planning time and language proficiency separately both at home and abroad (Yang, 2008; Gu, 2007; Zhang, 2003), but there are much fewer studies conducted on the interrelationship among oral accuracy, planning time and language proficiency of Chinese EFL learners. Therefore, the interplay of language proficiency and planning on oral production is still unclear.

2.2 Empirical studies

2.2.1 Studies on the effects of language proficiency on oral production

There are differences in accuracy among learners in the same proficiency level no matter which language proficiency level they are in. only a minority of learners can attain high accuracy. Middle and low level learners can make much progress in oral accuracy. In combinations with oral performance, learners with the highest accuracy may not obtain the highest grade (Pan, 2013). Based on Chen and Yue’s experiment, 35 English majors were tested by story-retelling and spontaneous speech tasks. The analysis indicated that language proficiency has different influences on accuracy and complexity with significant influence on accuracy.

2.2.2 Studies on the effects of planning on oral production

The form and the meaning of the target language can be taken into account by China EFL learners with pre-task planning. By virtue of pre-task planning, EFL learners have more chances to reconstruct the internal language knowledge involving integrating new language items and restructuring the language knowledge that EFL learners have mastered. The first meaningful research on pre-task planning was done by Ellis. By means of the task of describing some pictures, Ellis compared the accuracy of using the past tense based on different planning time. After comprehensive analysis, it was found that pre-task planning indeed improved oral output accuracy to some degree (Ortega, 1999: 221). Compared with linguists who study pre-task planning from the angle of the length of time alone, more scholars carry out their research of pre-task planning in a comprehensive way. Foster chose EFL learners as participants to study the effects of pre-task planning on oral production. By designing different cognitive levels of tasks, the study found that the performance of prepared students was better than those without preparation in oral fluency, oral accuracy, sentence structure diversity and complexity. Furthermore, the more difficult the task was, the more obvious the distinction was.

To investigate the effects of planning time on China’s EFL learners’ oral accuracy, the study (Zhang, 2003) found that the length of planning time is related to interpreter’s subjective and objective factors. More interpreters are willing to make preparations for terminology. Many SLA learners especially learners who are at low levels, they are unable to obtain immediate plans in most cases and have to recreate the plan. In addition, the process of recreating the plan is under control of high-intensity consciousness. In order to relieve the sense of tension, pre-task planning is recommended as an effective solution to improve oral output and reduce communication pressure (Crooks, 1989: 11; Foster amp; Skehan, 1996: 18). It is witnessed that pre-task planning has an optimistic effect on SLA learners’ lectures.

2.2.3 Studies on the effects of language proficiency and planning on oral production

An quantitative and qualitative research was conducted on fluency ( Zhang，

2000; Wu，2001). They analyzed the records of 12 students’ picture compositions twice and the interval period was 28 weeks. It was found that the development of accuracy was a U-shaped development. Students ignored accuracy in order to obtain the expression of fluency, syntactic complexity and content coherence.

Previous studies paid more attention to the effect of language proficiency on oral accuracy and the effect of planning time on oral accuracy respectively. There were few researches on the interaction effects of language proficiency and planning time on oral accuracy. That is the reason why I want to do research on the topic.

2.2.4 Limitations of previous studies

For the past few years, an increasing number of researchers and scholars have come into notice the necessities of studying the potential relations between planning time and language proficiency on EFL speakers’ oral performances, especially oral accuracy. However, there still exist some shortages in related researches.

Firstly, despite the fact that several researches have been conducted to study the relations between planning time amp; oral competence and language proficiency amp; oral competence, the number of relevant researches is far from enough. In addition, so far these researches mainly have been done abroad.

Secondly, researches of previous studies on the relationship between language proficiency and oral accuracy are not fertile enough and fewer findings are yielded, compared with the relationship between planning time and oral accuracy.

Thirdly, it remains unclear whether certain circumstances like planning time or language proficiency have positive effects on oral accuracy or not due to the fact that the results of studies are rather inconsistent..

In a word, there are still many gaps in the previous studies that need to be filled, which call for the implement of the current study.

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