Ágnes Albert

Stories students tell

Creativity and oral narrative task performance of English majors in Hungary


Measures of task performance

The respondents’ audio-recorded performance on the narrative tasks was first transcribed, and these transcripts were used for analysis later on. I measured six aspects of the respondents’ performance: accuracy, fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity/variety, quantity of talk, and narrative structure. As was argued in section 2.3.6 of the monograph, accuracy, complexity (syntactic and lexical), and fluency are widely used measures of task performance (see for example Foster & Skehan, 1996; Iwashita et al., 2001; Kormos & Trebits, 2011, 2012; Robinson, 2001c, 2007b; Skehan, 2001; Skehan & Foster, 1997, 1999). Based on considerations discussed in detail in section 2.3.6, I calculated accuracy as the proportion of error-free clauses relative to the total number of clauses while I opted for measuring fluency as speech rate. Besides being feasible, speech rate was found to be a reliable measure of fluency in a number of studies (Ejzenberg, 2000; Freed, 2000; Kormos, & Dénes, 2004; Lennon, 1990; Riggenbach, 1991). Based on Riggenbach’s (1991) recommendations, fluency was calculated as the total number of syllables produced by the participant divided by the total amount of time, including pause time, required to produce the text.

Stories students tell

Tartalomjegyzék


Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2021

ISBN: 978 963 454 669 6

This monograph presents research conducted in connection with the relationships between individual difference variables, like creativity and language aptitude, and the oral narrative task performance of first year English major university students. Changes in language instruction that involve greater reliance on learners' creativity imply that researching creativity as a potentially important individual variable should be imminent. The prominence of tasks in the classroom and in tests suggests that tasks and their decisive features leading to differences in task performance should also be investigated. The findings of the monograph contribute to a deeper understanding of how different individual differences contribute to oral narrative task performance on the one hand, and on the other, they shed light on the differential effects of task complexity. Therefore, the monograph might be of interest for researchers, course book writers and practising teachers alike.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/albert-stories-students-tell//

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