This study examines how task variables (target proficiency levels and academic disciplines) influence linguistic features of speaking responses. Thirty Grade 1 students and thirty Grade 7 students responded to six English language proficiency speaking tasks. Findings indicate clearer differences in students' linguistic features across target proficiency levels than academic disciplines.
When examining linguistic features in second language learners’ spoken responses, scholars have often focused on complexity and fluency measures (Housen, Kuiken, & Vedder, 2012). This presentation discusses the results of a study designed to investigate the relationships between speaking task characteristics and linguistic features of spoken responses on a speaking assessment for K-12 English learners in the U.S. The speaking assessment is designed to elicit academic spoken English across several academic disciplines, such as social studies and math. This study aims to develop an understanding of how two speaking task variables (i.e., target proficiency levels and academic disciplines) influence linguistic features (i.e., complexity and fluency) of student responses. A total of 30 Grade 1 students and 30 Grade 7 students responded to six speaking tasks (360 speech samples). Speaking task variables include two proficiency levels (intermediate and advanced) and five content areas reflecting language use across Social Instructional Language, Language Arts, Social Studies, Mathematics, and Science. Collected data were transcribed and coded for 10 complexity (e.g., lexical diversity, mean length of AS-units, cohesion) and nine fluency (e.g., speech rate, silent pause ratio, number of repetitions) measures following Gan (2012), Bailey (2017), and De Jong (2018). Afterwards, data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and two-way repeated measures ANOVA. Findings indicate that the majority of complexity and fluency measures significantly differed by target proficiency level and content areas in each grade level. Subsequent analysis of simple main effects show that, for example, in Grade 1, students produced more complex structures on advanced tasks than intermediate tasks; but they spoke less fluently on advanced tasks than intermediate tasks. Results builds on previous work analyzing the spoken discourse of young learners (Hsieh & Wang, 2017) and contribute to a more systematic understanding of how speaking task characteristics relate to spoken response features (Bachman, 2002).
