Past Event

Utterance-repetition in Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) lessons and automatization: A research investigation

Dr. Elizabeth Gatbonton
Concordia University

For learners to automatize their speech, sustained opportunities for the repeated use of and exposure to targeted elements must be available. Studies on task-based language teaching (TBLT) however, suggest that such opportunities do not always abound, as shown in research on teacher and student talk in these classrooms. Here, targeted elements such as regular past verbs are surprisingly rare and repeated tokens of the same are rarer still (e.g., Collins, et al, 2009, Swain, 1998). Similar conclusions about multiple word-repetitions can also be drawn from studies on vocabulary acquisition (Horst, 2010, Lightbown et al, 1997). These results suggest that meaning-based instruction, though rich in authentic discourse, does not provide enough repetition opportunities for automatization, unless deliberately designed to do so.

In this paper, we report a study in which 33 Chinese learners of English performed genuinely communicative and inherently repetitive collaborative tasks (i.e., their outcomes are achieved through repeated acts) in a four-week, 24-hour TBLT course. In the corpus gathered from the lessons we identified and analyzed utterances with past tense verbs (e.g, we came home, We watched TV.) in order to answer two questions (1) Was there a significant amount of verbatim or partial repetition of these past utterances in the corpus? (2) Were the amount and type of utterance repetitions the participants engaged in or were exposed to significantly correlated with their accuracy gains with past tense morphology, as determined by pre- and post- course tests? The results indicate high frequency of verbatim full and partial utterance repetitions and the effects of participant engagement in these repetitions are positive. These positive effects are compared to the effects of task repetition (doing the same task twice) and other kinds of strategies to induce repetition (e.g., task planning) employed in TBLT today.

We investigated a corpus gathered from 33 Chinese learners attending a 24 hour, 4-week English TBLT course in order to see whether frequency of verbatim and partial repetition of past verb utterances while performing genuinely communicative, inherently repetitive tasks correlated with accuracy gains during the course with past tense morphology.

 About the Presenter

Dr. Elizabeth Gatbonton is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Concordia University and a curriculum consultant for the Labrador Inuttitut Training Program curriculum development team. She investigates the role of social factors in L2 acquisition and the role of formulaicity in L2 fluency development.

(Refreshments will be served)

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies