Dr. Azizullah Mirzaei & Nasim Mellat
Shahrekord University, Iran
The study aims at assessing EFL learners’ oral performance in computerized and face-to-face (FTF) settings focusing on learners’ oral CAF measures. To this end, a cohort of 25 intermediate-level EFL students at a university in southwest of Iran participated in the study. The participants were asked to narrate a picture story in face-to-face (FTF), synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ASCMC) settings successively, each after a two-week interval. After transcribing the speech samples, the samples were analyzed based on grammatical complexity, grammatical accuracy, and fluency. The results of one-way repeated measures of ANOVA revealed that there was no significant difference between oral performances of learners in FTF, SCMC and ASCMC settings in terms of grammatical complexity and accuracy. However, there were significant differences in some features of fluency (i.e., filled pauses, unfilled pauses, repairs, & speech rate) in FTF, SCMC, and ASCMC settings. In other words, learners spoke significantly faster in ASCMC setting than in SCMC and FTF settings. In addition, more frequent instances of pauses and repairs were observed in FTF and SCMC settings respectively than in ASCMC setting. The results of this study have implications for teachers, test developers, as well as test administers.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 2-3 February 2017, Ahwaz.
