How syntactic processing training affects oral production of elementary level Japanese EFL learners

Abstract

For EFL learners, especially elementary level learners, the initial step in language production is to combine several words into sentences. This study reports the results of classroom research aiming to facilitate oral production of elementary level Japanese EFL learners through syntactic processing training. University freshmen in five English classes which use CALL facilities engaged in a 15-minute training at the beginning of each lesson over a total of ten lessons. The training consisted of two types of tasks rearranging shuffled word groups, based on a hypothesis that such training might lead to better automatized language production. In the first half of the training, the written task, the students looked at four to five shuffled word groups and decided the correct order. In the second half of the training, the spoken task, they listened to three shuffled word groups and orally rearranged them into correct sentences. In working out such tasks, the test takers should access vocabulary in their mental lexicon, remember the shuffled word groups they listened to, and rearrange them into correct sentences, which might impose them a high cognitive load and can lead to automatized language production. The data of 88 students who engaged in such training were compared with those of 29 students who did not at both the pre-test and the post-test stages. It was found that although both the experimental and the control groups significantly increased their scores in the written task, only the experimental group significantly increased their scores in the spoken task. The results show that training as a whole seems to have had a positive effect on the students’ oral production.