Running Head: ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Article Critique

Mengzi Cai

Colorado State University

ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Class: E527
Name: Mengzi Cai
Critique of De Jong & Perfetti (2011)

In order to test the effect of repetition tasks on fluency, De Jong & Perfetti (2011) used
24 ESL students to participate in an experiment. The students were to finish the 4/3/2 min
fluency exercises. They separated 24 students into three groups with three different conditions.
One condition was repetition which means that students in this condition would be given one
topic to speak about and they would repeat the same speech in 4 minutes, 3 minutes and 2
minutes. The second situation is no repetition which means that students would be given three
different topics and they should talk about these three topics in different time limitation. The
third condition is repetition-II in which students did the same repetition condition but later in
semester, i.e. over a longer period of time. They compared the first and second conditions and
came to the conclusion about whether repetition task works for the fluency. They calculated the
mean length of pauses, phonation/time ratio and mean length of fluent runs. The result of the
research is that fluency in both groups are increased but especially in the repetition condition,
students make more progress on their fluency.

The first condition where participants repeat the same task in different intervals of time
proved to help the most with their fluency so it is a worthwhile exercise for ESL teachers to use
especially if their students are interested in the topic they are speaking about. The third condition
provide the control condition for comparing test 1 and test 2. This design would avoid the other
influencing factor such as the influence of training, which will affect the precision of the results.
However, I think the difficulty of the topic and different backgrounds of students may affect the
fluency. Even though the authors select the familiar and interesting topic for students, students
may have a less successful experience and it may cause the different situations that someone may
feel the topic is difficult but someone does not. For example, the topic of shopping in US seems
to be familiar with some students who often go shopping in US but if a part of students who
don’t like to go shopping, they may have trouble to speak on this topic. It is hard to control the
same difficulty of topic for all the students so this factor might affect the fluency. What’s more,
different students may have diverse speaking speeds. It is a common phenomenon that someone
speak quickly and someone speak slowly. This element also leads to the different prosody time
ARTICLE CRITIQUE

and indirectly affects the examination of fluency. For instance, if student A has slow speaking
speed and his pronunciation of words is longer, then this factor would attribute to the length of
time it takes to articulate something. In this aspect, the measurement of the articulation times
isn’t under the variable control.
In addition, procedural process is under the fluency. When students improve their
fluency, as the same time they accelerate the procedural process. Repetition task is an effective
way to improve students’ fluency by allowing students to focus more on the content rather than
the grammar structure. Combined with the 4/3/2 min activity, repetition task is useful for
students to practice their fluency. In ESL class, instructor could have training and 4/3/2 min
activity of repetition incorporation to help students make progress on fluency.
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Reference
De Jong, Nel, & Perfetti, Charles A. (2011). Fluency Training in the ESL Classroom: An
Experimental Study of Fluency Development and Proceduralization. Language
Learning, 61(2), 533-568.