BOOK OF ABSTRACTS - EUROSLA

4 Papers
A longitudinal study of L2 oral fluency and lexical development in an
instructional setting
Imma Miralpeix and Natalia Fullana
Universitat de Barcelona
For a number of years, researchers have advocated implementing
longitudinal studies as the ultimate way to assess the impact of various
factors on second language (L2) acquisition (Muñoz & Singleton, 2011;
Ortega & Iberri-Shea, 2005; Singleton & Ryan, 2004). While the existing
longitudinal research has mostly focused on age of onset (AO), current work
has evidenced a new (or renewed) interest in the factor of input in L2 speech
acquisition (e.g., Piske & Young-Scholten, 2009). Additionally, the
dimension of oral fluency in an L2 has received considerable attention in
recent longitudinal investigations (e.g., Derwing, Munro, Thomson, &
Rossiter, 2009).
The present study aimed to contribute to the growing body of longitudinal
investigations by looking at the development of L2 oral fluency and
vocabulary in an instructional setting. The sample of the study comprised 15
Catalan/Spanish learners of English, with an AO held constant at 8 years old.
Participants were assessed at four data collection points over a period of 8
years of foreign language instruction. Temporal measures of oral fluency as
well as lexical richness measures were obtained from the learners’ oral
retelling of a picture narrative. Results showed that L2 learners generally
became more fluent over time, as indicated by faster speech rates and shorter
pauses. A higher degree of fluency was also related to greater lexical
richness, similarly to de Jong & Perfetti (2011). Despite this, learners’
degree of oral fluency was lower than that of a control group of English
native speakers. Moreover, learners exhibited different learning trajectories,
corroborating observations from available longitudinal research (e.g.,
Abrahamsson, 2003; Larsen-Freeman, 2006). Findings of this small-scale
longitudinal investigation highlight the need to further typify the quality and
quantity of input in instructional settings where exposure to L2 input is often
limited and nonnative-like (e.g., García-Lecumberri & Gallardo, 2003).
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