Shang-EN (Sean) Huang
National Taiwan Normal University
Sean Huang is a student from National Taiwan Normal University, majoring in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. He has two years of TESOL experience, and currently works as a private tutor who aims at helping his students achieve native-like English proficiency. In his junior year, he received the College Student Research Grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology, R.O.C. He defines himself as a passionate language teacher, and a researcher, who likes to examine various language acquisition phenomena through psycholinguistic lenses.
Sessions
Talking to Myself: Enhancing Fluency in Spontaneous Speech Through Soliloquizing
Soliloquizing has been identified as oral fluency training practice in Chinese after-school settings. Nevertheless, the actual potency of soliloquizing has not been established; in particular, whether soliloquizing is effective in promoting EFL learners’ fluency in spontaneous speech has yet to be validated. This study set out to establish the efficacy of soliloquizing in promoting spontaneous speaking fluency and to explore its optimal implementation setting(s). 31 EFL undergraduates were randomly assigned to four soliloquizing conditions, which differed in terms of time-pressure and restriction of filler words. To examine participants’ gains under the four soliloquizing conditions, their pruned speech rates before and after the treatment were cross-compared. Additionally, questionnaires and interviews were administered to these participants to probe their experience with soliloquizing. Analysis showed that soliloquizing effectively enhanced the participants’ affect and fluency gains, albeit to different extents under different implementation conditions.