Investigating the effects of task repetition on fluency and accuracy in english oral performance of low level adult students: a case study at vietnam air defence and air force academy

effective in accelerating fluency of higher level 
students, whereas the effects were more clearly 
identified in lower level learners. In Minh’s 
case, the reason could be that he added more 
new information in his second story than the 
other two participants, thus executing more self-
repairs was inevitable. This result was partly in 
line with Bygate and Porter’s (1991) research in 
which their two students coming from English as 
a Foreign Language (EFL) backgrounds gained 
more fluency in the repeated task than the one who 
spoke English as a second language. 
As subject-verb agreement and verb forms are 
not totally new linguistic areas to these students, 
they made relatively successful alternations to 
these features. However, it is possible that one 
of the ways these students avoided repeating the 
mistakes was to eliminate some of the sentences 
which included the highlighted verbs in the first 
transcript, even when these verbs were already 
feedbacked by the researcher. The changes to 
plural nouns were somehow productive partly 
because adding letter “s” to a noun is a more 
simple way than adding “es” or utterly changing 
the spelling of it. As a result, the students perhaps 
found it fairly easy to pronounce this kind of plural 
forms. However, because only a limited number of 
plural nouns were used by the three learners, plus 
Minh had the same trouble with two new nouns 
in his second speaking, it might be concluded that 
these participants need more explanations and 
practice on how to use plural nouns. 
Pronunciation of individual English sounds, 
unfortunately, has never been systematically 
introduced to these students before. Neither had 
they had a chance to practise pronunciation with 
a software. In addition, the teacher’s intervening 
lesson was too short to provide a thorough drill 
on the entire sound system, whereas student’s 
self study with Pronunciation Power software 
in fact depended much on each individual’s 
time management. These might explain why the 
subjects demonstrated fairly modest advancement 
in this particular section. Despite this fact, a bright 
36 KHOA HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ QUÂN SỰNo. 19 (5/2019)
v LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODOLOGY 
signal was that all the students agreed that the 
transcribing process helped them be aware more 
of their pronunciation than previously, and they 
paid more attention to the sounds when starting 
to speak. This short study could not lead to a 
significant decrease in anxiety, especially in the 
cases of Minh and Hieu, yet the confidence was 
somewhat observed in their second performance. 
Moreover, the most striking result was possibly the 
modification of content, which was most overtly 
seen in Minh’s and Thanh’s transcript. It could 
be understood that the planning time allowed the 
students to extend their thoughts, and that some 
changes in the content might have helped them 
avoid repeating the mistakes.
Generally, the learners followed the stages of 
task repetition closely, except for the transcribing. 
Despite having been clearly instructed and 
modeled by the researcher, all of them failed to 
write their articulation word for word at first. They 
either missed the pauses and repetitions of words, 
or wrote down the words they thought they had 
said rather than the ones they actually articulated. 
The researcher therefore had to edit some pieces 
of their information. The reasons behind this could 
be because these learners had had no experience of 
transcribing verbatim so far, and they did this step 
at home, thus could not get immediate help from 
the researcher when necessary. 
4.2. Reflections on future work
The present project was supposed to be the starting 
point of the researcher’s ongoing cyclical reflective 
practice. For more fruitful results in future 
research, she may need to adjust a few points. 
First of all, the rehearsed transcribing should be 
done at the presence of the researcher, just after 
students finish their recording. It is hoped that 
this could ensure the exactness of the transcript. 
Moreover, when students are familiar with such 
written reproduction, the final performance may 
be also transcribed by the speaker themselves. It is 
believed that learners will benefit from the second 
transcribing the way the benefit from the first one, 
not to mention they can see first hand the changes in 
their interlanguage, which could be a motivational 
factor. Additionally, this helps the researcher save 
a lot of time for the whole research process. Also, 
to deal with the problem of large class, she will 
have them record their speaking in the language 
labs where there are enough computers for more 
than fifty students to work synchronically. 
Secondly, various types of task will be used 
so as to investigate the multifaceted effects of 
repetition. This idea derived from two of the 
students’ opinions in the interview when the 
researcher asked them about what she should do 
differently to improve task repetition in the future. 
A circle of two weeks is believed to be enough for 
reviewing and repeating a task, yet it is unsure to 
guarantee the longer term effect of the innovation. 
The future projects would hence include successive 
cycles of task repetition throughout the course in 
order to make it become a regular practice among 
students. Finally, the researcher may adapt this 
intervention for writing skill because basically, 
reviewing a writing piece is to a large extent 
comparable to reviewing a transcript.
5. CONCLUSION
The case study’s primary aims were to explore 
in what ways repeating a narrative speaking task 
would result in student’s changes to accuracy and 
fluency. It also sought to examine the changes to 
level of anxiety when speaking as a secondary 
aim. Regarding accuracy, the findings revealed 
in a fairly similar pattern for all the subjects, that 
is they generally showed improvements after 
two weeks. However, it can also be concluded 
that the influence of task repetition on accuracy 
could have been more effective if the students had 
been presented and had practised those linguistic 
features more profoundly earlier in the course. 
The results of fluency took different ends since the 
37KHOA HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ QUÂN SỰNo. 19 (5/2019)
 LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODOLOGY v
highest level student was immune to the repetition 
of task, while the other lower level students 
responded rather well to it. Some minor decrease 
in anxiety was also observed, yet there should 
be more similar practice in the future in order to 
achieve significant improvements in this affective 
variable. Interestingly, the modification of content 
recorded in the learners’ second presentations 
opens a new research domain. It was hoped that 
this small scale study would set foundations for 
the researcher’s future innovations, and that by 
means of gaining such little changes over the 
course, the VADAFA students would consequently 
make substantial gains in the foreign language./.
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task repetition and noticing on EFL learners’ oral output. 
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Study design and implementation for novice researchers. 
The Qualitative Report, 13(4), 544-559.
Birjandi, P. & Ahangari, S. (2008). Effects of task repetition 
on the fluency, complexity and accuracy of Iranian EFL 
learners’ oral discourse. The Asian EFL Journal, 10(3), 28-
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Bygate, M. & Porter, D. (1991). Dimensions in the acquisition 
of oral language. Language acquisition and the second/
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Dicicco-Bloom, B. & Crabtree, B. (2006). The qualitative 
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Finardi, K. (2008). Working memory capacity and L2 speech 
production in a picture description task with repetition. 
Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 16(2), 129-144.
Flick, U., von Kardoff, E., Steinke, I. (2004). A companion to 
qualitative research. London: SAGE Ltd.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study 
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Hinchey, P. H. (2008). Developing a research plan and 
identifying a research question. Action research. New 
York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Lynch, T. (2001). Seeing what they meant: transcribing as a 
route to noticing. ELT Journal, 55(2), 124-132.
Lynch, T. (2007). Learning from the transcripts of an oral 
communication task. ELT journal, 61(4), 311-320.<doi: 
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ẢNH HƯỞNG CỦA VIỆC LẶP LẠI NHIỆM VỤ TỚI ĐỘ TRÔI CHẢY VÀ ĐỘ CHÍNH 
XÁC TRONG KỸ NĂNG NÓI TIẾNG ANH CỦA HỌC VIÊN CẤP ĐỘ THẤP: MỘT 
NGHIÊN CỨU TÌNH HUỐNG TẠI HỌC VIỆN PHÒNG KHÔNG-KHÔNG QUÂN
LƯƠNG THỊ PHƯỢNG
Tóm tắt: Mục đích chính của nghiên cứu tình huống này là điều tra sự ảnh hưởng của việc lặp lại 
nhiệm vụ tới độ chính xác và độ trôi chảy trong kỹ năng nói tiếng Anh của ba học viên. Bên cạnh 
đó, nghiên cứu cũng xem xét sự thay đổi trong tâm lý khi thực hiện kỹ năng nói. Phương pháp chủ 
đạo là nghiên cứu định tính, với sự bổ trợ của một vài phân tích định lượng. Kết quả nghiên cứu cho 
thấy, nhìn chung cả ba học viên có tiến bộ về độ chính xác, trong khi độ trôi chảy cho kết quả không 
giống nhau. Đồng thời, sự hồi hộp trong khi nói của ba học viên cũng giảm. Trong lần thực hiện nói 
thứ hai, tất cả các học viên đều có điều chỉnh về nội dung, điều này mở ra hướng nghiên cứu mới cho 
tác giả trong tương lai.
Từ khóa: độ chính xác, độ trôi chảy, lặp lại nhiệm vụ, dạy kỹ năng nói tiếng Anh, Học viện Phòng 
không – Không quân
Ngày nhận bài: 23/12/2018; ngày sửa chữa: 31/01/2019; ngày duyệt đăng: 28/4/2019